474: Boring Guy

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 episode 474 of Grumpy Old Geeks for September 23rd, 2020. I'm Jason DeFilippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. I had two weird work things happen to me this week, Jason. Or not weird, but interesting. And it's doubly interesting because I'm not really working. That is the funnier part of it. Like, all I'm really doing is the podcast and, you know, full-time teaching and babysitting and all that sort of stuff.

But I got a work email. And for the first time ever, I saw as part of the little thing at the bottom where you provide your, you know, all your pertinent details about your work, your position, your phone numbers, your email, all that sort of stuff. I saw gender listing, which I think is nice. No, it's good. It's a good thing, right?

Preferred gender. You know, call me he, him or whatever. Okay. Now you should put that in as part of your little tagline. Just help people along. I thought that was a nice touch. Okay, what are you putting? It's 2020. He, him. I'm pretty standard. I'm pretty boring. I'm cis.

Okay. You know, so boring guy. That's what it tells everybody. And the other interesting thing I got is, and I already know your opinion on this, but I'm going to ask you anyways. What's your statute of limitations in terms of helping a client that has fired you? Three years.

That's pretty long. That's longer than I thought you'd give them. Yeah, I mean, three years. Three years is free? Or three years you still expect to get paid if it's something that involves some effort? If somebody comes back to me after three years and says, hey, can you help me out with this? I will do it, but for a price.

I will not do it. There's no free involved. Yes, yes. Well, I'm seven years on, and someone reached out to me, and they're kind of annoyed that I was like, no. Yeah, after three years, you are well within your rights to say, actually, after six months, you're well within your rights to say, go fuck yourself.

Well, I would actually argue that, you know, if it wasn't a, if it was kind of an acrimonious split, you're right, you're in your rights one week after. Oh, no, no, no. The instant, the instant, you know? No, so this is a funny, like, it's a client that, it wasn't a bad thing, but I turned over all the information.

You know what I'm like. I'm pretty anal about this stuff. Yeah, we both are, yeah. Yeah, we both are. So I was like, all right, well, here you go. Here's everything you need. And for some reason, seven years on now, they can't find something, and they're reaching out to me. And I'm just kind of like, no, no. Yeah. It's been seven years. Figure it out yourselves.

I've had children in the time that it's taken you to write me. There's been a pandemic. I've had kids. This isn't even my email address anymore. Come on. I'm a podcaster. All right. I just wanted to make sure that I wasn't being way out of line, because judging from the tone of their emails, they think I am.

Okay. Well, you know what? Screw them. Because when, like my last client that I left, I gave them every single thing that I've ever done. You know, all the backups, all the credentials that I had listed out very nicely. And then, and everybody should do this. You need to go through and make sure that they remove access to every single thing that you have access to. Because if something goes wrong, you're the first person that they're going to come after.

Yes. One of my last clients that I had, that was not a very good split. And they did not remove me from anything. And yes, I got some threatening legal emails. And I was like, that's your guys' job. You take me off the stuff. I have not accessed it. Oh, I tested it. I tested it. You know, I'm like, okay, I still have access to this. I have, yeah, I have access to this. I still have access to this. Get me off of this. I'm very adamant about removing my access to anything. You know, it's like in the future, if you want to hire me to come back, fine.

But for now, I need to make sure, because I've been in that situation you've been in, and I'm like, no, we are going to have an email trail where you confirm to me that you have removed my access, and I cannot get into your server, your social accounts, your email accounts, this, that, the other. Get it gone.

Yep. Agreed. So, good times. Speaking of getting it gone, Apple has gotten gone of something that I really, really liked. Force touch support from the new watches, or the old watches, even. Well, yeah, the new watch OS.

Yeah, we got watch OS 7, and it irks the crap out of me. So, when I have a bunch of, you know, notifications, I just like to force touch it. I use the force, Luke, and then they go away. Yes, they don't do that anymore. And clearing notifications is a pain.

Yes. You got to scroll. You got to scroll. I've had complaints about how you delete text messages and things like that from your watch forever. It's multiple, way too many clicks. I've actually had a lot of problems with the watch OS 7 update. I don't know if you have, but for me, my watch has just rebooted a couple times. It's just shut down.

When I charge it at night, it will randomly flash up. Why is it flashing? It's charging. It's sitting on a charger. It should not be lighting up at all. And it does repeatedly every single night since I've done the update, which drives my wife nuts. And now I barely have a charged phone because I end up, you know, half asleep, just grabbing my watch off the charger and throwing it into the corner because it keeps lighting up.

