440: Precedented Times

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. Still with us, Brian, out there in the Monica of Santa? Yeah, still here. Where else am I going to be? We've been taking these weekend trips to quarantine with your family.

Yes, that is true. With my mom down in Orange County. And that's been a lifesaver, actually, because, yeah, it's good to have a little bit of space and a little bit of breakup with the child care duties. And everybody's much happier and ready to face whatever these things that are called weeks are.

Yeah, whatever may come next. Yes, exactly. So my week started out on typical Monday fashion. Woke up Monday morning and found that our 15-year-old refrigerator had finally, apparently, gotten the Rona. And by the end of this quarantine, you're going to have a brand new house.

I'm telling you, man. I'm telling you. Piece by piece. At the same time, DirecTV died at the same time. So they had to send me a new box. Yeah, we're slowly replacing it. You know, what is the ship of Theseus or whatever? Whatever that one ship is that everything's been replaced on. That's us.

We are slowly replacing the entire house one bit at a time. So, yeah, seven hours of cooking yesterday to try and salvage everything in the freezer. Right. Are you going to get one of those smart fridges so you can, you know, get app updates about when you're running low on cheese?

Nope. We talked to a lot of people yesterday because apparently buying, you know, major appliances in a pandemic is not as easy as you'd think it would be. No, trust me. I know. Okay. What did you replace? No, I just – I was still considering moving. So any large items being moved anywhere is a logistical nightmare too hard to comprehend during a pandemic.

Yeah, yeah. So we actually had refrigerator repair guys in the house yesterday, which was, you know, of course, fun. We had to spray the house down when we were done and all that good stuff. But, yeah, she's gone. She bit the dust. So getting a new one tomorrow. But we're getting just a standard fridge.

We talked to a bunch of people and they're like, no, don't get these. Don't get those. They die like right after the warranty is done and got some good recommendations. So we're going Samsung. We're going a couple generations older on the Samsung. No screens. Not even an ice maker on the damn thing.

Not even a Wi-Fi. No Wi-Fi. My refrigerator will not come with a subscription. Good. That's a plus. Or a privacy policy. Yep. No privacy policies. So I did a little research on Giphy because we talked about them on the last show. And we're like, how do they make money?

Is there a Giphy Pro or whatnot? Turns out the way that Giphy made money was, wait for it, venture capital. That's how they made money. They had a big runway. And unlike Imgur, who can actually charge and do things like that, they just basically were living the good life off their VC money.

They took in $110 million and sold for $400 million. So not bad. Not a bad flip. My biggest regret going back to the early days of the internet, Jason, and when I started up my own business is my biggest regret is actually having a product and selling it.

If only I would have come up with this business model of, you know, basically no product, provide a service, and don't charge for it. It was right there in front of me the whole time. But who would have thought? Oh, wait. Business planagers. Yeah, yeah.

Business people did. We had common sense, or so we thought. Yes. We're like, if we're not making something that somebody wants to pay for, why would we build it? Yes. Oh. Oh, the flipping. The flipping thing. Yes. I did not imagine that, much to my detriment. Yeah, yeah.

And it's funny. As I was going through Giphy and looking at Imgur and all these other things, we've talked about Pinterest in the past being, you know, the worst place for copyright on the internet. And boy, were we wrong. Oh, yeah. Giphy and Imgur and all these other sites, man, that's all it is. That's all it is. Is just copyright infringement over and over and over again.

Yes, which is why they can't charge. Because then they get sued. That's kind of it, yeah. So it's, oh, God. I just, I don't know where we went wrong. I don't know where we went wrong. We had morals and ethics. Yeah. And just no vision, I guess.

We weren't businessmen. We didn't have loafers. We didn't have penny loafers or khakis and blue shirts. So we also talked about the new, what was it, the Unreal Engine 5. Yes. And how that they've upgraded the Unreal Engine 4. So you can, you don't have to give them a royalty until you make a million dollars on your game.

And then we made fun of them because they have an Oculus package where you can make Oculus games. And we're like, who's made a million dollars on an Oculus game? Well, it turns out. They might have. Huh? A couple people did. Yep. Actually, Facebook says that they have 20 titles that have pulled in at least $1 million and 10 of those eclipsing $2 million.

So the total money in the Oculus Quest store is $100 million that they've brought in. So, well, so 20 people are actually having to pay Unreal for the thing. I'm sure there's a lot more developers than 20. But 20 people have passed the $1 million mark.

Right. Okay. So, and it's interesting. I mean, this is the Oculus Quest, the standalone one, the one that I was looking at. Yeah. And fortunately, I didn't buy one. Apparently, there's a new one coming soon. Of course, there is. But, yeah, it's a pretty cool standalone device.

Nobody's really wanting these PC-powered ones anymore that you're tethered. They want the standalone being able to walk around without a cable. Well, that is kind of the point, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, would you buy a mouse with a cable these days? No, I would not. Okay. Why would you want a headset where the whole point is to walk around and experience the virtual reality?

Exactly. Exactly. So, I'm not sure how much different the quality is. I'm sure it's, you know, greatly different since everything has to be on board the headset and not on an actual, like, massive PC in the corner. You just got to build up your neck muscles. You do.

You do. Yeah. Yeah. I look like, what's that, Batista guy from Guardians of the Galaxy. I look like him when I'm done with it. But it's interesting. I still want to try one of these. I mean, my problem is glasses. So, I don't want to buy one and not be able to see it because I have glasses.

I know they have extenders and things like that. But my eyes are so jacked. It's just like, I'm not going to spend 500 bucks and not be able to see the damn thing. True. True. Yep. A little follow up on Square. Square has done the same thing that Twitter has done because they have the same glorious leader, Jack Dorsey.

Square is going to let their employees work permanently from home if they so desire after all of this kerfuffle-ness in the world. Right. Okay. Surprise there. No surprise. Yeah. And we're doing a drink up on Saturday. Oh, I forgot about that.

Yep. What time are we doing it, Brian? Because that's up to you. Well, why don't we do it a bit earlier? Because we had people complaining that it was way too late in the UK last time. Why don't we shoot for like, say, three or four-ish? What do you think? I can do four. I can do four.

All right. Let's do four. I actually have a friend Zoom call scheduled on Saturday as well. And I've got to tell you, after two months of basically next to no social activities whatsoever, it feels a bit overwhelming to have two things in one day. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness.

Don't get Zoom fatigue. I will not. So, yeah. Okay. Let's say 4 p.m. Pacific time. That's a bit earlier than we did it last time. So, maybe some of the UK folks can join. I will be there for an hour, as previously stated. Jason will be there since we're starting at four.

So, roughly, I'd say six hours or until he runs out of White Claws. Until I run out of White Claw. That's it. So, go to GOG.show slash live. All the links will be there. And the password will be Deliveroo. It doesn't matter what it's going to be. I'm not going to be able to get in.

I figured it out. I figured it out. I didn't. I set the password while I was creating the event. So, boom. It should work this time. Okay. Although, I will try and get there early to test, just in case. I was there early. Well, you were. I said, I will try to get there early this time.

Because it worked before. So, why would I have to show up early? It worked. And then it didn't. In the news.

So, to the point that we've been discussing ourselves since this all started and certainly has become the major point of topic of contention in our security segment, the ennui of this ongoing, whatever the fuck it is that we're doing, there was a great article over on Slate called No Endpoint in Sight that kind of gets into the feelings that we've been feeling.

It's just the fact that, you know, everything gets pushed by two weeks. And, you know, at first it seemed like New York would be shut down for a couple of weeks, maybe. Then the order gets extended. And then schools get closed. You know, here we are in May and the calendar says the shutdown is up on Friday, but it's probably going to be pushed again.

And the states, the schools are not coming back for the year and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the whole, this whole article is just about going, you know, nobody knows. And that's the problem. There's no end date. There's no deadlines. And that's what humans need to endure pain.

And because we keep getting things pushed further and nobody's really sure. And there's certainly, the experts have no idea. The idiots tell us that they have an idea that, but their idea turns out to be wrong. So we, in addition to not even having end dates, we're given dates, but the dates turn, go away.

And this is why everybody is losing their minds. Well, I mean, the thing is, it's like, of course they have no idea. This is unprecedented. We haven't done this before. The whole, the whole human race hasn't, well, the living human race that we're in right now hasn't done this before. This is our first go round, you know? Yes. And as I posted on my social media, God, I miss precedented times.

Yeah. So it's, I do definitely miss precedented times. Oh God. I hear that one more time. Oh God. You just don't watch commercials. Every commercial. Yeah. You know, if you played the drinking games with the catchphrases on commercials, you would be a full-fledged alcoholic at this point.

By, by 10 in the morning. Yes. You would be passed out by 11 easily, easily. And we talked about Uber laying off some people last time. Well, it's going to keep continuing. The last cuts were 3,700 jobs, which is 14% of its workforce in early May.

And now they're cutting 3,000 more jobs, which is another 14%. And they're closing, wait for this, 45 offices. How many freaking offices does Uber need? One in every city, at least, that they're operating in at minimum. That's true. So plus, plus a main head office.

And so quite a few offices. And when you, when everybody hears those numbers, please do keep in mind that is not drivers because drivers are not employees. No, they're not. And I'm guessing the amount of drivers on the road right now is minuscule, which is why they can't afford to pay the people in the offices. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, how many, how many people have taken a ride share in two months? I don't know anybody that will get in an Uber right now. I mean, most of my friends wouldn't get in an Uber already. So that was, it's a different kind of sample size right there. But yeah, nobody's like, I'm not kidding. It's somebody crazy car.

You kidding me? And people who drive for Uber are like, I don't want no strangers in my car. You kidding me? So it's pretty much, uh, this might, this might be the end of Uber. Yeah, it won't be. They're like cockroaches. I know. And, and you know what? That would be good news. So damn, we can't have nice things.

No, we can't. And, uh, speaking of not having nice things, another really great think piece was over at Slate this week. Um, title was let's weaponize social media against COVID-19. So this is basically getting into how the past three years, even pre COVID has been a war against online information.

