272: Vulcan Tighty-Whities

Shall we just fucking do this thing? Let's just do it. 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. It's part two. Part two! Sequels always rule, don't they? One hopes this is our Empire Strikes Back, not our, well, what's a crappy one? I can't think of one offhand. Episode 1, 2, 3, 8, 9, 10, whatever, 7, 8, 9.

It's so nice. I'm back in the studio. I love this. Congratulations. Oh, it's so nice. And I got a pair of Doc Martens this week. I saw, I saw. I felt like 1990 all over again. I feel like a 20-year-old man again walking around these. I put them back on and I'm like, I just like, everything came back.

It's like I almost like grew armor of jeans, a t-shirt, and a leather jacket. Right. You know, like Iron Man. Like, you know, it almost just kind of came out of the boots. But I got the, I got the old school ones, the ones from England, which cost a lot more than those domestic crappy ones. That is true.

Oh my God, they're taking forever to break in. I have so many blisters. I forgot how hard it is to break in Doc Martens. Yeah, you kind of got to treat it like a baseball glove. You got to stick it under your bed, you know, let the bed frame sit on it, work it in. I was trying to get Bam Bam to wear them, but she just had nothing.

She was just nothing. No, not going to do it. Right. But, oh man. But yeah, so I've got my treadmill back. It's so nice. So nice to have my treadmill back instead of sitting all day. And I have a little quick follow-up on the gaming chair, the Fic Max gaming chair. After a week, it has started to squeak from every single pore on the chair.

I breathe and it squeaks. I move a butt cheek and it squeaks. It is the squeakiest chair. It should be called a Squeak Max for how much squeaking it does. So I'm glad it's not in a studio where people are recording because I would have to throw it out a window. That's true. So after a week, fail on the squeaky quotient of the Fic Max chair.

All right. Well, let's just go straight into our follow-up. We named our last episode, There Are Four Lights. And we got one of the only good things about Twitter are all the parody accounts because we immediately got tweeted by Gol Madrid. No, there are five lights. Try again. That's awesome.

So good stuff there. Yeah. And I saw the new Talking Dead with Chris Hardwick. Since we've talked about his fall from grace and then his rise again from the ashes like the phoenix, he did his first Talking Dead on Sunday night and he cried at the beginning.

He's just like, thank you so much. Thank you so much to the family for sticking up for me and things like that. It was kind of moving and there were hugs and things like that. So I didn't watch the rest of the show because I don't really care about Fear the Walking Dead. So the entire show would have been useless for me to watch. But I got to say, it was a pretty heartfelt intro for him coming back.

And I'm just waiting for his podcast to come back because that'll be interesting. He's still off social media, not saying a peep on social media. And if I were him, I would never come back. I would go ahead and let hire some higher professionals such as myself to run all that stuff for him moving forward.

That would be my recommendation. Well, I think we have some mutual friends. So if any of our friends that are listening to the show know Chris, Brian is available for work. Yes, he is. Sometimes. Speaking of that, I have some personal follow-up as well. We were talking about kids and the Amazon Echoes and whatnot in the previous episode.

And I'm recording this during my kid's nap because this is a bit of a crazy week with my wife out of town on a conference. And nannies are complicated at best. Where's the Uber for nannies? We need an Uber for nannies. Oh, there are things like that. It's just my wife doesn't trust them.

Ah, Uber. There's no Uber. But so I have the baby monitor in here with me because I just put him down for a nap. And I was watching to make sure that he got down to a nap. And I had the sound on right before I dialed up and connected with you. And all I could do was hear him go, Echo, Echo, Baila, Baila.

And Baila, Baila is the name of this dance thing that he goes to. And they're on Spotify. So he's asking for the song. So it has begun. It has begun. Oh, my God. Echo, Echo. In the news.

Crazy religious puppet Mike Pence, who is our unfortunate vice president, has detailed the plans for the creation of Space Force. It's going to be the sixth branch of the military.

Just what we need. More military industrial complex. I particularly enjoyed the Air Force going, guys, we do that. Yeah. Yeah. Excuse me. Excuse me. We're over here. Yeah. We kind of go up. We go up.

You know. Oh, my God. I don't know where to even start with this because it's so comical that I mean, we're only talking about it because we talked about it before. And it's space. So it is kind of nerdy in tech. But what do you think about this, Brian? Uh, it's stupid.

Okay. We're weaponized. You know, I don't like the idea of weaponizing space. You know, there's nothing wrong with planning for it. But let's have NASA keep doing it. Let's fund NASA. Let's not do a Space Force. This is stupid. And I don't know if you saw the logos. Oh, my God. Oh, boy.

Oh, boy. What was that site? Uh, Fiverr? I feel like they went there. Yeah. Because that's how that's all we have left in the budget. Now, we just have to send NASA to Fiverr to go give us some logos. Ars Technica has a link with all the logos, which is in our show notes.

What particularly bothered me about that is the the title. These are the logos. The Trump campaign is offering the Space Force campaign campaign. He's president in the fucking. He's in the fucking office. Yeah. I mean, they've won. They've totally won when even the press is just going ahead and continuing to call it a campaign.

That's ridiculous. Yes. Anyways. So ridiculous. So it this this August 17th is is deacta day. Deacta day. Which is the worst hashtag I've ever heard of in my entire life. Worst hashtag ever. Deacta day.

But it's picking up some steam. People on Twitter are pissed off about Jack's continued sucking up to Alex Jones and the far right and Nazis and everything else that he continues to do. So there is a big call out for people to if it quit Twitter at and if not do that, there's some sort of bull crap about like blocking the top 500 companies that advertise and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Well, hey, at least it's not change your icon to a Tiki torch day. That would actually be kind of funny. Actually, that is funny. We should start that one. Tiki. We should start that. And that's that's that's our campaign. Hashtag Tiki torch day. Tiki torch day, because we all know it's true.

We all know it's true. Poor Jack over there on the alt right by himself. Yes. Well, so I know you quit Facebook, but I'm guessing you're not going to quit Twitter. I would love to if there's just nothing else to go to. You know, I'm actually happy that you you aren't because much like you've shelved all Facebook grumpy old geek duties to me.

I'm pushing over grumpy old geek duties on Twitter to you because I hate that damn platform. Well, actually, you're still doing it because there's a little thing called buffer, so I don't have to do shit there. But anyway, yeah, no, I mean, God, I mean, if L.O. could just get their act together, then we could all just go there.

Because wouldn't wouldn't that be just poetic justice if the only place you could find us was L.O. How are those T-shirts doing, L.O.? Yeah, seriously. Bring back app.net. I did like app.net. The code's got to be around somewhere. Come on. I'm sure it's on the it's on the dark web, if nothing else.

Yeah, snapchats. Yeah, no shit. Yeah. Spin up some Azure instances and let's get this thing back on the ground. Come on. Let's let's get a crowdfunding thing going for it. Bring back app.net. Well, once we get that paycheck, we'll need an office. So we work. Oh, that's right.