Check out the alarm clock mode because that might have gotten turned on. It's not on. Oh, it's not? No. Oh, then hell if I know. It will just light up for no reason. Well, charge it in the kitchen then. I guess so. I mean, that's what I'm going to have to do now.

Yeah. The one that I've gotten is, so I turn my phone onto airplane mode before I go to bed. And then I let my phone, let my watch charge and I get up and usually I go to bed and I've got about 30% charge left. And over the past, you know, since the iOS or watchOS 7 update about like here, I have a very set schedule five in the morning.

I put my watch on nine o'clock at night. It goes on the stands. It's 35% charge. This has been going on for years now, or at least since I got the five. Nowadays, though, burning through the power, six o'clock in the afternoon, you've got 10% power left. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep. Yep.

And so experiencing that. Yep. What I figured out was when my phone is on airplane mode, my watch is trying to connect to my phone using Bluetooth instead of Wi-Fi, which is taking up more power. Because I looked at it this morning, I'm like, I've been up for about 45 minutes and I am down 10%.

This is not right. And then I realized, oh, my phone's still on airplane mode. I turned my phone off of airplane mode and my watch, the battery drain slowed down, you know, considerably. Right. So if you have an Apple Watch paired to an iPhone and you're in airplane mode, just, you know, just expect that watch to just start, you know, you can just sit there and watch the percentage drop.

It's ridiculous. Yeah. Yeah. It's, you know, Apple, I don't know what's going on with Apple, but things are just getting worse and worse, aren't they? Well, we're back into one of those cycles. You know, we've had these cycles before. If you go back to the beginnings of the show, we had these cycles where Apple can do no wrong.

Everything works. And then, oh, Jesus. Oh, geez. All the really good engineers have vested. So we're getting the fresh talent in. Then they get good at it. Then shit, they vested. Okay. We're back to the cycle. We are obviously on the vesting roller coaster again and on the downswing.

Yeah, my phone power charging is going crazy again with that latest update. So this is not a good cycle for them. And Johnny Ive is gone. He's buggered off. So take it with what it is. Okay. That's more Apple talk than we've done in a very, very long time.

And speaking of taking it for what it is, on Saturday, the TikTok deal has changed yet again. Oh, of course. Of course. Yeah. You mean the TikTok scam? Yes, the TikTok scam. The backroom shenanigan bullshit? Well, as the article that I'm reading from is titled, this TikTok deal stinks.

In so many ways. It's like week-old fish. Yes. Three-day-old fish. Well, Walmart is back in the mix. So now it's Oracle and Walmart who will be trusted technology partners in a new TikTok global of which they'll own 20%. And other American investors will supposedly make TikTok's Chinese parent company, ByteDance, a minority owner going forward.

This new entity will be based in the U.S., will reportedly hire 25,000 more U.S. workers, and put Oracle in charge of securely hosting U.S. users' data to address concerns over cybersecurity. There's obviously a lot we don't know about this. There's a lot that I'm sure even they don't know because they're just announcing things and really trying to figure it out later.

We have no idea how any of this will be audited. We don't know how much actual power Oracle and Walmart will have over TikTok's operations. So we have no idea about any of this sort of stuff. We have no idea if the algorithm and the underlying code will make its move to our shores, but you can bet it won't.

And it will continue to be coded in a country whose social media platforms double as tools of surveillance and censorship, which was the whole point of doing this to begin with. No, the whole point of doing this was two-pronged, two-pronged. One, to get back at TikTok for screwing up Trump's little rally and selling out the tickets.

And the other is to manufacture a problem so Trump can get a win. Oh, and third, third, to give a little bit of love back to Larry Ellison and his fundraising campaign. So this is a three-pronged approach. This is Poseidon's trident of bullshit.

Yeah, and if you really want to dig into it, we'll have the links in the show notes. But there are three main points that the article makes. It's a misleading deal. It's a grafty deal. And it's utterly ridiculous. In the news. We haven't really talked about COVID and working from home in a little while.