Um, mostly thanks to the party in charge here, uh, that, uh, kind of weaponized it for their own uses and basically destroyed the concept of the actual fact. And, uh, this theory is, well, you know, we know that we know the techniques that they're using.

We know the playbook. Why don't we turn around and use it against them? Why don't we fight fire with fire? Why not stoop to their level? Yes, they may go low and we may go high, but they're winning. So maybe we should try going low, lower, and maybe even lower, which is an interesting theory.

But the problem as, as it's quite a long article. And as you get into it, uh, the author kind of gets into, well, we should, you know, our digital, we need some, uh, the health officials need to hire digital markers. There's the, the federal at the state levels, they need to hire digital marketers, people who know how to do all these sorts of things.

Uh, the problem is we don't, uh, who, who's in charge, who sets the tone. And that's a real issue that we have right now because the states don't agree and health departments don't necessarily agree with state departments and federal departments. And, you know, the, you, you kind of need someone in charge of this to set the tone and we don't have that person and who would we put in charge of that anyways?

I, that, that, that's the thing that catches me here. I know who it is. We, we put Stephen Colbert in charge and he can be the truthiness czar. That feels a little 10 years out of date. I think we have to go with John Oliver. Yeah, it could be. Yeah. But John Oliver is too depressing. That's true.

That's true. We need John Stewart back. Somebody exhume the corpse of John Stewart and bring him back, please. You know, he's not dead, right? I know, but his career is, I saw him, he did a, uh, uh, what was it? Dave Chappelle won an award and, uh, John Stewart came out and talked about how much, you know, Dave Chappelle and him were buds at the beginning.

And, uh, and I was just, it was so nice to see him again. It was really nice to see him on stage again. I'm like, dude, shave the beard and come back to us. We need you more now more than ever. Well, he's too busy doing documentaries. Yeah. And living on his farm. Yeah. There you go.

Wait, isn't Chappelle on the farm? Oh, everybody's got a farm. John Stewart's on the farm. Letterman's got a farm. Stewart's got a farm. Chappelle's got a farm. So when you, if you're a comedian and, and your, your career bites the dust, you literally buy the farm. You do buy the farm. Who knew?

Who knew? Uh, got some Fitbit news. Uh, actually this came up in my household recently. Well, Fitbit did because my wife wanted to see, uh, how many steps she's taking as we pat around the house all day. So I fired up the old, uh, the old browser and took a look over at Fitbit, hoping that there was just going to be one of those little clip on things, you know, cause that's what they do theoretically for a living, but no, they only have highly expensive watches these days.

No, no clip on pedometers. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. Not on their website, Jason. Yes, they do. I'm going to tell you which one to buy and how to do it. Well, basically what you want is a Fitbit Inspire. That's the one you can take it off and you put a, you, they have a little hip clip that you can buy and clip it on. That's what I use.

That's what my roommate uses. We both use that. The Fitbit Inspire. And how much does that cost, Jason? $69.95. Well, I got one for $22 that does the job and it's not from Fitbit. There you go. So, that's a, so I did not end up getting a Fitbit and she's quite happy and she went, wow, that's really all I walk around the house during the day?

I'm like, yeah, we have to get outside. Yep, you do. You do. But in Fitbit news, they have decided to pivot and start making ventilators. Why? Why? Two months too late. And we also have determined now that ventilators aren't needed.

So. Yes, as the article points out. So, we're kind of curious as to why they've decided to just make, announce this pivot now because we've probably got enough of them. We have flattened the curve in that sense and they don't really help save lives too much. No, once you go on a ventilator, you have an 80% chance of never coming off.

Yes. So, that's the pivot they've announced. But we have known that they've been trying to go B2B and specifically healthcare industry. So, maybe it's just a method of if we announce this, we will be in talks with companies that will help us in the future. When things are better, perhaps that's the idea.

I don't know. I don't know. Like I said, my roommate and I have Fitbits and we've actually started doing daily goal challenges with our other friends that have Fitbits and it's been really helpful for morale. We actually do like, you know, battle each other and, you know, trash talk all day and we're getting out and getting more steps because of it.

So, that's the nice thing about the Fitbit is the community aspect of it. I hate community. I never saw that show. And speaking of community though, I had the weirdest dream the other night because we've been, like I said, doing a lot of Fitbit stuff around here. I had a dream that I opened up my app and it showed me that I had done 11,000 steps and I had been in contact with 80 people.

Like they had magically turned on contact tracing inside the Fitbit app. And I'm like, you know what? Honestly, that might actually not be a bad idea. Well, if everybody had a Fitbit, yes. I mean, that could be something, you know, it's like, I've just, it was just a weird dream.

And I'm like, what's that? What's that new icon there? Oh, 80 people. I don't want contact tracing from my Fitbit. What I'd want it to do is do this incredibly large red alert alarm from Star Trek if somebody was approaching me. Red alert! Somebody within 50 feet!

Yeah, cross the street, cross the street. Don't cross the streams, just cross the street. That's right. And I know you're a big fan of DGI and you have a couple of their drones. You might want to hold on to them now. They could be collector's items. Oh, I saw this. This is scary. Yeah.

Steptoe, a leading international law firm, has secured a major trial victory for Autel Robotics USA at the U.S. International Trade Commission, or the ITC. The chief administrative law judge found that DGI Technologies, the world's largest manufacturer of consumer drones, and seven related entities collectively known as DGI, have basically been I got to break in here.

You keep calling it DGI? It's DJI. DJI. Whatever. Yeah, it's one of those things. It took me forever to pronounce it properly. Just wanted to let you know. Back off my gif. I will. Anyways, apparently, yes, they've been infringing on a patent.

So I don't know if this is patent trolls or legitimate business concerns, but it's what's happened. And the judge has recommended, barring the following DJI products from import into the U.S., the Mavic Pro, the Mavic Pro Platinum, the Mavic 2 Pro, the Mavic 2 Zoom, the Mavic Air and Spark.

And they've also recommended a cease and desist order prohibiting them from selling any of these products that are already here. Crazy. What sucks is, I mean, I have a Mavic 2 Zoom and I love the thing. I've been taking it up every night and playing around with it because it's just nice to be able to see the neighborhood that I can't go out in.

And they just came out with the Mavic Air 2, which looks incredible. It looks incredible. It's even cheaper than my Zoom. But yeah, fortunately, I just bought a new chair, which everybody's been yelling at me about. But so I can't get a new drone.

But I don't understand the kerfuffle about the chair. Why were you guys, I saw that a couple Twitter notices and some emails that we got that people were yelling at you about your chair. I don't get it. I don't know why. What did you do? Did you promote it too much? Apparently. I talked about it on the show when I got it. That was it. Okay.

So I don't know why people... It's a nice chair. It's a great chair. I don't know what's wrong with people. I mean, it just means I can't buy a drone. But that's fine. I couldn't afford the chair either. But yeah, if you've got a DJI drone just to hang on to it right now, or just keep an eye on the market if this happens, then I might be able to sell my Zoom for a nice profit.

Well, see, the thing that concerns me, and this is something that you may not have thought of either, if they are compelled to pull these things out of the marketplace and no longer have this steady source of income, no updates, no support. Yeah, I know. I'm not a fan of this one. They need to settle and get this thing done.

Yes. Because, I mean, Mavic is massive, and DJI is massive over here. So pay the royalty for the patent and just, like, let's move on. Suck it up and move on. Yes. Yeah. I mean, they're worth billions. That company is so huge.

They can afford to pay for the patent. Let's move on. Well, that also means they can afford to pay for the lawyers to keep this dragging on and on and on. Hey, as long as they're still selling this stuff and I get my software updates, that's fine. Because the software updates are really key because it has the, you know, no-fly zones and things like that.

So you're legal when you fly, which is what I care about. You know, I don't want to be flying over someplace that, you know, they've designated a no-fly zone that I didn't know about because my software didn't update. And then I get dinged for a ticket, you know? Which would suck.

Now, Brian, have you ever used the Untappd app? Briefly. And I believe one of the friends of the show, Kyle, works for them, correct? Yep. Kyle Roderick. That's right. He's a designer over at Untappd. And I know my friend, Michael Burns, every day when I come on, he's posting which beers he's drinking.

Yeah, I use it for a while until I quickly discover that I'm not adventurous enough of a beer drinker. Yeah, I don't drink beer anymore, so it's useless for me. But there's an article over at Bellingcat.com and it's called Military and Intelligence Personnel can be tracked with the Untappd beer app.

Now, I went through this article and I'm reading it and it's like, okay, well, you know, you can find locations like you can put in Rammstein Air Base and see how many people are drinking beer at Rammstein. And it just goes through the same thing. And what this is basically is just a rehash of that fitness app.

Strata. Strata, yeah. It's exactly the same thing. And when you get to the very end of it, though, it says Untappd differs in three crucial ways. It has decent privacy settings as profiles can be set to private easily. Users have to consciously set locations to check into.

And most importantly, private residences are not registered unless a user has added their own home. In other words, with Untappd, the onus is on the user for the data they share, which makes this a big nothing burger to me. Yeah, except for the fact that, you know, yes, it does make it a nothing burger.

But the entire point of the app is for you to share all that information publicly. I know. I mean, you know, when I saw this and I read it, I'm like, you know, that's a feature, not a bug. Right, guys? Yeah. I'm like, okay, yeah.

People that work at the Pentagon like to go out and have a beer. Who cares? Shocking, yes. You know? It's like, okay, if they want to use Untappd, let them use Untappd. As long as they're not, like, in, like, some secret base in Afghanistan, who gives a shit? Yeah, probably not a lot of bars right around that secret base either, so.

Yeah, that's what I mean. It's like, but Strava, though, it's like, oh, that's all GPS-based with, you know, running paths and things like that. I can see how that would be a big problem. And the privacy settings were, you know, the other way around. Yes. The other way around. Yeah.

And over in interesting kind of odd news, I'd never heard of Club Penguin before. Really? Disney, certainly. Yeah. Why would I have? Oh, man. It was huge. I did some work for them back in the day, and I figured you might have done some work for them, too, because it was all, like, Flash-based and things like that.

