337: Semper Malevolum

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 a very cold Brian Schulmeister. Ah, you're up there in the land of the maple cookies. It should be warmer than it is right now, but we had snow yesterday and I, of course, am sitting in my in-laws' basement and in shorts and a t-shirt because as soon as we're done, I'm going to work out. Okay. Don't know if I needed all that information, but thanks.

It's chilly. That's all I'm saying. Sure it is. So I have a little follow-up on Flickr. Yes. I mentioned a couple weeks ago that Smug Mug, who had bought Flickr, was having some issues getting their login system and their user system decoupled. They were going for a conscious decoupling of the Yahoo login system.

Well, it turns out in a new blog post that I found, it says Flickr login freedom is here. Wee-hoo-yah. Login freedom. Okay. Yep. So they're rolling it out to, I mean, they've got hundreds of millions of users, so they're rolling it out slowly. But I figured out how to sign up for a new account and use the new login system.

Now, it does require you to sign up for a new fucking Yahoo account. So prepare for those data breaches now. Well, that's the thing. It's like I just signed up for the account real quick, used a monster password for it. And then as soon as I could sign in with my Yahoo account, it said, hey, would you like to transfer over to the new Flickr login system?

I'm like, well, hell yeah, I do. And they had me go through it right away. So there's going to be a link in the show notes to my new Flickr page. There's nothing there yet, but soon I will be populating it with basically everything I've got. And I'm going to be going pro because the pro accounts are only 50 bucks a year, which is adequate.

And you get full exports, which is great. And everything is going to be licensed Creative Commons attribution. So anybody can use my photos for any purpose as long as I get credit. Right. So I'm doing that for my entire catalog of every photo I've ever taken.

It's going to take some time, but hopefully I have the time. You know, I'm not dead yet. So we'll see how that goes. Now, we've been doing some data visualization stuff. Found some really cool ones lately. And I found one just for you. And this is what qualifies as middle income in each state by Nathan Yao.

Right. And since you like to talk about, you know, how the middle class is going away, I thought we can see how much it costs to be in the middle class or at least have have some middle income. Well, it's a pretty wide swath here because.

Yeah, it is a little disingenuous. It's hard to. OK, so you've got District of Columbia, which roughly. He has about the population of like one tenth of Los Angeles. Yeah, it's like it's like Thousand Oaks. Yeah. So and that's the highest, obviously, because, I mean, there's a lot of movers and shakers there and everything's very expensive and it's government and, you know, you make money in government because of, you know, Trump and other things.

So, yeah. OK, but then California. All right. OK, California median. You can you can only make 60 K a year and be middle income in California. OK, maybe in Bakersfield. But not in Los Angeles. You can't live in Los Angeles at 60.

Right. But this is talking about how much people are making. And it's it's it's this is what the numbers come out to between, you know, poverty on one side and super rich on the other side. Right. And this is just the median middle slice. And the thing is, it goes from for California.

It's like, yeah, 20, approximately 25 K because there's no actual numbers on this thing. And I'm looking for people in household of one because I am I'm a household of one. Yes. Right. OK, let me move over to two. And so, yes, it definitely changes when you go to two because that's you have double the income there.

But as a single person, it goes from like twenty four thousand dollars approximately to about seventy two thousand. Now, it's a huge swath. Well, and just in my limited understanding, I'm sure we have some economists that are actually listening to this podcast. Right. Are you kidding me?

My limited understanding is I've heard that twenty four thousand a year is basically below poverty line. So how is that middle income? Yeah. Hey, man, in Mississippi, it's like eighteen. Yeah. Yeah. So. So I don't know about this.

Yeah. So I'm not sure the you know how how good this graph is, but I thought I'd put it in anyway because, you know, it's over at flowing data. Right. We don't like the data to flow. Yes. The data must flow. But anyway, check it out. And if there are if there are any smart people out there who want to edumacate us on why this is right or wrong, please feel free to write us.

Right. And as we recently got scolded by a Canadian listener from Vancouver about my ongoing complaints about unlimited data here in Canada, I am on the ground on the scene here in Toronto reporting from the great white north is Brian Jewelmeister. It's cold, people.

It's cold. So, yeah. Anyways, I do have some follow up. There are unlimited data plans here now in in what this is Ottawa, I believe the state of Ottawa. Wait, is that correct? I don't even know. I'm a horrible Canadian. I've got to learn. I'm never going to pass my citizenship. Yes, seriously.

I got to I got to bone up on some poutine. Patreon dot com slash GOG so we can buy Brian a map, please. Yes, that would be helpful. But anyways, in Toronto, there are unlimited data plans now for home service, but there are price tiers and unlimited is pretty expensive. And I've talked to a couple of people that have unlimited and that they do throttle.

So, OK, as we've always discussed, once you get throttled, that is no longer unlimited, is it? Well, even unlimited is still limited. If you if you look at it and you're if you cannot download everything that you can for I mean, seriously, there is no way that it can be, quote unquote, unlimited because you are you are ground by the rules of the pipe that you are allowed to use.

So, but by the understood definition of what unlimited data plans would be, throttling does not factor into that mix. True. And as as the people I've talked to here, only people that rely on the Internet for a living and have to work from home often enough will pay up for the unlimited prices here because they're quite quite expensive.

And most people here are on certain, you know, gigabyte threshold plans because that's affordable. And as far as unlimited cell data plans, there are none. There was a brief period of time where they were briefly offered. So there are a few people here that are grandfathered in on unlimited plans.

But of course, if they try to upgrade their phones or upgrade their plans or anything, those go away. So interesting. I had the AT&T unlimited plan for so long. I was grandfathered in and I would never touch it because I was just like I wouldn't do anything to it. I'm like, I want to keep my plan. And then I realized one day I looked at my usage.

I'm like, well, I can actually save a lot of money. Yeah. And AT&T just switched my bill on me. I was on the four gig a month plan and they apparently took that away for some reason and said, no, you're now on the eight gig a month plan. So my bill went up 20 bucks. I'm like, squeeze me.

So I went to the website and I tried to downgrade to the three gigabyte a month plan, which is what they have now. I don't know why they went from, you know, four to eight instead of going from four to three. But especially if you look at my usage, I think I can tell you why they did that, Jason. It's more money.

It's more money. Yes, that's right. I didn't I did not get an opt in. I did not get anything. I just got a bigger bill. Thank you, AT&T. So on the website for three days, I've been trying to go there and I click the downgrade button. I want my three gig plan because I only use all three people that use phones on my family plan.

We use less than a gigabyte in a half a month between all three of us. Right. We never leave the house. And we're always on the website. You don't leave the house. Exactly. So and their website breaks every time. So I have to actually go to a store or get on the phone to get it downgraded because their website is so awful.

Thank you, AT&T. Technology companies. Yeah, seriously, you'd think they'd have that technology thing down and a little follow up in the scooter body count news. A man was killed here in Hollywood. Yep. At was it Hollywood and Vine or Sunset and Vine.