We will need an office. Yeah. So we work is still growing phenomenally as recode reports. But guess what, Jason? What do all these companies do? Lose money. That's right. Now, I understand that there are certain periods of time, even for any company, even back in the day when you would use investment money and seed money to grow your business and get it off the ground.

But this is just starting to get fucking ridiculous, isn't it? Oh, they just raised another billion dollars, billion dollars from SoftBank. And it's just like, come on, guys. What the hell? I don't know. I can't even put my put my words around it right now because it's so obnoxious.

Yeah, it is. And the problem, again, that I have is with the language that that people are using to write about these sort of things. The recode article gets into the actual financials of how much they're making versus how much they're spending and all that sort of stuff. And they talk about last year and they say, that's faster growth than in prior quarters.

No, that is incorrect language. That is slower loss than in prior quarters. That is the way that you talk about this stuff. This is true. This is true. Yes, we're slowing. We got we got two Band-Aids on the gaping wound in our side instead of one Band-Aid this quarter.

Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. Losses accelerate and they just have to get more funding and waiting for that thing to tip. I, you know, this still comes back to I swear, I think these are just like tax avoidance schemes. Like these people are investing a billion dollars so they can show a loss and just to hide their money.

Remember WKRP in Cincinnati? Yeah. Fine show. Fine show. If you the spoiler alert. I mean, I know that not many people are going to go back and watch WKRP. But the end of season one, they were going to shut down the station because they started making money. And the mother who owned the station had originally given the company to her son because he was so inept that she knew it was going to lose money.

So she could claim it as a loss on her taxes to make more money. It sounds like we work is WKRP in San Francisco. A couple of things on that really quickly. That also reminds me of the crystal shop that is down here on Main Street in Santa Monica, which never has any customers.

And you know that the it's the wife of a very successful businessman who is just using it as a tax sinkhole. Yeah. And secondly, I talked to an accountant, especially when we were starting up Grumpy Old Geeks. And you find folks at Patreon were starting to give us donations and you find advertisers were starting to knock on our door about how to set this up for myself financially.

And he said, well, you know, you can only show a loss for a couple of years before the IRS will actually, you know, kind of go, hey, enough and enough is enough with that. So you can't really get away with that. It is a trope in TV shows and things of that nature. But you do actually have to show a profit at some point or the IRS basically says you can't have any more write offs.

OK, everybody, please go to Patreon right now because we're five and a half years in for losses. Yeah, they're coming after us real soon. Pretty please with sugar on top. Oh, yeah, that's very funny. But these people are just they're just losing money hand over fist.

And that's the way they like it. Yep. Some things that we may not like, though, is Google. And this came out from the Associated Press, which is very interesting. They did a study on Google location services and they had some computer science researchers over at Princeton.

So not going down to the local community college there. They actually got some people who know what they're talking about. And it turns out, even if you turn off, don't follow me in Google, they will still track your location. They still follow you. They still follow you. Even though you clicked on don't follow me.

But here's the thing. Here's the thing that most people aren't. They're going to read the headline on this and say, oh, my God, this guy's falling. Everybody. Google is lying to us. They're evil. They're evil. They're evil. Well, turns out it's not the main Google service that is following you.

It is all of the different disparate apps that they have that ping back when you do things like take a photo or when you open up a certain app. And it will give them precise latitude and longitude. And they will just keep that there because that is a different app than the one where you turn off location services.

That's the difference. And right here, this is why engineers shouldn't be allowed to run tech companies, because you and I, Brian, we understand this. We understand that we can get around this kind of thing. We know the limitations, the workarounds and all that shit. But the unwashed masses don't know shit.

That's all I got to say. So when they see something like this, they're going to be like, Google's lying to us. Oh, my God. And these are people who can barely set up their own email. Right. They don't understand how powerful and complicated all this tech is that we've made to follow them. So the thing is, the thing is, this is how nerds get around this.

We have multiple apps. You sign out, you opt out of one app, but we can still follow you in another app. That app is allowed to phone home to the main service and we can get around it like that. That's how this stuff happens. So that's why nerds shouldn't be allowed to run these companies, because we know.

Agreed. Yeah. Now, where Google is lying is when they say they are being perfectly clear. No, they are not. They are not being perfectly clear. They are hot. You know, things are, this is the same as Facebook settings. It's willful obfuscation. Obfuscation. I always step over that word every single time on this show.

Every time. So, yeah, you know, doublespeak is not just for presidents anymore. Yes, yes. Fake location, fake location. No, fake or fake settings, maybe. But, yeah, this is, this is, they're doing an end around on us all the time. They're always going to be doing this.

So, get used to it. If you want to use these apps, just know that privacy is dead. Steve Rambam nailed it like 10 years ago. Privacy is dead. They're going to find you. They're going to follow you one way or another. Just because you say, don't follow me, doesn't mean they're not going to follow you.

They're just going to not follow you in the way that they lay out that setting. It's like, we're not going to follow you by doing X, but we're going to follow you doing Y. So, whatever makes you happy, you know? Yeah. Now, we've got an even more fun story.

I'm sure we'll talk about this more with Bittner when he comes back from wherever the hell he is. Actually, he's back already, but when we talk to him next. Yes, he's a blackout. Yeah. Yeah, an 11-year-old boy on Friday was able to hack into a replica of the Florida state election website and change voting results found there in under 10 minutes during the world's largest yearly hacking convention, DEFCON 26.

Under 10 minutes. Yeah. An 11-year-old boy. Mm-hmm. Now, you'll say, but it's just a replica. Nope. I mean, yes, it is a replica, but it's an exact replica, and it's actually, they said that it's actually slightly more difficult than the conventional ones. Yeah, because they don't really want people at DEFCON actually hacking in and defacing websites while they're doing it, even though it happens all the time, but still.

Now, also, before you think this is some sort of young prodigy, he's the only one that just did it in under 10 minutes. About 50 children between the ages of 8 and 16 were able to do this in under 30 minutes. There you go. Yeah. That's how it works.

And Rachel Toback on Twitter posted a video. She posted a video. How easy it is to physically gain admin access to a voting machine that is used in 18 states, requires no tools, and takes under two minutes. And the video is pretty incredible.

You can just pop off the top, take out the card reader, and reboot. And you reboot into admin mode. It's amazing. The link will be in the show notes. You definitely need to watch it, because it's just like, okay, that's it. Game over.

Secure my aching ass. Yes. And Recode had an interesting infographic, 10 charts that sum up 2018 so far. As they say, news cycles come and go, but data is forever. So this is kind of fun. The first one is Elon Musk being on a Twitter rampage, showing how he's been tweeting way more the past year than ever before.

Electric vehicles gearing up for a record year. So we got some infographics there about how they're becoming huge. Jewel has become a vaping phenomenon because they've actually marketed themselves correctly and done it right, as opposed to all the other vape folks that kind of started it. And it's way taken over smoking now, or at least as far as searches go.

The U.S. is super polarized. Shocking. Yeah. Cryptocurrency prices are down big after last year's crazy rise. Shocking. Facebook took a big bath, but it's already recovering. Good for you.