And we're all – well, most of us are still in COVID and working from home while other people have just kind of moved on and pretended it doesn't exist and gone back to real life. What's that like? That must be nice. I don't know. I really wish I had one of those bucket buckets. That must be nice until you end up on the ventilator.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, the old bucket bucket. That's pretty much what you need. But I did love this one. This is an interview with a scientist and mom who had little secret during her CNN appearance. Gretchen Goldman, a research director at a science nonprofit, went on Wolf Blitzer's CNN show on Monday to offer commentary on President Trump's latest appointment to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Let's not get into the politics, but shockingly, she said that this guy's stupid and should never have been put in position. Right. As, you know, most scientists believe about most of his appointees. Yeah. But as they point out, just below, off camera, her smart yellow jacket, she was wearing a tiny pair of shorts, and she stresses they were shorts, not underwear, and some famously functional water shoes.

And the well-lit, tasteful room she was speaking from under the desk that you could see was strewn with toys, her computer chair camera balanced on a chair. So her husband took a picture of that, and she posted side-by-side on Twitter, and it went viral because, you know, this is kind of the reality that we're all dealing with.

So it was a really good article, and I just liked this one little bit. They asked her, how have you and your husband been handling taking care of the kids while working? And she said, I feel like the answer is poorly. She's honest. She's honest, and this is our reality right now.

She says, I typically do two hours of work at night after they're in bed because I just can't during the workday because of the nature of my job. We couldn't do regular schedules. I know some families do like you take them 9 to 12, and I'll do 12 to 3, which is what my wife and I initially started to do. But then, you know, shit just goes out the window.

We have meetings at different times, and some come up that are more rapid response. So it's not that predictable. We've done it haphazardly just to try to make ends meet. The kids have gotten a lot of TV. I'm deeply ashamed that the two-year-old knows how to tell Netflix he's still watching. Don't be ashamed.

We're all with you. Yeah. Welcome. Welcome to the new normal. Yep. I haven't heard anybody say that in a while because I think everybody that said it back then has been punched in the face enough times. Yes. Well, Facebook is back in the news in the EU. This is an interesting story.

Mm-hmm. Did you get a chance to go through this one and read it? I did. I did. Yeah. So some people over in the EU are not very happy about Facebook exfiltrating some of the data of the EU residents back over the pond, back to the United States.

Yes. And this is literally one person that is doing this. And, you know, I would like to send her some flowers. And say, hey, yeah, this is good. This is good. But Facebook has come out, you know, guns a-blazing, fists a-swinging, however you want, whatever you want to call it.

And say, well, guys, if you really want to do this, then we're just going to have to not operate in the EU. And I'm like, really? Good. Really? Call their bluff. How can we get that done here? Pretty please? I would love to see that because that would actually destroy Facebook.

Because if all of a sudden somebody had to go, if everybody in the EU had to go three weeks without Facebook, they'd just find something else. And that would be that. It would be like the end of the Truman Show. It would be like the end of the Truman Show. Everybody's watching. Everybody's watching. And then it's over. And it's like, well, what else is on? And they wouldn't go back if it came back.

Yeah. So this is a giant game of chicken that Facebook is playing with the EU. And honestly, I hope they don't blink. I hope the EU doesn't blink. But, you know, they will. Me too. They will. They will. Unfortunately. But it's just one of those things where it's like you think about it and you're like, man, it would be nice if.

It would be nice if. It would be nice if. I agree. But one last thing, though. You have to remember that at least Germany has made them back down and pulled the Oculus out for sale in Germany. You can't do that. So little things are eating away at Facebook's power over there.

Yeah. Well, you know, good. Good. Because that's the only place that seems to be challenging anybody. GDPR is the only tool we have right now. So keep at it, EU. Yeah. Death by a million zucks. That's right. There we go. There's some more news coming out of Facebook. This makes them sound very good.

Facebook is testing a tool to let users claim their own image rights. They've revealed the Rights Manager for Images, a tool that gives creators the ability to track and moderate where their images appear across Facebook and Instagram. To begin, Facebook is testing that with select partners. They haven't revealed what partners?

And we don't know yet what plans they have to open the new Rights Manager to more users. But, you know, there it is. You've got a tool. You can upload a CSV file of the image and its metadata. And you can specify where you want to apply copyright. If at all, the manager will then monitor where the image shows up.