And it was like three o'clock in the morning and a drunk driver just took this guy out and backed over him, I guess, to make sure he did it right. And got to be thorough. Yeah. Well, do you remember that story in China where like people were not getting up from car accidents?

Because if you hit somebody, it was cheaper to make sure that they were dead instead of injured. So if somebody got in an accident, they would run the person over multiple times to make sure they were dead. It's like a Monty Python skit. So there's a video from KTLA where they're talking to people on the street and people are talking about, yeah, yeah, this is the most dangerous intersection.

And there's tons of people on scooters. I mean, I had no idea how many people were on scooters in Hollywood, all on the sidewalk, nobody wearing a helmet. And they have the gall to talk about how they appreciate safety and they're very careful about how they ride their scooter.

And not a single one of them had a helmet. Of course they didn't. Egypts. Yeah. Well, in keeping with the theme, this isn't necessarily scooters, but all the scooter companies are, of course, also doing bikes as well. And Lyft has now had to pull e-bikes from service amid alarming reports of excessive braking.

So problematic braking that in some cases resulted in rider injury has caused Lyft to pull its recently acquired network of e-bikes from service in, let's see, New York, San Francisco, and in Washington. Of course, here's their statement. Let's downplay, right? After a small number of reports and out of abundance of caution, we are proactively pausing our electric bikes from service, a City Bike spokesperson told Gizmodo in a statement by email.

Safety always comes first. Yeah. So they bought a whole bunch of bikes operated by a company called Motivate. Like, these companies have become stacking shells now, right? Like, Lyft is operating a company called City Bike, which has got its bikes from a company called Motivate, which has got its bikes from blah, blah, blah, which they all came from China and probably have blood on them already.

But yeah, so these, the braking systems on these are just ridiculous. And as a long-term biker, and I'm sure you've ridden a bike many times as well, if the front brake is really, really strong and you use it, this is going ass over elbow. Yeah. Yep. So that's happening left, right, and center with these bikes for people.

So good, good times. Yeah, and I remember in the old days where, you know, front brakes were just calipers. They weren't electronic or anything crazy like that, so. And they shouldn't be electronic on any of these things, not the front brakes. I'm okay with making the back brakes electronic, but definitely not the front, especially when, you know, I mean, I'm sure many people that get these bikes are seasoned bike riders, but I'm sure many people that get them aren't because if you're really, you know, if you're a prolific bike rider, you have your own damn bike.

Yeah. And you may not know that you probably should not rely on your front brake or which one is even your front or back brake, right or left. I don't know. Derp. I don't know. Derp. Well, you'll find out when you land on your head. Yeah. And that's one of the things that in motorcycle school they teach you. You get 75% of your stopping power from your front brakes.

25% is from your back. Yep. So there you have it. And in 996 news, Jack Ma, the man behind Alibaba, basically came out and said, suck it up, you little kids. It's crazy.

It's crazy. It is. And he's like, those who can stick to a 996 schedule are those who have found their passion beyond monetary gains. No, they haven't found their passion. They're just exhausted and are delirious. Yes, unless their passion is making you money. Seriously. That's ridiculous.

Yeah. What a douche. In the news. We're starting off this week in the news with some VR news. I know that you're such a fan of VR. But this is one that I think really might put you over the top here.

This is this is Vader Immortal, a Star Wars VR series. Right. And it's from the ILM X Lab. And I put this in here because I don't know. Did you get a chance to watch the trailer for this? I did. I looked at it. It seems OK.

You know, I don't know. Personally, I'm in. If I can if I can go to a friend's house and play it, I'm not going to set up a VR room. But if they have a VR arcade where you can go and play this thing, I would be so down for that. It looks fun and it looks gorgeous. I'd give it a go. I'd give it a go. I'd try it out.

But yeah, I'm definitely not going to purchase everything just for this. If there's a place I can go to give it a go, I will. I will do so. I may be the only person on the planet that doesn't find Maya Rudolph all that funny anymore. OK. Yeah, the article is Maya Rudolph joins Vader Immortal and more news from Star Wars Celebration Chicago.

There's lots of news to come out of the Star Wars Celebration. And this is one of the piece of pieces of the news. I don't actually know who Maya Rudolph even is. She was involved in The Good Place and Bridesmaids. She's she used to be very funny. She's been on doing a lot of writing for Oscars and things like that recently.

And all of those segments I felt fell really flat. Oh, her. She also has that new show with Fran Armistad or whatever. And that's not very funny either. Also, she's playing Fred's terrible. Yeah. So she's playing the clever, funny droid in this particular thing.

So so we'll see. I don't know. Actually, we won't see. Let's be honest. I'm never going to make it to this VR thing. Well, in continuing VR news, I honestly thought that this might be something that might get you and Bittner into the VR game because you're such Star Wars nerds. But yes, you never know.

Facebook can make VR avatars look and move exactly like you. This is their new technology that they're building. It's not going to be ready for quite some time. But so in other words, they can't do it yet. Oh, they can. You just need the the the two systems that digitize you.

One's called Mugsy and the other one is the Sociopticon. Oh, that's not a loaded name there. Yeah. Yeah. This these things gather 180 gigabytes a second while they're digitizing you. Is that not insane? That's pretty crazy.

Yep. And then they have machine learning behind it that learns your your facial movements and things like that. And if you look at the the tests that they have, the damn thing is impressive as hell. I got to say it is extremely impressive. Right. So once they can, you know, in the next couple of years when they can actually get this thing working into consumers hands, it's going to be cool.

I don't know how they're going to do it, but they're going to have to have cameras on the headsets that point back at your face to actually like glean different body movements and things like that from you. But they're working on that. And I was just I found the tech to be kind of, you know, this is what we've been waiting for.

This is what is going to give you true cyberspace when you can get in there. And, you know, this is this is your snow crash right here. Once once they get this tech working, it's going to be some time. But it's pretty cool, I thought. And that's all worked out so well in sci fi books. Of course it has.

No, we're going to we got some dystopian love coming today. I'm down for this stuff. Like, let us let us enter the world of William Gibson, because I'm down. Let's let's let's get this dystopia party party started. Facebook has spent 20 million dollars last year on Zuckerberg's personal protection.

We covered this story before, but it was only 10 million. And turns out, nope, everybody hates Zuckerberg so much. But they the company gave him 20 million dollars to protect his skinny white ass. It would be nice if the company spent even 10 dollars on our personal protection.

He's no shit, really. Yeah. How about spending a little money on protecting our data? Mm hmm. Hmm. Oh, yeah. Anyway, I didn't know he only took a dollar annual salary. He wants to be Steve Jobs, much like what's Theranos's chick's name, you know, like I want to be Steve Jobs.

So if you can afford to take a dollar annual salary, you don't need the money. That's well. Yes, because he's worth billions of dollars. And he doesn't even get an annual bonus. But yes, he gets it says he gets millions in other compensation. Yes. Two point six million dollars for his personal private jet travel and another 20 million.