Well, good for me. A movie pass was sadly too good to be true. Told ya! I wonder who was talking about that. Told ya! Yeah. We've got the biggest fire in California history burning right now, so they show the square acreages and things of that nature. U.S. unemployment rates are at long-time lows, although that does not factor in gig economy and that sort of stuff.

And the people who have left the entire ecosystem whatsoever. Yes, and people who have completely given up. They always forget to mention that those people aren't counted in those statistics. Yeah, all the boomers that have, you know, like kind of aged out of the workforce, things like that. Yes, and there's no song of the summer, but hashtag inmyfeelingsstormsocialmedia, apparently if you're younger than me, because I haven't seen it at all.

And finally, bonus graphic here, electronic scooters took over U.S. sidewalks. Never would have guessed that from listening to this show. Never would have figured that one out whatsoever. Nope. Oh, man. And I saw this one this morning, which just had me scratching my head.

The FDA has approved a contraceptive app. Now, you can really say there's an app for everything at this point. And they're saying now more could flood the market. The whole point of this is just it's a head scratcher.

It's called Natural Cycles. It's a contraceptive app that helps women track when they are most likely to get pregnant so they can avoid having sex during that time. Yeah. My entire life, I have said to my moronic friends that have tried things like the rhythm method or whatever, I have said, do you use a condom?

No. Then you're going to get pregnant. Then you're actually trying to have a kid. End of story. Idiots. Yep. Even. But here's the thing. Like I mentioned before, Dr. Drew said that millennials just don't use condoms anymore. Now they have an app for that. And here's the thing. The CDC says it has a typical use failure rate of 24%.

That means, okay, 76% of the time, yeah, it works fine. That 24%, those odds are not good. Those are not good odds. I'm sorry. No, basically, you fuck four times, you're going to have a kid. That's pretty much it.

Yeah. I mean, that could be a really good afternoon, you know? Back in my youth, it was. Yeah, I'm just saying, I'd do that shit before breakfast, but now, no. But, I mean, a condom is over 99% effective, so maybe try, you know, wrapping the willy instead, instead of opening that app, you dumb fucking millennials.

Anyway, now this one, this is just for the headline. This comes from eWeek.com. Google starts beta evaluation of new AI developer tools. Auto ML vision, Auto ML natural language, Auto ML translation are part of a Google effort to help developers more easily integrate AI capabilities into apps.

It's right there in the name, person who wrote this article. ML, not auto AI, not auto AI natural language, not auto AI vision. ML, bitches. Exactly. So, what we need now, we need headline ML to fix this shit, because apparently, nobody's paying attention.

I sequestered myself in my living room for a couple days last week and watched Orange is the New Black, season six. Why do you do these things to yourself? Hope springs eternal. Brian, hope springs eternal. Okay.

How did that turn out? It actually turned out okay. Okay. The first episode of the season was a head scratcher, but it was done for a reason. I get that. But it got progressively better as the season went on. And I have to say that I really enjoyed season six of Orange is the New Black.

Really? Okay. I really did. I thought it was one of the better seasons, because there's so many storylines now that, you know, you can pick and choose the ones that you like and just kind of go get another glass of wine while the other ones are on, but for the most, and there's some, there's some crazy twists and turns and yeah, I really enjoyed this new season and it was one of the ones that actually ended on a happy note.

So there's the spoiler for that. It actually ends on a happy note. Interesting. Yeah. Happy note for some. Gave up on the show two seasons ago. It's not that I didn't like it. It just kind of fell by the wayside. So maybe I should pick it back up. Yeah. I actually, I mean, I've stuck with it and last season I actually enjoyed and the season before that was, yeah, that was a tough one.

But so you'd have to go through season four, like suffer through that one to just get the story. But I like season five and I like season six. So I got to say it for, you know, just some popcorn TV in the background. It's pretty good. All right. All right. Good. Well, Dr. David Teeter might have been a little intoxicated when he sent a late night email this week with the subject better than Trek fuck discovery.

And this is a link that also came out of the Star Trek Las Vegas convention that Jonathan Frakes is revealing that Ted Danson and more stars will join Marina Sirtis in his Orville episode. So once again, I'm being forced to watch Orville, apparently. The thing is, it's literally turned into the next gen.

It's like he really did. Seth MacFarlane just said, fuck it. I'm making next gen again. Since he can't do it, that's what he's doing. And that's what it's turned into. It is such a good show. I guess I'm so excited about getting Picard back that I might give in to my Orville resistance and watch an episode.

I think it's worth it. I really think you should. I think you should watch three and then make up your mind. But it's fun. It's popcorn. I really enjoy it. It makes me feel I'm happy when I'm done with an episode. And yeah, the Orville does return for the second season on December 30th.

It was going to be earlier, but Fox got this stupid Thursday night football thing going on. So we don't get it. They had to push the whole thing. So you'll get it before next year. Barely. Stupid sports ball fans. Now, you and I are of a generation where Monty Python wasn't just part of our youth.

It was kind of baked into our DNA. Yeah. In fact, I would venture a guess that almost everybody listening to this are certainly of our age can start to quote scenes from memory, right? Oh, yes. Full scenes, not just the gist of it. Everything. So it was with great joy when I saw the headlines that there was lost Monty Python material that was coming out.

Yeah. The thing about the material is, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Unfortunately, Michael Palin's diary, he describes a lot of these pieces that they recorded as conventional sketches of Cleese and Chapman's, which are saved by good performances, which is on the whole accurate. But the thing is, there's a reason why these things were cut, why they didn't get finished, why they didn't get completed, why they didn't work on it more.

These are outtakes at best. And this is one of those cases where I don't think I'm going to go watch it. Even as big as a Monty Python fan as I am, I don't like hearing, like, when a musician dies, I don't like hearing the stuff discovered in the studio that wasn't finished. It's not done.

Yeah. And the one thing, the one example, the shining example of that I can say is Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt. Yes. To this day, I am still pissed off that I read that book because it had the unfinished Dirk Gently novel in it.

I don't know what I was thinking because Dirk Gently novels are very dense, very complex, and they wrap up in the last chapter. And you are just scratching your head. And I still want to know why half the cat was transparent. I said to this day, it bothers me and I will never know.

So, yeah, I think I'll pass on this one. Yeah. Now, another big news, and I don't really care too much about movies or talk about this stuff so much, but the Oscars have made a significant change to their upcoming broadcast this year. They are going after the kids. They're trying to get viewership back up.

They're trying to get interest back up. And I just really enjoyed this article over on Vulture. I'm going to read the first paragraph here because it pretty much encapsulates how I feel. How do you do, fellow kids? Today, the Academy announced some lit as fuck changes to the Oscar broadcast. The revamped, totally snatched show will run no more than three hours, and a new Oscar will be added to put respect on a popular box office banger.

Are you dead yet? In your feelings? Ready to stand? If it was exhausting to read just a few sentences of that, imagine how it's going to feel when the Academy does it. Now, what does Stan stand for? I'll let you Google that one. Okay. I don't know. But yeah, this is the dumbest thing I think they may have ever done.

It's, of course, it's incredibly stupid. And of course, now it's got all kinds of overtones about it because now people are saying, well, they would never give Black Panther an Oscar, so they'll give it the popular one because they won't want to give it the real one and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, you know, bad move.

