470: Mountains of Inane Faffery

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFilippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. It's hot. It's hot. It's a little bit hot. All of California is either literally or figuratively on fire. So, yay. Well, it's going to be a cool 96 degrees here after the 121 that we hit last weekend.

Broke records in Woodland Hills there, Jason. You guys get a medal. It was so strange. Walking out the door is just like getting hit in the face with just, oh, hell. Hell on earth. You had about a second and a half before your whole body started to sweat. Great. Yeah. It was pretty crazy hot in Santa Monica. And, you know, most of us don't have AC here in Santa Monica because we're used to our cool, gentle ocean breezes.

But it was unbearably hot here. So, I actually went to hotter weather. I went down to see my mom because she has air conditioning. Yep. Yep. Fortunately, we didn't get any of the rolling blackouts that everybody was talking about. Although I did have my UPSs that usually are, you know, set up in my studio and all that stuff ready to go in case we needed them to power the internal fans.

But fortunately, we dodged a bullet with that one. Yep. It has cooled down a little bit, but the skies are weird because it's, and my car is covered in ash. It's crazy. So, hopefully all that will get under control soon. But in the meantime, if you happen to be a gig worker for Amazon, throwing your phone in a tree no longer works.

Oh, man. Yes. Amazon has foiled the plot using phones and trees to get more deliveries, according to Engadget. Yeah. Contract drivers have said they're now getting more routes even when they're miles away from Whole Foods locations that had been hubs for the scheme. So, the tree-borne phones have vanished, along with the people lurking around them, one Chicago driver said.

So, yeah, we basically turned a real gig into, you know, the piles of less-than-legal folks standing around the Home Depot hoping for work. So, Gig Economy 2.0, awesome job, America. Well, if they're lurking around the trees, then why do they have to put them in the trees if they're lurking?

Yeah, I know. Just stand there. Yeah, exactly. They do have parking lots for those kind of things. Yeah. They fixed the issue by only altering a, and this is in quotes, few lines of code. They probably created a dead zone around places like Whole Foods to prevent gaming attempts.

So, they basically just turned off the fact that now you have to be, instead of within one mile, two miles. So, start putting your phones up in a two-mile area, people. Exactly. It's like, just move back a little farther. Yes. Please stand behind the line to get your Amazon Fresh delivery. We are winning, winning, winning.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Well, I did get to go visit the new Amazon Fresh store, the first of its kind in these United States, here in Woodland Hills, California. It's cool. Was it cool? Was it air-conditioned? I take that back. It's neat. Okay. Yes, it was very air-conditioned and very empty.

Very empty because it's invite-only so far. But I thought from my invite, it said they weren't going to have the dash carts yet, but they had a bunch. So, we actually went to shop around, and they did come pre-bagged. So, there were two bags in there already. That's about all they can hold. Well, they basically just followed the Scotty principle, right?

So, you know, don't promise it. And then if it's there, it's a bonus. It is a bonus. Yep. So, we walked around, and we found that the prices were actually better than our local Ralph's grocery store by about 30% on most of the things we get, which is the Amazon M.O. Why do we know why people do that?

I'm looking at you, Uber and Lyft. Yep. Yep. But everybody was really nice, kept their social distancing, one-way lanes, which I didn't figure out until I was halfway through the store. And I'm like, oh, wait, there's a big sign on the floor that says one-way. So, you were that jerk. Yeah, I didn't see them. The signs were not very well designed.

But it was a nice store. It was a nice store. And the actual Dash Cart experience itself was pretty easy. It was really easy, even with fresh fruits and vegetables, because the cart itself actually has a scale in it. So, when you put your food in, you punch in the four- to five-digit code for the food, and then you place it in the cart, and it automatically just shows up on the little LCD.

Oh, very cool. Yeah. Well, I expect to be able to try one out pretty soon as well. I've got an Amazon, and this is an air quotes, bookstore near me in the marina, and nobody goes there to buy books. It's basically just a glorified pickup and drop off your returns place.

So, I'm sure they're going to convert that into an Amazon Fresh store pretty soon. Yeah, probably. And, of course, at the end of the store, when you get to the very end, go back and do your Dash checkout. There was, of course, the Alexa table. Yeah, of course. So, you could do that.

And they were all around the store. We didn't actually use it to find anything, but they're like on every aisle. So, if you need to find something, you can ask the lady in the tablet. Now, have they locked those things down to only answer certain things? Can I walk around the store and have it start, like, playing Skinny Puppy everywhere?

Oh, that would be fun. But, like I said, we didn't try them. So, next time. Next time. Next time, we've got to see what we can do to mess around with them. Exactly. Yeah, see if we can play with the fresh lady. She can get fresh. So, I got this thing, and it popped up on my phone the other day, and it just said, it was an alert that says, You have a new memory.

I'm like, I do? That's cool. What is it? And it's one of those damn things in Apple Photos where it, you know, makes a silly little collage for you. And I'm like, no, that's an old memory. It's not a new memory. It's an old memory. What are you trying to do?

And so, I looked at it, and it turns out two years ago, you and I were in Canada together at the Fireside Conference. Oh, that's right. Yeah. So, that was popping up in my memories as well. Yeah, and so, and then, of course, because Google has to one-up on the Apples, I got another alert that I had more memories waiting for me on my Google Photos app.

So, I go into the Google Photos app, and what it's got is, like, this week, one year ago, two years ago, three years ago, and, like, what happened this week. And it goes up for me, since I've got so many photos in there, for 16 years. You want something to make you feel fucking old.

See what you were doing 16 years ago, and when you remember it, it's like, I thought that was, like, two, three years ago. Right. It's like, wow. Yeah, 14 years ago, I was hanging out with Shinny Jardin at Kaiju Big Battle, which was, like, one of those things where they dress up like Japanese monsters and do a wrestling match.

It was pretty fun, but it does not feel like it was 14 years ago. That's for damn sure. See, initially, you were making fun of them, saying these are old memories, not new memories, but, you know, you forgot, so new to you. Well, no, I didn't forget the memory. I just forgot how long ago it was. This is just basically how, you know, it's just, I was trying to come up with a term for it.

It's just computer-generated nostalgia, and I'm like, oh, I don't know if I like it or not. I don't know. It makes me feel funky for some reason. Like, when I'm in a nostalgic mood, I want to go find it, not have it forced down my throat when I'm having my morning coffee. That's the thing. That is the thing, and I do wonder if that's a generational thing.

I wonder what the younger folks think about this sort of stuff, because they're growing up with it, and they're used to it. But I don't, this is going to really date us, I don't like push technology, Jason. I don't either. Do you remember push technology? I still have the wired cover of it.