Yes. For personal security. Sheryl Sandberg. Basically, she only got two point nine million in personal security. She's not that important, apparently. I guess not. The EU has officially passed the controversial copyright law.

Now, I guess we're going to see what the what the real deal is. Right. Because we've we've kind of covered both sides of the story here. We've talked about how it's going to break the Internet completely, according to Google. And we've talked to about some stories that have said, no, it's actually going to give us more personal protection than we ever had before.

So it'll be a good thing. Well, we're going to find out now. So it has been approved a total of 19 European Council members, including France and Germany, voted in favor of the new directive. Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, Finland and Sweden voted against it. Belgium, Estonia and Slovenia abstained.

I don't understand how you can abstain. You should probably figure out something. So now they have 24 months to apply the directive to their national legislations. And under the new rules, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc. will be required to obtain licenses for copyrighted works from rights holders in order to host content.

They'll be forced to police copyrighted materials through the use of tools such as filters. And, yeah, they're going to be they don't get away with the just the platform excuse anymore. And, you know, detractors say this will kill memes. But we'll see what we've discovered through the Internet is things find a way of getting through.

That's true. Some people just don't give a shit and post whatever they want. Anyway, go figure. We call that Pinterest. Yep, we do call that Pinterest. And Pinterest is going public. Yeah. Yeah. So now we got to get used to the fact that the UK is no longer part of the EU. So I have a UK story that's specific because, you know, Brexit.

UK wants Facebook to remove its like buttons for younger users. So they wanted to turn off so-called nudge techniques, the psychological crap that's got us all hooked in, including Facebook's like button, Snapchat streaks, etc. For people that are under 18. Now, it's weird because this recommendation forms part of a new 16 rule code of practice for age appropriate design drafted by the UK's data watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office or the ICO.

Okay. Yeah. So anyways, other things they're suggesting include turning off location tracking. Be nice if we could all do that. Robust age verification systems, which works so well, limiting how children's data is collected, used, shared, and informing children if parents are monitoring their online activity.

I kind of like that one. It's kind of cool. Give the kids a little bit of an option here. They spoke to designers, app developers, academics, civil society, and spoke to 280 children as part of its research. So we'll see what happens. Yeah, it's an interesting one. I can get behind this one.

I can get behind this one for sure. I think it might save the next generation from coming up just addicted to this stuff in theory. In theory. In theory. But, you know, they always find a way. They always find a way. Now, I have been getting a slew of these ads over on Twitter.

And it is, where you can tour an Amazon fulfillment center in North America. This is about Amazon.com. And Amazon has been putting these everywhere in my Twitter feed. It is insane. So, I love this.

You can see the magic that happens after you click buy on Amazon.com by touring one of our fulfillment centers and seeing firsthand how we deliver for our customers. Search for a location and book for yourself or for groups up to 10 people over six years of age, please. Let's start with your email address so we can contact you about your reservation.

Yes. Come see the downtrodden workers being slowly replaced by a robotic fleet. No, no, no. This is, this is, come see what your future is going to look like and where you're going to be working in five years. That is hilarious. And I like the fact that they asked for you to at least be over six years of age.

We just went from a story about the UK trying to shut down things for anybody under the age of 18. But, hey, if you're six years old, come see the Amazon factory. Every, every tour comes with a free job application. We'll take you at eight. Yeah, that's right.

As long as you have a parental permission and we just have to go down the line because your parents are working around the corner, stuffing shit and boxes for you. Yep. You can all carpool. That's right. Until we replace you with drones and robots. So it turns out online drug dealers are dumping crypto markets for WhatsApp and Telegram.

All right. Yeah. Didn't see that one coming. Couldn't imagine that happening. I love this thing. This is, this is going back to my dystopian future because we can come up with stories like this all the time. And it's really fun. And we think that this shit's never going to happen. But this is the William Gibbsification of everything now.

And the independent report stated that drug dealers are currently advertising their Telegram channels via graffiti markers painted on the walls of various public places. Amazing. So this is meatspace meets dark space meets, you know, the underworld.

And I cannot be more excited about this. I think this is fantastic that these people have figured out how to actually, you know, go around. And I can just see the seedy alley and the QR code is up in the corner underneath the cardboard that you have to know where to go.

You drop your mirror shades and scan it. Yeah, exactly. I think this is awesome. You know, I would have loved to have been a criminal, but I know that everybody is going to get caught nowadays, no matter what. So, yeah, you're eventually going to get caught. It's just a it's a race now. Yeah, it's just a matter of time.

You're just you're you're just ahead of the curve, but not for very long. I just think this is fantastic because this really is the dystopianification of the world. And it's it's starting. It's starting. This is I didn't think that I was going to be around long enough to have a William Gibson novel turn into reality.

And we're getting there so fast. It's fantastic. It is speeding up. It really is. Oh, man. And password manager Dashlane has closed a 30 million dollar round. OK, wow. That's a lot of money for a password manager. Yeah.

Yeah. This is only part of it. They have raised more than one hundred million dollars in venture funding so far. Wow. Yeah. It's only got they've only got 10 million users. And so it's pretty far behind everybody else. But the thing about it is they're trying to like, you know, yeah, they're trying to take on one password and last pass.

But they're also moving into identity theft and scouring the dark web for your, you know, for your information and things like that. So it's password manager meets Norton and Norton and LifeLock. And companies like that who are also rolling out their own password manager.

So everybody's doing the all same thing. OK, got it. Yeah. Everybody saw how one password was doing and last pass was doing. And they're like, we can get in on this. So, you know, I tell you what, though, I'm not going to sign up for him because I love my one password. It does what I want. I don't need anybody out scouring the dark web for me and all this extra crap.

It's like I like companies that do one thing and they do it really, really well. We used to call these things bloatware back in the day. Exactly. It's what happened to iTunes. It's what happened to Microsoft Office. We want one thing that does one thing well. That's that is our mantra here. That is how we like our softwares.

Yes. Single serving software, please. Yes. What I like. So I don't think that I'm not going to even bother giving these guys a try. So I just think it's interesting that they need this much money to start out because I'm pretty sure one password didn't start with hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank.

Yeah. If you've got a couple mil for every user that you actually have, something's wrong. That's true. That's true. Yeah. I'm just going to point that out from a funding perspective. Yeah. Kind of a hundred million dollars in venture funding, but 10 million users. So, yeah, that's a bit extreme, right?

Yeah. Oh, what are you going to do? This one. Rolling money. Yeah, that's true. That's true. This one I put in for you because apparently Spotify is trying to take money away from songwriters. Yeah.

I've spoken to a number of my friends that are songwriters and they're all on board in a petition and they're very anti-Spotify right now. They feel that they got duped by Spotify and to some degree they did. How did they get duped, Brian? Well, they were promised a lot of, they were promised better to royalty rates.

They were promised more money. They were being promised, you know, we're going to sort this out. We're going to figure this out for you. And believe it or not, nothing's happened. Nothing's happened in Spotify and Amazon, Google and SiriusXM and Pandora are all appealing this new thing from the Copyright Royalty Board with their decision to raise rates for songwriters.

