242: The Last Shithole

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. I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Jason, I hear you may have drank some raw water this week. I know. I've got the Ebola's. No, I am down with the sickness, as they say. So it's been a crazy, crazy week. So my knowledge of what has happened on the internet is a little bit light, but it doesn't really matter because everything in the news was CES and nothing that I saw came out of CES that was worth reporting on.

Yeah, CES is what it is these days. I still think it would be fun for us as Grumpy Old Geeks to go and do a show from there. So, you know, maybe if the Patreon stuff kicks up for next year, we'll do that. I would absolutely do that, yes.

I would absolutely do that because I think we would have a lot of fun just going around and making fun of shit. Yeah. Yeah, speaking of, I was looking at the Internet of Shit's Twitter feed and he's got somebody that he sent out there. And the shit that is at CES is epically bad. Epically bad.

Yeah. Yeah. All the headlines are just talking about how everything is, you know, everything is Internet connected now. Everything has an app and everything has AI in it and everything is stupid. And we don't need any of it. The Internet connected toilet to the Internet connected dog collar so you can do your feeding.

There's so many of them. There's just too many to name. So it's not really worth it. And let's be honest, how well are these things going to work? Because I'm dealing with Alexa and Spotify, two companies that have two products and companies that have been around for quite a long time now. And they don't work. No, they don't.

No, they don't. I am still going through hell with my Amazon Alexa and Spotify. All I wanted to do. I've already done and discussed my work around for playlists because it stopped playing playlists and it stopped playing certain artists. So you have to then make a playlist of the artists because it can't recognize the artist anymore.

And then you have to do like five different things like rename the playlist twice and then rename it again to get it to recognize that. Now, all I want to do is shuffle the playlist because I've heard the playlist in the order a thousand times. So all you're supposed to do is say, sorry, guys, Alexa, shuffle playlist, playlist name.

It just plays the playlist. It does not shuffle it. But once it's playing now, then you have to Google these things and you start to find everybody's crazy workarounds. So once you've started a playlist playing, you can then say echo shuffle and then it'll shuffle the bastard. But it always starts with the same first song in the playlist because, you know, it just you can't say the command fast enough because it has to start before you can tell it to shuffle, even though you told it to shuffle in the first place.

Yeah. But some brilliant person on the interwebs found a one second of silence track on Spotify that you can add to the start of all your playlists to get around this annoyance. Except one second isn't enough. What I need is a 10 second of silence track. So I have to find that and then I have to bring that into all my playlists as the first track.

Everything is just connected with fucking duct tape, isn't it? Can't you just put that one second song as like the first 10 tracks of the playlist? Oh, yeah, I guess I could just do it 10 times. But yeah, OK, that would work. Then randomly, randomly, yeah, you'll think it stopped and then you start yelling at it and then it was just actually playing the silence.

And then you're like, don't. Now it started over again. Well, I'd like to thank you, Jason, for adding yet one more layer of duct tape onto my solutions. I do what I can here, man. I'm a programmer. It's all about the kludges over here. Yeah, it's insane. It's insane. I mean, I'm paying Spotify $9.95 a month.

I purchased my Alexa for however much money that was and none of this stuff works. It just none of it works and there's no customer support. Well, the thing is, I mean, Alexa and Spotify weren't originally meant to work together and they're working together is just kind of another kludge.

So, you know, on this one, I would blame Amazon on this. I agree. It is. It is on Amazon's side for this. It totally is because you could build web players and different APIs with Spotify and they all work. Amazon needs to fix their end of things. Yeah. Good luck with that.

I did find a little thing called MyPod, which is a skill that you can add to your Alexa and it will or your Echo or it is Echo, right? That's the actual product name, right? Yeah, it is. I get so confused. They can't even brand things right anymore.

Well, yeah, we talked about their new AWS names for whatever that was. So this lets you kind of create your own dealio with making new skills and playing different things and putting things in buckets and shuffling. But you have to have the files. It's not like at first I thought maybe this will help your problem.

But no, you have to shuffle files around to create folders on Google Drive or crap like that. Exactly. I looked into it because you had suggested it and I didn't see anything about it working with Spotify, which it doesn't. It does work with if you actually have your own files, as I do and as you do, we have gigantic folders of MP3s and things of that nature, which we try to hold on to, even though Apple and iTunes just try to systematically destroy them on a weekly basis.

But then, yeah, the problem with that then is I have to put them somewhere like a Google Drive. So I have to go through my files. I have to create playlists. I have to copy them up to somewhere else. It's not worth it. Pay for bandwidth for it. It's not worth it. Yep, exactly. I just want another big iPod that I can just plug into my home system and just play it everywhere like we used to do.

All I want is my original big brick iPod that held like 200 gigs. I just want that back. Yeah, the 250s. I looked online and people are still selling them. And you can mod them with little flash drives nowadays to make them a little bit bigger. But there are other companies out there that have much better products that you can actually use, you know, cards, memory cards.

So you can fill up your memory cards and stick them in and play them. But at the end of the day, by the time I got done looking at all that stuff, I was so exhausted. I'm just like, screw it. I'm going to go watch TV. Well, as I was getting so annoyed with all of that, I actually tweeted at Amazon Echo and basically just said, how come Shuffle doesn't work?

And they wrote me back and said, we'd like to work with you on this in real time with a link. And the link, of course, just goes to the submit a question. So that's not exactly what I'd call real time Amazon. Although I bet if you got on a chat with them, I bet you could have somebody try and walk you through it.

Probably, but they didn't send me to a chat. They just sent me to the send your question in the form. Yes. So and as I was doing that, I saw a tweet go by. I'm sorry that I don't have the attribution and I'm kind of I don't remember exactly what it said. So I kind of made up my own version of it.

So I just because I was really frustrated with everything and that continued. I want to talk about the reality of going to visit a website in 2018. Type type in the URL. Hit enter. Go to the website. No, I do not want to allow desktop notifications. Click.

Yes, I accept that you use cookies. Click. No, I don't want to sign up for the mailing list. Close. All right, fine. I'll disable my ad blocker. OK, now I have to close the full page ad. OK, now I have to stop the autoplaying video. Oh, the headline was completely misleading anyway.

So that was a fucking huge waste of time. Leather. Welcome to the Internet, people. Exactly. It is so terrible. I want to know what happened. Who's who are the web devs that are building this this world of crap that's out there now? I think they're all AI now. Could be.

Could be. Because, yeah, no. No self-respecting web dev would would still do this. It's like being a guarded Auschwitz. You just have to walk away from moral. Or are any working, self-respecting web devs. It's like, here's your WordPress package that will annoy everybody that comes to your site.

It comes with all these plugins. Have fun. Enjoy. In the news. All right, Brian, since we didn't really have any CES coverage and that's all there was, what did you find this week in the news?

I remember James Damore. James Damore. Refresh my memory. He was the Google engineer who wrote the lengthy memo outlining what he perceived as gender differences that made women less equipped to work in tech than men. The manifesto guy. Yes, Mr. Manifesto.

He actually made the title of our show because he was such a douchebag. He's back. Oh, no. Because he's probably found himself unable to be employed anywhere in the tech world. He has decided to file a clash action lawsuit against Google because he claims that Google is discriminating against them for their conservative views, their male gender, and their Caucasian race.

Oh, in the world where hashtag me too has taken over. Oh, man. Trying to play the gender and white card seems a bit silly to me. And I don't know about you.

I've been in Google's offices and walked around before. Awful lot of white dudes there. There are a lot of a lot of white dudes there for sure. And, you know, I think this ties in nicely with the fact that it is now legal to smoke pot in California for recreational purposes. So maybe the timing of this is since he didn't really have a job, he's been waking bacon too much and found a lawyer buddy to file this for him.

Because this sounds like the thoughts of a drug-addled mind. Oh, yeah. It's just crazy. This guy's crazy. But I'm sure we'll be talking about it. Can't wait to see what happens. Yeah. So Kodak, Kodak's done quite well in the stock market in the last two days.

They're not the first company to do it. But basically, it seems that if you say that you're getting on the blockchain bandwagon these days, your stock shoots through the roof. And that's just what happened for Mr. Kodak. Yeah, and to say through the roof, it went from like $1.50 to $3 or $4.

It wasn't – I mean, their stock was at the lowest point it ever traded. You got to – Jason, you got to remember, it's not really the dollar amount. It's the percentage. If you owed 100,000 shares of stock in Kodak, you just doubled that. That's true.

That's a lot. That's true. I think what really came out of this is Kodak still exists? What? I know. That's why people are like, I can still buy Kodak? Oh, I'll buy some novelty stock from my youth and then frame it or use it as toilet paper. Yeah, and the thing about this whole thing, there's two things that they've decided to do with the blockchain.

One is they're starting their own blockchain – oh, actually, let me back up for a second here. They're not doing anything themselves. They just license the Kodak name. They're actually proactively doing not a goddamn thing. So the first – besides licensing their name.

Many, many, many geniuses have done the same thing and created very successful, theoretically, businesses, although we haven't seen taxes about that, so we don't really know how successful any of them actually are. But I'm just saying there was a lot of licensing going on, and apparently that can make you president. Yeah. Oh, zing. Okay. Well, here's the deal.

Yeah, the first one is their own coin called Kodak Coin, which is – it's a whole technology around trying to make sure photographers get paid for their work that has been stolen on the Internet, something that other people have tried to do. So this is the actual sane prong of their approach that they're going for because there's another company that is – you know, basically it's a paparazzi company, and their guys are always trying to get attribution and money for their work, if you can call it work, you scabber bastards.

Hey, but what they're trying to do is noble. I like the idea of using blockchain to basically keep track of who took what photo and where and where it is on the Internet and who owns it and who should get the rights to it. That's great. I like that idea. Yeah. That one I'm okay with.

You know, I don't know if it's going to work or not because other companies have tried and failed at doing the same thing. The next one is – it's called CashMiner with a K, and this is one where you kind of lease a bitcoining rig, bitmining rig, not a bitcoining rig, a bitmining rig, to sit there and work in the background for you.

You pay $3,400 as an upfront investment. They keep the hardware. You split the Bitcoin with them. This is – we've talked about scams like this before, and I know some people that are actually doing it, and they're making a little bit of money off of it right now.

But what nobody is saying in their disclosures is that Bitcoin gets harder to mine as time goes on. As more Bitcoin are mined, it gets harder and harder and harder. So, you know, what they're saying in some of their press materials for the CashMiner is that you're going to earn about $375 a month, which works out to about $9,000 over the two-year commitment.

Except when you factor in the fact that bitcoining production just dropped significantly over two years. This is a rough estimate. But the final profits could actually come at around $2,457. So you're going to lose money on the whole thing.

Yeah. Yeah. It's not really a thing that you should actually go out and do. You know, go buy some old Kodak film and sell it on eBay. You will make more money. Most likely. In a little more Bitcoin news.