Again, we're just, everybody gets a participation trophy now and we have to change everything. The Oscars aren't supposed to be about popular stuff. It's supposed to be about the art and the work. But I guess that ended a long time ago anyways. No. Well, I mean, go look at the history of the Oscars. It was basically just to keep the actors happy.

That's the only reason that it was ever invented in the first place. It was invented during a strike. And they're like, oh, well, here, let's give you an award show just to placate you. And now it's turned into this huge thing. And when they went to like, was it 10 movies for best picture of the year? That is such an, that is just a cheap ass way to get people to go buy more movies because they're like, oh, nominated for an Academy Award must be good.

No, no, not necessarily. No. And they gave an Academy Award to the Hurt Locker. That should just tell you how rigged the whole system is. Because that movie sucked. Yeah, I agree. And we've talked about the music industry a lot and about how, you know, streaming has basically killed the industry in general.

Business Insider has a really good review or review report of a Citigroup report that was conducted about the money that the music industry generated in 2017. $43 billion. That was the year then everybody was talking about how music is back. Remember, Jason? We talked about that.

Music is back. Look, it's making money again. Unfortunately, recording artists received just 12% of that $43 billion. Isn't that? 12%. Isn't that usually standard, though, the way the music industry works? It was better before. It is definitely, there's so much more trickery going on with streaming and then the major labels owning parts of the streaming companies and being able to hide even more income and things of that nature.

It's just ridiculous. Plus, it's important to note that the bulk of that 12% came from touring, which the labels and publishers can't touch. So they're basically getting nothing, nothing from streams. That's insane. It's almost like you might want to take up photography if you're a musician.

Oh, wait. No, that industry has been killed, too. Or how about web design? Oh, wait. No, there's no web design anymore. Okay. Nope. Nope. Maybe we can go work at Snapchat. Podcasting. Oh, no. We can all become podcasters. Yeah. Yes. We'll be on the blockchain. We'll become podcasters on the blockchain.

Star Trek, oop-tacked. I mean, Discovery, that other show that we don't pay for on CBS's all-access pass. They're bringing back Spock. Okay. I don't know if I agree with that, but... Well, we knew they were going to because they had that connection between the main character and Sarek and Spock and...

Yeah. Of course, we were going to get... Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, it's eventually coming. But here's the thing. Spock will be played by Gregory Peck's grandson. Now, for me, that is pretty cool because I grew up with Gregory Peck and it's pretty cool that his grandson is an actor and he will now be playing Spock.

I kind of dig that. I think that part's kind of cool. I don't think he looks for... I have three Spocks now, none of which look alike. It's very annoying. That is a problem. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Zachary Quinto didn't look like Spock very much to me.

And now this guy looks a little bit more... They're basically going towards the Calvin Klein model look. Yes. So that's really kind of what they're doing. I never envisioned Spock as an underwear model, but there we are. Vulcan tighty-whities, what do you want?

Instead of Y-fronts, they're split-finger fronts. At the library... I read a fascinating book last week called The World in a Grain, The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization.

This is by Vince Beiser. I know it sounds silly, but it's kind of a crazy story that basically everything that we're surrounded by is made of sand. I'm sure this is fascinating. However, this does remind me of an anecdote back in the day when I used to go out on tour with bands.

And I was out a lot with the Goo Goo Dolls because I became really good friends with those guys. And Mike Malinnon, the then drummer for the Goo Goo Dolls, spent about six months in the tour bus reading a book called The History of Salt. And it basically got him the nickname, the most uncool rock star in the world.

Well, he is a vegan, so that might play into it, too. But that's funny. But this is actually a really good book. And it's terrifying because we're running out of sand, which is really bad. Yes, we are running out of sand. Well, I am living in the right place. I've got a shit ton of it just a couple blocks away.

Not for much longer, I'm afraid. I just have to Frogger style dodge all the limes and birds to get to it. But it's kind of, you know, one of those wake up calls. By the end of the book, you'll be like, oh, man, we're so screwed.

But this is where technology is going to have to come in. You can make sand, but it takes a very long time is the problem. And all of the specialty sand that we have in our cell phones and all that kind of stuff really is in very short supply. And Vince actually wrote an article over on Wired called The Ultra Pure Super Secret Sand That Makes Your Phone Possible, which is one of those, you know, basically promo for the book.

The book's not out yet, but it'll be out very soon. I highly recommend you check it out. It's a really fascinating read that's not sci-fi or anything like that, but it's what has basically built the world. And I knew almost nothing about it. It's pretty cool. Cool.

Now, let's get back into some sci-fi because I read enough about fucking sand. It's called Artificial Condition, The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. This is number two in the Murderbot Diaries series. Did you get to finish this one, Brian? I finally did finish it. Yes. What'd you think? I should have waited.

I should have waited a long time. I think it was a little too soon after I finished the first one. So I broke that rule and kind of screwed it up. I didn't enjoy it as much as the first. I think the first book, because the concept was so fresh and new and interesting, that really carried the first book.

Also, the first book was very short. This one's longer, and the concept isn't interesting enough by itself, and I didn't feel the story was totally there. I wasn't that interested. That was the problem I had with it, too. It was hard to get into, and I also broke the rule and went right into the second one.

And the third one is out, Rogue Protocol, the Murderbot Diaries, volume three by Martha Wills, is out now. It just came out, and there's a fourth one that will be coming out. I think by the end of the fourth one, this will be optioned for a Netflix series. Absolutely. I think it's got enough going on, and it's got a strong enough universe that it will definitely be picked up for either a movie or a series.

I see this on Netflix, for sure, with their bags and bags of monies. But I really enjoyed the universe. I didn't think this one was as strong as the first one. But I still think it was good. I enjoy it. It was all right. It was all right. I'm definitely going to wait a while to read the third one.

I think I'm going to have to go read about Sand first and maybe Salt as well. Well, how's Noir going by our good friend Christopher Moore? I'm getting back to it now. I'm having a hard time getting into it, not going to lie. That's why I ended up bouncing back and finishing the Murderbot Diaries. So I'm going to get back to Noir and see if I can finish that up for the next show.

Okay, I'm almost done with that, so hopefully we can talk about it next show. It does get better. It does get better. The beginning is hard to get through, which is why it took me like four times to get through the first half of the book. But now that I'm getting to the end and things are picking up, it's actually, it's not bad. It's not nearly as funny as all of his other books.

His other books are just, I'm crying half the time, you know? And this is just, there's like zero humor in here at all. So, but yeah, hopefully next week we'll have Noir by Christopher Moore. We will not have Rogue Protocol, the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.

Definitely not. No, no, no. A couple people sent this over. I think we got it from Moz6502 on Twitter as well. Snapchat dysmorphia drives people to plastic surgery to improve their appearance in selfies, researchers warn.

How does one get bunny ears put on one's head? What was that? No, no animal human hybrids? Is that what the president said at one point? Yeah. So people are actually getting plastic surgery so they can look better in selfies.