For songwriters. Not songwriters. I don't know what a songwriter is. I'm sure it's an app that we're not aware of. That's true. I'm sure it's out there. But yeah, they wanted to raise their rates by 44% over the next five years and everybody's up in arms. But the thing about it is one company that has a nice music app, well, not nice music app, one company that has a music app, one company that has a music app is staying out of it.

And that's Apple. Yeah. Well, again, because Apple is theoretically, technically, at least still for the moment, a hardware company that can afford to go ahead and say, well, we'll pay people what they want. It's fine. Wait till we're not making our. Yeah, we're not making our money off music sales.

So yeah, wait till WWDC when they have the next round of Apple Music and the new app that's coming for the desktop and all the other stuff that they're doing. Well, you know, from what we just said, though, I'm happy about that because Apple is pivoting to single service software in theory. In theory. In theory.

We'll see what happens. You know, I mean, this big push with them to move to everything subscription, they're betting the farm on this stuff. So they need it. They need it to work. But hey, as long as it's the death of iTunes, so be it. I don't care. Well, we just had record store day.

So a friend of the show, MVX, is that right? MXV. MXV. I get it wrong every single time. Probably had multiple orgasms because he bought a bunch of vinyl. But along with that now is they've started to kind of ramp up what it is. And there's a lot more experiences and concerts and special things like that happening.

One of them, which I was very excited about earlier, was that Ministry was going to tour their early wax era, wax tracks era stuff. And they did. They played a show. Now, when I initially heard about this, I obviously thought that they were going to play their very first stuff, their electro synth pop stuff, which I was going to be like, wow, that's going to be amazing.

They're going to do every day is Halloween and for love and all these other crazy old songs before they became hardcore. And they were just this synth pop band. No, not so much. But it still would have been good because it was from the first albums that I really loved. The early 90s albums, Land of Rape and Honey. The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste and Psalm 69.

Those were great albums before they went totally metal. I never got into Psalm 69. Psalm 69 is kind of where I checked out. That was about to be a little bit for me. I just like the first two. Land of Rape and Honey and The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste are fucking classic albums. They are. And as soon as I saw you put this in here, I was blasted at my neighbors.

I'm like, what the hell is going on? Yeah. Link in the show notes straight to the concert that they played. And they're doing a few more. They're going to play in LA and a couple other places. I might try to make it out to the LA show. So that'd be nice. That'd be fun. I saw them at Riot Fest, the last one I went to, and they were fantastic.

It was a great show. Just bring super duper earplugs. Yes, they're very loud. Very loud. And for something else that you definitely want really, really good earplugs for, David Hasselhoff is hopping onto the alternative music wagon.

There's a link over on postpunk.com, and you'll see a picture of him with the aforementioned Al Jorgensen from Ministry. He's covering Echo and the Buddyman's Lips Like Sugar and plans to follow up with the Jesus and Mary Chain cover of Head On. File this under things that should never, ever happen. It's funny.

My roommate and I went on a kick and downloaded a bunch of the old Comedy Central roasts, and we watched the roast of David Hasselhoff last weekend. I got to say, those roasts sold up. It was pretty damn funny. That's good. Excellent. And we have had episode one of Game of Thrones.

Woo-hoo! It aired the other night, and I was actually already in Canada, and I had to use a combination of HBO Go, my trusty VPN, and a special Samsung app that allows you to mirror your screen, but that finally managed to get it to work on my in-law's TV, and I was able to enjoy the episode.

What did you think? I loved it. It was great. And since I bought HBO Now, because with HBO Now, you can watch the East Coast feed. So, because we were going to get HBO for the house, and I'm like, but we're not going to get the East Coast feed, and that means I have to stay up until 9 o'clock to watch the new episodes, and that just isn't going to fly.

It's just not going to work for me. So, I ended up watching it. And it's funny, they actually released it like six or seven minutes early on HBO Now. I cranked it up and hit play, and it just started going at like 5.52 or something like that. It was a long time before six.

I was like, I was like expecting a countdown or something, and it just jumped in. I'm like, I'm going to beat everybody. This is great. Yeah. So, I thought it was a good episode, too. It's definitely, it was a slow, they're going for a slow, but very fast build, I'm sure. This was the slow one, and it's just going to go very quickly after this.

It wasn't that slow. There was a lot of revelations going on in this one, for sure. I don't know. I liked it. I thought it was really good. I thought it was a perfect way to set up and start, get things rolling. Now we've only got five left. As everybody's been talking about, this is probably one of the big last pop culture events that's going to happen, and Salon has a really good article about, this is the year of the pop culture apocalypse, because we've got the Avengers ending.

Thank God. Yeah, thank God. We've got Game of Thrones ending, and we've got the final film in the Skywalker-centered Star Wars series coming this year as well. So, what happens after this year? And it is a really interesting question, because I don't know if we're going to ever have anything that's quite as big as any of these things.

It's hard to imagine there being a show that everybody watches and waits for, you know, not a full dump, and you talk about it piecemeal here and there, like Game of Thrones. I don't know if there's going to be movies as big as Avengers or Star Wars, you know, because I can see people dropping off from Star Wars after we're past the main Skywalker trilogy.

It's just never going to get as big of an audience again. So, we'll see what happens. You know, people said that after The Sopranos, too. That's also what they get into in this article. This has all happened before, it'll all happen again. Exactly. So, we'll see. Until the next one will come out, and everybody will be excited. And they'll say, ooh, we get to do it again.

That's fine. But, yeah, this has all happened before, this will all happen again, no matter what. So, the one thing that I was really interested by was, as soon as the episode was over, opened up Twitter. I'm like, okay, let's see who's a douchebag. Fortunately, I've curated my feed, I think, well enough where if anybody spoils a show, they're instantly blocked for life.

And I think that I've done a pretty good job of getting the douchebags out of my feed because that was nothing. It was crickets about Game of Thrones. Nothing. Since I cleared up my Facebook feed, because I've kind of done the same thing that you've done with Twitter, I've created a very well-crafted, well-honed Facebook feed for myself with good friends and things of that nature.

There was much discussion about watching it, but nobody spoiled a damn thing. Yeah. See, those are the people that you want in your life. You weed out people who spoil things because those are people that have no place on the internet. They should be taken out back and shot. That's it. I did find an interesting Chrome extension for people who have not curated their feeds very well.

It's called Spoiler Protection 2.0. And it lets you put in keywords and filters for different sites that will then weed them out when you're using the browser. If you're using a mobile app, you're shit out of luck. I haven't gone back and looked at my Twitter mute list, but I have a feeling I might have some Game of Thrones mute tags in there somewhere because it was really crickety on there about it.

But all in all, I'm looking forward to the next five weeks of, you know, tits and dragons. Yes. Love it. And speaking of Disney and Star Wars, Disney Plus, we finally have the numbers for it opening on November 12th for $6.99 a month, which is in that sweet spot.