And creators can decide to leave the image up, issue a takedown, or block it from certain territories. Now, obviously, there could be issues with this in terms of memes. We could, you know, if you post Ham's hog and you've changed it enough times, then what happens? But the other thing that I find interesting about this, and this is not surprising, is yet again, Facebook is basically offloading their job of monitoring to yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. The thing about it, this is, it's like, you know, we have a mechanism for this right now. It's called copyright law. And, you know, we can sue. Well, we had it, but then there's Pinterest, which proves the copyright law does not matter at all. Exactly. Therein lies the rub.

And also the court ruling about Ham's hog last week, which is just utter bullshit. Yes. Yeah. So, you know, where does the percentage fall in the rights manager tool for, you know, how much has this been modified?

Well, obviously, it's going to be a pretty strict interpretation. It's going to be, if any change has been made to the image, this is not going to catch it. It's straight up reposting. Yeah. And how does it work with cropping and sizing and things like that? I mean, there's a, what's the one search engine?

TinEye, I believe it's called. It does a pretty good job. You can upload your images and find every instance of it on Pinterest forever. I used to do that and then finally gave up the ghost. I think I've made about $1,000 tracking people down. And when I did the hourly on it, it was, I made about $3.75 an hour tracking down those people.

So it just got to be the point where it wasn't worth it. Plus with, yeah, I mean, just the general sense of humanity, I'd imagine that most of the people that you reached out to and said, hey, that's my image basically told you to fuck off and somehow it's your fault. So it just ends up becoming a psychic burden. Yeah, it really does. It really does.

I mean, the only people I ever got money from were blogs and magazines who stole my images and put them in their articles. Yeah. You know, average Joes were just like, oh, fuck yourself. Yeah. It takes a special kind of person to deal with that sort of stuff all day. We call them lawyers.

But yeah, it's just not worth the psychic burden. Or patent trolls. Yeah, that too. We learned a little bit more about another update from Apple that may be of some concern. They consider this a feature on your iPhone, the voice memos. So they're having a moment, apparently, the iPhone voice memos app, because people are using it to record insights and dispatches during the coronavirus crisis.

Some people in podcasting are using it to record because they can't think of anything better to do to send things off. But one thing that people have noticed, and it's possibly invasive, if you don't label the memo yourself when you're recording it, the app will automatically use your location where the recording took place as its name.

So basically, voice memos is tracking your location. And you don't have to be too paranoid to see why that might be a problem. Of course, there's an easy enough fix name in your file. But yeah, this is a feature. They refer to it as location-based naming. And it's done because they thought that'll help jog people's memories when they look back through their recordings.

Oh, I was here at this time. So that's when I recorded that. So it kind of makes sense. And again, it's easy to fix. Just name your file something. You can also disable location-based naming by going to settings for voice memos. So much ado about that. And turn it off. Yes. I think it's a great feature, personally.

Because if I'm out on a walk and I'm leaving voice memos, it's nice to know when and where I was at. So I look at this as a feature. And yeah, if you don't like it, turn it off. Turn it off. Yeah. Quibi! Quibi's back in the news. Oh, is it? This is over at the Wall Street Journal.

Quibi explores strategic options, including possible sale. Already! Yep. Already! Oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. That's all I need right there.

I mean, I got a whole bunch of article here that I don't care anything about. You don't need to. And it was one of the... I actually watched the Emmys, and we'll get into that in media. Oh, yeah, yeah. But they had the best line. Quibi has 10 Emmy nominations this year. It actually won two, shockingly enough. But Jimmy Kimmel said, it's the dumbest thing to ever cost a billion dollars.

Yep. That was really good. Really good. And yeah, they've raised $1.75 billion now, so... Jesus Christ. For that. For that. Yep. And shockingly enough, I have some gaming news for you, Jason.

Did you mean what? I know. I saw this, and I thought this was interesting. Microsoft, the Xbox maker, has signed a deal to buy ZeniMax Media, one of the largest independent games publishers in operation. You may not recognize that name in and of itself, but the studios it owns, you will recognize.

Even I recognize them, and I'm not a gamer. It includes id Software, which made Doom and Quake, probably the last two games I ever played. Arcane Studios, which is Dishonored and Prey, Tango Gameworks, The Evil Within, and Bethesda, Bethesda? Bethesda.

Bethesda. That's also a hospital, right? And a place in Maryland, yes. And a place in Maryland. There you go. Which did the Elder Scrolls and Fallout. They were going to pay $7.5 billion in an all-cash deal. Oh, that's good for them. ID was obviously, you know, one of the premier places back in the day with Wolfenstein and all those guys.