I just love this one. There was a bug in Overstock.com that let you pay with the wrong currency. So, you know, you could buy something in Bitcoin on Overstock.com, put it in your cart. But when it came time to pay, you could pay with Bitcoin Cash, which is ridiculously lower of value than Bitcoin.

So you get a massive discount. This lasted for about three weeks until they finally fixed it. Yeah. Nice. I wonder how, you know, what they're doing to, you know, mitigate this loss. It couldn't have been a huge hold.

Like, you know, a lot of people couldn't have found out about it because they would have been, they'd have shut it down a lot faster. You'd think, yeah. Yeah. And there's a lot of he said, she said going back and forth between Coinbase and Overstock because it was a, first they thought it was a bug in Coinbase's API. But then Coinbase is saying, no, Overstock screwed up their programming.

And all in all, at the end of the day, this is a silly programming bug that somebody made and somebody profited from. That's what you get. You know, every time I think about this stuff, I always remember, I can't remember who it was. I think it was Beyonce.

But somebody made headlines a couple of years back because they sold their latest album in Bitcoin. And there was a lot of that going on, right? Like, I remember, was it BMW or Porsche or some dealership did the same thing where you could buy one with Bitcoin. And it was, you know, pure, just get a headline.

And this was like five or six years ago. And I'm thinking, how bad, how stupid does anybody feel that actually paid for a Beyonce, like a $12 Beyonce album in Bitcoin when those bit, that $12 in Bitcoin right now is probably worth $120,000.

Yeah. Your album that you purchased is now $120,000 album. Yep. Which you probably don't even own anymore. You took it to the resale shop and sold it for plastic. Yep. Exactly. And in just, you can't make this shit up news, the North American Bitcoin Conference ticketing page now states that you cannot buy tickets for the Bitcoin Conference with Bitcoin.

They are not taking cryptocurrency at all. And the tickets are $1,000. Wow. So, yeah. Yeah. Apparently, there's, you know, with the fluctuation of the value of Bitcoin plus the high transaction fees, they just said, no, I think we'll stick with cash, which is fairly funny.

Yeah. And, you know, we've talked a lot about Snapchat recently and the fact that it's not, doesn't seem to be doing so well. And they're reinventing things that we made long, long ago. Next up by Snap will be web rings. And we'll, you know, see some news articles about that.

The Daily Beast has gotten a hold of a lot of their internal data and has been kind of tracking it. This is a very long article where they go through months and months of data and kind of break down the different features and functions of Snapchat.

Right. I couldn't read the whole thing because it was just way too long. But for the most part, nobody's using Snapchat with all of the new stuff that they're doing. They're just using it as a chat platform. That's about it. That's kind of what, yeah. I mean, all these companies, all these social media companies just keep rolling out, you know, rolling out feature after feature after feature.

And everybody's just using it for what they originally used it for. Nobody needs all this or wants all this stuff. Yeah, except for the investors who want a return on their investment. But I found it really interesting, though, the one, some of the stuff at the beginning of the article where they talk about how unbelievably protective they are about their internal metrics.

And they just don't want, there's like, you cannot see them. And it turns out that, was it, Evan Spiegel is very, very scared that people are going to see how bad, just how incredibly poorly that they're doing there. Right. So it's a, it's a, the stuff I read is pretty fun, but okay, you know, TLDR, Snapchat still sucks.

And we talked a little bit about CES and how dumb it all is, but over at fatherly.com, a site I check a lot more often these days as I'm in a fatherly way, they talked about the best tech for parents from CES 2018. This stuff's come a long way pretty quickly.

I'm sure if anybody was listening a year and a half ago when I first had my kid, I tried out some of the various different tech things that they had for kids and none of them were really that great. It wasn't quite there yet. Things like monitors that you couldn't keep on, on your toddler's body, all that sort of stuff.

But this stuff is getting more and more interesting. I've got a link over to fatherly where they list off some of the interesting stuff. I'm not going to get into it in detail because probably not a lot of parents out there listening to this. But if you are one, go check out our show notes and click through it. The smart toothbrush is pretty interesting and I totally dig the smart lamp that they have.

It's really cool looking. Okay, I'm going to have to go look at this because you just said smart toothbrush and I'm pretty sure three episodes ago, we ripped the shit out of anything that could be considered a smart toothbrush. Those were for adults. This one tries to gamify brushing your teeth when you get to the age where you're trying to force your kid to brush their teeth, which they don't want to do.

A little different approach. Any Bluetooth enabled leashes out there that you can attach to your kid? No, but I might be in the market for one of those soon. Okay, you got a little runner? He's all over the place. Okay. Now, this one makes me sad.

Amazon is thriving thanks to taxpayer dollars. This comes from New Republic. It's an article by David Dayen. So, turns out in Ohio, where Amazon has a 6,000 strong workforce, over 700 of their employees are on food stamps.

And this is after that they've gotten over $123 million in subsidies from the state of Ohio. So, they're basically double dipping. Now, this is a common thing that we've talked about with companies like Walmart, where, you know, they don't pay a livable wage.

And then, us taxpayers have to make up the balance, even though we've already made up the balance with all the tax breaks. So, it's kind of an interesting loop that these things are in. Now, at the very end of the article, there's a quote in here that I would like to read real quick.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has a net worth of about $100 billion. Take that down to $99.5 billion, and nobody working at an Amazon facility anywhere in America would need assistance to eat. But, this is as much a problem with state and local governments who feel the need to give a fantastically wealthy corporation incentives to build facilities that are critical to its business model.

So, some people are scared that they won't get the job, so they're giving the incentives, which the companies don't actually need. But, they're going to take anyway, because that's the fiduciary responsibility they have to their shareholders. Yeah. But, don't forget, Jason, it's going to trickle down. Oh, yes. That's what the Republicans keep telling us.

That's what this new tax plan's all about. All these people are going to trickle down that $0.5 billion that they're talking about, and everybody's going to be okay. Oh, wait. That doesn't ever happen. Well, it seems to be happening at Walmart, because they're going to start raising their initial wage to $11 from the $9 that they pay right now.

And, they're going to be giving some employees bonuses. These are one-time bonuses, up to $1,000 if you've worked there for, wait for it, 20 years. Work at Walmart for 20 years, you get a grand. Wow. Anything under that, you can get $200, and sometimes up to $400.

But, they're also... That'll help. Yeah. You know, you can buy some stuff at Amazon with that money. But, what you can't buy is a Google bike, because they're cracking down. Apparently, people like to steal Google bikes. You've been to Google. You've seen all the bikes they have there. I have, indeed.

I kind of would have liked to take one home. I figured they've got enough of them. It's kind of like a perk, you know? You go to the mothership, you get a free bike. You get a bike. You get a bike. You get a bike. Well... Everybody gets a bike. Apparently, that's what's happening. They maintain a fleet of about 1,100 G-bikes for their employees.

And, about 100 to 250 go missing every week, which is pretty funny. That's a lot of them. That's awesome. They should just go out and give everybody in the community a G-bike. That way, they won't have to chase them down, follow them around, and then everybody in the neighborhood has one, and then they can just join in the whole, everybody's got a G-bike program, instead of having to have the Google bike cops go around and find these things.

And some have been found in, I love this one, some have been found at the bottom of the Town Creek, one has been found on the roof of O'Malley's sports pub, and one even turned up in a TV commercial for the brand Garnier. So, nice. I thought that was pretty funny. That is hilarious.

Yeah. And to round out our Bitcoin news of the week, Warren Buffett has chimed in. And, yeah, he says, with almost certainty that cryptocurrencies will come to a bad ending. When it happens, or how, or anything else, I don't know. This comes from, even back in 2014, he labeled Bitcoin as a mirage, which we've, you know, we've agreed with on many, many occasions.

And he's not going to be signing on for any of the Bitcoin futures markets. He says, I get into enough trouble with things I think I know something about. Why in the world should I take a long or short position in something I don't know anything about? We don't own any. We're not short. We'll not grab a position in them. So, well, Warren Buffett, you know, pretty rich guy, pretty smart guy when it comes to financial things, says, yeah, no, Bitcoins and Bitcoins and cryptocurrencies, they'd be a mirage.

Agreed. I think that's the official Grumpy Old Geeks position as well.

Media Candy. Brian, we've talked about the Cody Box kerfuffle a couple times. First, we talked about Tick Box getting sued by all of the major studios. Remember that? Mm-hmm. I do. Yep. Well, the same band of brothers has joined on against a new one called Dragon Box.

Ah. Yeah. And these guys are in California, so there's nowhere to run. No, that was dumb. Yeah, really. Let's make this amazingly illegal box, and let's do it in their home turf. Yes. Not smart. Not smart. So they will be going down.

Yes. If anybody was thinking of getting into the business of making a Cody Box, because it is fairly easy to make, and they're pretty cheap, don't. Do not do it. Don't do it. I mean, you know, I could totally be in that business right now and just do it on little Amazon Firesticks, but I didn't because I'm not dumb.

Yeah. Yeah, don't poke the dragon, or don't poke the dragon box, as it were. No. Or don't tick that box. Definitely. There are many jokes one can make. None of them surprises me. You're very good. None of them particularly funny. Speaking of things that aren't funny, Silicon Valley Season 5, the trailer's out.

Have you watched the trailer? I watched the trailer, and I was like, oh, we're still just making the joke where the main character gets uncomfortable in front of people, and that's all we got, really. Pretty much. Yeah, I watched it, and I'm like, never so glad was I that I stopped watching a TV show, because I quit laughing.

I watched two episodes of Season 4, and I'm just like, nope, not funny. Moving on. Yeah, you know, T.J. Miller, for all of his potential faults as a real-life human being, was goddamn funny on that show, and he's not going to be there, and I'm not interested in it anymore. He was the only saving grace of that show, and even that was a stretch, so.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't expect I'll be watching. I mean, I'll probably watch, like, the first episode just to see if it's as bad as this trailer makes it seem to be, but, yeah, I think this is definitely on my list of do not watch anymore, which is growing. Speaking of that list, did you watch the X-Files this week?

No. I only watched the first episode, and did not like that. It was all over the map, I'm telling you. Well, it was like that last season, too. Remember, there was, like, what was it, 10 episodes total, and, like, four of them had to do with the overall arch, and three of them were standalone weird monster ones, and two were just bizarre, so I don't know what they're doing.

It's the same formula that they had when they were trying to fill episodes back when they had a full 22-episode season. It's like, okay, we can't keep the story going for the main overarching one that long, so let's throw in some monster ones, here's a couple weird ones, and this one was, you know, some AI action, of course, and a ghost in the machine, and they brought back one of the lone gunmen for it, which was fun.