That is the sweet spot. Oh, my God. They can take my money because and the sheer value of what I'm going to be getting. You know, I don't care too much for Marvel. I do hope that they at some point bring back kind of the more edgy stuff that we had on Netflix. That's the Marvel stuff I do enjoy. Obviously, it's great to have all the Star Wars stuff.

The previews and the photos I've seen from the Mandalorian look really interesting. But in terms of I have a toddler, Disney, everything that they're going to have on the streaming service, this is a no brainer for me. I'm going to be getting the amount of content I'm going to be getting for $6.99 a month versus CBS All Access at their $9.99 a month or whatever it is.

Yeah. This is ridiculous. So, yeah, I think I pay $6.99 a month for CBS All Access, though. I've got to say, and yeah, it's so far, it's a decent, decent price point. I'm going to jump to Star Trek Discovery real quick because it's interesting. I was trying to find the link for the show notes for Star Trek Discovery.

So I went on Google and I typed in Star Trek Discovery and there's a link that says Star Trek Discovery and it gives me a link that you if you copy and paste the link instead of clicking on it, the link that they're posting with their ads that they're paying for is to the original series. Oops.

Oops. Idgits, you Idgits. But yeah, this coming week is the season finale. So you better get caught up. I know. I've got to catch up. I've got to catch up. I'll just see what I can do from here. So I've got a couple more days in Canada land where I'll have some nights to myself. So I'll try to catch up.

Oh, I did want to do a little follow up because I remember we were talking about the Spotify Hulu thing the other week. Yeah, yeah. I was able to go ahead. Once I logged in on my desktop account, I was able to find it very quickly, sign up for my free Hulu account. And following up even further back, they have all of MASH on there.

No way. All of MASH is on Hulu. So I'm very excited about that. So now with my being paid for Spotify account and my now free Hulu account, I can watch MASH from day one on. Oh, my God. I've been I've been going through the Twilight Zone on CBS All Access because that's kind of the only thing that they really got that I can get into.

It's not all the seasons as well, too. But that's cool that they have MASH. Oh, that might be my new my new jam. Yeah, I'm going to start getting into that because especially because it's old episodes, right? 30 minute, 30 a half hour show. So 22 minutes. That is such a perfectly bingeable amount.

Like after my wife has gone to sleep, I could just watch 22 minutes of something. Go to bed. It's probably 24 minutes because they didn't run that many ads back in the day. That's true. Somewhere in there. Yeah. No, I'm psyched about that. That's really cool. Because I've logged into Hulu once since I got it. And I got MASH, man.

That's the only thing I want to see. Yeah. But that interface, dude, it's so bad. You were right. I remember you complaining about that. And as soon as I was in there, I was like, do I have to be a millennial to understand this? Where is this Snapchat? What's going on here? Exactly. You have to know how to use Snapchat to use Hulu.

It's just so unfair for us. Major Potter with a Snapchat filter on him. It's got glasses and a beard. And that dog nose with the tongue sticking out. Somebody should do that. Just for shits and giggles on YouTube. It's a great idea. Run old TV shows through Snapchat filters.

Oh my God. I think we have a weekend project. Yeah. So we also talked about the Deep Space Nine documentary that's coming. And finally, we have a trailer. Oh, it's a good trailer. I am so excited about this.

So excited about this. And it's actually going to be in the theaters. That's crazy. Yeah. Yeah. May 13th, it's going to hit the theaters. But then we'll get some home distribution, which is what I'm going to wait for. Because I'm not going to get my ass out to watch a documentary about a TV show in a movie theater.

No. Yeah, no. That's not going to happen. No. I'll just wait for it. But man, it looks good. I got so many chills. I'm excited. That was such a good show. Underrated, I think. A lot of people don't think it was a great one. And it was. It was fantastic. It was my favorite of the Star Trek series.

And I was working on the lot when those guys were filming. And I got to hang out with those guys all the time. Like every day, we'd all be at the truck together, hanging out with Romulans and Ferengi, buying, you know, just having tacos, having pastrami sandwiches and just sitting in the shade, shooting the shit. It was so cool. I miss those days so much.

And I'm going to follow up with a little love, death and robots, because everybody under the sun recommended that to me. And so I started watching it. And I got to say, unless I've, you know, skipped the shitty one so far, I'm like seven in. I'm enjoying it thoroughly because some of the stories like, you know, they do end kind of abruptly and but it leaves a lot to the imagination, which is what sci-fi short stories are really good at.

And the animation in some of these is just mind bogglingly good. I mean, it is incredible. Like some of the sex scenes are pretty gratuitous and I actually fast forward them because I'm like, I don't need to see cartoons fucking, but which I never thought cartoons I need to see fucking are in Team America.

Yeah. Then those aren't even. And those are puppets. Puppets. Yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah, so far I'm enjoying it. I'm going to finish the series up because they're like, you know, anywhere between seven and 20 minutes each. Right. So you can, you can just pop one in, watch it and go about your day, which is really nice.

And I found a new podcast that I am in love with. It's called you're wrong about dot dot dot with Michael Hobbs and Sarah Marshall. These people are both journalists and they write for like the HuffPo and BuzzFeed news and things like that. But they love research. And man, these are good episodes.

They just take the piss out of everything from Ebonics to the obesity epidemic to, was it Ed Gein and all sorts of really weird stuff. So it's like Penn and Teller's bullshit meets revisionist history. Kind of. Yeah. It's I mean, I really enjoy it.

I mean, they need to get Mike a new mic. His microphone is terrible. But for the most part, though, I'm really enjoying this show because you can just pop in and like look through the list and find the things you're interested in and see why everything that you thought was real is wrong. Excellent. It's really just what we need.

Do they do one about eggs yet? I don't believe so. I don't believe so. And this this one is kind of strange. I I don't know what to think about this one. Netflix wants to buy Grauman's Egyptian theater.

OK, now I see why they would want to, because they need to show some of their movie somewhere because they make all these movies and they're like, we got nowhere to put them. I think that it would be really cool if Netflix owned the Egyptian. Personally, I, you know, I thought about it for a while. I'm like, yeah, that's fine because I love the Egyptian.

Have you been there recently? Not recently. Not for it's been bought out by a couple of different people right over the years. I don't even know who owns it currently. So, oh, American Cinematheque. OK, so the last time I was at the Egyptian and this is going to date when when this was. I saw Planet of the Apes.

And it was, you know, one of those things where they show the movie and they had a roundtable for Planet of the Apes. Sitting behind me when we're watching Planet of the Apes is Charlton fucking Heston with his grandson. I've got to say, I think the last time I was there was for one of the crappy prequel Star Wars movies.

Oh, I'm sorry. Yeah. But listening to Charlton Heston's grandson asking his grandfather about different things in the movie and hearing him answer, hearing Charlton Heston literally right behind me.

He's like, Grandpa, what's a gelding? He's like, I'll tell you when we get home. It's just like the kid asking all these questions because he was like maybe five, which is a little young, probably to see Planet of the Apes, but it was just so awesome.