And, of course, Quake and Quake 3 Arena. And Rocket Arena, my personal favorite. So, yeah. They're just slurping people up right now. Fire sale. Get them while the getting's good, since nobody's going to work. That's right. Yeah. And this one came in through our friend Chris Lockhead.

He sent this over yesterday. Amazon details its low-bandwidth sidewalk neighborhood network coming to Echo and Tile devices soon. Now, we talked about this when it first came out. And we're like, does anybody really need this? And apparently Amazon thinks they do.

And so, this is the whole mesh network where, you know, everybody's Echoes and, you know, ladies in the tubes and things like that will all create a mesh network in your neighborhood. So, you can walk down the street with your dog with its little, you know, little tile collar. And if little Fido gets away, you can find it using the neighbor's access points.

Right. And, yeah. Asked for this, said no one ever. No. It'd be one thing if it wasn't a low-bandwidth network and if we were blanketing entire neighborhoods. So, perhaps the more disadvantaged of us could actually then get free access to the internet.

But that's not what this is. Yeah. This is just strange. Yeah, I don't get it. I just find this thing is strange. I mean, you know, to quote you, Jason, it's kind of neat. Yeah. And I'm sure the engineers were like, let's see if we can do this because this would be cool.

But I can't imagine much usage for it. Yeah. I mean, I don't know if I'm missing the whole point of it, but it doesn't seem like it's required. All right. I mean, I get what they're trying to do with, you know, okay, I can bounce from neighbor to neighbor.

So, that little device is always online no matter where it goes or picks up, you know, where the spots are. But, yeah, is this something that we really need? I don't see it. I don't see it. It's really just to facilitate more tracking of little devices that we've talked about ad nauseum that we are tired of being tracked by little devices everywhere.

This just facilitates more of it. That's true. Yeah. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day.

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Media Candy. Okay, Brian, let's just get this fucking thing over with. I have to get this over with now. Okay. Musician, author, and speaker Amanda fucking Palmer has launched a weekly podcast, The Art of Asking Everything.

And this comes from, you know, Pod News. They say, of note, the show is entirely paid for by over 15,000 people on Patreon. Well, as of this writing, I went and looked this morning. Nope, not over 15,000. It's down to 14,842. So.

Still not insignificant? No, it's not insignificant. And we've talked ad nauseum about Amanda Palmer and her Patreon and how she, you know, basically stole her audience from the music label that paid millions of dollars to make her a star and then went out on her own. And now she has a podcast. Great.

Yeah. Look, I don't like Amanda Palmer. I'm not a fan. I don't like her music. I think that her position. The only issue I have with it is that she keeps running around trumpeting that she built this all herself. She did not. And that's the issue. So. Yeah. I will not be listening to this podcast.

Yeah. No, it's like people saying Reply All built themselves from the ground up when, nope, they took a lot of NPR money to make that show and then they buggered off and took the audience with them. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Our tax money at work. Well, Peacock is in the news again. Have you signed up for Peacock?

Um, no. Do you plan on it? No. No. There's nothing on Peacock that I'm interested in. Okay. Same here. Same here. Uh, well, uh, they have finally gotten their Roku app together. They've cut a deal with Roku.

So the app is going to be coming soon to you. Roku enabled devices. Now, the only reason I give a shit about this is because this actually helps get HBO Max onto Roku, which is what I really want because I like HBO Max because I pay for it. And there's a lot of stuff on there I want to watch.

And some of it might be hate watching like that Wolves show that we'll talk about in a second. But yeah, I just, I pay for HBO Max. I pay for my Roku. Guys get it sorted and figured out. So this helps get that pushed through, I'm guessing. That's what everybody's saying because Roku stock went through the roof after this deal with Peacock.

So, I don't know. Maybe it's time to buy a little more Roku stock because when the HBO Max things goes through, maybe it'll jump up a little bit more. Maybe. Maybe. We'll see. Maybe. I watched the, what I guess I'm calling the virtual Emmys. I'm not big on award shows, but my wife is.

So they're always going to be on. But I was curious this time around because I was like, well, how are they going to deal with this? And it was actually pretty good. I thought they pulled it off pretty well. People were at home for the most part. And they would have somebody show up in a very funny hazmat suit delivering the Emmy if they won.

There was a write-up about it. The weirdest thing about the pandemic Emmys was how normal they felt. And so, yeah. And I thought that was kind of true. We're so used to this life that we're living now that it just felt normal, even though it was all pretty weird. Now, there is one thing I have to say.