But, yeah, Club Penguin was massive back in the day. Yes. Well, Disney hasn't been running any form of Club Penguin since 2018, but that hasn't been stopping people from running clones. And the media giant Disney has had enough and sicked lawyers after them.

Now, before you go, oh, this is another case of lawyers run amok. Not so much. Multiple servers had content filters disabled, allowing racism, harassment, and other harsh language to flow freely. There were also e-sex arrangements for Zoom meetups and, at least in the past, doxing campaigns.

So a lot of people were using this for nefarious purposes. And I say nefarious because I've been watching Minions nonstop and Dr. Nefario is on my mind a lot. I just, I actually had to draw him yesterday for my kid, which I did not know I could draw Dr. Nefario, but apparently I can.

So, yes, Disney is going after these people, saying in their statement that child safety is a top priority, as it should be for all people, but particularly Disney. So, good. Get them. All right. And finally... Who did the fact that there was a clone? Like, I didn't... Was it like the server source open source that they could create these clones?

I suppose it must have been in order to create a clone, right? Yeah. Or somebody wrote their own that mimicked it and people ran with it that way. Yeah. The only way you could do that is if the communications weren't, you know, secure. So you could see all the protocols that are going back and forth and then just back, you know, reverse engineer it to kind of build that.

I've seen that done before, but it kind of would make sense since Club Penguin was around back before we knew about these things called security and... Security. Yeah. And encryption and all that good stuff. Yes. So, it's interesting. Yeah. Pretty interesting. And I just love this for our last story of the week.

And the best part is probably this first paragraph. Anyway, like many of the worst stories of 2020, this one starts with a tweet from Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. On Sunday afternoon, Musk tweeted, take the red pill followed by a red rose. Now, this was somewhat unclear.

We don't know what he was... No, it's not unclear. If you know what the red pillars are, this is not unclear. It's like... Yes, okay. It gets into this in the article. So, anyways, as it says, the scene is tailor-made for conspiracy theorists and grifters who prey on them. In the years following the Matrix release, it's been adopted by a variety of fringe movements claiming to hold the secret key to understanding the world.

From 9-11 truthers to men's rights activists. So, it also gets into the socialist movement that he may or may not have been advocating. Lots of stuff going on here. But this did not stop Ivanka Trump from endorsing either these conspiracy theories or just the general concept of taking unidentified pharmaceuticals as she tweets in and basically says, taken.

And, of course, Don Trump Jr. Oh, so she's a racist. Great. Yes. Well, nothing we didn't know. Donald Trump Jr. got in on the fun, too. Again, it remains unclear exactly whose ideas or policies anyone involved in this conversation thought they were talking about. And, as they point out, you know, the vagueness here is deliberate on all sides.

None of these people are committing to any particular idea. My workers should willingly go to their desks so that I can become richer, for instance. So, none of them can be asked to answer for anything that they have said. So, all this is going on and enter our hero, the film's co-director and co-screenwriter, the now Lily Wachowski, who made a brief but eloquent statement on the matter of Ivanka Trump and Elon Musk using a metaphor from her film as a way of endorsing unspecified but undoubtedly terrible ideas.

She simply tweeted, as a reply, fuck both of you. Dropped the mic. What? Out of the room. Best thing that happened on the internet all week. No shit. I love you, Lily. Rock on.

At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then, explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love.

From beauty and fashion, to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com.

Media Candy. Another week, another new Star Trek series has been announced. But this one might actually be a little bit exciting for all of us, as opposed to, say, I don't know, some who-knows-if-it's-going-to-work-or-not animated show about the red shirts under the decks.

This is a big one. This will be called Star Trek Strange New Worlds, which, according to the press release, will feature fan favorites from Season 2 of Star Trek Discovery. Anson Mount, as Captain Christopher Pike, Rebecca Romijn, as number one, and Ethan Peck, as science officer Spock. The series will follow Pike, Spock, and number one in the decade before Captain Kirk boarded the Enterprise as they explore new worlds around the galaxy.

Luckily, we all know how the show will end. Yes. Now, you mentioned that they were doing another Star Trek series on the last show, and then I finally got to see the press release for it, and I have to tell you, I am so damn excited. God knows when this will be made, because nobody can go to the studio right now.

But I love all these characters, and I didn't even realize that that was Rebecca Romijn. I didn't either. I had no idea. No idea. I'm like, she was hot. I knew she was hot, but I didn't realize she was Rebecca Romijn hot, and apparently she is.

So I am really looking forward to this one. Hopefully they can make it. My thought, I had two thoughts. First, God, I hope they do retro backgrounds and scenes and sets, but they won't. And then my second related thought to that is, I wonder what incredible technology that they'll invent for this show, that they'll have to have some sort of wrap up that so it disappears and nobody ever speaks of it again.

Well, no, remember, though, I mean, the Enterprise was kind of, they kind of Battlestar Galactica'd the Enterprise in this, because they didn't like the new technology. That's why they were redoing everything with old school technology in season two of Discovery. Yeah. So it's already being retrofitted already for that look and that feel.

I'm hoping they do it. Can't wait. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I totally think they have to, because they have to set it up for when Kirk takes over, why everything looks the way it looks. And you know, they're going to, they're totally going to do that because it's, it's inevitable in five years, Kirk is going to be back on CBS All Access.

Yes. You know, it's since the movies have basically shat out and that's not going to happen anymore. Yeah. Yeah. And Shatner is not coming back. So we need a new Kirk and, uh, uh, I, I, I'm sad that the way the movies ended because that last Star Trek movie was just a dumpster fire.

Well, it is the way that Star Trek seems to end in movies. That's true. That's true. But I love the first two. I thought the first two were fantastic. They were well done. Yeah. They had Winona Ryder, man. Come on. You can't go wrong. Spock's mom has got it going on. Yes, she does.

And, uh, I saw this one and this was, uh, this just made, made me smile too. Uh, these, I mean, how, how often do we get two bits of good news in media candy? Not that often. Hamilton is going to be coming to Disney plus much earlier than they thought because it was going to be in the theaters on October 15th, 2021.

And we're all like, why so long? It's already done. Well, they, the original plan was to wait until the LA run ended that I was supposed to attend, but since that's off the boards now, well, then you can just sit in the comfort of your own home and see the original cast from the best seat in the house starting on July 3rd.

Yep. Looking forward to it. I plan on watching it. Oh, me too. I'm going to sign it for Disney plus just for that. Yeah, I am. I am so looking forward to this. It's, uh, I've seen some of the footage from the taping that they did and it's beautiful. I mean, it's absolutely beautiful.

So it's going to be, it's going to be awesome. It's really going to be awesome. Much better than that. Much better than that bootleg I sent you. Yeah. I never watched that because I, the bootleg, just the quality wasn't there. I was like, I don't want this to be my first experience. Ah, it's so good though. So good. Yeah.

I'll wait. Any port in a store, man. Any port in a store. Now I talked a couple episodes back about, uh, in apps and doodads about some apps that have been made as a book adaptations from the Julia Donaldson, uh, book series for kids, a room on the broom, the Gruffalo and the Gruffalo's child, all of which highly recommended as books.

If you have a child, uh, the apps are also extremely well done. And what I discovered this weekend is that there are, uh, short film adaptations of many of her books. Um, by short film, I mean shorts. They're about 23 to 25 minutes, which is perfect length of time to get, get off your back for a bit or even watch it with them.

And there is some serious star power on board on these things. I didn't realize really how big these books were. So we have links in all the show notes, a room on the broom. Of course, Jillian Anderson plays the, uh, the, the witch, which is great. Simon Pegg is in this as well.

The Gruffalo has Helena Bonham Carter and Robbie Coltrane. Also the Gruffalo's child, the sequel stick man has Martin Freeman and Jennifer Sauners. And there's one called Zog, which is about a dinosaur. Kit Harrington makes sense for dinosaurs. Wow. And they're all extremely well done.

I mean, we're talking like probably, you know, the version, this is the version for kids now for us that like Aardmark, Aardmark innovation was for us. You know what I mean? So very cool. I mean, yeah, that's some serious star power right there. And they're very well done. Highly recommended.

Yeah, definitely. And one thing I highly recommend, I've talked about this on the show before, but, uh, and I took a little break because the secret history of Hollywood is one of my favorite podcasts, but it's very much like hardcore history. It takes them a long time to do these like four hour epics, but they are so damn good.

But also I found that like over on Patreon, he does a lot of behind the scenes stuff and a lot of extra episodes, unlike our good friend, Dan Carlin. So I just signed up again for the $5 Patreon level and I got a ton of new content that is what I need right now in these, uh, in these unprecedented, these unprecedented times.

Now more than ever, Jason, everybody drink. Uh, so I highly recommend checking out the secret history of Hollywood podcast and the new one that's coming out. I am super excited about because it is the, uh, the secret history of Hollywood Cary Grant edition.

Oh man, it's going to be great. I love Cary Grant. And, uh, the stories that this guy gets into are fantastic. And, uh, on a lot of the shows, he actually, uh, has Mark Gattis on is one of the either voices or, you know, like, I'm sure he's like, like they're buds and they, why does that voice sounds or that name sound familiar to me?

Mark Gattis is the, the guy behind Sherlock. Oh, there we go. All of those. Yeah. He's, he's Mycroft in Sherlock. Right. Also Dracula, which I enjoyed thoroughly. I still got to go back and watch that. Oh, thanks for the reminder. I gotta, I gotta put that on my room. I gotta go back to that one.

Yeah. Can't be fun. Yeah. Yeah. I got knocked down my, my Netflix queue. So I haven't seen it. I need to go check that one out for sure, but definitely check out the secret history of Hollywood podcast. It's even if you're not so big into movies, it is a great history podcast.

And you go back to some of the, uh, the old school studios and just the drama that happened back then. And it's just, it's really, really interesting and fascinating. And, you know, his production quality is top notch. It's got great music. It's got fantastic voices.