Yes. I want to be able to seek something out if I want it. I do not want it presented to me. That's the big difference. I don't like getting those notifications on my phone either. I like the technology. I like the algorithms that they use. I like going to my photos, and then if I search for it, or if I go into the tab for memories, I often like the little presentations that they give me.

Especially, you know, when you have a kid. It's nice to see those things. Nice to share those with grandma. All that sort of stuff. But I don't like it given to me, forced upon me. I want to go get it myself. Yeah, when you're in the mood to do it. Exactly. You know? Yeah. I'm not a fan of it.

That's just the main part. Some of it is cool to see, and some of it was really not cool to see, because there's some memories in there that I'd preferably not, like, shove down my throat, you know? That I don't want to remember. I still have the photos in case I need proof for, you know, the legal lawsuit. Yeah, exactly.

But I don't want to remember them quite a bit. Yeah, my roommate got hit by a car, like, two years ago, and the entire year on Apple Photos, it said, it used a picture of her all bloody-faced and everything, saying, this is your highlighted photo of the year.

I'm like, and you can't turn it off. You can't make that go away. So every time I'd open Apple Photos, there's my, you know, my half-dead roommate. I'm like, thanks, Apple. Appreciate it. Well, yeah. I mean, we talked about that story a while back about that guy that I think it was on Facebook, and it kept popping up, you know, your most liked photo, and it was his mother's grave.

Yeah, that's what I mean. That stuff is messed up. Yep. In the news. Well, the Pentagon says Microsoft is still deserving of the $10 billion Jedi Cloud contract.

We've been talking about this for ages, because everything takes ages these days. Amazon was also going for it. The DOD is basically saying, yes, we're going to give it to Microsoft, but we can't give it to Microsoft yet, because Amazon is still suing. Of course. Of course. So there's a temporary injunction, because the Amazon lawsuit, which is arguing the contract had clear deficiencies, errors, and unmistakable biases.

Now, I was not aware when I was running my own business, and I was going for contracts and doing proposals and all that sort of thing, that suing was an option to try to continue to get the contract that had not been awarded to me. I know. Man, if I'd have known that. If I'd have known that, I'd have made a lawyer the third partner, and we just would have sued left, right, and center.

Really? Like, oh, you don't like our work? Well, I see bias. The bias is you don't like my work, but I don't care, because it's bias. Yeah, definite causes for lawsuits. There were multiple times that our exact proposal was taken and handed to another shop, and they just built it because they didn't want to pay us for it.

So, you know, I should have just kept suing. Yeah, actually, you should have sued for that one. That one I definitely should have sued for. Yeah, seriously. Man, I hate when they did that stuff. It was regular. That's just, that's business. Yeah, pretty much. Shouldn't be. Pretty much. Well, I saw this one come across.

I thought it was pretty funny. Millions of WordPress sites are being probed and attacked with a recent plug-in bug. Now, this is a file uploader bug, you know, so you can, basically, it's called File Manager. Yeah, and different files that you can put up, because sometimes you can't upload things directly to WordPress. Like, if I wanted to upload a Word doc, sometimes they say, no, you can't do that.

So, you have to have a separate plug-in to do it, which I don't know why. But anyway, more than 700,000 sites have this plug-in installed. And, of course, the bad actors are just pinging everybody on the planet trying to find it. So, if you have the File Manager plug-in, you might want to check your install, because you're probably owned at this point.

But, definitely, WordFence was one of the plug-ins that I always used to help protect my WordPress sites when I still ran them myself, which I don't do anymore. It was a good one. Definitely worth the money on that one. But what's, to me, worth more money is just using WordPress.com and letting the business package take it over, because that way I never have to worry about it again.

That's the best part. That is nice. It is nice. It's expensive, but it's nice. Now, we just talked about Facebook getting dinged by the German government for trying to bundle together the Oculus accounts and the Facebook accounts and things like that.

And they're just still on a tear. They are now going to let some people view Instagram stories directly on Facebook, another bit of coupling that they're doing. I don't know why they just don't roll everything into Facebook. I was about to say, I'm already seeing Instagram stories directly through Facebook, because all people do is cross-post everywhere anyways.

So, just integrate them already. Make it easier for everyone. It's so stupid. Yeah. And, you know, I took Instagram off my phone now, because it's useless. I get four stories, and then it shows me, like, hundreds of other people. Ads, ads, ads, ads, ads.

Well, not even ads. It's the people you might like. Yeah, those other ones. And that's even gotten to the point now where it's all the same. So, it's not even worth it. So, I'm like, eh, I think Instagram is pretty much toast from here on out for me. Just TikTok for Jason.

Yeah, right. There's just no value left. If they're not going to let me see what my friends are posting, that's kind of why I use your app, to see what my friends are posting. If you're not going to let me see what my friends are posting, fuck you. Well, I mean, that's all of the big social medias, right? That's not in their vested interest to show you that, because that doesn't make them money.

So, again, I come back to, I would happily pay one, two, three bucks a month for Facebook if they actually showed me what I wanted to see. The new design is a completely useless train wreck where you can't see anything under the page. You have to actually scroll to see anything that you'd want to see.

It's ridiculous. Facebook Purity, I have to give those guys another shout-out again. They're scrambling to deal with the new design, and that's already made it a little bit better, because you can totally hide, like, the gigantic stories block. And so you can actually see one story, one actual post, through my homepage on Facebook now.

So thanks for that. Yeah, I mean, the standard operating procedure now is you open up Facebook, and then you go to the sidebar, and you click the little hamburger, and then you find the link for most recent. It takes four clicks just to get in to actually see something useful.

And it's funny, my roommate this morning posted on a new forum, and she's like, it's not here. I just posted, and it's not here. I'm like, we just looked at it. And she loaded up. We went to the group, and it took us, like, 30 seconds of scrolling to get past all the group bullshit, all the comments, all this other stuff to find her post, which was the newest post in the list.

But it was, like, you know, seriously, 30 seconds of scrolling down. Yeah, completely buried. Yeah, I've noticed that with the desktop version, especially when I post stuff for, say, Grumpy Old Geeks. I'll post it, and it will not show up anywhere in my timeline. So I'm like, now I have to go to the page.

I have to scroll all the way down, because I want to confirm that it actually got posted. Yeah. And it's impossible. That's exactly what we were doing. We were just trying to confirm that they actually received our message. Yeah. But, no, it's crazy. And this is even crazier. This was over at Forbes.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg warns of violence or civil unrest after election. Well, no shit, Sherlock. I don't know if he's looked out the fucking window lately, but we got a little of that going on right now. We got violence and civil unrest pre-election. You think we're not going to have it post-election? Oh, it's going to be bad. It's going to be bad.