Who has this time and money? Affluenza. Who are these people? People who are also suffering from affluenza. Gotcha. Yeah. Dumbluenza is more like it. Yes. And I love the very, at the very end of the article, it says the solution lies not in surgery, but therapy.

Well, thank God that there's an app for that now, too. Yeah. Yeah. Social media bred body dysmorphia can be treated with psychological intervention and medication to boost serotonin levels. So basically what they're saying, these people are crazy. So you would think that the doctors who are getting tasked to do this, the plastic surgeons who are, you know, actually doing this would go back to their Socratic oath and actually saying, no, we can't do this.

Here's my card for my colleague down the hall. Go tell them about your mother and figure out why you want to do this. That would require ethics. Ah, yes. Now, this one's fun. I love this one. Russia tasks Hollywood actor Steven Seagal with improving U.S. ties.

Oh, my God. So Putin gave Seagal a passport in 2016, saying he hoped it would serve as a symbol of how fractious ties between Moscow and Washington were starting to improve. OK, let's give one of the worst actors in the world a passport and say, hey, go fix it.

I mean, it's not like this is like Will Smith, you know? No, it's this is Steven fucking Seagal of all people. I mean, granted, I liked his first three movies because they were they were different back in the day. And, you know, he has a history of three word title movies. And back then, if you ever watch him, he's an Aikido guy and he would basically slap people like he's in a girly fight and then break their arm.

Go back and watch. That's his fighting style. Slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, crunch. That was it. And it was it was new and exciting back then. Now, Steven Seagal is not very new or exciting. No, but I can definitely see a Steven Seagal Dennis Rodman ticket for 2018. Yep. Yep.

And this just in. Oh, whatever. I don't know. It's taking so long. How much longer do we have to wait for an election? I know. And this just in sexual assault allegations against Harvey Weinstein, Steven Seagal and Anthony Anserson land on L.A. Prosecutor's desk.

Seagal, a Russian citizen who was named last weekend as the Kremlin's newest special envoy to the United States, has over several decades faced more than half a dozen allegations of sexual assault, including rape. The allegations have been leveled by actresses, film workers and reporters. He has repeatedly denied committing any sexual misconduct.

Representatives for Seagal could not be reached for comment Thursday. So, he's getting Weinsteined, not Winehoused. Oh, boy. All right. Well, Airbnb has made it to our Moron of the Week segment. Apparently, renting out a priceless ancient cultural relic as a hotel for a night isn't the best idea.

What? That's what Airbnb learned after it advertised a contest to spend one night atop the Great Wall of China. After backlash from social media, the company has canceled the contest. Oh, my God. So, Night at the Great Wall was part of Airbnb's Night At program, which has the tagline, Win the Sleepover of Your Dreams.

The previous night at programs have included the top of an Olympic ski jump, a floating house on the River Thames, and Ellis Island. For the Great Wall of China contest, Airbnb users had to submit a short response to the question, what is more important now than ever to break down barriers between cultures?

How would you want to build new connections? By sleeping on a wall built to separate cultures. Apparently, Night at Auschwitz was canceled first. Luckily, that was coming up next, and they finally went to this one next. Dodged the bullet. Way better stop now.

Oh, man. Well done, Airbnb. Well done. Well done. And well done, Internet. I love this one. We're closed forever. How the search for the perfect selfie led to bedlam at an Ontario sunflower farm.

So apparently, Instagram made one of their top posts, a picture of somebody in a field of sunflowers at this farm in Ontario, like outside Toronto. And well, everybody said, those are gorgeous. I want to go get my selfie there, too.

Well, apparently, sunflowers are notoriously fragile. And if you screw up the plant, they don't grow right. And thousands of people went to this person's farm and basically just overran it. They used to let people in. They used to charge and people could come in.

They had like, you know, parking for like, you know, a couple couple cars. And then they like walked out one day and there is a line down the road of people trying to get into this farm. And so what do people do? Because people are jerks. They just park their cars on the side of the road and walked into the fields trying to get their perfect selfie.

People, people, people. Yeah. And this is one of the great quotes. I used to love these flowers, says Marlene, one of the owners of the farm, waving a Tesla away from the driveway. She makes the quote. Now I can't stand them. Awesome.

Way to ruin someone's passion. Right. Love you. And what I'd like to do moving forward, because I think we all need a little happiness in our lives. In addition to the moron of the week, I want to try to find somehow genius of the week. To go along with it. Just good luck.

It is difficult. And I'm already upset. And I've decided Lifehacker is once again a moron, even though they did post this story, because the continuing with their tradition of wildly inaccurate headlines, how to eat perfectly ripe bananas all week. One extremely clever Korean grocery store.

So you can only do this if you happen to live by this Korean grocery store. That's the only way. So this is not going to help anyone except for people that live right by this Korean grocery store has solved this very pressing problem by selling a pack of bananas at varying stages of ripeness so that you may enjoy one each day as it becomes perfectly ripe.

That is perfect. That is genius. Every store should do this. Come on, Whole Foods. Well, $6 a banana times five, you know, about what they would charge for it. It's a very good idea. It is a very good idea. And of course, Lifehacker sucks.

Going along with, if you do live next to the grocery store and you want to have that perfectly ripe banana all week, I would like you to go read my next article, which is the correct way to peel a banana. This is just the first one that came up on my Google search, because everybody does eat bananas the wrong way around.

And the entire point of this is step one, turn over the banana. That's really all you needed to know. Because most people try and peel it from the end with a little stalk on it, which is not the proper way to do it. You flip it over and you peel it from the end with, you know, the thing, just like the monkeys do.

And we're monkeys, but we apparently along the way forgot how to eat a banana. So if you do get the perfectly ripe bananas all week, go watch the video on how to eat a banana if you don't know this already. Feedback loop. We have a bunch of new Patreon subscribers.

Oh, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Steven, Robert, Chris, Michael, Mario, Nicky, Mario again, Eric, Snoopy, TRB, and Brett. And Brett's donation was so generous that we think it must be a typo. Yes. Thank you so much for all of that.

We also have a few more that donated and also sent in some comments, the first being Waylon. I recently started using the Eero Plus options with my new Eero setup. It comes with encrypt.me as a VPN option. I have used PIA in the past based on GOG suggestion. Can you tell me if one is better than the other and why?

I have not. Well, I can't. Well, I have not dug into encrypt.me yet because I am an Eero Plus subscriber as well. And I haven't dug into it. But the reason that we promote private Internet access is because that they were the only one that we could find that was tested in court by the FBI as being a no log VPN.

The FBI tried to get their logs and they said, no, we do not keep logs, period. And this was in court. So that's why I trust them with my VPN history. So they're not going to be the they're not going to be the ones that are just going to say, oh, here you go.

Yeah. Oh, he was sitting on Pornhub spanking it all day. That's what he did. So that's the main reason why I still stand by PIA encrypt at me. I need to do some more research for and I will do that for the next show. And I will get back to you, Waylon. But thank you for the question. Yes, thank you.

Eric writes in, I've been freeloading off you guys for several months and I figured that it was time to pony up and give you guys a hand for staying on the air. So thank you very much, Eric. I'm sure you already saw this, but but this is another classic example of covering all the bases on both sides when reporting the news. Marvel reportedly scraps James Gunn's Guardians of the Galaxy 3 script.