He's got, you know, lots of different cast members on a lot of these shows. It is a production. This is like, you know, old school, like full on radio. So highly recommend it. If you want something really, really good to listen to. I don't think I've, I've, I've said it's good enough yet, but I'll leave it at that.

I finished the brand new novel by Christopher Moore, Shakespeare for squirrels. I actually finished it last week, but Jason had not finished it yet.

Have you finished it by now? Nope. I haven't even started it. So let's hear what you have to say about it. And I can tell you right now that it's going to be better than Christopher Moore's last book that we both started seven times and never finished. So the fact that you finished it says a lot. Yes, it is a return to form.

This will be a spoiler free talk really quickly just because you haven't finished it yet. And, and because I think we have quite a few Christopher Moore fans that listen to our show as well. He's one of my favorite authors. You're right. His last book, Noir, which was a departure for him. I could not get into, still cannot get into, is still sitting on my, on my bedroom cabinet here, unread and collecting dust.

And I don't think I ever will finish it. This is definitely a return to form. It's a return to specific characters as well. Those that we love from Fool and one of his other books. This is the third book that these characters have made this appearance in. I can't quite remember. So Pocket, the Hero of Fool, oh, and Serpent of Venance.

That's right. Ah, yes, yes, yes. Yes, all of which I liked. It's, it's a good book. I wouldn't say this has blown my mind and, and reached the top pantheon of Christopher Moore novels for me, but it is a, in these unprecedented times, Jason. And now more than ever, did I need a good laugh.

And it's a quick read and it's fun. So, uh, good. It's a great, it's, it's a good read and, and you'll enjoy it thoroughly. So pick it up, get back to it. I've got it. I'm ready to go. I just haven't had the time, but I'm definitely looking forward to it because I love those characters. I love Fool. Serpent of Venice was great.

I mean, granted, you know, in my, in my heart, he still peaked at Lamb. But by far, that's the, you know, that's one of my top five books of all time. So, uh, yes, yes. And if you ever want to get the, uh, the audible version, Fisher Stevens reads it. And even my dad, when he listened to it, he's like, I can't believe this is one guy reading this book because there's like, you know, 85 characters in Lamb and you would never know it's the same guy reading everybody.

It's, it's fantastic. So the audio version of Lamb, I've listened to probably 10 times. It is so good. Excellent. As we talked about a little bit earlier in the show, uh, misinformation has kind of taken over the internet and it's gotten extremely bad.

And a huge part of that misinformation is, of course, the batshit crazy conspiracy theorists. However, we can't just dismiss them out of hand anymore while they still, while they still are batshit crazy. It's almost become mainstream, which is terrifying, to be honest.

Uh, so, uh, the Atlantic, which we now subscribe to, has done a very good job of collecting a number of articles about conspiracy theories and how they've become mainstream and, uh, what's going on and how we can try to battle against it and how we can try to sort out some sort of reality again in this world.

And, uh, it's all collected under welcome to shadow land at the Atlantic.com slash shadow land. It's a collection of about, I'd say, I think it was around eight very long form articles that go super in depth. It's incredibly fascinating, incredibly depressing.

Uh, but there are some nuggets of hope in there as well. And I highly recommend that everybody read this, particularly as we lead up to the election and the conspiracy theories are ramping up. Very good read. All right. I will, uh, I will have to look that up when I'm in a better mood.

Yes. So two, three years from now. Yeah. Maybe then, maybe then. Now I saw this one over at food and wine.com and it was trending briefly on Twitter. And, uh, apparently Brian, uh, nowadays people are trying to support their local restaurants and, you know, get, get some money back to the peoples.

And, um, something showed up on delivery apps recently called Pasquale's Pizza and Wings. All right. Well, people have been ordering from Pasquale's Pizza and Wings, thinking that they were getting, you know, some maybe local, local fare.

I take umbrage. Technically local. I take umbrage with this theory because you, you should be trying to support local restaurants that you already love and enjoy. You shouldn't be ordering from something you've never heard of. I don't believe that that is supporting your local restaurants. I agree with you on that.

Yeah, definitely. I just ordered from Guido's yesterday and it was delicious. Thank you, Guido's Pizza and Woodland Hills. You are awesome. Well, uh, Pasquale's Pizza and Wings has a deep, dark secret to actually Chuck E. Cheese. Ugh. Yeah. I'm like, dude.

I didn't even like that. I didn't like that pizza when I was a kid. I know. Talk about the worst bait and switch ever. I mean, at least Domino's is passable nowadays, but man, have you tried it recently? They really did a good job. They did a good job. Okay.

Um, you just got to get it made well done. Anyway. Yes. Pasquale's Pizza and Wings is actually a front. It's a front for Chuck E. Cheese. The worst pizza in the history of pizza, I do believe. Now, in their defense, they do say in their statement that this, that they are trying to create a premium pizza while staying true to the Chuck E. Cheese brand.

The Chuck E. Cheese brand is shit pizza. That's true. So how are you going to try to create a premium pizza when your brand is shit pizza? I do like the tie-in with the conspiracy theory thing here, though. The pizza gate, you know, good, good tie-in here. We also have some more hot pizza discussion coming in feedback.

Oh, hot pizza discussion, my favorite. Yeah. So, yeah, if you see Pasquale's, skip it. All right. And I've got a hero of the week. Uh, this is making the rounds on social media, and I do love this. This is genius marketing at the top level. Uh, Ikea offers up six genius ideas for homemade blanket forts.

So, uh, they themselves didn't do this. This was a Russian advertising agency called Instinct. So fire up your conspiracy theory engines, everyone. But, uh, yeah, it links in the show notes. It's pretty awesome. They give you Ikea-esque, uh, you know, uh, instructions to build a six varieties of forts with your, with your sofas and things you should have around the house, probably from Ikea.

Very cool. Very funny. Very well done. I really enjoyed it. I looked at it. I'm like, oh, I like that one. Maybe I can try that one. And if you've got kids, this is genius, actually. I think I might make blanket forts for the dogs. Over at Patreon, we've got some new subscribers, Ben, Brendan, Plemmin, and Jennifer.

And a quick shout out to everybody that has actually been upping their pledges. We've had a ton of people that have increased their pledges. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. And over at PayPal, we have Ryan, Michelle, Andrew, Linda, Michael, Scott, Natalie, Andrew, again, and Nicholas, Colin, Stephen, and Stephen says, thanks, guys.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. All of you. We appreciate it. We really do. A lot. Over at Twitter, Runcat writes us, regarding the passage of time and the blur of days, as was mentioned in the most recent show, my wife, Trudy, or Trude. I'm not sure how you would pronounce that since there's no Y at the end.

It's an E. Hmm. Interesting. I'd go with Trude. Trude. Suggested planting something. Weed? For Brian, that may be something as simple as planting chives in a pot and then watching them grow. It might be a fun project for his son as well. And it's an interesting idea.

We haven't gone with anything living yet because my wife has a brown or black thumb. So we will give it another go, perhaps. I actually saw one, a little planter on Amazon the other day. It was like a hundred bucks and it's for making herbs and things like that.

So it's got a little grow light on it. Yeah, that's been on my to buy list for quite some time, but maybe now's the time. Yeah, yeah. It looks pretty cool. So you can just do your little own herb garden in there. Yeah. That's cool. And David writes in, pretty disappointed on browser fronts. I've tried to live with Vivaldi.

It's good, but it doesn't play video well at all. Giphy Cat is his blocks, freezing and green blocks. I don't know what that means. Devs say it works on their machine, but loads of others report same problem. Back to Chrome for me. Okay. Well, I don't know. Got no problem with video on my Vivaldi.

No, not at all. None whatsoever. Yep. And Strickey writes in, I see he's realized another deepfake video. And this is a post Obama's incredibly inspiring commencement speech. Trump gives the independent day speech. Yes. He posted another deepfake video, thus normalizing deepfakes as I've been terribly concerned about for three or four years.

Great. Yeah. I mean, this one can be, you know, labeled as parody because it is obviously from Independence Day. Yes. And so the Hollywood reporter reached out to Bill Pullman, who actually did play President Thomas J. Whitmore in Independence Day. And he says, my voice belongs to no one but me.

And I'm not running for president this year, said Pullman. So, yeah. Come on, guys. I mean, I know Thomas J. Whitmore and you, sir, know Thomas J. Whitmore. I'm trying, man.

I'm trying. It's okay. You put your all into that one. I give you that. I did. You tried to sell it. Yeah, I did. And KS writes in, hey, I was just on break doing match day support for the, how do you say this one? Bundesliga. Bundesliga. Well, listening to the latest GOG podcast was nice to hear that my work and that of other people as well is appreciated all over the world.

Well, how cool is that? It was very cool. I was up at 6 a.m. on Saturday morning to watch the very first game, first major sports net league to be back since COVID-19 is the Bundesliga. And that was the very first game when I saw this. So we had a little bit of back and forth before he had to get back to work.

And I thanked him very much for his service. And I very much appreciated being able to watch the games this weekend, this last weekend. And we'll be watching the games this coming weekend. It's weird. No, no fans or anything like that, but it's better than nothing. So this wasn't one of the games that had all the cutouts of the fans in the stands?

No, that was, that was just one particular team in the Bundesliga and they played later. I did get to see it. It was cute. Very cool. Okay, cool. And I always struggle with this name, but he writes in all the time. Jackal. Well, yes, but it's J4CKL3. Yeah. You don't speak Hexor.

No, not anymore. And he just mentions that he's been using MX mice now for years on PC and Mac, and they're amazing. And we both agree. So, Dr. David Teeter, get off your stupid magic mouse. Yeah. Oh, God, Jesus. I just got my MX Master 3 that came this week.

It's nice, isn't it? Oh, my God. I tell you what, the build quality on the new ones is really nice. The ergonomics is phenomenal. The ergonomics is almost identical to the two and the one and the two, but it does feel nicer in your hand. It feels a little heavier. But I got an open box version.

I can tell the mouse hasn't been used, but somebody jacked the damn charging cable. Like, you bastards. You bastards. Pretty standard cable. I'm sure you have one laying around. Well, it's USB-C now, because I try to stick in the charging cable for my other two mice, and I'm like, why isn't this thing?