No matter which way it goes, it's going to be bad. Oh, yeah. The reality is, especially since we're all going to, or the vast majority of Americans are going to do mail-in voting, it's going to be different. It's going to be, we're not going to have a result right away, which means one side is going to claim a result right away.

And it's going to be a mess. It's going to be a goddamn mess. Yep. So they're trying to figure out how that they can not be part of the problem, but part of the solution. Good luck with that. Since you are the problem. Shut Facebook down. Shut Facebook down from November 2nd until an actual announcement is made.

Yeah. Or just never turn it back on. I'd be fine with that. Just never turn it back on. Well, you can be fine with that, but life finds a way, Jason. It's like Jurassic social media. Because I saw this article, and I've never played Animal Crossing, but this is what's happening everywhere.

Disinformation is coming for your Animal Crossing game. Jesus. On Tuesday, the Biden-Harris campaign debuted a new series of lawn signs, emblazoned with the official logo, the word Joe with the rainbow E at the end, and three pixelated sets of aviator sunglasses, his signature prop, guess where they were?

In Animal Crossing New Horizons. Yes. You can get those digital assets to put in your digital whatever, because I've never played. So I don't know. You never will. And I never will. So, yeah, it's coming everywhere. So, and that is a reality. All these multiplayer games, they have chat.

They have the ability to talk to people. It's not that different from social media. And this argument is making the, or this article is making the argument that game companies need to think about all the problems that Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, et cetera, are dealing with in terms of misuses of their platforms and gamifying their platforms for misinformation or regular information and figure out what they want to do about it.

And they should start now, because if they start now, they won't be as far behind the curve as all the social media companies are. Yeah. I mean, I think a lot of them have started a long time ago, but yeah, it is what it is, man. We know what the answer is going to be.

We've seen it time and time again. They're going to say, well, maybe we shouldn't allow this. Maybe we should ban it. Oh, you're going to pay us to do this? Okay. We'll put this in there then if you're going to pay us. Come on through, buddy. Come on through. Well, Apple is pissed off. Oh, they're pissed off.

They're firing back at Epic now because they're pissed off, which I think they have a right to be pissed off because Epic basically with their whole lawsuit and they're trying to skirt around the rules of the Apple store and sideload their payment option.

We've talked about this for weeks now, going on and on and on, and Apple has finally said enough is enough. You guys broke the contract. Yeah. You know, you broke the contract, period. So we are going to basically sue you and get something back for us.

So the new suit doesn't actually have a monetary value on the damages. But, yeah, this is going to be a nasty fight. This is going to be a nasty fight. And, by the way, I don't see any way that Apple doesn't win. I don't either. Yeah. They signed the contract.

Yeah. They signed the contract. You can argue that you don't like the terms of the contract all you want. You signed it. Yeah, exactly. You knew what you were getting into. You knew what the deal was. You knew what the percentages were. You can have back-channel conversations with them. You can have front-channel conversations with Apple.

You can go and have the conversations with journalists saying, you know what, we don't really think that this percentage is fair. We don't think that the deal is fair. We'd like an open conversation with Apple to discuss about ways to make this more equitable for everyone. You can do all of that. You can't fucking sue. And here's, I mean, it's not like Epic is the little guy here, you know.

It's a multi-billion-dollar company. It isn't. They're massive. Yes. They're absolutely massive. It's not like Joe Blow, a game developer on the corner, is trying to sue them. This is a multi—this is basically rich guys fighting, you know. That's all it is. Who's going to be richer? It's giant versus giant.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. There's no David in this fight whatsoever. Anyway, Twitter's actually trying to work on its trend section, which I found interesting. It's been in the news a lot that it's kind of a dumpster fire. I find it somewhat useful, but— You have texted me multiple times saying, I wish they would put dead or alive or not related to that anytime a celebrity is trending.

And I'm always like— That's it. I never look at trending. What's trending? Who's trending? Who almost died? Well, that's the thing. I mean, literally, they're going to start putting headlines in some descriptions on what's going on. And, you know, like if someone does say something, then they'll have a little description on why they're trending.

If they're a celebrity. I just want dead or not. That's it. Yeah. We need a label. Dead or alive. Yeah. That's it. I'm like, look, if they're not dead, I don't care what they're doing. I really don't care. If they're dead, then I want to find out how they died and if it was embarrassing or not. You know? That's about it.

I'm like, do we have any auto-rex? You should just follow People Magazine. Yeah. Seriously. I'm like, all right. Or TMZ. TMZ is faster than all of them. But yeah. So either get rid of it or fix it. One of the two. But, you know, this middle of the road thing that you're trying to do here.

Because it's like, well, try and do it on some of them. We can't say it's going to be on everything because it's all algorithmically based. You'd have to have somebody sitting there with, you know, a giant sheet of everything that's trending all across the world because it's localized for most people. And yeah, I don't see this working very well.

Or they could, you know, get that new, what's the AI? The GPT-3? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. They can write something. Yeah, have that write all the articles until people figure out how to game it. All you really need is one line. That's it.

Just a headline. And that'll solve the entire problem. But yeah, somebody has to write them. Gee, paying people to do work. Interesting. What a concept.

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Media Candy. So I'm going to leap into this with a quick aside immediately, because I just realized this. I watched both Raised by Wolves, the first three episodes that dropped, and I watched all of Away, which was 10 episodes.

And I believe you wrote me and said that the first three episodes of The Boys had dropped at the time as well. And I thought that that was really an interesting compromise between the whole, let's dump the entire series right away so people can binge, versus the drip drop that we actually kind of prefer, even though our id and our ego doesn't prefer it because we want to be able to just binge.

But we've discussed multiple times that shows are actually more enjoyable if you give them that space and time to breathe. And I just think that this whole, like, drop the three right away so people can binge the first three episodes, figure out if they like the show or not, get into it, talk about it, get the buzz, and then slowly release the remaining episodes week by week to continue the buzz for a long enough period of time to get other people into the show is a really good compromise for these streaming services.

I'm sure an algorithm somewhere came up with that exact number to know what's going to hook you and get you going. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So let's get into it. Raised by Wolves, what did you think? Okay. So I went into this thinking I was going to like Raised by Wolves and not like Away. The exact opposite happened.

I loved Away. I really did enjoy it. And Raised by Wolves, I'm not sure I'm going back. I finished an episode and a half of Raised by Wolves, and I'm done. I'm done. Yeah. No. What I'll say for Raised by Wolves, Ridley Scott, it looks beautiful.