Can we stop with the fucking pandemic security theater? Okay. Because some of these shows, like Schitt's Creek and some of the other ones, they got together in a big place together, the entire cast. You know? And fine. Put down a little disclaimer on the bottom saying, we've all been tested.

But let's not pretend because everybody is sitting six feet apart and everybody has a mask on until they win something. And then they all throw off their masks and they all start hugging. Which is it? You know, that's that part of it. Well, there are two parts about the whole Schitt's Creek thing that really pissed me off.

One is that they obviously knew how many they were going to win because they had the girl from the commercial in the hazmat suit standing there giving them all the things. They had a microphone set up that they just put right there. It's not like everybody didn't know. There was a shit ton of people off camera doing, you know, doing the thing.

This wasn't one of those home rigs that they sent to everybody. This was a professionally lit setup that they had going on there. They were all in the room. There was, you know, literally no surprise going on there. And like you said, the fucking stupid security theater. All we thought about and all we were screaming at is we hope every single person in that room gets it just because of the bullshit that they were spewing, you know?

Well, it wasn't just them. It was a lot of them. I mean, a lot of some people were just at home by themselves or just their family. But a lot of people had gotten together with groups. And that's fine. It's fine if you're doing that. Just admit that you're doing what you're doing. And like I said, give us a disclaimer. You know, everybody in here has been tested or we're all part of the pod.

We've been taping the show together for weeks now. Blah, blah, blah. We're not stupid. And don't put on the masks and sit six feet apart for two camera shots. But then next thing you know, you guys are both like chugging off a bottle of tequila together. We're not idiots.

We get it. We know what's going on. Don't do it for our sake. Don't do it because you think the people need to see that we're wearing masks. We don't. Yeah. That and just the fake responses from the Schitt's Creek people just piss me off. Oh, my God. We won again. Oh, I'm getting the vapors.

I'm getting the vapors. No, I find that actually. I think that's believable because I don't think that they thought that they were going to sweep. I think as they kept going on and on and on, it was just like, oh, my God, we're winning everything. So I found that somewhat believable. I'm not going to show them for that. Did you ever watch that show?

No, I heard it's very good, though. Yeah, I'm not going to. I'll pass. That's fine. I did watch the Go-Go's documentary on Showtime. It was excellent. Highly recommend it. Don't have too much to say about it. It was just it was good. It's so long ago now that it's hard to remember that they actually started off as a punk rock band.

And they totally were. Okay. So you go back and see that, which is great. All right. I'll check it out. And other good news. Ted Lasso has been renewed for season two at Apple. Smart move on Apple's part because it's actually a really good show, which they don't have many of. No, they don't. No, they don't. Speaking of shows that they have at Apple, Long Way Up, I discovered on there was I was done with my Ted Lasso.

And I'm like, let's see what the hell's on here. And I found Long Way Up, which is the, you know, the 20 year on sequel to Long Way Round and Long Way Down. Yeah, Long Way Round was the first one. Long Way Down was the second one. And Long Way Up is the third one. And man, they had to do some vocal gymnastics on that theme song to get Long Way Up to work.

And I don't think they did. And this show could they didn't need to make this show. It is. They're trying to rekindle the magic of the first one because let's be honest, the second one was terrible. Long Way Down was no good. They brought their wives along with them. It's just you and God forbid.

Oh, God, it was terrible. She didn't know how to ride. It was nothing. And on this one, like at the beginning of it, it's so funny. Charlie Borman, the big motorcycle rider. I, you know, he loves riding his motorcycles, but he's just not very good at it because, you know, he crashes twice before they even start filming.

And he's like got broken bones and all this crap. I'm like, Charlie, you just really don't know how to ride a motorcycle. It's fine that you like it, but let's not pretend you're any good at it. So, right. It's it's I've three episodes in. It's painful to watch because they're trying to ride around or they're trying to ride up from South America to Los Angeles on these electric Harley Davidsons.

And most of the show so far is three episodes of trying to figure out where to find a fucking plug. That's really it. That's kind of a metaphor for current life, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. But I do have to say the trucks that they built, I think it's Rivian, built these custom trucks for the chase crew.