It was fun to see him again. That was really fun. But for the most part, yeah, they brought Langley back, and there was a mention of the overarching plot at the very end, which was, you know, interesting. The characters were, like, completely separate people in this one from the first one.

The first one, they were so serious, and this one, they were kind of joking and running around, and still, like, I don't know, it was like, it's like this show has schizophrenia, and next week, I watched the preview for next week, monster one, yep, following the pattern. Yeah, I think I'm not gonna keep up with it.

I'll wait and hear what the big final, you know, is, because Jillian Anderson has already stated she's not coming back, this is it for her. Oh, good. So they're gonna have to wrap, well, I have to say things like, they're gonna have to wrap it up, because I've been saying that for 20 years. It's unconceivable that they wouldn't wrap up the whole story.

Nope. I know, but they're not going to, so I'll wait and see. You've never watched professional wrestling, have you? No, no, I have not. But speaking of shows, did you also, did you happen to go to Sweden to get Star Trek Discovery and catch up on, see the latest episode? I did not know it was out again. Uh-oh.

They have come back. The first episode dropped last Sunday. Adding a note to things. Go to Sweden. It wasn't bad. Okay, the weird thing is, as I've mentioned, I'm watching Star Trek Voyager. Like, I just throw that on a Netflix after the kid and wife have gone to sleep, and before have a glass of wine, and I just watch an episode or two of Voyager.

The thing with Discovery, I actually miss the self-contained episodes that they used to do in Star Trek. Star Trek Discovery is straightforward. We've got a main plot, and we are going to run through it. There are no self-contained episodes at all. Right. And I kind of miss it. I miss the little morality play individual episodes.

I'm enjoying Discovery. I've got to say, I liked it. A little bit of a spoiler alert for this episode. Don't, don't, no, no. It's not really a spoiler. Don't worry about it. I worry about shows that go so quickly to the alternative universe.

Oh, dear. Okay. Yeah. We're talking, you're still in your first season, and you're dropping them into the alternative universe. And the funny thing is, we know that the alternative universe was created because of Gene Roddenberry, and on this show, they don't follow the Roddenberry rules, so they shouldn't have to go to the alternate universe ever.

Yes, I agree. Oh. So, it's interesting. Okay. Yeah. It wasn't bad, Jason. Watch it. I'm interested in your opinion on it. No, no, I'll definitely watch it. And what's interesting is, since you mentioned Voyager, I'm guessing you haven't dove into the Orville yet, because the Orville is mostly standalone episodes that are very akin to the old Star Trek one-offs.

I have made my opinion about Orville very plain. Okay. But I thought you said you were going to try it now that it got picked up for a second season. I lied. Okay. Well, I had this at another spot in the show, but I'll put it in here now. It's a Star Trek Deep Space Nine watch guide from Max Temkin from Cards Against Humanity.

It's called Steep, Steep Trek, Star Trek Deep Space Nine in 82.5 hours, where he, it's a great write-up of just the history of the show, how the show came to be, which, I mean, it's a really good write-up. And at the end, he's got his episode list, so you can get through it with the minimal amount of episodes required.

Right. But even he says, it's like, screw it, just hunker down and watch all of them, which is what I would recommend, because it is a fantastic show. So when you're done with Voyager, feel free to dive back into DS9. I might do that. I might do that. I feel like I have to catch up on so many new things, particularly for the show, that I feel like I'm wasting my time going back and watching old things, but whatever.

Yeah. Speaking of, just quickly, of new things and trying to catch up and get back into things, I finally got around to listening to the No Such Thing as a Fish podcast. It is now my new favorite podcast. Is that not the greatest thing ever? It is so good, and it's not just because they're in their delightful British accents making jokes.

It is fantastic. I absolutely love this podcast, and I'm thrilled to see that there's 199 that I have to go back and listen to. Yeah, that's what I said. When there's nothing in the queue, and if the shows are something I don't want to listen to that week, I'll delete those and go grab a couple old episodes and throw them on in the background.

It is, as you just said, delightful. And I like things that are delightful. I need more delightful in my life, because right now it's just a lot of shitholes. So I'm guessing you haven't watched Black Mirror yet. I haven't. It's on the list of things to do. It's just so, I guess, not in the headspace for it right now.

Yeah. When you're feeling happy and you want to feel like crap, go toss on Black Mirror. Yeah, I've actually been feeling very happy, because I have a whole bunch of new music to talk about. We don't talk about music that often, because I'm an old guy, and people don't put out music that I like that much anymore. But a bunch of old bands are putting out music, and I'm thrilled.

So I want to share this all with you. I'll just do a quick rundown. We've got a whole bunch of new things coming out and singles out, so you can taste a little bit of it now. Shoegaze Band Ride. I've been talking about them on this podcast for two years now, because they reformed. They did a tour that brought grown men to tears, how it was just so good.

They put out a new album a couple months ago that was really, really good. They're just going for it. They've got another EP coming with a new single out right now called Catch You Dreaming. We have the links for all these singles in the show notes. Really, really good. The Breeders are back. What? Really?

Yes, they have a brand new album coming called All Nerve. The single is out now called Wait in the Car. We have the link for that in the show notes as well. It rocks. This song is so good. I haven't heard a good rock and roll song in a long time. Nailed it. It's awesome.

Cool. Well worth a listen. Can't wait to hear the album. Can't wait for them to tour. That'll be a lot of fun. I'm a huge Black Rebel Motorcycle Club fan, although, to be honest, their albums have getting diminishing returns. I like their older stuff a lot better than new stuff. They've got a new album coming out called Wrong Creatures.

The first single is out, Little Thing Gone Wild. Not bad. It wasn't bad. I listened to a little bit of it. And like I was telling you, it reminded me of Murder City Devils. So if you like this stuff, next week I'll throw in some Murder City Devils for the show notes, because I really, really like them. Their old stuff is great.

Right. And David Byrne, who was the lead singer of Talking Heads, has not put out an album in quite a long time. He has a new one coming called American Utopia, and this new single called Everybody's Coming to My House. It's certainly interesting. I'm definitely going to give the album a listen to, because we have gotten the nail in the coffin of there ever being a Talking Heads reunion, because David Byrne is playing Coachella as a solo artist.

And we all know that Coachella would be the one place where you'd get a big payout reunion tour. So obviously, never going to happen. Well, what was that Old Man Festival where like the Stones played and all that crap? Aren't they going to bring that back? I think we're about 15 years away from people that we like doing the Old Man Festival.

Okay. Got it. Okay. Yeah. And we're going to do The Last Jedi. We're going to do a spoiler cast on it, but we're going to wait for Dave Bittner to join us. So that will be coming up shortly. That will be at the end of the show, because I know a lot of people have listened to a lot of podcasts about The Last Jedi recently.

And I've read a lot of Twitter posts from a lot of people that said, I can't listen to your show this week because you're talking about The Goddamn Last Jedi. So we're going to talk about it, but it is going to be at the end of the show, and it is going to be a complete spoiler cast. So once we start going, and very short, I've seen podcasts that are five hours long about The Last Jedi.

I've listened to probably four hours of The Last Jedi podcasts, and talking about The Last Jedi, we're going to be quick. Yep. Security? Ha! I just wanted to make a quick note.

We've made a lot of oblique references to the shithole comment. And we've also talked a few times about the need for things that fill us with delight this week. And I have to say, it has been thoroughly delightful watching the news media try to deal with the shithole comment, particularly NPR actually tweeting out that they will be using the word shit on their news programs, because, well, it's news and they have to.

So I just wanted to mention that really quick before we got started. Now, here we are. Security. Ha! The Cyberwires. Dave Bittner is back. And we're here to talk about some scary stuff, and then the even more scary Last Jedi. That's very good. Hello, gentlemen. Welcome back, Brian.

Missed you last week. I'm sorry. I was in a plane, so I could not join you, but I missed you as well. So it's good to be back. That's all right. The gang's all back for the new year. I want these motherfucking geeks off my motherfucking plane! How is traveling with a little toddler?

Isn't that delightful? Yes. Delightful is definitely one of the words. You know, he's really... How did you? He's hooked on Elmo right now, and we had an iPad loaded up with about two hours' worth, and that kind of got us through it. That and eating. That's great. So it wasn't quite the nightmare scenario I was expecting it to be.

No, we would always drug our kids with Benadryl before we put them on a plane. That helped a lot. Yeah, I think that's in our near future, certainly by the next flight. Speaking of kids, my first bit of news here, smart toy maker to pay $650,000 after millions of kids get hacked.

This is VTech. We've talked about this sort of thing a few times and how companies over in Europe are doing a much better job of cracking down. France and Germany come to mind. We've talked about stories from both those places. But here, it's finally here. So at the end of 2015, a massive security breach at VTech has emerged, revealing that hackers broke into the company's servers, gaining access to almost 5 million parents' customer accounts, 6 million children worldwide.

Information included names, emails, passwords, downloaded histories, home addresses of parents, first names, genders, birthdays of kids, and over 190 gigabytes of photos taken through the KidConnect app.

So lots of shots of the kids. Awesome. Yeah, this is one where, and I think we have touched on this before, but this is one where this was so flagrant that I think they were almost daring the FTC to not come down on them.

You know, they said that the data was being encrypted. The data wasn't encrypted. You know, it was just, it was about as bad as you could get in terms of requiring to protect kids. One of the things that I found interesting in this article, and this might just be bad writing.

Certainly, there's none of that on the internet. There's no bad writing on the internet. No, never. In the last paragraph, it says, in addition to paying the FTC, VTEC must put into effect a comprehensive data security program that will undergo independent audits for 20 years. All right.

So far, so good. Here's the sentence that caught my eye. It is also permanently banned from violating the children's privacy law and from falsifying its privacy and security practices. Well, isn't that what laws mean? Yeah. Look, you are banned from breaking the law.

Right. You are permanently banned from committing murder. Yeah. I guess, I guess it's just, I guess they're, I mean, you put it in writing as a reminder, I suppose. But come on. Another thing I saw that's not in this article that someone pointed out about it, I think on Twitter, was that $650,000 is a drop in the bucket to VTEC.

So it's not that it's going to hurt them so much as perhaps get the attention of other companies that the FTC, there's a new sheriff in town and their name is the FTC. So we'll see. Well, I guess also the other hope would be for somebody like me who hears about this and goes, well, I guess I will not be purchasing any VTEC stuff that connects to the internets.

And I want my 30 cents from the class action lawsuit that I am definitely going to get a postcard for in the next six months. Yes. Right, right. By an Elmo stamp. Yes. Well, speaking of creepy pictures of kids, there is a very long running Mac malware piece of software out there called FruitFly.

Have you guys, have we talked about FruitFly? I don't think we ever have talked about this on the show before, but you may have, Dave. We may have. It's definitely on my radar. I think we may have talked about this. There are some connections here. You know, the researcher, Patrick Wardle, he's been on this show.