It's gorgeous. It's beautifully shot. It's stupid. It's dumber than a bag of fucking rocks. It is so stupid. I don't want to go into a huge spoiler alert here, but I mean, and I won't. I'll just talk about the whole idea of a future society with atheists.

Basically, it's atheists versus people that believe in some bizarre random god that would not evolve in our future society with all that technology. They're so far backwards. And then you've got the robot that basically, it's a nod to Metropolis that turns into the Metropolis robot. Yeah, which they don't explain.

Which they don't explain. Like, why? Why does any of that happen? None of it makes any sense. Maybe it'll make sense if you watch all the episodes. Who knows? Somehow, I doubt it. I doubt any of those points are going to be brought up because it's just meant to look cool, and that should be good enough for everyone. No, it's not good enough.

It's really not. It's silly. The show is stupid. Yeah. The whole premise is stupid. The acting is not great. No. It's pretty in parts, but not pretty enough to get past the fact that the story is just so damn dumb. Yeah.

Tell me why you like Away, because I'm having a hard time getting into that one. I liked Away a lot because it just – look, I was talking to my wife about it, trying to figure out why I dug it. And the reality is it just comes from professionals who have done sitcoms – not sitcoms – who have done dramas for a living.

Like, the people that – it's like the people that did Felicity, and it's the people that did 30-something, and it's the – it is straight-up formula. It is exactly what you would expect. Start – every episode starts with a little bit of drama. Then you've got the five people in the ship. Then we explore one of the person's backstories, and we end with a music video montage of them fixing problems.

Oh, God. But it works, and it's well done, and it doesn't talk down to you. You're going to hate a lot of the personal interactions, Jason, because, you know, it's the character development, and it's, you know, it's families, and it's love triangles, and it's all that sort of stuff.

But all the science is really well done, and it's plausible, and every aspect of the problems that they hit and the personalities of the astronauts and the kind of people that we would send up there, it all makes sense, and it's all really well done. And I got wrapped up in it, and I wanted to see them get to Mars, and I watched – I binged it, and it was good.

Okay, okay. I'll try it again, because it can't be any worse than Raised by Wolves. That's for damn sure. Oh, it's way better than Raised by Wolves. Okay. I mean, maybe that's one of the reasons I liked it so much, is I came off Raised by Wolves and just went, well, this is really ambitious sci-fi that has flopped, has totally fallen on its face and failed, while away, like, or at the library section.

Popcorn sci-fi, but it worked. All right. I will give it a shot. So, I did finish the first three episodes of The Boys Season 2. Mm-hmm. And if you liked The Boys Season 1, you're going to love The Boys Season 2. That's about all there is to it. It picks right up, and man, is it good.

It is good. I watched the first episode last night, and I think I'm just not in the headspace for it, because I've came away from Away, which was a very positive and uplifting view of humanity, and The Boys is not. No, The Boys is definitely, definitely not.

This is a series for 2020 in my book. Lots of craziness and violence and scary, scammy people. But, yeah, no, I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it. I was very bummed when I hit the three mark. I'm like, damn it.

Man. Especially since I thought I was on episode two still. I forgot that I had jumped to episode three. I'm like, this is a long episode. Oh, wait. It auto-played when I went to go take a leak. Damn it. Did finish Entourage all eight seasons of it, though. All right. Very sad when it was over.

It was such a good show. Really, really liked it. So if you want to go back and watch some shows, a TV show that could never be made today, and it's not even that old. It's not that old. The fun part was watching it when we were watching it so fast, because they're only like 25 minutes each.

In each season, you can watch the progression of cell phones and iMacs is what I really enjoy. I'm like, okay, what season are we at? Oh, we're at the Razer season. Oh, there's an iPhone 1. Oh, there's an iPhone 3GS, you know. It's pretty fun. And the trailer for Discovery Season 3 is out.

Have you had a chance to watch that? I have not. I have not seen any of the footage or seen anything from Star Trek Day yesterday, so I'm a bit behind the curve on all that. Yeah, well, no need to run to go watch it. I was really pumped for Discovery Season 3, and then I saw the trailer.

Now I'm not. Let's just say now I am not. I am. I don't know what the hell they were thinking with this trailer. Well, I just read the headline, and I'm already like, okay, so jumping into the future now. All right, we're already jumping into multiple dimensions. Can you just do a show where you go and discover things?

I guess we're going to get that, right? Strange New Worlds. We're going to get a classic Star Trek show from that. Kind of. Kind of. Sort of. You've got to watch the trailer to get it. But I think the reason that they jumped into the future, it's like 900-plus years into the future, was because that way they got around the paradox of all of this crazy spore technology that otherwise would have been in the middle of the canon timeline.

That, you know, they had to get rid of it somehow. Right. So let's just throw it in the future and get rid of it, where it makes more sense. And we'll put it there, where it makes more sense. Because we kind of stepped on our dick when we wrote season one of Discovery with all of this. With this crazy tech. Yeah. Exactly. So. Exactly.

Do we know how many more seasons there's going to be for Discovery? Because if they're dumping all this future tech into the future now, does that mean they end the show? Or do they go back and all of a sudden they've got an old school ship that looks exactly like Enterprise from 1960? I mean, how are they going to recover from this?

I have no idea. I have no idea. I mean, because Discovery can finish. I don't know what, obviously I haven't seen the season yet, so I don't know where they're going to finish it or if it's been picked up yet. But, you know, they're going to be doing the other series that's back in the main timeline with the other captains. So we'll see how that plays out, too.

So that'll be the bridge from the Discovery up until probably, you know, the original Star Trek. But, yeah. I think the men in black are going to show up with their little wands and mind erase the entire Federation. None of this ever happened. Yeah.

Well, get a chance. Watch it when you get a chance. We'll talk about it on follow-up on the next episode. All right. And I got a little bit of news about streaming services, at least in India. Variety is reporting that Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Hotstar, which I have not heard of, and 12 other companies have signed a self-regulatory code to stay on the good side of India's regulators.

Basically, they're going to be putting age labels, content descriptions, and a reporting system for violations, i.e. something that nobody will ever read, up and get that up and running because India doesn't want to do it themselves. Yeah, whatever. You know, I mean, honestly, fuck India.

Our podcast can't be played there. So I don't really care about India that much. If you put an explicit tag on your podcast, you can't be in the iTunes, or I'm sorry, Apple Podcasts catalog in India. Well, look, India, we're self-regulating. Yeah. Yeah.