And, you know, it just had with the standing ovation at the end. I couldn't stand up because I would be standing right in front of him. So everybody. So I'm sitting there. I am the only person in the theater that's seated because I want everybody to see him. And I'm clapping and smiling. And he looks down and smiles at me and winks. I'm like, yes, that was so cool.

So that's why I love Grauman's Egyptian. So there's my little anecdote about that. There's your story. Yep. So I got a couple of books here and one audio book, which is it's been a good week.

I've got a new daily routine where I get up at 430 in the morning and everything's structured. And at night, at like seven o'clock at night to nine o'clock at night, I go to go to my room and I literally read now. You'd be proud of me. You'd be proud of me. I am proud of you. I've got my 12 inch iPad and I got the Kindle app and I just have been powering through stuff and it's nice to read before you go to bed.

I think it is, too. It really helps for me. Yeah, I'm retaining a lot more than I would with an audio book. And I do get headaches because I've got terrible glasses. But for the most part, I'm enjoying reading on my iPad with the dog sitting there, just farting and snoring away.

But it's really nice to read again. So I've got it actually baked into my day to read every night. And it's fun. It's really fun. So my first book was Growth Hacker Marketing, a primer on the future of PR, marketing and advertising by Ryan Holiday. This is an updated edition of his 2011 book where he went back and added a bunch of new stuff and modernized it.

And growth hacker marketing is it's one of those terms that irks me. Yet, I understand, like viscerally, because it's what you and I used to do back in the day, which like, OK, we can't we don't like marketers. We don't like advertisers. We don't like PR people.

It's like, well, we got to get our shit out there. So how are we going to do it? So let's find let's find the route to get our stuff to the public. It is nontraditional. Yeah, I totally remember doing that. Of course, now that's all mainstream. Never used to be. It is. It is kind of. But, you know, the mindset is still there about trying to find alternate avenues to get your product out there.

Right. And it's really the book is mostly about, you know, the mindset behind it, because everything that like you can't put a tactical book out there on growth hacker marketing because everybody's steel shit and shit goes away. Then you can't do it anymore. Yes, exactly. So you have to be on the cutting edge and always thinking about new ways to do marketing that is outside of the standard realm and in tying like product development to marketing at the same time and those teams working together and actually most of the time being the same

people is really what the book is about. It was a good read. Yeah, yeah, it really is. And it was a really good read. I highly recommend it. I like Ryan Holiday's books. Trust me, I'm lying is, you know, just a fascinating book back from the old days on how he did a lot of the things that he did that were very sketchy.

But I mean, the guy worked at American Apparel and he worked for Tucker Max. Yeah, that's all you need to know. Yeah, exactly. But he's a nice guy. I met him when we went to, oh, what's his name? Robert Green's house. He was there and I finally got to meet him in person, which was pretty, pretty interesting because I didn't know he was going to be there.

So the next book I have is Under the Influence, How to Fake Your Way into Getting Rich on Instagram, Influencer Fraud, Selfies, Anxiety, Ego, and Mass Delusional Behavior by Trey Ratcliffe. Now, Trey Ratcliffe is a photographer. He came to photography late in life.

I think he started when he was like 37, 38. Had never picked up a camera before that. And now he's like a massively huge photographer. He found a niche and went into HDR photography right when it was starting and he knew codes. He was a programmer, so he figured out how to like write command line tools to do all the HDR stuff before it was like, you know, just point and click.

And I've never been a fan of HDR because it just looks fake as shit to me. But interesting guy. Very interesting guy. Now, I'm about 15% into this book. And so far, it's just it's shit we already know. Okay, there are influencers on Instagram and there are a lot of scummy people who buy a lot of likes and a lot of comments and they get paid a lot of money for it.

So, so far, can't recommend it yet because if you've listened to this show, it's everything that we've already said, you know, there's nothing new under the sun here. So I will have a follow up for it next week. But if you're on the fence about buying this book or I've heard of it and you're thinking about, you know, maybe I'll pick that up.

Hold off till next week and I'll give you the skinny if it's worth it or not. So my last book is not really a book. It's a short story on Audible. It's an Audible original and it comes from 2017 and they finally just put it out for free and it's called The Dispatcher by John Scalzi, who we love most of the time.

I think 90, 90% of the time. Most of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love his books. It's narrated by Zachary Quinto. So you will know as Spock. That's right. Spock and was it Skylar from Heroes? I think that was the first time I saw it on Heroes. That's right. Yep. Heroes season one was epic, man.

It was. It was fantastic. They really screwed the pooch. No, they didn't. You know who screwed the pooch? The Writers Guild of America. Right. Because they were rolling into season two right when the writer's strike happened. Right. And so they had to, I mean, they just had what they had and went to press with it and they missed half of a season and it was written poorly.

But anyway, I'm off topic here. This is a great little short story. It's only two hours and 18 minutes long. If you're an Audible subscriber, you can get it for free from the Audible originals that you get every month. You get two Audible originals every month. Highly recommend picking this one up. It's really good. It's really good.

It's about this. Yeah, I read through the little brief on it and boy, I wish I could read it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you can just get an Audible account. But I think you can probably pick this up. You can buy the audio version only on Amazon if you wanted it. But it's probably like five bucks, but it's really, really good.

It's really clever. And it's cool sci-fi that just comes out of nowhere. Really dig it. Excellent. I wish I had a book to read, but I was hoping on my plane flight I would get some time. But that kid is at that age. No time. Oh, man. Well, you're not allowed to read on the plane because we need drunken movie reviews or semi-drunken movie reviews.

I've got some for next one. Okay. Making sure. Making sure. Moron of the week. Well, we were talking about Facebook and VR and the Oculus stuff. Well, they turned out to be our moron of the week as well as some of our technological overlords that we're looking forward to in the future.

Well, what they did is some of their Oculus VR touch controllers, they put in secret messages on the inside that some people are calling inappropriate. Things like, the Masons were here and Big Brother is watching. And, uh, hi, I fix it. We see you in this space for rent.

For me, this is almost hero of the week. I enjoy this so much. I think this is fantastic. You know, I'm kind of with you on that one. The moron is the guy that, you know, obviously led it through the production cycle.

And I, I, I have a feeling though, that this isn't the fuck up that they're claiming it to be. No, it's getting a lot of press for something that probably wouldn't have got them that much press otherwise. Yeah. They say it's, you know, dumb and embarrassing, but, uh, it's hilarious and it's awesome.

This is the best thing that Facebook has ever done. I know. I, it's really cool. The only way you're going to see this thing is if you take it apart, which is why the, which is why there's the, I fix it tagline, which is, which is hilarious. It's hilarious.

It's absolutely hilarious. Again, I stand by this best thing ever to happen from Facebook. All right, moving on. Well, we got another one, which is pretty funny. A guy got a QR code tattoo and then someone broke the link. Now this guy, this guy, he got a QR code to like a YouTube video.

Okay. And of course somebody went on YouTube and basically just reported the link is fraudulent. So the, it got taken down. So this guy now has a QR code tattoo on his body of a dead link on YouTube. Now we've talked a lot about times about not, uh, building your, your house on somebody else's garden, but this is true.