Remember, I did an interview with him and included a segment of that. He's really one of the top guys when it comes to Mac-specific stuff, you know, researching vulnerabilities on the Mac. And so interesting to see that he was in the center of all this. Yeah, definitely. And the defendant is Philip R. Durachinsky.

And he's apparently been running this for about 13 years. And we've figured this out, apparently, because of some of the libraries that were used in the malware. And it has been patched throughout the years. It's just kind of a scary piece of malware because it's just one guy, a lone gunman, who can whip out this code and just throw it out there.

It's not like self-replicating or anything like that. It's just, he's just a creep. That's why they, and I love it in the Ars Technica article, they call it creepware. Because that's kind of what it is. It's very creepy. It's a one-off. It's a one-off. And the fact that he was able to be under the radar for over a decade doing very creepy things and not being detected is both fascinating and disturbing.

Yeah. You say disturbing, I say, look, it's somebody doing it right. That's true. Yes. It's true. Well, he'll be doing it right. He'll be doing it right in prison for a while. Oh, yes, he will. And it's also interesting that they still don't know how the stuff got on people's machines.

Yeah, that's the curious thing, because you, in the segment, we've talked a number of times about, you know, is there anybody out there that has a Mac that we know that has been affected by malware? How has that happened? How, you know, here it is, but we still don't really know how it got onto the systems. I'd assume he must have had access to them at some point.

Or who knows? Microsoft Word macros. You know, if it's not self-replicating and he's doing, you know, spear phishing with it, it could be as simple as that. Right. Yeah, the article says, you know, it speculates that it might have been malicious web links or email attachments, the usual suspects.

But, yeah, and you'd think at this point when he's busted, perhaps they could get that detail out of him, but maybe not yet. Yeah. Got to wait for the plea bargain. I would like some rope for my soap, sir. I will tell you how I infected all those computers, please.

Well, moving on, you know, we have the famous hack of the Democratic Party, which, of course, affected our last election. Butter emails. Butter emails. And the... No collusion.

No collusion. The Fancy Bear group, who are the Russians. I don't know about you guys, but do you find yourselves reflexively still wanting to say Soviets? Yeah. Especially because I've been watching the Americans on FX. Yes. I just started, we just, my wife and I just started watching that too.

It's a fantastic show. Stick with it. Enjoying it. Yeah, very much. Very much. But... Can't wait for that last season. The Russians. Yeah. The Russians are behind Fancy Bear and we're behind those hacks. Well, according to the good folks over at Trend Micro, a cybersecurity firm, they are gearing up.

And this time, their target is the U.S. Senate. Yep. In preparation of the next round of elections. And none of this is surprising. What's interesting is the sort of back channel conversations.

And I want to emphasize that this is perhaps straying into tinfoil hat territory. We do that every now and again. And I say it makes it perfect for this show. There's speculation that perhaps some of the flood of resignations we've been seeing from the Senate lately perhaps could be related to people getting in front of things.

If you know that perhaps you had behavior unbecoming to a senator in your email or any of your other electronic communications, and based on what you saw these folks were capable of doing in the last election, perhaps you want to get out of dodge before the possibility of things being released becomes a certainty.

That is definitely a little tinfoil hattery. You've got to admit that. It is. It is. It is. Absolutely. We've had far more things, far more tinfoil hat territory than this one. I would classify this as plausible if we're going to go with the Mythbusters ratings. Okay, Jamie.

Yeah. So – and, you know, again, it's this – I'm just – I think we're all gobsmacked that the party in power has really turned – a blind eye is probably not fair to say, but the energy that's been gone after the Russians is certainly not what we expect from the Republicans when it comes to going after these sorts of things.

We're at the other side doing it. I guess it's fair to put it that way. Yeah, I think that's fair. The other interesting point is we were all talking a year ago now that there appeared to be some good signs in terms of cybersecurity that would be coming from this administration. That's true.

That's true. We just – we have not seen them implemented, apparently. And, yeah, cybersecurity is supposed to be something that has bipartisan agreement that, you know, is not part of – the need to protect the integrity of our elections, you'd think no one would have a problem with, and yet here we are.

So, yeah, yeah, that's fun. I think we're going to be hearing a lot more about that in the next week or two, so let's – I suspect you're right. I suspect we will. One other thing that we've talked about often is Facebook, and, you know, we did the whole finally, hopefully, we're never going to talk about it again, Facebook is not listening to you thing.

But we've also discussed about the whole somewhat creepy people you may know feature, and the folks over at Gizmodo have put together – the Gizmodo Group's special projects desk has released a tool called the People You May Know Inspector. I think this is fascinating, to be honest, because they're aware of the fact that this is a black box that we cannot find out why and how and what is going on behind the screen at Facebook there with this.

But what they're doing is they've made this tracker that basically checks your people you may know suggestions every six hours, saves that information to your computer so you can review who's appearing there, when, and how often. And then through big data means, because they've been doing this internally for a while, they're starting to theoretically, hopefully, be able to piece together how this algorithm functions and why it does what it does.

So I am fascinated by this. I'm fascinated by this. Have you guys installed this? Well, do you really want to give Gizmodo Media's special projects desk access to your data? No, that's not built into – you can choose to do that if you want to, right?

The software itself purely saves it to your own desktop, and you can review it internally. We've never made a checkbox that never worked and still did what it said it wasn't going to do, ever, because we know Gizmodo and their crack programming team of cybersecurity specialists.

Never makes a mistake. Go for it, Brian. Let me know how it goes. No, they did open source it so people can look at the code. So I suppose you could wait and see – allow other people to take a look at it and see what's really going on. That doesn't mean – this comes back to my problem with open source that we talked about a long time ago.

Just because they open source it doesn't mean that's what's compiled and running on their servers. Look, all I'm saying is I'm interested in what they're doing in the same way that I am interested in, say, medical trials that will cure cancer, but that doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to sign up for the trials. Okay.

Right, right. Exactly. I'm just saying. That's all I'm just saying. Isn't it fun when you're gone for a week and you come back and everybody just piles on? Oh, I live for it. I'm going to take a few more weeks off just because it'll be that much better. Yeah, that crowded airplane ain't looking so bad right now, is it?

Nope. I'll have a gin and tonic, please, and let's watch another stupid Lego movie. Yeah. So Amazon, I found this fascinating. Your Amazon order might lock you out of the Trusted Traveler program. I am part of the Trusted Traveler program. I've got global entry status and all that sort of thing because I go across the border all the time.

This was fascinating to me, the fact that Harper Reid, who is an engineer at PayPal, ordered a suitcase on Amazon. It's a higher-end luggage brand that costs several hundred dollars usually, and apparently he paid full price for the suitcase. As far as he knew, it was legitimately a real whatever-the-brand-is suitcase, and he was quickly refunded.

He never got the suitcase. He was refunded the money, and of course, Amazon provided no explanation whatsoever. Shocking. And he just carried on with his life. And then he tried to renew his global entry status and was told by U.S. Customs and Border that he could not. He has been flagged for importing counterfeit goods.

So, apparently, whoever Amazon was getting the suitcase from got in trouble. Amazon got in trouble. Amazon had to shut it down. Amazon simply refunded the guy. But the guy still ended up in trouble, and apparently this got reported, obviously, to Customs. So, this is pretty effed up.

It is. Just to that this person did nothing wrong. No. Nothing wrong. And how – and U.S. – I mean, Customs is looking at his purchase history, which in this case, I suppose, is allowed. But what it does, for me anyway, is it makes me really think about all of the things I buy on Amazon that come literally on a slow boat from China.

And I don't know when I hit the order button that they're coming on a slow boat from China because, in a way, it seems like Amazon tries to hide that from you. Yes, they very much do. It's very difficult to find out often who the actual real vendor is or where the product is coming from. Yeah, and the connection – connecting it to the individual who does not have access to this information is insanely wrong.

And if you've ever dealt with these kind of government agencies or even, for that matter, Amazon, appealing, these sorts of things, getting information, trying to right the wrongs are insanely time-consuming, year-long processes. Yeah.

So – Yeah. It also reminds me – like, I've had packages come, just stupid little things, you know, of a case for your iPhone or something like that. You know, you'd choose the cheap one and you'd find out that it's coming, you know, directly from China and it gets to you.

But the packaging is clearly mislabeled and I would say intentionally mislabeled to allow it to scoot through customs more quickly, I suppose. You know, and so I think that's a fairly routine thing. But I had nothing to do with that. So if someone gets busted doing that, you know, it seems – Well, we're – you know, we're still living under buyer beware except we're reducing the amount of information that buyers can ever see on anything now, which does not seem at all fair to me.

But, hey, it's the world we've decided to live in. It reminds me, right after 9-11, a friend of mine was the – he's actually the head of pediatrics at Georgetown University Hospital. So a marvelous, you know, loving, giving man who has built a career healing sick children, you know, and has risen to the top of his – Farts rainbows, rides unicorns.

Yes, he's risen to the top of his craft and received accolades from those around him, you know, respected the world over. Happened to have the same name as someone on the no-fly list. Right. And so begins the fun at airports. We live in Brazil.

That's it. We just finally live in the movie Brazil. Yeah. Yeah. Well, the next thing we have here, an article from Motherboard. It's called, My Joke Cryptocurrency Hit $2 Billion and Something is Very Wrong. I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on this.

Part of what attracted us to – we actually talked about this a little bit on the Cyber Wire. And we were – the fact that the coin is called Dogecoin, which is a reference to a Homestar Runner cartoon, which immediately made us fans of it. Of course. But this guy – what is his name?

Jackson Palmer. He's from Australia. And he started this joke cryptocurrency called Dogecoin. He hasn't had anything to do with it in years. And recently, Dogecoin's value, you know, topped $2 billion. And this is the crazy state we're in when it comes to anything cryptocurrency.

Again, I don't want to spend a whole lot of time on this, but I put the article in here for – if folks are interested in this sort of thing, this is a really good article, measured, thoughtful about this sort of tulip madness run-up that we're in right now when it comes to cryptocurrency.

And how the initial intentions of some of these cryptocurrency and blockchain things seem to have run away from us, where when it's the very financial markets that they were trying to do an end around are trading in these things, it ain't working.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. I also put a link in if – I'm sure many of our listeners are familiar with the book, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. It is a classic book from the 1800s, and it covers things like tulip madness.

It's actually quite an entertaining read. There's a link to it for a free PDF. It's from the 1800s, so it's in public domain. A good read. If you're into this sort of thing, conspiracy theories and crowd behavior, it's one definitely worth checking out.

Oh, cool. I will definitely put it on my iPad for a fine evening read. There you go. Now, drunk droning in New Jersey can finally land you in prison. That's right. Wait, so flying something through the air that has whirling blades that took out Jason a couple months back while drunk isn't a good idea?