Oh, okay, USB-C. Right. That's fine. But yeah, I like the three, man. That's nice. I'm going to actually have to move that to my main machine, because I want it on the one I use the most. Right. InMOS6502 writes in, LOL, and it's a link to, our weird behavior during the pandemic is messing with AI models.

This is funny. Yeah, it was over at Technology Review. So as you can imagine, it's quite a long read. But the TLDR is, they were doing fine until everything changed. Until TP-Gate. People changed all their behavior.

And as they point out, automation is now in a tailspin. What's clear is the pandemic has revealed how intertwined our lives are with AI, exposing a delicate codependence in which changes to our behavior change how AI works, and they have not been able to adapt well in these unprecedented times.

They have to, you know, our codependence has turned into COVID dependence. Apparently, AI only works well with precedented things. Yes, you can only, yes. Oh, the precedented switch on the, oh, God. So basically, the entire article gets into the fact that everybody is now saying, people who are saying, we can just use AI and we don't need the people are now saying, AI really only works when people are there to monitor it.

So, yes, even machine learning is people, too. And when people are acting normal, it has no idea of edge cases. It's funny. And now that we're all edge cases, it's screwed them up. And over at GOG.show, Scott writes in, hey, guys, love the show, especially these days. It's the only podcast that I'm keeping current with.

So many other ones have just become too much of a downer. Your coverage of this craziness has been refreshing and real. I especially like the security, ha, segment. I just threw a little money away on PayPal to thank you. Well, thank you. Also, for some reason, my in-laws, who are nice and geeky, use the term grump as a synonym for poop.

So when your listeners tell you guys to grump on, I get a little chuckle. Stay poopy. Stay poopy. And Ref and two or three other people, which, sadly, I was a little late this morning, so I didn't grab their names, sent us the same article, DoorDash and Pizza Arbitage.

And this is over at the margins. And this was an awesome article. I don't know if you got the chance to read this yet, Jason. No, I haven't seen this one yet. Well, they were playing around with the DoorDash algorithms and basically figured out that when DoorDash was underselling to try to get new people on board, the restaurant could actually just sell pizzas that didn't actually, basically just make money selling fake pizzas off of DoorDash.

Yes. It's an interesting read. You should definitely go read this. And as they point out, was this a bit shady? Maybe, but fuck DoorDash. Note, I did confirm with my friend that he was okay with me writing this, and we both agreed, fuck DoorDash. So it's a very long article.

It's very funny. It's very interesting. It dives pretty deep into how these companies are trying to fuck over restaurants and make money left, right, and center. It gets into the ethics of if they're trying to fuck me, is it okay for me to fuck them? The TLDR on that is they both agreed, yes, it is okay.

And it gets into the whole idea of the thin margins, and are any of these companies, these food delivery service companies, profitable? And the answer to that is no. None of them are. So why is everybody trying to do this? And that is the really interesting question.

Highly recommend everybody read this article. It's really interesting. I definitely got to check that one out. And my roommate and I had a discussion about two weeks ago, and we decided that we are going back to food delivery now that she's over her paranoia about the Rona being on all the boxes and the bags. I finally got her, settled her down on that one.

But we're only ordering from local places that have their own delivery people. That's it. We're not doing DoorDash. We're not doing Grubhub. We're not doing Postmates. We're only talking to people who we know the delivery people. And so they're getting paid, and they're staying in business.

We don't want to give these people money. No, fuck Uber Eats. God, I don't know. One thing you absolutely, positively, 100% have to do, and I'm sure you know this, Jason, but I'm just telling this for everybody out there, because one of the things that came out in that article I was just talking about is how these companies are hijacking restaurants' phone numbers.

Yes. You must go to the place's website themselves and get the phone number from their own website, because these companies are going through, they're buying Google ads, so they come up, you know, top on the thing that makes it look like it's the restaurant's phone number, but it goes to a dialing service for one of these entities.

They've hijacked phone numbers on Yelp. They've hijacked phone numbers everywhere else. Go to the restaurant's website, get their phone number there. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, you probably already know your local people anyway, you know, call them up and just ask them a couple of questions. You're like, hey, how's it going?

How are you guys doing? You know, just try and make a little chit chat if you're unsure about the number. But yeah, that whole thing with Yelp, when they were hijacking all those numbers, that was just sleazy. And websites, they were like hijacking websites too. So be careful. Ask the people what they want. And, you know, everybody's got their phone number on their door.

So if you're driving by, just stop by and write the phone number down or add it to your address book. That's what I've got. Every local place that I order from, I've gotten my address book for my phone because, you know, I love my locals. I love my locals. And by the way, like I mentioned before, if you're in Woodland Hills, go to Guido's. They got the best pizza in, I think, in Los Angeles personally.

And Gabe writes in, hi, guys. I just heard you discuss the Facebook Giphy acquisition. And I think there's more to this story for the GOG crowd to be grumpy about. I also thought it weird that Facebook acquired a web property mostly used within other applications like Slack. Turns out Giphy's real value to their new overlords is how much it tracks your keystrokes by keystroke every time you Slack.

And yeah, this is kind of crazy how basically the Giphy stuff has built in keystroke tracking. Yeah, it's all JavaScript embedded. There's beacons, blah, blah, blah. So they track all your keystrokes when you're using it. Again, I know it's data and data is king, but I can't see how that data is particularly valuable.

It's crazy to me. Yeah, I don't either. Why do they care what I'm searching for in terms of a stupid GIF to send to somebody? And I love just saying GIF now because it's funny. God damn you. So I think, you know why they do this? And I can see this from a technical aspect.

On the fly search, you start typing, they send your keystrokes over because they're building that search query on the fly. So if I'm typing, you know, Steve-O and I get to S-T-E-V and then they're going to, they're searching as you go. Like as soon as you put in a keystroke, they search. That's the technical use case for it.

It's not that they're tracking or anything like that. It's to give you real-time search results as you go. Yeah, exactly. So I don't think it's nefarious. I think it's just technology. It's not Dr. Nefario. It's not Dr. Nefario. No. And Dan writes in, just ran across this and thought you might enjoy it.

It reminds me of the good old days with Commodore 64 and Apple II programming that I dabbled back in the day. Love your show. This is a long article over at Vice, God's Lonely Programmer. This is a 44-year-old Terry Davis, the founder and sole employee of Trivial Solutions. For more than a decade, he's worked on Temple OS, which is now 121,176 lines of code, which puts it on par with Photoshop 1.0.

Or a third of Technorati when I built that. Or by comparison, Windows 7, which is about 40 million lines. So he's doing this work because God told him to. According to the Temple OS charter, it is God's official temple. Just like Solomon's temple, this is a community focal point where offerings are made and God's oracle is consulted.

God also told Davis that 640 by 480, 16 color graphics, is a covenant like circumcision, making it easier for children to make drawings for God. God demands a perfect temple. And Davis says, for 10 years, I worked on programming Temple OS full time. I finished, basically, in the last years, it's been tiny touch-ups here and there.

So, hey. I would like to point out that Terry Davis does have schizophrenia as well. Well, there's that. There's that. Yeah. Cuckoo, Cuckoo, Cuckoo, Cuckoo. Yes. And Jim writes in, fog-free mask lead for Jason. Larry Nolan from Versaflex is selling masks on Etsy.

Versaflex makes soft goods for film, sound, and photography professionals. Also a super nice guy. His stuff is all well-made and wears well. A glasses-wearing sound mixer colleague has been raving about how great her mask is. Well, is it a him or a her? Name's Larry, but when I go to Versaflex masks, it's a woman.

I don't know what's going on here. Maybe it's a Wachowski situation. Yeah. I think Larry's a dude, but he does have probably his girlfriend wearing the masks. They look like masks to me. I see. There is one difference, though. If you look across the Bridge of the Nose, they do have kind of like a seal across them, which looks like it might be pretty good.

But yeah, I might actually check one out. But we do have, Brian, a mask update, if you'd like to hear it. I would love to hear it. I know you're winning. Yes, by quite a bit. Because you promote it and I don't. Yes, you have sold, what is this, 13 masks.

Woo! And I have sold, uh, do-do-do-do-do, trying to do the math, 17. Oh, okay. I'm not very far behind for not having bothered to tweet it out even once. No, no, you're picking up. You're picking up. I got a couple sales from you yesterday. You're doing good.

And the nonpartisan mask, how's that selling? So far of those, we've sold 35. Oh, not bad. Not bad. So check them out. And now that you're on the unemployed train or the furloughed train, you said you were going to start maybe throwing some designs up for yourself.

Yes, I will get on that. I have, uh, I have one more thing I have to wrap up for my previous company. So once that's done, I will, uh, try to make some shit for people to buy. All right. Don't put up any Dr. Nefario masks. We don't need copyright infringements. No, no copyright infringements. All right.

Uh, Mike writes in, in episode 435, he mentioned the noise cancellation of the NVIDIA graphics card. Just thought I'd flag that BBC clicked it in an episode where they tested it versus crisp and crisp was almost as good. Plus it works on Mac too. Then it gives us the link. Crisp dot. Hey, I, I installed this yesterday cause I was going to give it a shot.

And then I immediately had to uninstall it because, uh, Brian, you know, my routing situation here, I'm a professional audio guy. It hijacked everything in my system, the computer absolutely unusable for what I need to do to actually make a living.

So maybe I'll try it on, uh, you know, I'll, I'll try it on my Mac book air because that way I can use the built-in microphone and really test it out to see what it, uh, see what it does out. Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like, I could normally just go up to Ventura Boulevard and get a lot of traffic noise, but there's no cars anymore.

I don't know, man. Traffic's picked up a lot. People have been given up. Well, you know, we have, we have opened to back up. We have opened back up for the most part. Uh, still can't get into Trader Joe's, but Hey, what are you going to do? Stay home. That's what you should do.

Stay fucking home. Quibble writes in pretty sure you'll have seen this one yourselves, but I'd love to hear what you guys and Dave make of it. You can't make this stuff up. And this is the UK accidentally left secret plans for its COVID-19 contact tracing app on an open Google drive. Whoops. Way to go UK.