They're really cool. Those are cool. The Harley Davidsons are cool, too, but they can only go like 200 miles. But all in all, you know, watching some of the tech with the trucks is pretty cool. They made these things in like three weeks. Right. But yeah, so far, it's just like, come on, guys. Let's either buy a new bike or get get a plug.

Seriously. Right. And speaking of things that didn't need to be made, HBO Max has announced that they are renewing Ridley Scott's Raised by Wolves for a second season. Okay. I went back and I watched two more episodes of the show. I'm not watching the show anymore.

I don't care. I don't understand the point. I'm not engaged. I'm not interested. I just don't give a shit. Okay. Yeah. All righty. That saves me some time. Well, I actually have the time because HBO Max is still not on Roku. So fuck it. But I've been watching Lovecraft Country.

I watched episode six last night. That show is so, so good. And I have to say episode five has some of the best horror special effects I've ever seen in my life. They're not, I don't know how much of it's practical and how much of it's CG. I'm guessing most of it's CG, but it is so seamless and so good and so disgusting.

It's great. Honestly, this is my favorite show on TV right now. I love this thing. Right. And I've kept up with Star Trek Lower Decks. I know I'm in the minority in thinking that this is actually a very funny and pretty good show. However, to give ammunition to all the haters, season one, episode six, Terminal Provocations was absolutely painful.

Yeah. They've been painful since episode two. It was one of the worst things I've ever seen. It was horrifically bad. Damn. Too bad. I wanted the show to be good. Yeah, I did too. I've been, I've watched them all, but I think I'm going to stop just in case that they're looking at these numbers thinking that it would be a good idea to renew it.

Yeah. Which, which it's not. I guess, you know, we got to vote with our wallets as it were. Yeah. Vote with your eyeballs at this point. But man, yeah, no, it is so bad. And there's just nothing else to watch on Thursday nights. It's like, come on. Yeah. It was only, you know, like 30 minutes long.

Speaking of that, because there was nothing else to watch and I didn't want to try something new, I went back and randomly rewatched the 1984 David Lynch version of Dune. Which one, though? Did you watch the short one or the long one? The short one, because the long one is only available from Sweden and that wouldn't have involved thinking about it ahead of time.

And this was completely an impulse view. So. Okay. Yeah. You know, does not have legs. What they did with the story, I thought was pretty impressive. Condensing that entire book into the short version of this movie.

They hit all the major points, which was nice. It has not aged well. The acting is horrific. Which is stunning because it's quite the cast. So you kind of have to throw that at David Lynch's feet. Well, they're also young then. They've gotten much better as actors as they've gotten older.

This is an old ass movie. Well, not everybody is young. There's some older people in there that should have done. Patrick Stewart's in there, for Christ's sake. He was like 25 back then. Looks exactly the same. Yeah. He came out that way. He pretty much came out that way. Yeah. So.

And the special effects. Boy. You can say, oh, they didn't age well. But I would argue that those special effects were actually bad for 1984. Oh, yeah. They sucked. They sucked during the day. Yeah. Definitely. They were horrible. They were bad. And speaking of oldies, I did forget about this one.

Hackers turned 25 last week. Oh, man. I remember going to see that in Santa Monica with my girlfriend the day it opened. The morning it opened. First showing at the movie theater in Santa Monica. And I've seen it probably a hundred times since then. I think that movie has legs. But that's just me. I have not rewatched it since I saw it originally.

Really? Oh, man. It's fun. You should go back. Great soundtrack, man. Oh, great. One of the best soundtracks. Really good. Yeah. And I've been thinking about this since we're recording on Tuesday, September 22nd. And it is the first day of fall here in North America.

And I was thinking about this song from Rasputina. It was called 1816, The Year Without a Summer. And I don't know if you've ever heard that song. I was a huge Rasputina mark back in the day. Back when I, you know, I like the gothy stuff back then. And it's crazy. Melora, the singer of Rasputina, she's 54.

Yeah, well, we're not young people anymore. No, we're old. But yeah, I just went back and I was listening to the song because it dawned on me that, you know, we really didn't have a summer this year. Didn't have much of a spring either, to be honest. Spring lasted for four years and summer lasted for like 10 minutes.

And I didn't leave the house. It was either too hot, too smoky, or just too damn depressing because you couldn't leave the house because you might die. So I think 2020 is also the year without a summer. But I don't know. You got out more than I did, I guess. You go out on your bike rides.