Yeah. This is hilarious. Now, if this guy was smart, he would have gone to hover.com slash GOG, bought his own domain, added a redirect to the QR code. So then he can change it anytime he wants. There you go. Yes. You know?

Own your, own your QR tattoo. I, you know, I, as I was writing that, I was thinking, I kind of want to do that now. It's not a bad idea. JPG.me. There you go. I just put a QR code on my forearm and it's like, Hey baby, scan my arm. And then you can get the latest meme. You can get more about me.

You can do whatever you want because you then control where that link is going to go, you know? And it's, it's, it's yours until you kick the bucket. So, but man, what an idiot. That is dumb. And, uh, I just have one that is basically from the no shit Sherlock files.

And I can't believe somebody has got paid to study this. Uh, this came across my newsfeed. This is an actual real study, a medical study, forcing a smile for customers linked with more drinking after work. No shit. Sherlock is right. Employees who force themselves to smile and be happy in front of customers who are trying to hide feelings of annoyance may be at risk for heavier drinking after work.

According to researchers. Yes. A team of researchers at Penn state and the university of Buffalo got paid to study the drinking habits of people who routinely work with the public. For example, people in food service who work with customers, nurses, teachers who work with students, and they found a link between those who regularly faked or amplified positive emotions such as smiling or suppress negative emotions such as you stupid, idiot.

Have you tried rebooting it? Resisting the urge to rolls one eyes, for example, matched up with heavier drinking after work. Duh. Because every time they fake that smile or that resist that urge, they die a little inside. They die a little more inside. And you can only replace that life force with the water of life, a.k.a.

whiskey. That's right. Feedback loop. We've got a lot of new Patreon subscribers this week. Thank you so much. We've got Christopher. We've got Sylvia. We've got FML. We've got Ross, Rafal, Jamie, Jim, Plumman, and Amanda writes in formulaic, but fun sci-fi.

Hello, Grump and Grump here. I wasn't sure if you were familiar with Marco Clu's Frontline series of novels, so I thought I'd throw it out there. Clu starts off looking like Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, but quickly expands into much less idealized look at the government and the problems of the world it takes place in.

Keep up the grump or Semper Malevolum. I like that. Semper Malevolum. That needs to be our new. We're going to get some challenge coins made with that. That might be our title. This book sounds right up my alley. I definitely want to check this out. I've added it to my Audible queue. I will definitely check this one out. Nice. And Jay also wrote in on Patreon, I've noticed that you have to download an episode in Overcast in order to give it a star.

Would it be helpful if I downloaded your entire catalog and gave each of those old episodes a star? Or do you think that there's some kind of recency waiting? Perhaps a useful listener experiment. Man, you guys have a lot of time on your hands. Here's the deal. I can tell you exactly what you need to do here. When you log into Overcast, go to your account.

You can make an account with basically an email address and a password. Once you do that, you should be able to star every episode. And sometimes the star will go away because you just press a little info button and it'll drop down. You can press the star and just do that all the way down the line. But if one doesn't show up, then just download one episode and then it'll show up for a bunch of them.

Then you can star them that way. You don't have to download the whole catalog. That'll throw our numbers way off if everybody's downloading the whole catalog just to get us a bump, which somebody did a couple of weeks ago. We got a massive spike and we're like, woohoo. Oh, shit. No, darn. Yeah. Went back to normal.

But yeah, if you if you create an account, you don't even have to use your real email address. You can just type in some gibberish and add a password and it will do it. But, you know, it's actually nice to have an Overcast account because you can then use the website to, you know, see what you've got and manage things. And if you're an Overcast premium subscriber, you can upload your own stuff from the website through your account and it will show up on your phone in your Overcast account, which is what I do a lot for testing shows.

So either way, there are ways around it. You don't have to download the whole thing. So but thanks for checking it out. And please, everybody keep adding those stars on Overcast. We are still getting our ass handed to us by ATP. Damn it. And over at PayPal, Linda sent us a donation.

So thank you very much. Thank you very much. Over on Twitter. Seth writes in. Hey, when JP Deaf said he would try anything for $4.99, can we take this totally out of context and put this to the test? No. It is a bummer. Third in command also wrote us. Them Legals sent us a link to a story over at thestandard.co.uk.

Electric scooter riders on roads and pavements in London targeted in police crackdown because it's illegal to ride them. There you go. There you go. That's what they do. If it's illegal, they're going to crack down. TJ writes in, the British, Australian, Ecuadorian, and U.S. governments have made an ad about Julian Assange's arrest, and it's surprisingly honest and informative.

And this is fucking hilarious. This is from the Juice Media, and the link will be in the show notes for it over on Twitter. I was cracking up. It was very funny, but I think it would hold a lot more weight for me if Assange hadn't been Trump's bitch during the election. True that. True that. And Strickey writes us, sends us a link, Amazon staff, listen to Alexa recordings and put them in chat rooms.

Now, we talked about this a bit last week, but putting them into their little internal chat rooms to laugh at us and share things is a bit fucked up. Well, yeah, that breaks the entire process there. If, you know, granted, you and I know that that's shit people do when you're working at a crappy tech job.

Yes, they do. But they don't cover that really in the article saying, no, this is all good. No, you know, we have protections in place to prevent this sort of thing. Bullshit. Nope. This is the same thing that this is your own internally owned Amazon chat rooms for your employees. People are sharing these things and that is messed up.

It is probably found out because it was left on an unsecured AWS bucket somewhere. Yeah. And Brandon also writes in, hey, Jason, I'm curious on what your supplement list is. Mind sharing. I've recently downsized from a bunch of things down to L-carotene, HTP, vitamin D.

Just curious what you have found works for you. Thanks. Sure thing. I take a bunch of supplements every morning. I take B6, B12, mega food multi for men over 40, L-tyrosine, NADH plus CoQ10, L-carnitine, which is how you actually pronounce that, CLA, mega food, turmeric strength for whole body.

I do not take vitamin D because the research basically says that vitamin D supplements suck. Stick your head out the window every now and again and get some vitamin D from the sun. And that's the best way to go. I take fish oil and vitamin C. That's about it. Get rid of, you can stop taking both of those. Yeah, that's what I've heard.

Fish oil is snake oil. Get rid of it. You're just wasting your money on that. And it's for vitamin C. Eat an orange every morning and you're going to be just fine. And it's going to protect your eyes as you grow older because you've had perfect eyesight for your whole life. So you want to keep that up. Yep. Two oranges a week have been proven to stop macular degeneration.

So highly recommend that. I have two oranges every week. And Scott writes in, that was quick. Flaws in WPA3 Wi-Fi standard allow attackers to crack passwords and view traffic. Well, that was quick. Pretty much is it.

Yeah. We could get into it more, but it's already useless. Yeah. I mean, it pretty much says it right there in the headlines. Yeah. And Christopher writes in, I'm 24-year-old and I'm generally happy, so I had imposter syndrome being a fan of the Grumpy Old Geeks. Last week was not so great. Friday, I got frustrated.