You should be okay with us. It's all right. Anyways. God, I saw this one come through this morning. So this is a little bit of breaking news. So this is on deck for me. The Social Dilemma on Netflix. It says, This documentary drama hybrid, what scares me right there, explores the dangerous human impact of social networking with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations.

Oh, documentary drama hybrid. I'm out. It's going to be horrible. That's what I mean. I'm just like, I don't know. I have to watch the trailer and see if it's going to be. There's only one social dilemma right now, and this will tie in or foreshadow our Moron of the Week section. To leave your house or not to leave your house. Don't leave your house.

There's your social dilemma. Do not go to Sturgis. No. Oh, God. And Xena, Warrior Princess, turned 25 yesterday. Wow. Feeling old. Didn't show up on my Google, but. Wow.

Lucy Lawless must be up there in ages. Aged now by then. Mm-hmm. Yep, but she still looks good. Looks really good. And I got this, too, because it was Star Trek Day. I signed up for the Star Trek T-shirt club over on Amazon. You're a bit.

Just because you're a fool. I know. I just want to get one of them. I just want an OG Star Trek shirt. It's like Loot Crate just branded themselves a Star Trek Loot Crate, and you were all in. If you look, they've got a ton of these types of things for different properties, like Marvel and all that.

But I'm like, ah, maybe they'll have something good in there. I'll try it like once or twice. I can always use some. I wear the same T-shirt every damn day. I have multiple copies of it, but it's the same style. But, yeah, why not? Me, too. I've got a drawer full of black T-shirt, V-neck T-shirts, all from someplace.

I can't even remember where. My wife just reorders them for me all the time. Yeah, mine are Hanes V-neck short-sleeved black T-shirts. I have, like, 15 of them in my closet, and I have some that are still brand new that when I need a shiny one to go out for the first time, I just rip the tag off and throw it on, and Bob's your uncle.

Yeah, mine just gets cycled in. This one's old, so now it's a workout shirt. Get a new one. That's how it goes. But soon, maybe I'll have a Live Long and Prosper T-shirt. All right. Anyway, so finally, some good news in 2020. The Kardashians are finally hanging up their hat on TV.

You'll note that they actually don't end until 2021, so we still have to get through the rest of 2020. The news is in 2020. Yes, the actual ending will be next year, but, yeah, they're like, ah, we've got enough money now. We're good. I'm sure ratings are down. I mean, you know, there are a gazillion versions of them now, so.

And why watch a TV show when you can just watch their drama on Instagram? At the library. Cory Doctorow's got a new book coming out, and it is book three of the Little Brother series.

It's called Attack Surface. Well, you know how he usually does his book releases. The audio books for Cory's stuff, he hates Amazon, so he won't go through Audible because it's, you know, you're locked in. It's got DRM and all that other crap. But he started a Kickstarter for this one, so you can go get the audio book on Kickstarter.

And it is read by Amber Benson, who, if you were a Buffy fan back in the day, you will remember her. But, yeah, I went out and pre-ordered it, and it'll come in a couple weeks or several weeks. It comes out in October. So that could either be four and a half years or two days ago, depending on the timeline.

2019 is affecting the brain. But, yeah, I mean, I'll check it out. I read the other two books. I didn't think the second one was as good as his little brother. But, you know, he's got to get a hit for me sooner than later because his last couple books I just didn't, couldn't get into. I've never really, yeah, he's just one of those fringe guys for me.

Occasionally I read a book of his and I like it. Most of the time I don't. Although, to be fair, I feel like every time I launch Twitter, I'm reading a Cory Doctorow book. Yeah, that's the thing. He's too near future science fiction. You know, you can have near future science fiction like William Gibson does that's a little bit out of reach.

His is just like reading the fucking names. His is tomorrow. Yeah, it's really it. So, but, yeah, I'll check it out. I threw him some bones. Excellent. I'd like to support the Cory. Moron of the Week. Well, as I mentioned, most of California is burning right now.

One of the larger fires, the El Dorado Fire, has burned through more than 7,000 acres now and forced the evacuations of 3,000 people. As of this morning, it's 11,000. It's 11,000. That's right. It's gone up quite a bit since this article was written. You'll never guess how this fire started, Jason.

Oh, I've seen the news. I know how it started. Gender reveal party in a park using pyrotechnics. And this is not the first time that something like this has happened. In 2017, a Border Patrol agent started a 47,000-acre wildfire that caused more than $8 million in damages in southern Arizona, doing the same thing.

Two years later, an explosion at a gender reveal party killed an Iowa woman in October of 2019. In November of that year, an elaborate gender reveal party led to a plane crash in Texas, as a plan to dump 3,350 gallons of pink water went wrong.

And yeah, so everybody's just saying, can you stop this? Even the woman that apparently started the whole trend of gender reveal parties has written an op-ed saying, knock it off. Yeah. You know how I told people the sex of my baby? And by the way, nobody cares, really. But I just told them.

Yeah, exactly. So we're having a boy. Yeah. Yay. Okay. Okay. Moving on. Can I get another beer? That's about it. Oh, wait. Hold on a second. Can I have to cause millions of dollars of damages and destroy some people's homes to announce this? Yeah. So it'll be interesting to see if either the photographer or the people who ordered it are going to get charged with anything.

Because it's millions and millions of dollars in taxpayer money right now. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yep. Yeah. Okay. Second bet here. We kind of knew this was going to happen. The annual 10-day motorcycle rally held in Sturgis, South Dakota. Began August 7th. Ran until August 16th.

Was attended by nearly half a million people. Didn't use masks. Smash Mouth played. Yep. We know. We know. Yep. So studies out now. They used anonymized cell phone data to show foot traffic at restaurant and bars, entertainment venues, hotels, campgrounds.

Rose considerably in and around the Sturgis area. They've looked at the rate of new COVID-19 cases in that county, as well as where people went back to. Over a quarter million coronavirus cases directly linked to Sturgis. That's how it goes.

I mean, you can't be surprised at this. No, no, no, no, no. Not surprised. Saddened. Deeply. Yeah. Yeah. So if we conservatively assume that all of these cases were non-fatal, then these cases represent a cost of over $12.2 billion. Based on the statistical cost of a COVID-19 case of $46,000.

That is enough to have paid each of the estimated 462,182 rally attendees $26,553 not to attend. That's funny. And let's just end with a quote from the event itself. Now we're all here together tonight and we're being human beings once again.

Fuck that COVID shit. Quote from Smash Mouth lead singer Steve Harwell at the concert at Sturgis. And Brian, well, if you haven't had enough Smash Mouth already, there is a YouTube video called Smashed Mouths, an all-star deepfake smash-up. It's pretty funny. It's actually pretty funny.