Yeah. Well, I didn't even, I didn't even look at this. I'd be like derp. Yeah. And Amelia writes in someone had mentioned game soundtracks as a background while working at home, so I simply must add here my two favorite soundtrack albums from near Gestalt and near Automata. Did I get any of that right?

I don't know. Close enough. All right. What is special about this music is that although there's a lot of vocal work, lyrics have no meaning. Oh, so like the Cocteau twins. One of my favorite bands. Those were, it's in German. I know, but they have no meaning to me because I only took four years of German in high school, which means I can say, you know, uh, ich bin ein großer Bahnhof.

That's about all I know. Anyways, we have links in this, links in the show notes if you want to check out the soundtracks. Way to shit on an entire country and their history. Jason says German has no meaning. Well, it sounds like they got phlegm, man.

Come on. Jesus Christ. I can still count to a million in German. So, hey, I'm ahead of the game. Ein, zwei, ah, fuck it. Ein, zwei, drei, vier, fünf, sechs, sieben, acht, neun, zehn. Keep going. Why don't you read the next comment?

All right. Barrett says, SpaceX releases the Dragon Crew, or the Crew Dragon Simulator. I've tried it out a few times. Pretty fun. Have you tried this thing out? I did. And I, you know, me with games. I was like, huh, this doesn't have just one joystick? What the hell with this?

Yeah, it was tough. It was actually really tough. I never made a successful docking, so I will not be an astronaut. But it is pretty cool. I mean, I tried. I tried really hard. But, yeah, you have to have patience for that one, and I have none. I basically just, you know, floored it and ran into the ISS many times.

But in other good news, SpaceX is setting up the Crew Dragon for its first human space flight on May 27th. It has actually made it to Kennedy Space Center, and they're prepping it for launch. I am, I don't know about you, Brian, I'm really, really excited about this thing.

Yeah, me too, because I want to get off this damn planet. As soon as possible. As soon as possible. Just don't hire us to dock the damn thing when we get up to the space station, because that would not work out well. No, we'll navigate. Yeah. We'll have our Thomas' guide to the universe.

Yeah. And need more TP for my Corona hole, writes in. This tech company preyed on retirees. FTC and this law firm are suing. Love you guys. I'm a young techie, but you both speak the truth. And this is a consumers filed class action lawsuit against Online Trading Academy for fraud.

Shocking. An online trading academy is fraudulent. Amazing. They targeted consumers and elderly individuals in particular. They claim to offer consumers a low investment, high profit online trading strategy and charges each student up to $50,000. Fucking Christ. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of students who received the training did not make substantial income promised.

And many students lost thousands of dollars trading on top of the money they spent on the OTA training. So don't buy that shit, people. Yeah, just don't. Don't even bother. Over at iTunes, we have a couple of reviews, some fun ones this time.

And Matt C29 writes in five stars tech with snark. Tech, tech, snarky tech. I've been listening to and recommending this pod for years. GOG's healthy skepticism of big tech and refusal to drink the Kool-Aid keeps them ahead of the curve again and again. Love to hear their thoughts on possible quarantines part two in the fall.

Are there new strategies to employ and essentials to gather? Move to family or friends before the second mass lockdown or just buy? This is my comment on it. Just buy a lot more booze and you'll be fine. I'm down with the moving in with family or friends. I think finding some lockdown partners will be key, particularly if you have children, because you want to share the pain.

My hope is to get the hell out of the country before the second lockdown and be locked down in a better country. But we shall see what happens for that. Good luck on that one, brother. We got another five star rating from Alamadean. A fun ride. Every podcast is informative and fun to listen to while I take a break from griping and moaning about the world.

Thank you. All right. And this one comes from Don't Bother from the U.S. It's a two star and it says, copy much? Lots of repeated content from Adam Carolla. Might be accidental, but happens frequently. This one's a head scratcher for me because I completely stopped listening to Adam Carolla about three months ago now.

I stopped listening to him three years ago now. And when I did listen to him, I don't think, other than the news, because we talk about news, I never really heard anything that we have vastly different opinions about everything. Everything.

Yeah. We don't like cars. So what the hell? I have no idea what he's talking about. Me either. No idea. And this is from redacted user. And I have to say, I think this is a repost because I know we've had this exact same comment again. So I think we're getting trolled a bit here.

Boring and definitely grumpy. Oh, and this is a one star. COVID-19 update. I really enjoyed the show with these two grumpy oldie geeks when they talk about technology, which is 80% of the show. I stopped listening in 2019. It is 2020. So you must have listened again. I just couldn't take all the political conversations and political jabs.

Their political views mirror the latest mainstream media headlines. Mainstream media is quite biased and polarized. So are these guys and they are void of critical thinking. However, please, for God's sake, stop talking about politics and other stuff you have opinions about that have nothing to do with what most people want to hear from you.

Based on what you think is going on anywhere in a very complex and fluid world, you have very little clue about other than the fake news from mainstream media you read, hear or see, especially stop getting upset what politics you see on social media. You should know better. Blah, blah, blah, blah, mainstream media. Blah, blah, blah, mainstream media.

God, do you fuckers have anything besides pissing on mainstream media in your toolbox? You do not shut up. He obviously also doesn't have spelling or capitalization going on. Also, you know what podcasts are? They're shows where people talk about their opinions. Their fucking opinions.

Redacted user, my ass. Redacted brain. By the way, if you can't spell definitely, you definitely shouldn't be leaving comments. But hey, hey, it's free world. It's free world. You get to have your opinion too. And I get to say, go fuck yourself.

Thanks for stopping listening in 2019, but obviously listening through 2020 to go ahead and give an opinion and a repost on 2020. You know, we're that effective that he can have that much vitriol that he comes back over five months later than 2019 to actually update on this COVID-19.

Yeah, that's good. I'm sure he's listening right now. If you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to gog.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. Tell us how much you hate mainstream media. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash iTunes and toss us a five-star and snarky review.

And keep clicking those stars in Overcast. We really appreciate it. We're still kicking ass up there. Thanks to you.

We're back again this week with Seth Miranda, photographer extraordinaire, man about town, our man on the streets in New York City. How's it going, Seth? Well, I'm not about town and I'm definitely not on the streets here in New York City. I did go out yesterday, though, so it was very surreal.

I saw you had some pictures from your studio, which you haven't been in in quite some time, I'm taking. Yeah, it was three months and I opened up the door and I was like, oh, yeah, this is actually a pretty good space. It was very weird, though. I mean, you know, everything's still closed up. Everyone's trying to be active because it's super nice out.

But I am seeing the dumbest people putting the mask under their nose or on their chin, which surely does the job, obviously. Yeah, obviously. It's like, you idiot. It's a self-selecting sample. Maybe kills them. Who knows? Yeah, I don't know.

It's just disheartening that we're all in the same boat with what's going on right here, but no one understands that you're not special and things don't just apply to you. But, you know, whatever. Come on, man. We're America. Get used to it.

Yeah. I was hoping New York would have some sort of intelligence level, but nope, nope, just doesn't happen. No, it doesn't. So how are you doing with that studio? You still got to pay for it, I'm assuming, and you can't use it. So how's that work out? Yeah, I'm basically trying to use it for recording stuff and using it to create online live stream demos and workshops and, like, just get my YouTube videos done from there.

But in the end, I think I'm just going to have to eat it for a little while and hopefully just get through this. I'm very fortunate, though, to be doing the stuff I'm doing. My channels are growing, and the people I have contracts with are still going forward. So I'm very, very fortunate, all things considered. Well, that's good to hear.

So what do we got in the world of photography and streaming and all that good stuff? Well, I thought it would be kind of interesting to talk about this thing Raspberry Pi has put out. It's, you know, Raspberry Pi has been known for just putting out these boards that you could do whatever you want to do with them. And mainly people make video game emulators out of them more than anything.

But for $50, you can get a Raspberry Pi that allows you to mount a lens to it. And this is pretty much any screw mount lens like C-mount or these Russian Helios lenses that a lot of Instagrammers like to use because they're soft and swirly and shallow depth of field.

But you get 12.3 megapixels for something that's basically the palm of your hand and interchangeable. I thought that was pretty cool and a lot of fun as far as a project goes for people who are photo nerds, you know, things like that. No, that is pretty cool. I think we talked about that before when you were on last time.

We talked about the new mount for that thing. And it's a pretty neat little device for sure. I don't think I'm going to go down that road. I've had a Raspberry Pi in the past. And it can be a little bit hard to program sometimes if you're not really into it anymore.

Oh, no, they're totally a rabbit hole. I'm not going to deny that. The one Raspberry Pi I have, that Super Nintendo emulator, just all of a sudden it's decided to not recognize any controllers. So that's my new hobby. Trying to get that thing to work again because it was super fun to just have it on hand.

But this one I'm kind of interested in mainly because you can get an adapter from a screw mount lens to virtually anything. Like I have my Nikon Z6 adapted with a Helios right now. And to have, you know, a really weird looking lens, it has a very interesting quality to it on a Neo New School body with stabilized lens and everything like that.

I'm sorry, stabilized body. It's pretty awesome. So if you can adapt these under $100 lenses with a unique look onto this $50 board and see what you get just for fun, I'm all for it. And if you want to put like a gigantic monster 300 millimeter Canon lens on it, you could find an adapter for that as well.

Oh, that would be fun. A little 300 2.8 on that thing. Just go nuts, you know? Yeah, you definitely need those big lenses that have their own tripod mount on them to hold the damn thing up. Well, that's the cool thing also is the Raspberry Pi has a quarter 20 mount on it.

Really? Yeah. So all the distribution of weight is kind of equalized. So you can actually use the... It's right under the lens mount. So it's basically just a raw board with a lens mount screwed into it. It looks like a science project, obviously. But the quarter 20 mount's awesome.

And so you have that option as well. And I think with it being so small and light, why couldn't you put this like on the strap of your backpack and then feed a wire into something or whatever? You know, I just feel like I'm really curious to know what the community is going to do with this thing. And at $50, I'm down to give it a shot. Yeah, I think I might give one of those a shot for $50.