And after a few tequilas, felt pretty old. Late night coding wasn't lifting my mood, but listening to your podcast did. Thanks, guys. Well, you're very welcome. The fact that we can make somebody happy while they've had tequila is a good thing because tequila is angry juice. I'm pretty happy by myself with tequila.

Oh, tequila, angry juice. Tequila makes my pants fall off. It might do. Mine, too. Yes. We're going to stop right there. Over at GOG.show, Nathan writes in, Hello, geeks. I recently saw an ad on the social media platform.

We all love to hate for Mikey, M-Y-K-I, a password manager that stores and encrypts passwords locally. Doesn't seem to have many users, but the reviews look good. Any thoughts? Brian? Any password manager that stores and encrypts passwords locally is useless to me because I need to get them on my laptop, my tablet, my phone, sometimes my wife's laptop, etc.

So I like mine encrypted on the cloud. Yes. That's why I like 1Password because now you have the 1Password cloud, which is great. But before that, you could put them on Dropbox. If I had all my passwords stored locally on my laptop and my laptop tanked, I'd be effed. Exactly.

Yes. Well, you should have a backup anyway. Multiple backups. Assuming. Yes. Mark writes in, I hear you guys hate on Squarespace on a regular basis, but wondering what do you recommend instead? Just starting on the adventure of owning my own domain and trying to decide what to use to showcase my portfolio. Thanks for any help and keep up the good work.

Jason? This is where we become hypocrites because if you don't know how to build a website, go get Squarespace. It is an unintuitive clusterfuck that you're just going to hate to use. But since it's a better, it's a better clusterfuck than WordPress. Yeah.

I mean, you can get WordPress.com, but it is going to be much harder to use. They're both difficult when you just don't know what you're doing. But if you're just doing a portfolio, Squarespace is built for that. It is really if you just need to throw some shit against the wall and let people see it, you can do it.

It's going to take you a while to get the hang of it because, like I said, it is unintuitive. But once you get the hang of it, it kind of works. I do that for Gigi Edgley's site. I've done it for years for her there. I hate updating that with a passion because everything that you think it should do, it doesn't.

So you have to think like some millennial coder who made this damn thing. But once it's set, you can set it and forget it. That's it. So WordPress is going to be a little harder to use and you're going to have to learn that interface. But it's more powerful.

It's way more powerful. So WordPress.com account that you pay for, which is, you know, it's decent. I have a paid WordPress.com account for JPD.me. You can upload your own themes. It's a business account. It costs like 300 bucks a year, which is not cheap, but they have smaller plans.

You know, I would do, you can get free samples of each of them. So you can do a trial for Squarespace. You can do a trial for WordPress.com. Check them both out. See which one jives with your style. Find a template you like. Yeah. And just go from there. Yep. Bob's your uncle.

Neil writes in. What's your issue with Geek Squad? I've always respected them as the precincts I've had experience. Precincts? I didn't know they were police. I've had experience with have always been great with their customers and helped out a lot of folks in the older generations who aren't that tech savvy or fall for scams and get tons of malware on their computer.

Not too many reputable places to get tech support anymore. For those older folks, if not Geek Squad, who would you recommend for support? Brian, would you like to start this one off? Well, I got to warm up the engine real quick. Okay. I'll just do the TLDR that Jason's about to do.

Trust no one. Read RTFM. Okay. There we go. Can you give me enough time there, Jason? Well, not really, but that's okay. The Geek Squad has, speaking of precincts, has been brought to court many times for the young techs that they send into people's homes, stealing things off their computer, actually putting on keyword loggers and spyware.

So, that's one side of the Geek Squad that you don't want to have happen. The other side is, they are ungodly expensive for what they do. They are, I mean, they went in to fix my dad's router one time, and it cost three times the cost of the fucking router.

Excuse me? They updated the firmware and changed the password. And it cost like... They could have bought a new router. Yeah. It cost like $280 to update the firmware and change a password. I'd be like, why didn't you call me? Yeah. This was the point when my brother was like four years old, and I was living in California, so I couldn't just drive down and do it.

Fortunately, now my brother is a medical physicist and is more technically savvy than I am, so he can fix it. What you should do, Neil, is go back in time and have children, and then when those children grow up, have them fix your computer for you. That does appear to work for most of my family.

You know what I would recommend, though? We'll see how Jason feels about this, but the small mom-and-pop shop that happens to be nearby. Get to know them. Get to trust them. That's the way to do it. There are tons of those guys around, and they're fantastic. I've got Mac shops around here that I go to. If I need something fixed, they'll do it super cheap.

They'll do it super fast, and they're going to be local, and they're going to be good. And their business goes out the window if they screw with people immediately. Yeah, yeah. These guys are in the business to just do it right, keep you as a customer forever. So look for your local PC shops or your Mac shops, depending on what platform you're on, and go with those guys, because they will fix your computer, and they will do a good job of it.

I mean, I use those guys all the time. That's a really good recommendation, Brian. Good call. Thank you. Very rare for me. Over at iTunes, we've got a five-star rating from Dot underscore I'm Cute. Educational, grumpy, and just plain good. These are the guys who used to stalk in the coffee room.

Just to listen to them complain and get up to date on the news. It's technical, it's a barrel full of laughs, and it's grumpy. You'll learn and be well-entained by them in the process. This is not your mama's podcast. Grump on. And I want to hear Jason say, deliveroo! If you want your question or comment read on the air, 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 snarky review. And get on those overcast stars, people, please. We need you. We need you. Feedback loop. My closing shout-out is to the people of France, Paris, and frankly, the world.

The loss of Notre Dame is just pretty damn horrible. I mean, the last time I was there was 1992. Definitely left a mark on me, and I hope they can rebuild it. The donations that are coming in, already, it's like over $350 million. Did you see those, Brian? I did. I did. It's pretty amazing.

And it was good to hear that they actually saved almost all the artwork, I believe, and most of the treasures that they had inside have been saved. So we didn't lose everything, which is good. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes, we can rebuild it. We can make it better than it was. But when you walk in the door, it'll go, na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na.

But it'll do it in French, with a French accent. Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. Oh, wait. That's the way they always speak, so never mind. But a hearty fuck you to all the conspiracy theory fuckwits who have been posting bullshit out there the whole time. Oh, does everything have to be this way now?

Apparently it does. This is what the internet has done to us. It's the worst thing about this nightmare that we seem to have created for ourselves. Like, nothing can happen without people just having to fucking blow up their own bullshit and make up shit. Yeah, yeah. And speaking of people putting bullshit on the internet about the fire, YouTube's algorithm added 9-11 facts to a live stream of the fire.

Yeah. Well, at least they were facts. They were facts. They were the wrong facts. Bright side. Bright side, they were facts. Downside, wrong facts. 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 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 337. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy.

Oh, my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time. We finally really did it.

You maniacs! You blew it up! God damn you! God damn you! All the hell!

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