I actually watched it. It was pretty funny. I saw somebody else post on somebody, because obviously everybody was posting this news about that. And somebody was like, I guess I need to go through my music collection and remove everything from Smash Mouth. And I was like, you should have done that anyways. Yeah, how did it ever get in there to begin with? I mean, I get it.

You know, back in the day, big old Napster and Torrance scoops, you end up with a lot of music that you wouldn't necessarily want. But come on. Yeah, seriously, Smash Mouth. Jeez. And finally, to kind of put a button on all of this, because this is never going to go away and we are never going to get over this until it just magically goes away by itself.

That's supposedly what's going to happen. Even Olympics legend Carrie Walsh Jennings has caused a stir about wearing masks, because she posted herself going to a grocery store without a mask. And then, you know, obviously, I love this. Picture the scene.

She is just, of course, sitting at home reading Ralph Waldo Emerson, and that caused her to realize that she shouldn't wear a mask. How? Well, because it woke her up, Jason, and she wondered how she could mindfully and compassionately stand up for her rights and her freedoms, that her constitution has guaranteed us without being reckless or putting anyone else in danger.

Well, she failed, because by going to a grocery store without a mask, you are being reckless and putting other people in danger. That's pretty much it. Anyways. So, yes, she's doing all this. And, of course, the Trump hordes are coming out going, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Civil, we have rights, man. Yeah! So, but she obviously got a lot of blowback as well, as she should, because you are putting people in danger, and you are being reckless. It isn't about you. It's not all about you. Somebody should smack her in the head with that gold medal.

Over at Patreon, we've got some new subscribers. Crazy Igor, William, and Michael. And over at PayPal, we've got Doug, David, Kirk, Breed, Andrew, William, Michael, Mark, Adam, Ralph, and Ruffall. And Stephen, as well, who writes in, hello, Grumps, I hear you guys talking about, if you don't have three copies of your data, you don't have it at all.

I just bought a Western Digital NAS on a RAID 1, and I have a backup of it on my keys. Do you guys have any suggestions what I could do for my third backup copy? Find a friend and mail it off to him. And recycle that every month. Yeah, you can do that. Just, you know, just another USB drive, make a copy, put it somewhere safe.

Outside of your house, you can get a safe deposit box, keep it there. There's plenty of places, but you want it off-site. You do not want an on-prem backup, because if your house burns down, like around here, it could happen any minute, you want that to be somewhere safe. Yep, and Nikolai also writes in, Dear Grumps, I was also the one listener on Spotify.

Well, I expected I wasn't, but for ever so brief a moment in time, I felt really special. I hate Spotify's UI for podcasts, but it gets the jobs done. It gets the job done. And I don't want too many apps cluttering up my phone. I ditched Patreon and switched to PayPal. And at the same time, I've upped my pledge to 15 bucks each month.

Be safe, be snarky, and grump on. Thank you. Thank you very much. And over on Twitter, Josh writes in, I listen to almost every episode in its entirety. I just get frustrated when you state your opinion on some things and with a tone that indicates they are facts. We have too much false information in the news, and we don't need any more from a podcast that has a reasonable reach.

Well, first, thank you for thinking that we have a reasonable reach. Yeah, I was going to say thanks. Thanks for that. That makes us feel a lot better. Josh, we were getting into this a little bit on Twitter. We are not a news program. We are a podcast. We talk about our opinions often. We try to correct things when we find out they're wrong.

We try to be as reasonably informed about things as we can be. But we're a fucking podcast, man. Sometimes it slips through the cracks, man. I mean, look, you know, I like to think we're a lot more right than wrong, and sometimes we fuck up. And we always say when we fuck up.

But, yeah, there it is. So, there you go. I'm sorry. If you want us for tech news, you're in the wrong place, man. Opinions. YappyFox writes in, I'm torn in the wireless charging inefficiency. You need to factor in all those charging cables that break and need replacing. Which is worse, trash cables or the wasted electricity?

I don't know how many cables you're going through, YappyFox. Must be all those outfits you're wearing. But I really don't go through that many. Sure, occasionally one will get frayed or break or whatnot. But oftentimes, the only times I need to change my cables are because Apple has changed the cable I need.

Yeah, and it's been a long time since they swapped out the lightning connector. So, yeah, I usually have more cables than I know what to do with because you get one with every phone. So, yep. My roommate goes through them pretty heavily. I've noticed that. I don't know if it's just a female thing, but they're always bent and frayed at the ends.

But I don't know. I don't know. I'm still going with the electricity side of things because, you know, that's just... The planet. Yeah, that's what I go with. And it's just faster to charge with cable, which is the other thing. And Seth writes in, hey, guys, I thought you'd appreciate another 2021st.

And this is a link to USA Today. What's a zombie fire? Dangerous underground fires spark record-setting wildfires in Arctic Circle. Welcome to California, Arctic Circle. And Stuart sent us this link. A robot wrote this article. Are you scared yet, human? And this is from The Guardian.

And I believe this was the... What were we talking... It's the GPT-3 that wrote this entire article. It was given an assignment. Convince us that robots come in peace and won't be here to kill us. And it made me feel the exact opposite by the time I got done with it. I am terrified. Yes, very terrified.

And Twitter needs to just go buy... You don't even have to buy it. It's open source, I believe. And get this going for their headlines because it's pretty damn scary. Pretty damn scary. And RightFilm Sleeper Pete writes... I've deliberately bought an alarm clock precisely to stop me taking the phone to bed.

Well, it's pretty smart. Just don't get a smart alarm clock. You're even smarter. Yeah, there you go. AJ writes in... De-identified data and AWS and Amazon are different companies. It's all just a little too nothing to see here, folks, really. And this is a link from ABC in Australia, mate.

Amazon's Vector Power Smart Meter deal puts how you live your life on web giant servers. So, the New Zealand company Vector has made a deal with Amazon Web Services to collect, analyze, and sell electricity meter data from 1.6 million households in Australia and New Zealand. So, these are smart meters that will collect information about energy use and can provide insights into when you are at home, what appliances you are using, and when.

And obviously, privacy campaigners are concerned about this data going to Amazon. Ah, yeah. Privacy's dead. Get over it. And it's not like you can probably change your power company. I'm guessing they have a monopoly.

Yeah, I'm guessing it's a monopoly. And, yeah, so, you know, I'm not too concerned about deals of this nature, except for the fact that, you know, eventually the data just gets left on an AWS server with no privacy or passwords or anything. Yeah, no password. And then everybody gets the data. Well, since they're coupling with AWS to do this, maybe AWS will have a default password that will be easy to crack.