And then it turns out updated updated because turns out they're going to use it. Yes, they fired him, but they're still going to use his script. Therefore, everybody is supposedly happy. But what really happens in these situations is nobody's happy. Right. And it's still kind of contingent on his exit deal that they're going to give him because he just may say, go fuck yourself, which if I was James Gunn, I would definitely say that.

But yes, I would. And also, I wanted to bring to your attention that Pittsburgh has embraced the dockless scooter fiasco. Yeah. So they've got Scoobies in Pittsburgh now. Yeah, those are a little bit different. Those are the bigger ones. You know, it's not quite the same as a bird that you just dump off in somebody's place.

This is equivalent to like almost getting a Vespa. It's exactly the same as getting a Vespa. You have to have a license and all that stuff. So it's not the one that you can really like scoot around on the sidewalk with. This is a real scooter. Yep. Which I'm okay with. That's fine. Okay.

Yeah. Next up, Andreas. Finally, I pulled something out of somewhere and got my Patreon act together. I have decided to match my Netflix and Apple music fees with Patreon support for the podcasts I listen to. That leaves two bucks for you per month. Thanks for a great podcast. No, thank you. And we're actually making more money than probably any artist on Spotify is making from you.

That's true. Or Apple. PopSquad writes in, hey, GOG, been listening for a couple of months and wanted to show you some love. While I may not always agree with the political views, I'm mature enough to listen and disagree without losing my shit. See, this is how adults do it. Thank you so much.

I hope you will consider promoting a local movement I'm part of called PopSquad. If you're familiar with To Catch a Predator, we do the same thing, catching predators that come to meet with underage children. While not tech-related per se, it's still an important cause worth spreading. Stay grumpy and thanks for the show.

PopSquad is awesome. You guys are doing, I was going to say the Lord's work, but then I'd be like, oh, shit. That's all it is. Yeah. Wouldn't be me. A bit weird coming from a handful of atheists. It would be kind of strange, but you guys are doing great work over there and check it out, PopsquadHQ.com.

It'll be linked in the show notes. Right. And David is already a Patreon subscriber, but he sent us a message, thought this would be right up your alley. Unfortunately, the birds have arrived. Hundreds of birds dumped at Dallas Recycling Center as Ofo leads market. So one company leaves, another company comes in, and there's just a bunch of stupid bikes dumped everywhere.

Yeah. The thing about what Dallas is doing, though, is they're going to take the bikes that work and redistribute them instead of just scrapping them. I mean, a lot of them are banged up and beat up because people are dicks, which we've covered in several episodes up until now. But since Ofo is left and all these bikes are left around, there were like 5,000 bikes, I think, that were in the market from Ofo.

And they're going to try and redistribute them to people who need them, which is good, like homeless people who need them and things like that. They're not putting all 5,000 back on the street because that would just cause chaos, but they're going to actually try and do something nice with them, which I think is really good because otherwise it would just be so wasteful.

Yeah. And Wolfgang gave us a five-star review over on Facebook because you can do that. I am going physically every Monday from Austria to Sweden. Your podcast is the perfect way to spend two hours in the plane. Thanks to the recommendation of my dear colleague Ignacio, the commute is interesting and fun.

Also on my way back every Thursday, thanks to your media candy. Talking about media candy, you might like some candy from Sweden, Fever Ray, and her album Fever Ray. Now, when I first saw this, I'm like, Sugar Ray? I thought Sugar Ray. I'm just like, oh no, I'm not going to listen to Sugar Ray. I just want to fly.

Oh no. Well, he is flying when he's listening to it, so it would make sense. So I watched the Fever Ray video that's on her main channel, and that is one creepy-ass video. Yeah, the video's weird, but I did like the music. The music's really good. I actually really enjoyed it. Yeah, thank you for that. Yeah, definitely. Thank you, Wolfgang.

Over on Twitter, David Finley writes in, just went back and listened to episode one of the show. Google Glass is going to be a game-changer. Google Glass is going to be amazing. What happened with your QR code donation app in episode two? Like everything we talk about.

It took us a few episodes to get to our fine 500 batting average of being right. Yeah, yeah. I might have been fucked up on that Google Glass one, and we were drinking in the early episodes, so a lot. Yeah, that's true. Yes. And what happened with our QR code donation app is what happens with all the great ideas that we talk about in every one of our episodes.

Fuck all. Yeah, we don't do shit anymore. We give you guys the ideas. You need to go out and implement them. Yeah, so then give us 10% on Patreon. We'd appreciate that. Yes. Next up, Brian. Y'all's reaction to Facebook's hopes of online banking made me literally LOL along with thee.

Along with thee. Craig writes in, I wondered how these would survive a Cleveland winter. Now I won't find out. And it's an article on Cleve scene. Whose sidewalks? Our sidewalks. Cleveland tells Bird Scooter Company to get lost. Nice.

Right. Oops. Unfortunately, I cut out whoever sent this one to us, but somebody sent us the voting software XKCD comic, and it's very funny. So we have the link in our show notes. And thank you, whoever you were. Sorry. Got lost in the show notes there. Yeah. Yeah. And you should definitely go look at this comic because it is goddamn funny.

Yeah. Bear the hairless writes in, this will end well, I'm sure. Scooters on campus. And this is from the University of Toledo. Electric scooter sharing has hit Toledo. Yeah. That should be. Actually, you know what?

On a campus, I can actually see it working all right. Because, you know, you've got bike parking and all that sort of stuff. You can dump them everywhere. You're not dumping them in front of businesses. Although my other argument would be, you're young kids. Walk. Walk. Run. Jog. Stay fit.

Yes. Stay fit so you can have sex four times and get pregnant once. Exactly. Don't get the diabetes like us. Moving over to GOG.show. We got an email from Lawrence. Greetings, Grumps. I know you love to love hate some movies.

Need a break and a laugh? The editing room offers hilarious rewrites of movies in screenplay format. They make fun of movie tropes and call out every cliche. And he sent us a link to the Mission Impossible version from the editing room. And it's really funny because I actually had the editing room down for Brick-A-Brack for next week.

So now I have to find something new. Thanks, Lawrence. But I love that site. They are beyond funny. So much fun. Yeah, it's really good. I was looking through some of them. This is like a long-form version of Honest Trailers. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, pretty good stuff.

Mark writes in, Thanks for podcasting. You guys have a way of delivering relevant media after a long day of dealing with the monotony through your unique style. I love it. I'm a student at a state technical college in Georgia. And the network security environment here, though excellent with instructors, needs a little more momentum for information tech world so we can excel in the modern workplace.

Being in South Georgia, we are somewhat isolated from the great minds of computer science. Ah, but that's the thing about computers, Mark. They connect everywhere. I have authorization from the student government to start an information security or any computer-related club pending review of my findings. Do you have any suggestions of nationally recognized clubs that I could try to get a charter for here?