Nope, apparently not. Flying lawnmowers. If you get caught with a blood alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent, which is the same legal limit for driving a vehicle, it would be considered a disorderly offense under new rules and would carry a $1,000 fine and up to six months in prison.

Okay, good. Surprisingly, the bill was approved at a 65 to 0 vote. Amazing. Yeah, who's going to be the one legislator who stands up for drunk drone driving? This is New Jersey. Look, I have one platform and one platform alone, damn it.

Exactly right. Right. Yeah. So, and as a bow on the whole president, we have to wait for Governor Christie to sign the bill before he leaves office. So, so he may be the 66th person on the ballot.

He might vote no because, you know, well, actually, who knows? He's not a fan of drones after that little, you know, partying on the beach incident. So, we'll see. Well, but I have to wonder what led to this. Is this just something where someone came up with something so obvious that we might as well put it through and I could put a feather in my cap and go back to my constituents and say, look how I'm protecting you?

Or was this actually a problem? I know we have had fatalities with drones. There was a tragic story of the groom who was killed on his wedding day by the photographer's drone that was taking photos of him and his bride and flew into him and, you know, cut his neck open and he died.

So, it can happen, but this article doesn't say if there was an actual event that led to this or if it's just, you know. Probably pandering, pandering to their base. You know what? I'll take this kind of pandering. A little bit of legislation is not a bad thing.

Trust me, I live in the Midwest. I know what drunk people do to try and have some fun. I would be fine if they can, I mean, I'm sure it's not a deterrent, but if they can get a couple months in jail just to cool their heels, I'm fine with that. I wish the fine was a little higher. Ten grand.

No, one grand. No, it's one grand, one grand. Ten grand I'd be cool with, but a thousand bucks? The drone costs more than that, and they don't even say if they're going to impound your drone. Again, keep in mind, though, this is New Jersey. A grand could be a lot. Oh, that's true. That's true. Poor New Jersey. I miss the Sopranos.

Anyway, that's it for this week, guys. We will talk in about five minutes about The Last Jedi. So, guys, if you've made it this far in the show, stick around until the end, and you can hear us talk about some Star Wars. We've done a number of segments and commentary on the German language on this podcast, so much so that somebody on Twitter pointed that out to us this week, which we'll talk about a little bit later.

But that inspired me. I found something on Mental Floss. Fifteen adorably wunderbar German terms of endearment. Because, again, I need more delight in my life. Schnurzel purzel. Schnurzel purzel. Is my favorite. Schnurzel purzel. It's just a lovely word. So you'll want to check out the link in the show notes and learn all about this.

Schnurzel purzel specifically means it's just fun. Okay. I went through them, and I had a grin when I was done. So definitely worth checking them out. And one of the things that we've talked about a little bit on this show, I talk about it more on The Art of Charm, but the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Yes. Where really stupid people think that they are the best at something. We like to call it the current administration. Because they just don't have a grasp on how stupid they actually are. Now, I found this on OpenCulture.com. It's an article, but it's wrapped around a video from Ted Ed, which I thought was really interesting.

Ted Ed did a great video about the Dunning-Kruger effect, which I highly recommend checking out if you don't know what we're talking about or would like a refresher to be able to send a link to your friends who are suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect. It's well worth it.

I don't know if you saw the link at the bottom of that article, Jason, but if you're interested in a more humorous take and still get the same knowledge, you can listen to John Cleese from Monty Python describing the effect. So I'll put that link in the show notes as well, because that video is well worth a watch.

I did watch that, and it's awesome. It's John Cleese. Come on. You can't go wrong with him. And just on a random happenstance of serendipity, which I don't get that much anymore, I clicked on an Amazon ad for the Hasselblad H5D60 Medium Format Digital SLR Camera Body.

And this is a $30,000 camera body. It's not small. You know, it's a 60-megapixel Hasselblad, so you'd expect it to be expensive. So what caught my eye was that there are a lot of one-star reviews. Now, I went and read the one-star reviews for this.

I'm going to leave it in here for people to go explore. And these are fucking hilarious. They're very funny. Because not a single one of them is actually true, which is great. Yes.

For this price, you would expect it to come with a memory card. It also doesn't fit in my pocket. And the funny thing is, most of the people found all of these helpful, which is good. Yes, I like that. It was very enjoyable. This is one of the more fun comment sections I've ever read. Yeah.

Yeah, I'm glad people are still doing this. It makes my day. And I saw this. I don't know this guy, Paul Hain. Somebody retweeted his tweet this morning. There's a tweet that said, I knew they initially tried to make Patrick Stewart wear a wig for Captain Picard, but I'd never seen the test photo, and now my day is complete.

And it is a very funny photo, so we'll have that linked in the show notes at gog.show slash 242. He actually looks a bit like Scott Bakula. Oh, my God. With the wig. Does he not? Maybe. I mean, I'm just looking at it right now and kind of, like, blurring my vision a little bit, and it's like, this could be from Enterprise.

Wow, maybe. I'm squinting, too. Yeah. Yeah. Or Neil Patrick Harris. Oh, yeah. It could also be Neil Patrick Harris. I can see that. Yeah. I know you're not really into the sports ball, Jason, but there's this fella out there named Tom Brady.

I've heard the name. I've heard the name. Yeah, yeah. He's widely considered to be probably the best quarterback of all time, and, you know, he has a beautiful Brazilian model as his wife, who actually probably makes more money than he does. So, win-win. But apparently he has not made enough money, and he's going to start to rebrand himself, because he may be done with the ball of the foot as of this year anyways.

This could very well be his last year. He's an old man for football. But he apparently is going to start a new career as the Gwyneth Paltrow of sports, because he is pushing something called the TB12 method, Tom Brady 12, which is how he stays in shape and what he eats.

And he's basically got a total quack doctor named Alex Guerrero, and this is his thing. So, for the low cost of $19.99 per month or $199.99 a year, you can get the Tom Brady app and learn how to be like Tom. So, if he's trying to be the Gwyneth Paltrow, do I actually have to shove the iPhone up my ass to make the app run?

Probably. I think you steam your balls. That seems to be step one. There's recovery sleepwear that you can purchase. There are useless brain games. Hey, remember those? I did those. That'll make you smarter. Drink lots of water can prevent sunburns. No, you can't.

Yep. And, of course, if you buy all of his special TB12 incredibly expensive electrolytes and supplements, you could replace the 72 trace minerals you lose when sweating. Oh, great. Powders and juices and things like that. Will wonders never cease.

So, it was funny because until I got to that part in the article where he talks about upselling on his product line, I was going to say, I'll try that for three months just to see if, just so we have something to talk about on the show. You're buying an app that is just selling you more shit.

Exactly. So, yeah. None of which actually work. Also, Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop, I think he might have tapped into something here. I think so. I think he's going to do very well, sadly. Yeah, I want to meet some of the people that pay for the yearly subscription for that.

I just think that would be excellent. Yes. Other moron of the week. And this is not the reason that most people are going to think, but it's just a funny one. Our potato in chief has come out and said that in November we started delivering the first F-52s and F-35 fighter jets.

This is to Norway. And this was in a press conference with Norwegian Prime Minister Ernest Solberg. He says, we have a total of 52 and they've delivered a number of them already, a little ahead of schedule. Well, the F-52, turns out, does not exist. It is a fictional plane from the game Call of Duty Advanced Warfare.

And the press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has declined to comment, I should say, on whether or not the president does play Call of Duty. I just, it hurts. It hurts. I can't even laugh anymore.

It just hurts. I just wish he played Battlefront because then we could have, we've got 52 TIE fighters and X-Wings on the way to Norway right now. That'd be great. Feedback loop. Big thanks to Hanky, who joined us on Patreon with a lovely monthly donation.

We appreciate that. Thank you so much. Thank you, Hank. Thanks, Hank. Yeah. Thanks, Hank. And over on Facebook, we have another five-star rating because you can rate us there now, too, because, like we mentioned, all social networks have to keep rolling out features. But we appreciate it.

ARA N says, an amazing, informative podcast that keeps me in the know. Thanks for explaining IT tech stuff, such as Meltdown and Spectre. In layman's terms to us non-techie people, my only complaint is Jason didn't finish reading Children of Time. One of my favorite books is a fellow sci-fi nerd. Give it another try if you can get past the spiders.

Keep up the great work. I will not be giving it another try. I've already returned it because Audible will give me my money back. They won't give me my nightmares back, though, so I'm still stuck with those. Yeah, Jason does not deal well with spiders. No, I don't. And this next one comes from Ladarius H.

Do you think it's a better idea to attend a six-week programming boot camp or get a four-year computer science degree? Thank you for your time. I'm a big fan of the show. Well, from personal experience, I would say neither. Do not get into programming. Do not get into programming.

Look, here's the deal, in my opinion. A six-week programming boot camp will train you up on a particular language or development platform or whatever, so you can get work right away. But as we've talked about many times on this show, being a programmer is a young man's game, and whatever language you use will not be in vogue soon enough, and you will have to continue to keep learning different things and go to boot camp after boot camp after boot camp.

You do not want to be a programmer. A four-year computer science degree will actually train you up in the nuts and bolts of all this stuff and make you much more valuable and get you doing a lot of different things, not just programming. Yeah, a computer science degree is going to give you longevity, for sure, and get you higher-paying jobs out of the gate, especially if you're going to go that route.

Go into AI, because as we've seen, starting salaries at Google and AI start at $275,000 a year. Unless you get a free bike. And a free bike, unless somebody from Yahoo comes by and steals it from you, because they don't have anything anymore. But if you want to start with the basics, yeah, a six-week programming boot camp will teach you the basics of logic and conditionals and all that crap.

I've seen some of these, and honestly, you're going to learn just as much from those, like, learn a language in 31 days books as you will from a six-week programming boot camp. There's not going to be anything in there. Find problems that you want to solve and solve them. That is the best way to learn programming.

There's just – some of these boot camps are just not very good. That's the only problem with them. But if you're serious about it and you want to make a career out of it, go for the computer science degree, even though I never got one. Or me. Yeah, but we got into this at such a different time. Yeah, completely different time.

We've talked about how the internet was the wild, wild west. We were there at the beginning. We trained ourselves up on it at the beginning. There was no learning curve. Right. All right. Everything was a learning curve, to be honest. So we were lucky, lucky, in air quotes, that way. Well, I mean, I think we were lucky.

We had a pretty good run of over 20 years in the biz. And I don't think you can do what we did anymore. You can't come in learning those skills from scratch. Uh-uh. No. If you want to make a career out of it, doing it, bootstrapping it like we did, no way in hell are you going to make it. Because there are just so many kids coming out of everywhere that wanted to be Silicon Valley millionaires.

It is just a dumb route to go if you just, you know, want to have a good life, is all I'm saying. Because computer engineering is hard work. It takes a lot out of your body and your soul. And you, you know, I just don't, I would never do it.