Would be nice. We'll go with that. Nathan writes, and this may save you some money if you have AT&T. You may be eligible for Spotify for free through the AT&T Thanks app. That's what I did. I'm going to have to look that up. Yeah, well, I'd get Spotify for free, but I wouldn't be able to make a phone call. Thanks, AT&T.

AT&T sucks in your neck of the woods. Yes, it does. So bad. And Adam sends a link from the LA Times column, how millions from Uber and Lyft are funding the harassment of a critic. Yeah, this kind of drives me nuts. I know there are a lot of people campaigning against AB5 here in California or, well, I guess now they've moved on to yes on Prop 22, which will try to overturn AB5 here.

So many numbers and letters. It's basically the whole deal about if you work full time for any gig economy companies like Uber or Lyft, then you're an employee and they have to treat you like one. And they're saying no to all that. And if you wonder where the money is going that they're collecting, because remember, they don't make a profit, but yet they managed to have millions of dollars to fight this.

It also includes harassing people that are coming out to talk about it, including this woman, Vina DeBal. So this entire article gets into all the different ways that they are basically doxing her and millions of other things that they're doing to her because, you know, because they can't fight fair. Interesting.

So maybe I should take that fuckprop22.com domain that I have and maybe just table that one. I don't really need that kind of hassle. Jesus. And over at GOG.show, Justin writes in, hey, geeks, recently new listener and love the show. I was turned on to the Brave browser a few months ago and it was, oh, it was pastly okayed by you.

Yeah, so we said okay to Brave in the past and we didn't say okay right away. We always say we're going to try it for a while and then give you the verdict. And it says, recently you mentioned it's not all it's cracked up to be. Not a fan of Microsoft browsers. I've used Firefox in the past with all the security conscious browsers out there.

Which do you like that keeps data mining at a minimum? I'm still using Vivaldi. If anybody's going to mine our data, let's have it be in a different country. Yes, exactly. Let the Chinese have it. This isn't the Chinese. This is the original team that built Opera. Oh, right, yes.

So there's Scandinavian somewhere up there. Okay. But, yeah, I've just been using Vivaldi since the Switch and it's been rock solid. I've got all my plugins to keep my private data private and everything seems to be peachy keen. Yep, I still use Vivaldi as well.

I basically only have Vivaldi and Chrome installed because every now and then, very randomly, I'll find something that some site that Vivaldi doesn't work on very well. So I've got Chrome as a backup, but hardly ever launch it. I have to use it every week to publish this show, so I have to keep Chrome around.

But, yeah, otherwise it works great. Yep. Helen writes in, I'm not tech savvy in the least. That's why it took me years to listen after Jordan Harbinger introduced me to your show. I took the plunge and plowed through from episode one to current day. Bravo, Helen. We came up with, if you actually do that, we'll send you some, like, magnets and stuff.

So send us your address. Stickers and magnets. Yeah, send us your address. And, you know, some drugs because you've got to be crazy. It took me six months. I've learned a lot and I'm forever terrified hearing, go ahead, Jason. Deliveroo! For the first time was glorious and shocking.

Puts a smile on my face. Thanks for hanging on through the tough spots. I'll be sending money your way soon. Grump on. Thank you. Thank you, Helen. Yeah, definitely send us your address and we'll throw a little care package in the mail for you. And Annie Wonder Woman writes in, hey, grumps, I get all sorts of news delivered daily.

And this one I thought was just perfect. Cyber squatting. Who knew there was so much squatting going down? Discussion for the lovely furry Dave, maybe? Well, cyber squatting has been around since the internet started. So this is not a new practice. Nope. I do like the different definitions that they came up with.

Obviously, the one we know is typosquatting, where a domain is created using a well-known brand with a slight misspelling. But combo squatting, popular trademarks combined with words such as security, like Netflix payments, security.com. Homeograph squatting, taking advantage of internationalized domain names, where Unicode characters are allowed.

Sound squatting, words that sound like variants of popular domains. Bit squatting and level squatting. I just like the definitions. It's kind of cool that it's got so granular. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's good stuff. Yeah, but it's never going away. Nope.

Never going away. Nope. And speaking of things never going away, Mateus writes in, hello there. And suddenly the death per capita is higher in the USA than even Sweden. That is not good. Not at all. No, no, it's not. Annie says, oh yeah, now to something completely different. Install the paid version of the Plex media server.

Add your music library. Add the Plex music app to your phone and done. Thomas also writes in about this. This is when I was talking about trying to get my music library onto my phone. Brian says, you should look into Plex for streaming your music library to your phone once you have it sorted out on a NAS.

While I mostly use it for movies and TV, it has a good interface with lots of sorting and filtering options. I have found it to be very reliable and will transcode the audio if the device you were listening on does not support the source file. Great show and keep on grumping. I have not gotten my NAS yet. That is on the list of things to do.

So my immediate question is, does that mean it only streams over Wi-Fi in my house or can I go on a bike ride and stream my music from us? You should be able to go on a bike ride and stream your music if you set up your NAS properly. Okay, good. Yep. That's part of what makes Plex so cool is people, you set up your media library and when you go on vacation, you can still connect to it and get your files off and watch movies and stuff like that.

Nice. Well, I'm looking forward to that eventually. And how is it already? September writes in. Hi, what's up? We still need PCs for better cooling so you can pump in more power. P.S. Don't know if it checked out already, but Ted Lasso and Apple TV is fun and uplifting.

Ciao and gracias. Everybody's been telling me about Ted Lasso. Me too. Me too. So I don't think I'm ready for the boys yet. So I might watch one episode of that tonight. Yeah, it's funny. Every time somebody tweets at me with about Ted Lasso, one of the stars of the film always likes the tweet.

So apparently, he's got a bot, I'm guessing. I'm pretty sure he's not sitting around. Waiting for Twitter mentions. Exactly. And fiend of the show, Barrett Rees writes in. Have either of you two checked out the short 16-minute documentary on Netflix? John was trying to contact aliens.

It's really a great watch and I wish I had his vinyl collection. Anyhow, enjoy, stay safe and stay grumpy. No, I haven't watched that yet. Never heard of it. We'll have to throw it in there. 16 minutes is right up my alley. Kirk writes in. Hey guys, I signed up with Patreon for $10 a month as well as just did a one-off $20 PayPal donation.