I am asking you because I know you guys aren't going to bullshit me on a stupid organization that will not help us achieve our goals. The goal is to create a group of folks here on campus that have an interest in computers and meeting weekly or monthly while also organizing events like red teams and blue teams. Thanks, Mark. Mark, I'd love to tell you we do, but Jason and I have been out of college for a long, long, long, long time.

Let's just say I had a pager in college. I did, too, actually. I did, too. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to send this to a few friends who are in the business. And also, if anyone in the audience knows of any organizations that Mark can use, let us know. Podcast at GrumpyOldGeeks.com is our email address.

And we'll follow up next week if we find anything that's actually useful. Yeah, agreed. Michael writes in, what's with the Amazon affiliate link not working? Fine way to support this show if you want to go buy something you'll talk about. Well, Michael, let us know what link you're actually talking about and we can maybe fix it.

I don't know. Yeah, because we don't do the store thing anymore on the site because Amazon pulled the rug out from under us with that and you couldn't do it easily. So all we really do is do Amazon links for anything that we talk about on the show in our show notes. And if there's something specific that isn't working, do let us know.

Yeah, because those should be definitely working. And Matt writes in, for sale, survey data on millions of high school students. In a supposedly optional survey at the beginning of the college board's exams, minor children are unaware that they are consenting to give away their personal information. Does anyone really expect that minor children are going to be aware that these surveys are optional and what the ramifications are?

I'm pretty confident that a child presented with a bubble sheet will fill it out. That's what they've been conditioned to do. He didn't provide us with the link, Matt. So I'm not sure what the story is there. But I don't I think it's illegal to take information that way from a minor. As long as you're over 13, I believe.

Well, 13. Yes. You know, you get COPA. So you can't do anything. Yeah, that's right. And that kind of thing. But if they're part of the school thing and they automatically do it, I mean, as long as I think you're over 16. But yeah, send us some send us some more info on that. That'll be interesting. And Steve writes in discussion about Tesla charging versus time to fill up.

Well, here's a new and unnecessary service. This comes from The Washington Post. The latest way busy people are saving time, hiring someone else to fill up their car with gas. My God. So they will come to wherever you're at and give you a filler up while you're at work. Oh, my God.

Yeah. Yeah. And Waylon, who also wrote in to us over on Patreon, sent us a message here. Long-time listener, first-time caller, and first-time Patreon. Thank you. Since I came across GOG almost two years ago, I have since listened to every episode. I even love the earlier episodes that you two seem to rag on.

And not just us. We got ragged on earlier about those episodes. I find that I tend to agree with everything that you say. I've also taken many of your recommendations. I just started using my new Eero system as of yesterday. And yes, I use your promo code for free overnight shipping. I also signed up for 1Password as part of the Eero Plus subscription.

Switched over from LastPass. I think the only recommendation I have not looked into and eventually followed is switching browsers. I still use Chrome. I missed why you don't like it, but I still love it. Opera's faster. Opera's faster. It takes less memory. I have a lot less, you know, I actually have a lot more system memory available.

Because Chrome is just a memory hog because it just really is. It was our browser weapon of choice for an awful long time, but it just became so memory intensive. It was getting crazy. So that's why. And then he says, I wanted to ask you if we've ever seen or tried play on in Plex.

We've covered Plex. So we've covered Plex considerably on the show. Jason's all in on that. Yeah. Yeah. I like Plex. I'm still having a bit of an issue getting it set up because I just haven't had anything to watch lately. So I haven't gone back to it. And play on is interesting because it's like a DVR for your digital services.

Like, you know, your HBO goes and your Netflix and your Hulu, which is kind of interesting since that's already on demand stuff. Yeah. You can, you can record a show that they may take off the air, but I'm like, if I want to watch something on Netflix, why would I pay somebody else to record it for me?

I don't quite get that. And he says, from my limited research, it seems to be legal, but I would love your opinion on it. I don't quite understand it either because most of the stuff you can stream just fine. I'm sure in small print somewhere, this is, it's not legal. I'm sure that they don't want you to, uh, to download and save these things on your own computers or using any other service.

That would be my guess, but, uh, I know I'm not really sure. I actually know somebody that works over at HBO in their legal department. So I will try to get some follow-up on that for you. Okay. Very, very cool. Peter writes in, hi, I enjoy your show occasionally. Thanks. Damning with faint praise.

And I sometimes look up whatever product you're touting this week in order not to waste my time, I would appreciate it. If your comment included limitations in the offering, one example could be can only be used in the U S or only for U S citizens with the U S address or the like that saves us unfortunates that do not live in Trump country.

The bother of finding it out when we are halfway through the process of ordering, maybe just putting it in the show notes would work. Keep up the grump. Um, I'd love to, but my God, man, that's a lot of fucking work. And we're not getting paid a lot of money here. And geo filtering has made a lot of this stuff a pain in the ass too, because we'll only be served the U S sites because we're here in the U S.

So we don't know. We don't know. That's a lot of, you know, and this is the internet age, man. Just look at the website before you, before you order. Yeah. I mean, and cause yeah, if I have to research every single thing and is it, when it comes to the advertisers on the show, we do say like for Eero U S and Canada only RX bar U S only.

And so there are, there are definitely certain things that we, we will say when we know we'll say it, but I just, I, I mean, I already spend, you know, 20 hours a week on the show. I can't go research every link. Otherwise I will be making a dollar 25 an hour and I will be living on the street with no internet connection and will not be able to do the show.

But, uh, you know, point taken. And if it's right in front of us, we will start to mention that. Yeah, we will. Cause it is an international show. Yes. Uh, Duncan writes in gents love the show, even from down under what see international when it arrives on a Monday night, the day goes slowly as I wait. Here's a little article about Oh bike, which you may find instructive and explaining why there are so many birds.

It's not about the bike, the real story of Oh bike and what it can teach us. This is a long article. Yeah. It was a very long article. Yeah. It's, it's all, it's just, all of these things are a mess. A mess is basically what I've learned. Yeah. So it's just all a mess and everybody knock it off.

Go buy your own goddamn bike. Yeah. Buy a bike, buy a scooter. These things aren't that expensive. Come on. No personal ownership. People bring it back. Dometheus writes in, Hey Grumps, you previously mentioned how cities were now beginning to regulate the bike companies. And as a result, many of them have pulled out of those cities.

This is what happened to all of those abandoned bikes that were in Dallas. And, uh, this is the same article as before about the Dallas recycling center. So, uh, thanks again, Dometheus for sending this in, but yep, it's pretty cool. He says, ironically, the bird scooters haven't been too big of a problem in the city.

I live, I live in downtown Dallas, so I see them every day. So far, so good for now. On a side note to proofread my messages. I use Apple's text to speech feature as a Mac user yourself. Have you noticed that creepy ass computer voice now takes breaths and has subtle mouth noises?

I have not. And that is disturbing as fuck. Yeah, I haven't noticed that either. That would actually really bother me. Although related to the text to speech feature, I just saw on Facebook that one of my friends, uh, texted, uh, their kid's doctor saying that they had to cancel the appointment because their schedules were too erotic.