I would never recommend going into that field at all anymore. I agree. Well, some happy news. Let's go, let's go over to Twitter. Yep. Over at Twitter, B. Lachman says, I'm a big fan of your show. Thumbs up. Greetings from Germany. That country with long words. Yes.

Thank you. Glad you listened. All right. And Droidian Cowboy says, please don't stop the stock predictions. I really like that aspect of the show. Well, you're the only one. It shows your thoughts and actions. Just subscribe to your podcast and might join your Clash Royale clan level 12 here.

Oh man, I wish I, hopefully you got in, hopefully you got in. We'll talk about it a little bit more later, but, uh, uh, the stock predictions thing. I think the problem with the stock predictions is we only picked one round at the beginning of the year. That's why, where it wasn't that much fun for me. It's like, okay, we did it once. And then we just spent 12 months figuring out how poorly or great we did.

It turns out we did fantastic, but, uh, no, I mean, I, I don't think we're going to do the game aspect of it again, but, uh, we'll continue to talk about stock prices and things like that. We've been doing that and we'll continue to do it. So just probably not gamified anyways, we kind of did that whole segment to hopefully get a sponsor for the segment, which never happened.

Damn you Schwab. Yeah, seriously. I think the fun thing about doing the segment and talking about it is it did get kind of get me reinterested in investing and just putting a little bit of money in and looking at stuff and figuring it out. So, you know, since I've been doing that more, maybe I'll, maybe like, you know, when I, when I have things that I've bought, I'll talk about them on the show.

Just, uh, it'll just be a caveat that I paid for them. So, uh, you know, I'm tainted in some crazy way. I'm sure. Right. We'll talk a little bit about this offline. Maybe we'll figure out something. All right. Uh, Bernie B 5 1 3 says, love what you do. Keep up the great work. We're trying. We're trying. Paradox double O four nine says, just finished your newest episode where you talked about Amazon taking pictures of your front door in the Amazon shopping app.

There's an option for them to not take the picture and there will be a link in the show notes for that. Thanks for that. I'm going to keep them on though, because as creepy as it is, I kind of like to know when they show up. Why don't you just point one of your Chinese cameras at the door? I've got two pointed at the front door, so I kind of already know, but I like to see if I like to have a corroboration from Amazon.

I have three points of corroboration. I think you should start doing like an elf on the shelf with the Amazon cameras. I want you to start putting like a little figurine out there. Okay. Move it around every single time and like do a stop motion animation out of all the photos from the different things. I think do something artsy with this, Jason.

Well, Vine is coming back. So once Vine is back, I'll hook up my cameras. Yeah. Awesome. All right. Song of the Oz says, I wonder if we are going to cover the perfect LG sales pitch for their new smart home tech, the Clio. I'm assuming you saw this video, Jason. It's just another product fail demonstration.

It's at CES. I've been sick, so I missed it. Yeah. Well, he's, you know, it's a, you know, it's a device that you're supposed to talk to and it just fails spectacularly. Oh, kind of like the Echo. Yeah, kind of. Yeah. Hey, Siri, get your ass out, your head out of your ass.

Okay. Next one comes from Anthony Rossbach. Shocked. You missed the key Intel news that the CEO sold all the stock he was allowed to before Spectre and Meltdown came out. Filed it in October and was told about the flaws in June. Interesting. I have not seen that covered it in any of the stories we have.

So if that comes back up across the news feeds, we'll definitely cover it. But it did not come across my feed reader at all. No, me either. I didn't see anything about that. So that's interesting. I'll have to look into it. And Gadlaw6 says, you should get a Discord channel for the show.

Okay, I would just like to say that we have a new Bluetooth because when I updated my phone recently, it turned on Hey Siri, which has just been recording my conversation that we've had since we said that, which is pretty funny.

Right. Okay. All right. Over at iTunes, we have some five-star ratings this week. No one stars, sadly. Grumpy Brethren says, iTunes one, me zero, round two. I posted a review previously, but apparently it was PG-13 and not G, so here it goes again.

Jason Bryan, I too am a grumpy old geek and I've been listening for about a year now. I feel ashamed that I have not taken the time to review your podcast or donate until now, but I've spread the word quite often to others. I tend to get a lot of ideas and information from your podcast, including reading material, gadgets, and security news. I also share a similar taste in music with Bryan.

Need to find a way to see The Cure? Well, you can if you go to London in the summer, you lucky bastards. Also listening to my large 80s music library stored on an NAS burned from records and CDs and sadly purchasing new releases in digital format, i.e. The Church. Another great band. Love them.

Curious if Bryan also enjoys bands like Marillion. I'm aware of them. They're in my iTunes collection somewhere. Just don't listen to them a lot. So, Jason, see you on Clash as I'll be joining your clan here soon. Hopefully you got in. Look for my donation via PayPal and I won't be seeing you on any social networks as I've avoided them for years due to the time waste factor.

Keep up the good work and cheers to a prosperous new year. Well, thank you so much. Thank you very much. And the next one comes from Sterling1091. Nothing but love. I just started listening to you guys last week and I've been hooked ever since. One question. What is your clan name for Clash Royale? My God.

We have more people interested in joining Clash Royale than we have on Patreon. We got to be able to monetize that. All right. You got to start paying five bucks to join our clan. It's GOG.show like we mentioned last week and it's full right now.

So hopefully you got in. Hopefully. And finally, a short and sweet one from Nclenchick. Nickel Chick is what I'm reading. Nickel Chick. Oh, Nickel Chick. Nickel and Chick. Nickel and Chick. Yes. Love these guys. They're hilarious. That's it. All right. Thank you.

All right. We appreciate that. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash support and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review. And as always, please tell your friends.

Closing shout outs. I want to give a shout out to a friend of the show, Andy Stuchanski, who also wrote our outro music. He's a singer songwriter in his own right. We have a link in our show notes to one of his albums and he is working on new music.

He shared a new track with me last night. It is fantastic. So very excited about talking about that in the future as he wraps it up. So good. Good on you, Andy. Keep going. Share it over this way. I like Andy. I will. I got I finally got to meet Andy at our last meetup where we got the grumpy old geeks Mjolnir. That's right.

Very nice guy. And a quick Clash Royale update. Brian has joined the clan. I have. I bought shit a brick when I saw that. I was like, what? Yeah, I downloaded it. I installed it. I was I was tired of hearing about how I don't participate in show activities.

So I'm in there. Peer pressure for the win. I've played a few battles. Yes, yes. I've played a few battles and I don't know how much longer I'll be there. So I might clear out and make room for some of these other people that want to get in. But just keep it for a good crapper game, man. It's fun. It's three minutes. You know, it's a couple of pinches and you're good to go.

I'm almost at well, I'm at level nine and a half now. And it's taken me as long from get to level nine to level nine and a half as it took to get from level one to eight. So they've got some some serious leveling issues there. But I'm having a blast. Everybody in there is really cool.

It's fun to chat with everybody. So sorry that you can't play that we're talking about right now. But some people do come and go because I, you know, on the totem pole of players, I am like way down the list. There are some gamers in there that have been there for, you know, since it began who are just kicking ass.

It's fun. It's just a lot of fun. Yeah. Well, I'm so glad that somebody so low down is running the show. That's right. All right. Well, we'll see how long I'm there. You know, you know, you know my track history with games. I last about two weeks. By the time this airs, Brian will be gone.

Most likely. Yeah. Until next time, I'm Brian Shilmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Stick around for our Star Wars Spectacular. Well, here we are. We're going to we're going to do The Last Jedi. It's a spoiler cast. If you haven't seen it yet. What the hell's wrong with you?

Stop listening. Now, I thought we would just have a little discussion here. But I'm going to I'm going to cede the floor because Dave Bittner has come with an outline and notes. Yeah. And he has cross-referenced things, apparently. So hang on there. Let's go. Yeah. I just before we begin, I would just like to say I am a little bit concerned that we are now going into nerd podcast territory.

I never thought we would be here, but we are. So everybody. Yes. We've never done anything nerdy on this podcast. What podcast do you think you've been doing for the past? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Jason, who's been pushing his clan on Clash Royale for three weeks.

But we've never we've never had a Star Wars review segment. This is new ground for us. Well, well, well, it's about time. I have to say there's one thing I can bring to this show. I'm proud that it's this. Why don't we start with the three of us just doing the quick what we thought of it?

I think that no real spoilers. Just impressions. Well, as I say, as a person who runs a, you know, a movie review show, I think those are best left till the end because, you know, you got to you got to you got to see that stuff out. OK, well, I'm just saying Dave's got an outline and Jason's already shot down my thoughts.

So I'll just step back. I think we should go point by point. Let's go point by point on Dave's outline. Bring us bring us home, Dave. I've got strings and push pins all over the wall. All right. All right. Let me let me just start with an opening statement and say that I will put it out there that I will challenge anyone to be a bigger Star Wars fan than me.

I was eight years old when Star Wars came out. It was extraordinarily influential on my life, foundational on my life. And so it's something that I love. It is just a part of everything for me. Let me just state really quickly that I am 100 percent on board with you and in the same place.

And Jason is not. I was. Well, I was OK. I was six years old when Star Wars came out and I saw it in the drive in theater opening like week. So I've been I've had Star Wars my whole life. But yes, but it does not. It does not flow through your blood as it does for both Dave and I. That is right.

No, I ran out of many fucking Chlorians a long time ago. We're not we're not here to review those talking about that word means nothing to me. So, yeah. So that said, the notion of there being this last trilogy or this, you know, next trilogy, whatever you want to call it, was very exciting to me.

And I enjoyed The Force Awakens very much. It felt like a Star Wars movie. I enjoyed Rogue One. Again, felt like a Star Wars movie. Went into this movie with great expectations, high hopes. I would say overall, this movie surprised me in many, many ways.

There were things that I expected to happen that didn't happen. There were things that happened that I didn't expect to happen. I had a lot of fun while I was watching this movie. But when I left the movie, the longer I thought about this movie, the less I liked it. And the more I heard other people talking about this movie, the more I found myself agreeing with some of the criticisms that they had.

One of the interesting things, though, is that I think the people who like this movie and the people who don't like this movie have very much been talking past each other. Like the people who like the movie, it seems to me like they're saying to the people who don't like it, they're saying, you know, you're resistant to change and you just want everything to be like it used to be.

And this shakes things up and it's a glorious mess and it's messy in all the best ways. And I love it. And that's not what we're saying. I think for many of us who found themselves disappointed in this, a lot of it comes down to craft. A lot of it comes down to storytelling and sort of death by a thousand cuts.

You know, there are lots of things that I could have overlooked. But when they pile up one on top of the other, I just found myself by the end of the movie kind of going, huh. Like, oh, okay. Oh, that. Oh, okay. Now, I will say I've seen the movie twice and I enjoyed it more the second time than I did the first time.