It sounds kind of fun. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, basically, you make your own personal body cam out of the thing and just put it on the strap of your backpack. With whatever lens you want. Yeah. I'd always have to wear that shirt that you sent me, the You Are Being Recorded t-shirt. Oh, my God. That was so long ago. I did that with bleach and a bunch of stencils.

And I ran out of letters. So I remember using like the dollar sign for an S or something. That's funny. Yeah. I've still got that thing. I was going to actually frame it because it's such a cool shirt. So that was years and years ago. That's when we first met. Yeah. Well, you kept on talking about it.

So I was like, oh, I got an extra shirt in your size and I got a bunch of bleach. Let's see what I can send over to Jason. And you wore it to some convention. I remember you told me that everyone was like eyeballing you for it. Yeah. I can't remember what convention that was, but I definitely wore it out on the street.

And they're like, am I being recorded right now? I'm like, well, not by me, but just look around, buddy. Look around wherever you go. Oh, my God. So what's new with you and your tech? I know you've been setting up an office and a studio and everything. Well, I mean, I've had this thing for years now with the Nikon D810.

I always wanted to use it as my streaming webcam. And I could not figure out how to get this damn thing to stay on for more than $29.59. Like in live view, it always shut off. And you reminded me the other day, you're like, did you upgrade the firmware? And I'm like, no.

And I looked and I looked and I was on 0.02 of the firmware, which means that, I mean, that's what it was when I got it. So that's how old the thing is. Yeah. And it was like on version 14M now. So I got it. I uploaded it and flashed the firmware.

And I'm like, oh, here's a new setting. You know, live view timer set to never turn off. Boom. I got a $2,500 webcam now. Yeah, pretty much. And it's kind of amazing what firmware does. One of the biggest examples is Fuji.

So when Fuji put out a firmware update for one of the cameras, all of a sudden it did 4K video. Like, wow. Yeah. So people get caught up in these specs of a camera or whatever it is. But if it has something, whatever device it is that has upgradable firmware, it's really the limitations of what the hardware can do.

If it has a killer processor in that camera, they might do faster frames per second. It might unlock different, you know, resolutions for video and things like that. And I think people have to really look at the hardware they're buying, not so much the specs. And usually when the community complains about a feature of a camera so much, usually they'll go into the firmware.

And when you told me that you're only getting the under 30-minute time limit, I'm like, that was back when that camera wasn't even thought of to be used in such a fashion that you're doing. Right. So, yeah, the upgrade took me five minutes and boom, now I have new features. And I remember with the Fuji, I used to have the X1.

And when I got this thing, I got it from Kent Nichols, one of the guys that did Ask a Ninja back in the day. I loved that camera. But the autofocus was crap. Yeah. And it never really worked right. And I went and I found the firmware update for the camera and for the lenses as well, which helps because you needed firmware for those lenses.

And it got better. It still kind of sucked. And I ended up selling it. But it was nice that you could actually upgrade it and get a little bit more, squeeze a little bit more functionality out of it than you could when you started. Yeah. They definitely keep on updating the autofocus more than anything else because that's what kind of sells cameras.

When the Nikon Z6 came out, there was no eye autofocus on it. Couldn't recognize eyes, right? Now it has animal eye autofocus. It can recognize all types. Yeah. And it's the same camera. It's the same camera you bought. It's just they're not leaving you hanging. And they're not trying to sell you the next body.

They just want you to feel confident in that brand. And a firmware update is free, kids. Check your camera's firmware. Go update it with the – and it could fix a bug you'd even know that the camera had causing it to have worse battery life or heat issues, all sorts of things.

Yeah, definitely. One of the firmware upgrades that I'm always on about is I've got this Rodecaster Pro. And it's a decent piece of hardware. The preamps aren't that great. But the problem is when this thing came out, it was not pro. Like you had these settings where it's like, okay, you can turn on a noise gate, but you can't set the settings of the noise gate.

Like my noise gates need to be very specific. I need to set the attack, release time, what the knee is, and all that stuff to get it to where I want it to be. And you couldn't do that. It was just a button. It was a PhD. Push here, dipshit. And now the new one that they just came out with, the firmware that's in beta, lets you tweak everything.

So this thing is getting better and better with every firmware upgrade that they have. So I love that device now. It's like before I hated it, I just kept it on the shelf and I would only take it out when I really had to go on location. And I have a podcast studio with me when I went out. But now I've got it hooked up to my video station and I use it all the time.

It's really nice. And they just did that with a couple of firmware updates. Yeah, I mean, it doesn't end with just – I mean, it's like you have to figure out if whatever you're buying is able to update firmware. And that's like a positive now. I mean, even my studio lights, my flashes, my strobes have firmware in them.

And it makes my radio controller more and more reliable, less interference. I've even seen longer battery life and faster recycle time on strobes because they just figured something out and they pass it along to you. So that's the moral of my story today on your show is go check your firmware on everything and see if you can get up to date.

Yeah, definitely. It really makes a difference. So what else you got, Seth? So I wanted to bring up the Canon EOS R5, which has been a real hot topic in my world pretty much because Canon has always been playing catch up with the technology out there, mainly because they've been known for kind of crippling the video features in a lot of their cameras because they're worried about them going – like they're worried about those cameras cannibalizing sales from their cinema line, okay?

So normally if they had 4K video in their camera, they would be like, yeah, sure, but it crops the sensor so it's not full frame anymore and all your lenses become more zoomed in. And that was always an issue with Canon and people were staying away from it. But then they came out with this crazy announcement about the R5 and this is not new, the news as well, but it's not out yet, but everyone is sweating this thing.

They don't even care what it really looks like. They don't even care to hold it. They don't care to see an image from it. They're just looking at these specs and going, I want to buy this thing and they don't even have a price for it yet. And that's where I start having a problem, right? Yeah. This is what the problem is. People buy hype, but they don't invest in themselves because no matter what you're buying, you're still the person that's got to use that camera like we always say.

But here's the big deal. They're saying it has 8K video, 30 frames per second raw recording in camera. Right. 4K 120, 120 P. So 4K 120 means you can do some really high res slow-mo, which is awesome because usually you're stuck at 720 or 1080 and sometimes you get audio.

Sometimes you don't get audio and it also gives you C-Log, which means you're shooting in log 10 bit video in the camera. Now, here's where I think the catch is. If you have 8K 30 frames raw in camera, why do the specs also say 4K 60, which is lower res, higher frame rate, but it can only record it out into an external recorder from the HDMI?

And the reason I think that is because the 8K recording might only be for a minute or two. They're not releasing recording times on this thing. Oh, that could be the gotcha. And I don't think anyone's really talking about that too much. I think they just get caught up in numbers go up. I want to buy it.

The resolution's up and the frame rate and I can do stuff. Can you do stuff? Think about this. And I'm not trying to hinder anybody's excitement about this camera. The fact that Canon is setting the tone for the next generation of cameras, which is usually Sony, right? We always hear about Sony putting out like the next technology, but we haven't heard anything from Sony.

We haven't heard anything from Nikon. Fuji's doing their own thing like they always do. Pentax is like, when the hell we heard about Pentax? They just put out some APS-C camera. Olympus, who knows what's going on. But Canon, to set the tone is a big deal. And maybe this will set everyone else off and put some fire in some of the brands and we'll benefit from it because they'll put out better or more specs, rather.

But I just don't buy this 8K video until they put out record times. And who knows if this thing can handle that much data without overheating? 8K video cameras, like a RED or something like that, have huge fans in them that are spending all the time to dissipate heat.

You're going to tell me this. Yeah, massive heat sinks on the side of them. Those RED cameras are basically like a heat sink with a lens half the time. Absolutely. They're built – exactly. When you look at them, they're totally a heat sink. People – and what about battery power? You know, how much could this thing possibly handle? And it just goes on, man.

I just keep on going like, you guys are waiting for this catch. I'm telling you. We don't know a price, right? Yep. Canon put out a DSLR with 6K video for $6,500. Ouch! Well, that's a top-end flagship camera, and I get it.

And they did an amazing job with it. I have to give my hats off to Canon with that one. However, this thing is going to come out mirrorless with higher-res specs, and you don't think the price is going to start creeping up? I don't know, man. Well, fortunately, I'll stick with my Nikons. But – Well, we need another generation from all these camera companies.

Sony is getting set to talk about two cameras in the next month or two, so we're wondering what that's going to be. Is that going to be like, oh, Canon, here, hold my beer. I got this. And they're going to drop something even crazier. But, I mean, honestly, who needs 8K video? So that's another point, right?

People think 8K is a lot. It's a heavy load. Well, here's the thing. A lot of people, clients, are asking for higher-res 8K video because they want to future-proof the content so that when people do have 8K TVs, they can put it out there and it's ready to be at that resolution, even though right now we don't need it.

Or they want it so they can punch in. So if I zoom in 50%, that 8K is now 4K video, which is our standard right now. Yeah, I get that. I get that. So it just gives you wiggle room to actually get the shot that you want. Yeah. Yeah.

Or make sure that you have a fail-safe that, you know, if I'm shooting two people talking and I'm shooting at 8K, if I punch into you talk and I punch into the other person talk, it's still 4K. It's just one video feed. That saves a lot.

Yeah. Saves another camera and another cameraman. Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. I think it's very cool. I sound like I'm like a grump about this one. I just get really down when people salivate over a bunch of specs on a blog before they even see a camera and what it actually does in real life, you know?

Yeah. No, I totally get that. Totally get that. I mean, it's a nice-looking camera, though. But like I said, I'm just not a Canon guy. It's one of those things where, I mean, I started shooting Nikon when I was in high school. So that was 1988. And I'm not about to switch now. Let's just say that.

Look, I think it's important to let everyone know that whatever brand you're shooting with right now, it's awesome, okay? Like, they're all doing a good job. There are some systems that are more fleshed out than others, yes. There are some things that are thinking more towards a genre. Like, if you want to get into video more, there are some cameras that do video better than something else.