Oh my God. Because it took erratic and sent erotic to the doctor. So auto-correct for the win. How ducking great is that? Now there's some, some breasts and subtle mouth noises for you. Uh, Dave writes in, hey Jason, hey Brian, first time listener, long time caller or something like that.

Love the show. And I know I drive Brian crazy with retweets, but I'm still going to ask for this shout out. For the record, I'm a $10 level Patreon and I've never asked for a shout out before. All right, you get a shout out. Now I don't have a website, business or app. What I do have is an amazing wife who is jumping off a perfectly good 16 story building for cancer victims.

Yes, she gets to use a rope, but still it's 225 feet. Me, I'm scared of tall step stools. So what I'm asking is if you could say a shout out for her and put a link on the donation page in the notes. The event is September 7th. So sorry for the short notice, but I'm trying to spread the word for her in any way I can. You got it.

So we got the link right in there in the show notes. Go check it out and send her some money because fighting cancer is worth it. Yep. She's halfway to her goal and this is for Jen Fackler. So definitely check that out. She is going to be repelling off the building. She's not going to be like mission impossibling it all the way down with just a rope, but she is going to repel, which is pretty crazy.

So thank you, Mr. Bear the hairless. Who is always retweeting us. So I appreciate it. Oh, he says also PS tell Dave. I said hi also. Hi, Dave. Hi, Dave. There you go. Mark writes in here. You go a payment plan for sex bots. Don't forget to air gap them.

And this is a British firm that is going to offer you a sex bot for 25 pounds a month financing. Oh, why? Why bother? Why not just make this make it an Uber or a bird thing? Let's just rent them. Oh, God. How gross would that be? Oh, rent a snatch.

Subscription models. Yay. Rent a snatch. Great. Oh, boy. And something for the ladies as well. Sex dolls, which go all night, could replace men as women can't tell the difference. Well, this is a fun one, too.

These are just, these scare me. I didn't think anybody was actually buying these things, but apparently they're flying off the shelves. Dude, what's an incel going to do? Oh, my God. Especially when they get kicked off Twitter. They got to do something with their time. Sean writes in.

Hey, guys. Jason mentioned on the latest episode he's looking for a good PC-based digital audio workstation. Jason, have you tried Reaper? I've been producing music and doing sound work for 20 years. I used to be a Pro Tools or Nothing guy. After hearing some rave reviews in the Gearsluts.com forums, I decided to give Reaper a try. Now I cringe every time I have to open a Pro Tools file.

Reaper does everything Pro Tools does, but better. 64-bit, can run off USB, and uses a fraction of the resources. Also, you can batch convert files. Right. Do you work for Reaper, Sean? Yeah, maybe. There's a lot of specs you're throwing at us. No, it looks cool.

I took a look at it. I actually, I don't have a PC anymore, but when I eventually switch back, which I'm sure I will, I'll try to remember that. Yeah, no, I know a lot of people that use Reaper, and actually, that's how I got the job working for Tim Ferriss, because he couldn't figure out how Reaper worked, and he's like, I'm trying to fix this thing in Reaper.

I'm like, just send me the damn audio, and I'll fix it for you. And then 120 episodes later, I handed the show back to him, but I'll give it a shot. I'm going to stick with Studio One, because it's paid for. I own a lot of PreSonus gear, and so I get Studio One for free, because I've spent a couple thousand dollars with them.

So I'm going to stick with that, but I will try it out, because I want to find all the different audio options that are out there. So I do know a lot of EDM guys use Reaper, and it'll be interesting to give it a shot. Daniel writes in, thought you might enjoy this. Madison, Wisconsin doesn't want birds.

And it's pretty funny, because my brother used to go to Madison when he was in college, and I wish he was still there so he could give me the skinny on the birds. But he's not anymore. He's graduated, because we're all fucking old now. But Madison doesn't want them, neither does Milwaukee.

So Wisconsin hates your birds. That's right. We got a bunch of five-star ratings over at iTunes. First up, from MasterChef of Jason's. The show is one for the books. In a major defeat for Uber and Lyft, New York City votes to limit ride-hailing cars. Okay. Hey, man.

You're supposed to give us a review here, not give us a news story. Yeah. Let's clarify this real quick here. The iTunes reviews are to talk about this show, not send us recommendations for stories. I don't know where we fucked up on that one, because we say, you know, give us a five-star and a snarky review, not a story.

I think it was user error, Jason. I don't think it was us. Okay. MWRCS writes, an amazing podcast. Just want to let you know, I just started listening to your podcast a few weeks ago, and I'm loving every minute of it. Listening to your podcast has actually motivated me to begin the work of starting my own podcast, something I've been wanting to do with a friend of mine.

Oh, and by the way, just when you thought you'd heard enough about scooters, I stumbled across Moto Bag, the first luggage of its kind. You can ride around the airport as a scooter. Again. We don't need story recommendations in the iTunes reviews. And we actually did cover Moto Bag.

But since you are a new listener, we're going to give you a pass on that one. Yeah. And my favorite five-star rating of all time comes from Matt underscore C29 with the title Tech and the Body Tech Tech Snarky Tech. That's how you do it. That is a snarky review, if I've ever heard one.

Christopher J. from Sweden writes in, love this show. Excellent bits of analysis on latest tech news and trends with a cynical twist. I hope that the one day this podcast will go on to become a platform on the wild, wild web while leveraging the latest AI, ML, crypto, and HTML technologies to spread its gospel.

Nice. And the next up is from Longin Usterwalski, I think. This is from Poland. So really entertaining. These guys are really entertaining. I love the way they discuss issues from the world of technology. It is a pity that they don't understand the meaning of the word free in the statement free software.

Love them anyway. Regards from Poland. Well, free software, is it free as in, what was the old line? Is it free as in software or free as in beer? Because those are the differences. So Dangles99 writes, an amazing podcast as a college student looking forward to working in the tech industry.

You guys are the best to listen to. Your personal experiences teach me a lot and have given me many insights on what it means to be a good person in the tech world. Well, we try. Well, we point out the people that are not the good people in the tech world. Yes, yes, we do.

And finally, Iggy fan writes in great show. I'm fairly new to the podcast and I loved it so much. I became a Patreon supporter. Thank you. I love the news and humor really helps get me through these horrible, trumpy times. Thanks for everything you guys do. And I look forward to a lot more episodes. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG dot 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 dot show slash iTunes and toss us a five star and a snarky review and not a not a news story. Closing shout outs. Thanks for bearing with us through this first week of a big shift.

I hope you enjoyed the two episodes. We get this one probably sucked. We're going to try to dial it in a little bit more, but we'll see what happens. And a shout out. I don't know what's happening since we went to air. But as of as of recording this morning, Aretha Franklin was not looking good. So shout out to the Queen of Soul.

Rock fucking steady. Yep. Yep. And I've got a link as you have a link to a YouTube video that you like. And I have a link to a YouTube video that I like. Think from the Blues Brothers is one of my favorite songs of all time. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks.

To support the show and keep us on the air, go to patreon.com slash GOG. Toss us a buck a month and we'll love you forever. If you'd like to give us a one time or recurring donation, go to GOG.show and click the PayPal button in the sidebar. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 272. And there you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like.

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