Well, thank you very much. And I bought a mug and a mask. Been listening to your show for years. Was a Patreon subscriber years ago, but money got tight. Money situation has improved, so I'm back on board. Really appreciate your show and look forward to every episode. You've been an island of sanity in a very tough year. Keep on grumping.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Yes, and Ralph writes in. Jason, a couple months ago you were bemoaning the fact that you couldn't find a reasonably priced USB-C multi-port expansion dock. If you're still in the market, this $30 one may fill the bill. And we've got a link to Amazon from the pluggable USB-C hub multi-port adapter, 7-to-1 hub compatible with MacBook Pro, Windows, Chromebook, Dell XPS, Thunderbolt 3, and more, 4K HDMI 3, USB 3.0 SD, and MicroCard SD card reader, 87-watt charging by pluggable technologies.

I'm getting better at reading those. It's like, you know, I could probably sit underwater for two or three minutes now just because of Amazon. Exactly. Your lung capacity has expanded. I wasn't looking for a USB-C multi-port expansion dock. I was looking for basically a USB-C expansion port.

I want more than two damn USB-C ports on a hub. That's what I want. And they all have two ports. I need three. I want three, damn it. And you can't get three. So it looks like I might just have to buy a MacBook Pro 16-inch just to get four ports. Bastards.

Vincent writes in. I can imagine someone in Camden Market in London. Come get your amazing, tasty Amazon reviews. Five stars for a pound. And he's got some emojis here. And this is a link over at The Verge. Amazon takes down a five-star fraud in the UK. This is a story of a gentleman who was very prolific with his reviews to the tune of one an hour for a very long time.

And then he would sell all the product reviews. Yeah. Yeah. Like somebody from China would send him a bunch of crap, then he would review it, and then he would sell it. So got busted. You're not allowed to do that, according to Amazon. And Raph writes in. Yikes. And forwards an Adam Carolla tweet.

Adam Carolla, turns out the people dying from COVID are old or sick or both. How many of you pussies got played and who's going to get played the next time? Yeah, this is exactly why I stopped listening to his show as soon as coronavirus hit. Yeah. Don't agree with his opinion on it. I think it's being proven wrong on a daily basis.

So, yeah. Stop listening. Yeah. Well, I mean, he's talking about the CDC report that says, like, you know, over 94% were old or sick or both. That nobody was really talking about. But, yeah, I mean, this just shows how that 6% of normal people who got sick and died.

And also, it doesn't even go into the extra 200,000 people who were dead that, like, are out of bounds of the stuff. It's a very... Or that we're increasingly finding out that there are long-term health implications from just even getting it, even if you're asymptomatic, including heart disease. There's all sorts of...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Mark writes in, hello. So, I know you guys hate this book because I suggested it to you and you were clear enough about how you feel about it. I like the first book of the series and to your bliss. Cheers, guys. Ha-ha. And this is a link over to Polygon, Game of Thrones, Benioff, and Weiss to adapt sci-fi epic The Three-Body Problem at Netflix.

I will watch the first episode. Yeah, we all liked the first book. The problem was the second and third books. Yeah, the ever-growing second and third books. But the first book, I thought, was perfect. It was a really good book. Let's take a look at the people involved here.

The Game of Thrones writers who fucked up the ending of that show. Rheon Johnson, who single-handedly fucked up all of Star Wars. Can't wait. Here's the nice thing about The Three-Body Problem. That comes to them pre-fucked up. That's true. They don't even have to do any work. Oh, God.

Yeah, that's going to be horrid. Juiced writes in, good evening, regarding the latest show and the pie hole where your wife likes ads in the web interface under group management. You can say, okay, a lot of people wrote me in and said that I can put in the work to make sure that my wife continues to get ads and I can stop ads for me and the kids. And so thank you for everybody that told me about this, including Mateus, who also wrote in a huge thing about it, too.

So, thank you. Yep. Yep. It's all in the DNS. And over at iTunes, Wine Freak gave us a three-star. Like a stopped clock. Notwithstanding their claim to have predicted every negative outcome in the world of tech for years, they don't seem to be able to generate enough income to actually do anything besides talk.

A stop clock is right twice a day, so they do occasionally come up with something interesting. Although it's mostly just an audio read of other tech sites and feeds. I appreciate the three-star rating. That's an honest one. It's not a one-star just because, you know, you like Trump. Do anything besides talk?

We're a podcast. That's what we're supposed to do. That's what we're supposed to do. Yeah. And I love this because, on one hand, you know, people get pissed off at us and say that we're just reading news. And on the other hand, people get pissed off at us because we're giving opinions. I know. Take a fucking side.

Come on. You can't please anybody any of the time. No, you can't. Well, we were able to please Olaf. Olaf T in the UK gave us a five-star review. Voices of reason in the world, even before COVID, the Grumps were a helpfully cynical counterweight to the mountains of inane faffery, which threatened to smother us all.

In the current circumstances, they are an invaluable aid to sanity. Well, thank you. Appreciate that. 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 so we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to gog.show slash review and toss us a five-star and snarky review.

And Jason's going to say something about Overcast here, even though they changed the algorithm and we're never going to reach the lofty heights we had before. Well, we're moving up the stack. All right. When they changed the algorithm, we hit number 35. We premiered on the list at number 35, and we're up to number 30.

So it does work. Moving on up. Yep. Click on those little stars next to the episode, and we'll see if we can get back on top. Closing shout-outs! Shout-out to all the firefighters that are working so hard in California right now.

It is insane here. We don't even just have California firefighters. We have firefighters from other states. We have international firefighters. Keep at it. We're burning, man. Yep. Big ups to the super scoopers from Canada yesterday. They saved Topanga Canyon in, like, record time.

Because that idiot... You have to remember that California is the land of the high-speed chase. Any TV show will always be interrupted by a high-speed chase. And there was one yesterday, and this guy basically set Topanga Canyon on fire on his way out. Fortunately, it was on his way out, not his way in, because on the way in is by my house.

But they knocked it out in 45 minutes because they had multiple helicopters and the super scoopers, which just got here from Canada. So thanks, guys. Dropping maple cookies on fires. Bastard. Smells nice. Yes, it does. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. The show is a labor of love, but your support keeps the show going. If you like the show, please visit GOG.show slash donate to help us out. We'll love you forever. Or visit GOG.shop and pick up some good old-fashioned GOG swag. If you can't do that, please pass the show along to a friend.

Word of mouth is the only way the show grows, so spread the grump far and wide. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 470. From there, you can find links to old episodes, leave feedback, ask questions, donate to the show, buy our swag, and get links to stuff we like. Stay grumpy and decide if you want us to just read news or have opinions.

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