You know, some people want the resolution. Some people want less resolution so they can have faster file exchange, all sorts of stuff. But it's really important to look at the tools for what you're trying to do and not just buy a bunch of specs. If that was the case, every Leica that's $5,000 or more with lower specs than every Nikon Canon wouldn't be worth the $5,000.

Yeah. No, I still don't get the Leica thing, man. I know you do. We talked about that before. But what I tell my friends now when they want to get a DSLR, I say go to the camera store and hold them in your hand. Yep. And feel which one feels best for you. Because some people have smaller hands and Canon's good for people with smaller hands.

Nikons are bigger, better for people with bigger hands, I've noticed. Because I just, I can't hit the controls right on a Canon because my thumb's bigger and my fingers are bigger. But Nikon feels perfect in my hand. But the cameras are going to just do about exactly the same damn thing. You know, you're going to take great pictures with both of them.

And the price point is pretty close to the same. So you're in the same range. I just tell them, like, find something that you're comfortable with that you can hold all day and take pictures with. That's all you really need to know nowadays. You know, for people who are just getting started, I'm not talking about people who are like, you know, have a specific use case.

But for just, you know, the average guy on the street who just says, hey, I want to start taking digital pictures with a DSLR. I'm like, go to the camera store. Pick them up. Feel them. Find what feels right. And you're going to be fine. Yeah, and, you know, when Sony was being touted out there for pushing the technological advancements in imaging, no one was really mentioning how they had a hard time holding the cameras because they kept on making them smaller and smaller and smaller, which also caused heat issues.

And now if you look at the Sonys that are coming out now, they're responding to all these people complaining about them not being able to hold it. I couldn't get my finger between the lens and the grip. It was actually hurting my knuckle. And I'm like, I can't work a full day with this camera, whatever the specs are. But what's even funnier is almost every other camera you pick up still has a Sony sensor in it because there's only like three sensor companies in the world.

And they buy the sensor. They go to them. They go, hey, I want a sensor that has this res with this kind of – they tell the bakery what ingredients to put into it. And then they take it from Sony and then after the sensor, it's up to Nikon or whoever else to process the information off the sensor.

It's not the sensor all in for the image. It's also how it interprets the light, how it processes the data to create the image, color science, you know, dynamic range, how much information is in your shadows, in your highlights. It's not all about, well, this resolution and this company made the sensor and that's about it.

Yeah, yeah, it's the science behind the, you know, the CPU and the camera and what software they've built to handle that raw image data and what they do with it. Nice. Yeah, definitely. So, yeah, I'm – I'm down. I – like my Panasonic Lumix G7s, like I would never take that out to actually shoot anywhere because it is so small.

I'm like, it's nice and light and small and plasticky, but if I put it on a tripod and shoot video with it all day, it's perfect. But I would never take it out to like, you know, for a day of shooting because it's just – it feels like a toy in my hand. It's like way too small.

It really does. Yeah, right toy. I was not saying right toy, right job, but I was not saying right tool, right job. Right tool, right job. Yeah. It kind of is right toy, right job. But, yeah, the job for that thing is to sit on a tripod all day and take pictures of my stanky butt. That's about it.

Well, you know, you were on my show on Facebook with that camera, right? Yeah. Yeah, that was actually the camera that I used for that. And no longer, though, my main camera is going to be my D810, and I'm going to use the G7s for basically pickup shots and B-roll.

So if I'm demoing a product, I'll use it for that. I'm still waiting for my switcher from Blackmagic. What are those things called? ATM minis? Yeah, the ATEM minis. I'm just like, where the hell is it? Everybody's asking that question. Everyone's asking that question. So Blackmagic is kind of famous for that.

They make this crazy hype, and they make something that's pretty cool at a good price point because that's their thing. It's like higher production value for an easier price point. And then we don't know about the supply stream, right? Which I think is what's going to happen with the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X, right?

All this hype about the specs and what these new SSDs and this processor and all this great stuff. Awesome. And everybody always is ready to buy for a holiday season. Great. I guarantee you there's going to be some supply chain issue, and it'll become rare. It'll be all over eBay for $2,000 a system for the people who actually got them.

It's like the Tickle Me Elmo, you know? Yeah. I'm fine with my regular Xbox One. I'm good for now. I don't need a PlayStation 5. I'm stuck in the Xbox ecosystem. But the new one, I don't really see a need to upgrade just yet. Well, I'll wait a couple years. With consoles, I always tend to wait because same thing we go back to the beginning of the show.

They always update the firmware and get more out of the processor and juice it up, and you get more capability as the thing gets older. Yeah. But did you see the new Unreal Engine 5 demo? Oh, my God. That is mind-blowing. I know. That thing is incredible.

You know, people look at it and go, eh, so what? It's just good graphics. I'm like, it's not just good graphics. You're not realizing that your character isn't just walking an animation that's been programmed. When it hits a rock, its foot will jitter or, like, it's actually in the environment now, and the light theory is perfect.

Yeah. It's incredible. I highly recommend it. We just talked about it on the last show about how Unreal has come out with the new bump. So you can get the Unreal Engine. Right now, it's 4 because 5 is not out until late next year. But you can get the engine and build your own games, and they won't charge you a royalty until you hit $1 million in sales, which I thought was fantastic for new game designers.

Yeah. We were just talking about this on Twitch. Basically, there's no barrier for entry. And if you're a young developer, a kid, you can learn on the engine that's widely used and actually build a career for yourself starting early. And to not pay a royalty, I think it was like $19 a month.

It's incredible. And an indie game might never hit a million dollars, so you might just have a free engine to just keep putting out your work. Yeah. No, it's incredible. I was talking before. I learned on the Quake engine back when they were starting to release that. And it was really fun to develop on, but I was never going to be a game developer.

But it was just something fun to do and figure out how it worked and all the back-end tools that you get when you get the whole engine. And, you know, right now, nobody's doing anything. Instead of playing video games, maybe go learn to make one. Yeah. And then when this thing's over, you can actually get a job in the video game industry, which is, you know, granted, a sweatshop.

But you can still have a career in the video game industry. It's not a fun place to work. But have you seen Dreams on PlayStation? No, I haven't. So it's basically like a $60 game, but it really is an interface for you to build anything you want.

And a lot of people have been remaking games that they love or like a surreal environment. One guy created a forest that people didn't realize was an emulation until – or simulation, I should say, rather – until they really looked at it. It's amazing when you give the keys to everybody how many people really actually belong inside that party sometimes.

And I think this lowering the barrier for something like developers, even if you didn't think you were a developer, there could be some amazing artists out there that just needed an access to this tool to create this medium, you know? Yeah. No, it's really exciting. It's really exciting.

And I hope a lot of people take advantage of it. So, you know, and hopefully it'll change the way that video games are made. You know, if a lot of – if more indie developers get into it, then they can change that business because that business is a terrible business. It just tears people up, you know, 80-hour day – or 80-hour weeks, not 80-hour days.

That would be a tough sell. But can you FTP me some extra hours? I'm running low. But no, hopefully it'll, you know, change things up a bit because, man, it's – and especially with that 5 engine, it is just incredible. My jaw was on the floor when I watched that. It was nuts. And that's not even a real game.

It was just like they just made it for that. They made it for that. That's why I was – I'm like, you guys put this in for a demo? This looks like a, you know, like a AAA game. Yeah, it was insane. So, I think another thing that changes the industry is that we're seeing the actual community now.

It's not just people that buy games. It's an actual community of people that are in constant contact while they play these games, constantly talking about them, giving their opinion on it. And when they go, oh, we all hate EA and we hate loot crates or loot boxes or whatever and microtransactions, you start seeing things shift a little bit.

No one – everyone thought that single-player games were dead. Then God of War came out and it was only single-player. And, you know, we never thought that our dollars would be this much of a vote. But if those – if video games bother you or the way they're doing it or they're working those developers to the bone and give us a glitchy game that we need to wait for an update for months after anyway to make it playable, don't buy the game.

Yeah, seriously. I have to – you know, if I'm playing that night, I always have to turn my Xbox on in the morning because there's like 30 gigabytes of updates for all the games coming through. It's crazy. Yeah, it's new school problems for sure. Yeah, definitely.

Well, thanks for stopping by, Seth. This has been fun. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. Closing shout-outs! Very sad news. Sad to say goodbye to Fred Willard, who, as we know, is an amazing comedic actor, best in show, A Mighty Wind, all of those documentaries.

One of the best turns he ever did. Obviously, I'm biased here, but of course, it was in – oh, God, I'm blanking on the name right now. Jesus Christ. The best rock and roll mockumentary of all time. Spinal tap. Spinal tap. Thank you. It's early. I have my magnetic – it goes to 11 knobs sitting here on my – there we got it.

What was it? Fireside. Fireside, yeah. I've got mine too. Yeah. So sad to see that he passed away. Quite the life. Very funny, dude. And the tributes to him on Twitter from fellow comedians are heartwarming. He had a good run. He had a very good run. And a quick shout-out to Chris Curran and the Podcasters Lounge.

They had me on last night with a bunch of other podcasting professionals talking about our workflow. I'll put a link to the show notes so you can go back and watch some people and figure out how we do this thing that we do called podcasting if you're interested in that. And thanks to Seth Miranda for stopping by and giving us a little chat.

And don't forget the drink up on Saturday, May 23rd at – what did we say? 4 p.m. 4 p.m. Pacific time. 7 p.m. Eastern and whenever the hell that is in London. Yes. In these unprecedented times, now more than ever, do you need to listen to us and watch us drink for an hour?

Yes. Go to GOG.show slash live. 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 GOG.show slash donate. Toss us a few bucks and we'll love you forever. Your support really keeps us going and we really appreciate it.

Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 440. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, and get links to stuff we like. It would be remiss of me to not mention the 440 was a seminal drum machine used in a lot of the early 80s and 90s electronica.

So, you know, when the numbers hit, that's what we do. Stay grumpy. And when you take the red pill, you learn the real meaning of covfefe. At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out.

It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead.

With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com.