Because the second time there were no surprises, I knew what to expect. So I could just kind of take it for what I knew it was going to be and spend my time examining how it was made. So that's my opening statement. Brian, shall I turn it over to you? Okay, I was going to say we're going with Brian's thing then.

Just say what you think about the movie. Never mind. I can. Yes, we are. Two to one, Jason. You've been overruled. I am happy. Well, not happy. That wouldn't be the correct term. You and I, Dave, I think are, I can already tell, we're pretty much simpatico on this.

I enjoyed the movie as I sat in it. As I walked out of the theater, I looked over at my wife, who is of a slightly younger age, but enjoys Star Wars, I'd say, more than Jason. She's into the mythology in the universe. And we both kind of said, we're depressed.

It depressed us. And it took a while to figure out why, and much like you, the more I thought about the movie, the less I liked it. In fact, I avidly despise the movie at this point. I hate the movie. Now, having said that, I think it's a good movie.

It is just not a, it's not a good Star Wars movie. It's a good movie. It is not a Star Wars movie. It does not feel like Star Wars. And the arguments that other people are making, the people that enjoy the film are, that's a good thing. They're shaking it up.

No, no, it's fucking not. This is Star Wars, and it's supposed to be Star Wars, and what he has done is he has taken away the entire mythology of Star Wars and trying to replace it with something that we're not even sure about yet, and he's not going to continue.

That is one of the biggest frustrations for me, is things like saying Daisy Ridley's parents were nobody, and then he's doing interviews saying, well, who knows what's going to happen, because I'm not doing the next movie. Maybe it was just a lie. Well, no, fuck you, tell a story, so it's really frustrating to me, and it's funny, because Jason was texting me.

I did not know Jason was actively watching the movie. Well, hey, no, no, let me tell my story. Let me tell my story before, you don't have to tell my side of it. Okay, so that's my overall impression, is I enjoyed the movie at the time, and I think it is a very well-done movie. It is certainly visually stunning. It is a beautiful movie, but it's not a Star Wars movie in terms of flipping and destroying the entire mythology, and it's not a Star Wars movie in terms of feel.

There are jokes that I would consider to be modern jokes that do not feel right in the Star Wars universe. There are entire sequences that do not feel like they belong in the Star Wars universe. What he is doing, what he has done with the main story and with the main characters and the overall mythology of Star Wars is not Star Wars.

And I'm sorry, you know, you can say it's a good thing to be arty and to, you know, he has his artistic vision. This is fucking Star Wars. It is the biggest franchise in the universe, and it is also owned by Disney. If there is any company in the world that is in the business of fan servicing, it is Disney.

So I just want my Star Wars, man. Jason? Okay, so I think my love for Star Wars has been kind of overshadowed by Brian's negativity for me just not wanting to go see this movie the instant it came out.

And it comes back down to The Force Awakens. When that came out, I loved it. I was so into it in the theater. I was just like, I wanted to see it again, but I couldn't get it back to the theater, so then I watched it on TV when it came out. And it dawned on me that it was not a good movie. It was Star Wars-ish.

It was, you know, it was Force-ish, but it was just a retelling of, you know, the first Star Wars movie, not episode one, two, or three. We don't count those. And which also left a bad taste in my mouth for sequels when they just keep screwing with things.

So I'm jaded going into everything with Star Wars now. But I started watching this movie, and in the middle of the movie, or actually it was about two-thirds of the way through the movie, and I texted Brian, I'm like, our next episode is going to be called The Last Box of Kleenex, because I was weeping like a baby every time Carrie Fisher was on the screen.

This could have come down to the fact that I was two bottles of wine in and on Drick Sorrel Non-Drowsy, but every time she came on, I got mushy. And, you know, it was difficult. Every time, Jason? Every time she was on the screen. Even the Mary Poppins scene where she pulls herself back into the ship.

Okay. When the floor is seated to me again and I start talking about all the different things that bump me from this movie, that was more Uncanny Valley than Tarkin or Young Leia in Rogue One. That was one of the—you have, at the time, you had a live actress.

That was the most wooden, horrible, stupid—people laughed out loud in the theater, and not in a good way when that happened. Okay. It was a horrible bump. So I think this is where having a really shitty copy and watching it at home came into play, because this comes down to also back on The Force Awakens.

Like, a lot of people who saw it in 3D didn't have a problem with the CG characters, and if you saw it in 2D, you did. And when I went back and watched it in 2D, I'm like, oh, my God, that looks terrible. But in 3D, it looked great. So when I saw this with a really crappy copy of it, and it looked—it didn't have, like, you know, the high super quality detail that you saw, so it didn't look as wooden to me.

It just, like, was part of the story. And I was just like, oh, I know they didn't kill her. I know she's going to come back. How is she going to come back? But then she does, you know, this Peter Pan shit and flies back into the ship, which, you know, 10 minutes later, I'm thinking, that was really stupid. But the whole point was, as I was going through the movie, I was more and more emotional just because of Carrie Fisher.

And I was like, I'm watching this thing going, why are they in Vegas? What's going—I mean, there were so many plot points that made zero sense. And then, of course, Brian spoils the ending five minutes before Luke dies. Brian's like, oh, and Luke dies.

I'm like, what? Hold on a second. Now, this is bullshit. This is what really pisses me off. How the fuck am I supposed to know that you're sitting at home watching it from Sweden drinking wine when you're texting me? No human being texts somebody about a movie until they're out of the theater and the movie is over.

I'm not—how am I supposed to know you're in the middle of watching it? We've done five years of shows together. You expect me to get off my ass and go to a theater? Come on. Well, I just figured you had finished the movie when you started writing me. No. How would I do that? Come on. I want real-time feedback.

I just don't want to know what happens. Okay, so beyond that, the things that really bugged me was force time. You know, the whole force projection thing was, I thought was, I'm like, okay, this is terrible. There were so many terrible things about the movie that by the end of the movie, I forgot how good I liked the beginning of it.

And then I just, like, at the very end when the closing credits came up, I'm like, what the fuck was that? That was not Star Wars. That is not anything about anything. Yeah, this director needs to be taken out back and shot because he just screwed everything up. J.J. Abrams set up the first movie for where he wants it to go.

This guy comes in, shits on the legacy, and then J.J.'s left to pick up the pieces. I wouldn't say—I would agree with you and say he—but I would expand it even more. He didn't just shit on J.J. Abrams' perfect set-up tee of what to do. He shat on George Lucas and the entire mythos of Star Wars.

He shat on humanity. He really destroys the—he destroyed the entire mythology of the Jedi. Just destroyed it. Just because what? All of us. Nobody should ever see another movie this guy makes. I'm sorry. He needs to be blacklisted. They're giving him his own trilogy.

I know. It's amazing. Okay, there's one scene that I know is semi-controversial that people liked or didn't like. My favorite scene in the entire movie is when Yoda sets the tree on fire and busts up laughing. That was the only joke in the movie that I loved. I thought it was loved.

And I love that we had a puppet Yoda. Yes! That too. That's what sold it for me. I'm like—they went to the archives and got us a good Yoda. That's the— It was funny, you know, when I was trying to avoid spoilers, one thing I saw was that Frank Oz went to both of the premieres, the L.A. and the London premiere.

And I was thinking, well, Frank Oz would probably get invited anyway. But it got me thinking, hmm. Hmm. In the movie. Yoda in this movie might be. Yes, exactly. Cameo I am, yes. So, yeah, that I enjoyed. And that was a little delightful to see a puppet Yoda back.

The rest of the jokes, come on. The whole—the beginning jokes— The jokes were rough. The jokes were rough because, like I said, they don't fit into the universe. They feel modern. They feel—they should be in a Will Smith cop movie, not in a Star Wars movie. And this gets to my overarching point.

And we can get to specific details in a second, and I intend to. Damn it, I intend to. But this sort of crystallized for me probably about a week ago because I've been thinking about this. A lot of shower thinking has been about this movie since I saw it and not in the fun way.

And I think what this movie lacks is emotional maturity in that, just like you were saying, the way that the jokes don't land, this director doesn't seem to be mature enough to let a serious moment sit.

Yep, exactly. For example, Chewbacca busts into Luke's little hut, and there's a nice little reunion there, and we go, oh my gosh, these two haven't seen each other forever. And then Luke says, where's Han? Cut away. Like, fuck you, where's Han?

We don't—we get that moment. You know, Rey is up learning to use a lightsaber. She cuts the big stone in half. It rolls down the mountainside, and the little frog nuns get their little cart, you know, blown away. Right? Like, every time there's a serious moment where we should have reflection, there's like a, oh, nope, we're not going to let you sit on that.

Here's a joke. You know, like, ha, ha, ha, wah, wah, wah. The entire—the entirety of the—like, you know, their fighter fleet gets destroyed, and he has to put a joke about BB-8 putting his head back on, you know? Right. That should have been a very serious moment. It's like, oh my god, we just lost, you know, our entire fighter fleet.

Can we have a beat? No. No beats. No breaths. No nothing. Well, like you said to me, Jason, when we were doing the texting, and I was giving you my eight-point dissertation on why this movie is complete and utter shit, and you responded, I'm assuming, because two bottles of wine in, you're like, it's just a kid's movie, for God's sake.

No, it's—the thing is, Star Wars aren't kids' movies, but this one almost was. I was trying to rationalize my disappointment. All this humor was very—it was all—it all felt very Jar Jar. It felt very, you know, something happens, and Jar Jar does his silly reaction to it.

Every emotional point was stepped on with a bad joke. And if you think about, for example, the end of Return of the Jedi, where you have these three scenes cross-cutting, you know, you've got the group down on the planet trying to disable the shield generator, you've got the fight going on in space where they're waiting for the shield generator to get turned off, and you have Luke, you know, in with Darth Vader and the Emperor, and these things are—they're cross-cutting in between them.

And as we're going, we're building—this whole thing is building to a crescendo, and the tension is building, and the tension is building, and we're—and it's accelerating as we, you know, as we start flying through the Death Star, and Luke's fighting with Vader, and, you know, they're trying to blow up the shields.

And so, builds and builds and builds, and there's none of that in this movie. He is not able to sustain tension. What's great about you mentioning that as well is the sense of time, and I had a real issue with the sense of time in this movie, because you've got Rey with Luke, and that felt like it could have been two, three weeks, four weeks maybe, but it's being intercut with the whole chase sequence, which is a matter of hours.

But then you've also got the two people that leave, go to a completely different planet, have their own adventure over there, while the other ship is running out of gas, and they told us it was only—I had gas for, like, two or three hours. Right. The sense of time was all over the map, and you could never get a feel for what is happening and when it's happening.

Yep. And how they're doing all this stuff. Yeah. We have enough gas for side trips, though. And by the way, ships can just kind of come and go as they please, and not get chased down by the Empire. They can, you know, like, oh, okay. As long as we're talking about ships and the impossibilities of certain things, there is one thing that happened in this movie that upset me so much, because it destroys the first movie, it destroys the third movie, and it destroys The Force Awakens.

If you can take a ship, and you can point it at something else, and you can go into hyperspace, and it destroys it, why the fuck didn't we do that to the first two Death Stars and the sun-killer planet? Yep. All we had to do was put a goddamn drone on a ship and point it at those things, and they were done, and there's no movies.

Yep. Yep. And that also comes to my point, why are there pilots on these ships? There shouldn't be pilots on these ships anymore. God, we've got drones nowadays, and we're primitive peons. But yes, that whole thing about, yes, if you can go to hyperspace and then destroy, like, a fleet, well, that just blows everything out of the water.

Yeah, but my feeling about this is that, again, going back to my point, is I think he made a lot of his decisions on the visuals, on this movie being a visually stunning piece. My other point about the visuals and things just, decisions being made for the visuals and not for the story, you've got, okay, we've got this, okay, we've got this red planet, right?

It's a bright red planet, and it's entirely covered in white salt, and we're trying to track the Rebellion. The Rebellion, they're there. We've got to find them somehow. Hey, Snoke, we've got some specially trained Imperial troops that they're the best trackers in the universe. Should we send them there?

No, don't worry about it, guys, because the Rebellion only has ships that actually have to touch the ground on one little point, leaving these little bitty lines of red. So we can track them everywhere they go on the entire planet. They're the only ships that they have there. It makes no sense whatsoever. But, boy, it looks pretty. Yeah, and those ships move in a two-dimensional plane rather than three dimensions.

Yes. So they should have just been picked off like flies by those admittedly very cool-looking Imperial walkers. I mean, it was, it's sort of Hoth 2.0. It's definitely a callback to Hoth, which I don't have a problem with. It looked really cool. You know, getting back to the weaponization of hyperspace, there was when I had a problem with them sacrificing General Holdo, that such a high-level person would, the number two person in your resistance.

Is the person that's going to kill themselves. Is the person that's going to sacrifice. And there was a moment when, the second time I saw the movie, when Holdo says to Princess Leia, she says, someone needs to stay back and pilot the ship. I wanted there to be a beat and then both of them to look over at 3PO. That would have been a joke that would have landed.

Look, and this was a recurring theme throughout the movie. It's just the tossing off of theoretically major characters. I mean, you have Snoke, who's been built up in the first movie, who gets his brief little I'm Emperor Palpatine at the end of Return of the Jedi moment, except I'm wearing my, you know, my Hugh Hefner gold robe.

He got Darth Mauled. He's just killed as an afterthought. Yeah, he's totally got Darth Mauled. And then... Yeah, my final point is, I just... The most heartbreaking thing for me of all of this is, well, we know there isn't going to be Leia in the next movie, so she's going to have to be written out.

I don't feel that Luke really got his exit. It didn't feel really good to me. But the most heartbreaking thing was that the belief that Han died for a purpose in A Force Awakens, and you find out, no, he didn't in this movie. He died for nothing. He did not save Kylo Ren.

He did not help Kylo Ren. Kylo Ren is just a dick. And that saddened me to no end. Okay. You think we might not come back to that in the last one? I think the next director would be very smart to do so, because this one certainly made it feel that it was all for naught.

Well, it's J.J. Abrams, so we'll see what he does. Yeah. I mean, I certainly trust him more. I feel like Star Wars is in good hands with J.J. But to that point, I mean, I was imagining, can you imagine sitting down at the pitch meeting, the story sessions, before they kicked off this final trilogy, and they said, oh, and by the way, there are going to be no scenes with Han Solo and Luke Skywalker together in any of the three movies.

I know. Are we okay with that? You know, like, okay. So, I don't know, maybe we can get Han back as a Force ghost, or a Flash back, or a, I don't know. All right. So, quickly, I'm going to go through some of my grievances. Okay.

The Millennium Falcon flying through tight spaces. Yep. Are we done with this? In Empire Strikes Back, it's motivated. They fly into an asteroid field because they'd be crazy to follow us. In Return of the Jedi, they fly through the Death Star under construction, makes total sense, and to me, is one of the most thrilling special effects sequences of all time, when the Falcon is flying out of the, where the, you know, the power source is, and then gets from that big space into that little space.

It's just, it's an amazing special effect. My all-time favorite special effect. In this case, they're flying around on a planet where presumably they'd never been, and Chewie decides to pilot the Falcon into a hole in the ground. I thought the same, yes. And expertly pilots his way out.

Right. And busts through to the surface. This makes no sense whatsoever. Repeated lacks of payoffs. Again, you said, you know, General Snow, or Snope, his death. The death of Phasma. Another wasted character.

Interesting character. Just, no, no, you know, screw you. We're done. Poe is a traitor. Why was Poe not taken out back and shot? He was responsible for, what, 90% of the resistance being blown away. Yep. They had, they said about 400 people at the beginning of the movie.

At the end, they can all fit in the Millennium Falcon. And it's all because of the bad decisions that he made. Yep. Against orders. Losing the bombers. Yep. Against direct orders. And then you have Holdo and Leia saying, well, he's a likable guy. But we like him. He's roguish. We don't have Han now, so we need a roguish good guy.

Yep. The side trip to Morocco is pointless. Yep. Makes no sense. Are there no tractor beams anymore? We think at least a ship the size of that dreadnought would have a tractor beam if the, you know, they sort of casually mentioned tractor beams in episode four as if this is something that we all know about.

Someone made the point that the whole movie is basically a big wagon chase, which I think is interesting, you know, an old Western wagon chase. They can just stay just out of range. Again, this makes no sense if the resources that the bad guys have, if they have all these ships, why can't they just bring in folks to get in front of, you know, here's our location.

Get in front of us, you know, and all right, fine. And this is what we're getting to, this death by a thousand cuts. Like one or two of these I can accept. I can say, oh, okay, Luke and Leia are siblings. And why were the bombers so goddamn slow?

Yes. Right. Why are the bombers so slow? Right. Why do bombs in zero gravity drop? Yeah. You know, things I can, these things I can overlook. Oh, by the way, I was really hoping that, um, uh, what was the, um, uh, what was the Asian woman's name? What was her character name?

Rose. I was really hoping that her sister was her lover at the beginning. That's what I thought it was as well. I thought they would much more interesting if they had a romantic relationship and that's, it would make more sense to me with the necklace and all that sort of thing. It would have been much more interesting to me if they both died because I hated her character.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, she, she did not do much. The, the, there was no chemistry between her and Finn and the, the kiss didn't really make a lot of sense. But if she wouldn't have, if she wouldn't have stopped Finn, Finn would have broken the gun, the, the big stupid gun that came out of nowhere that they were dragging across the planet for some reason.

They fly it all the way down there and then have to drag it to the front door. Made no sense. But if she would have let Finn break the gun, then Luke wouldn't have died. So she killed Luke. Ah, yeah. Well, see, again, the death by a thousand cuts is, as any, any bit of this onion that we peel back, we see more rotten stuff underneath.

That's the real problem with this movie. How did Rey get off of the ship and back to the Millennium Falcon completely? Oh, no, she took, she took a single line. No, she said, they said that she took Snoke's escape shuttle. That line was in there. How did she know where that was?

How did anybody know where any of these things are? Yes. Yeah. This is their first time ever on the ship. She's, what? She used force time to go figure out and look up the map. Yes. Yeah. So, I guess, bottom line is, it makes me sad that we are stuck with this movie as canon in this cycle.

That this is, this is movie seven, you know, or movie eight of nine. Until the special edition comes out. Yeah. Bring Lucas back and fix it. You know, I hope, it makes me sad because I, you know, now I'm just thinking, like, how are they going to mop up this mess?

Well, that's the real problem is, is the only way to make this fan servicing faithful to the rest of the series as it is, or as we all see it as fans, is to wipe this completely from memory and make it useless as a movie. Like, you have to backtrack and, and the entire thing.

And by the way, you've killed off the three old major characters now at this point, or at least you will have to have done that by the beginning of the next episode. And it's, it's, it's infuriate, infuriating to me that the two people that are killed in the movies are the two that are still alive. And the only way that they can fix this is if Luke wakes up in a sonic shower on some island and he goes, it was all a dream.

And then they finished the series with the last movie. We Dallas the shit out of it. Right. And so, as many people have said, is the opening scene of the next movie Leia's funeral? Because. It has to be. Yeah, it has to be. They've said she's not going to appear in the next film. Yeah. I thought, you know, killing her in this movie was going to happen.

And so that's where I say there were things I thought were going to happen that didn't happen. So that was sort of unsatisfying because. I thought when she got blown out of ship, that was it. I was surprised it was going to be so early in the movie. Along with, by the way, Admiral Ackbar, who just gets killed.

Yep. Not even. Another beloved character. Just sort of, oh, he's gone. Yep. Sorry. You know. Yep. There was no fan servicing. Again, to my original point is this was this was this is like when you go to a restaurant and you order a BLT and they bring you some vegan soy and some arugula and some sun-dried tomato on top.

And they tell you, well, this is our take on a BLT. I don't want your take on Star Wars. I want fucking Star Wars. So it's it's been frustrating. Like I said, I've seen it twice and that's enough. Am I going to see the next one?

Of course, I'm going to see the next one. Am I going to see the Han Solo movie? Of course, I'm going to see the Han Solo. Am I going to see every single Star Wars movie till the day I die? Of course, I'm going to see every single Star Wars movie till the day I die. But this one just left me feeling disappointed and frustrated and sad that this is what we're stuck with, you know, now and forevermore.

Well, I'm happy that you're sad forevermore because when we when we started talking about this and you were so excited to talk about it, I'm like, oh, God, he likes it. Shit. This is going to be uncomfortable. I was going to be I was a little worried about that, too. I was like, is he going to come in and say this is the best movie ever made? Yeah, well, he's got like, I've got notes and he's very exuberant.

I'm like, oh, shit. I'm just happy that I finally got somebody to talk to about this. It's finally good to vent. All right. We can have group therapy sessions every Friday after the podcast. There you go. There you go. All right, gentlemen, I think that's enough. I think we've done it.

Yeah. It'll be interesting to see what kind of feedback we get on this because the people who like it really like it. I know. And they're wrong. They're all wrong. I'm jealous of them because they haven't had their Star Wars ruined. Yeah. I'm jealous of them, too. And that's the thing I said at the top.

I think people are talking past each other. On the Internet? Never. Like I said, I had fun. The first time I watched it, I had fun. But I had fun watching some of the prequel movies, too. So, anyway, crappy movie.

Misa's sad. Oh, boy. Oh, God. All right. May the force be with you. Always. Always.

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