I take a bike ride. Yeah. It's more than I did until I just got my bike. I've been out on like 10 bike rides this summer. But I throw this out there because if there's any fans who are Rasputina fans, like our show fans who listened to Rasputina back in the day, there is an album out there called Unknown.

This was the seventh album by Rasputina, and it was only released on CD, and it was kind of journaling Melora's rise after she basically got her identity stolen and stalked and all this crazy shit that happened to her back in the day. And if anybody has a copy of this, please get in touch with me because she's never going to release it on any digital platform because it's kind of antithetical to what happened to her.

And God even knows what she's doing nowadays. It's impossible to find her. So if anybody has a copy of this album or knows how to get it, please get in touch with me. Jay at jpd.me. I really want it. All right. At the library.

Well, I reread a great old book. I'm not necessarily going to recommend this to anyone that is triggered by end-of-the-world scenarios or basically life right now outside your window. But if you're up for braving it, The Postman by David Brin.

Ignore the movie. Forget about that. If you ever saw it and you thought that was a stupid story and what the hell, Kevin Costner with your hair. Oh, that was it. I was thinking, is that the Kevin Costner movie? It is, but it was a book first, and it is an amazing book. It's one of my favorite books of all time. Post-apocalyptic, obviously, even though this was written many, many, many, many, many, many years ago.

Boy, oh boy, does it feel current and topical. All right. You know, the dystopian fiction, the gift that keeps on giving. Right. And I'm putting this in here because this is just vindication for me, personally, at least. This comes from the New Statesman, and it's called Why Goodreads is Bad for Books.

And it's a very long article and talks about different things, but I am going to, like, just read you this one paragraph. Ah, this feels good. Goodreads today looks and works much as it did when it launched. The design is like a teenager's 2005 MySpace page, cluttered, random, and unintuitive.

Books fail to appear when searched for. Messages fail to send, and users are flooded with updates in their timelines that have nothing to do with the books they want to read or have read. Many now use it to purely to track their reading rather than get recommendations or build a community. It should be my favorite platform, one user told me, but it's completely useless.

Vindication. Thank you, New Statesman. There you go. Moron of the Week. Our Moron of the Week was recommended by both TJ and Koi Zero on Twitter, who both sent this in with hashtag Darwin Awards. A woman fell out of her car window while filming a Snapchat video on the M25.

Freeway. In England. Yep. In a post on Twitter, the Rhodes Policing Unit said, It was only by luck she wasn't seriously injured or killed, adding the hashtag, no words. Well, there we go. Darwin Awards for the win. There you go.

Feedback loop. Over at Patreon, we've got Robert. Over at Patreon, we've got Robert. Just poor Robert. All alone. All alone. But over at PayPal, we've got Nicholas, Michelle, Jeff, Michael, John, Tom, John, Jeffrey, Mark, Matthias, Ryan, Andrew, Joseph, and Stavros.

And a bunch of more successful stock trades from Martin over on the Discord channel. And you go, Martin, man. You're kicking it for us. Woo! Yes, thank you. Keeping the show afloat. Yeah. Amanda Palmer's got Patreon. We've got Martin. Exactly.

So Martin's our secret weapon. And speaking of Discord over on our Discord channel, KillerQ09 wrote in, holy shit, way for Apple to downplay this new awesome iOS 14 feature. Takes me back to the Android days, but better. I would have a feeling that you guys will find this very handy for some reason.

There are many actions to choose from, and this is how to use iPhone back-tap custom controls for shortcuts, accessibility, and system actions. It's pretty cool, I got to say. Okay, so I used to use triple-click on the right button, the power button type of thing, but now I just triple-tap on the back, and it'll toggle the color off and on for the display.

So it'll go black and white or color, depending on my mood. And then, of course, FASM, FASM, writes, why black and white, may I ask? FASM must be a new listener. We covered this on the show many, many moons ago. And I'm going to link to an article basically from our friend Tristan Harris over at Humantech called Take Control, and he says, Colorful icons give our brains shiny rewards every time we unlock.

Set your phone to grayscale to remove those positive reinforcements. It helps many people check their phone less, and I have to agree. That's why I do it. Right. There you go. Yep. And over at Twitter, Nathan writes, If you haven't already found this, you can create your own widget stack. You don't have to use the SmartStack version created by Apple.

I love this for making the home screen more usable in iOS 14. And he sent us a video, and then I tracked down an article over at The Verge on how to do it. Yeah, I'll get on that. You know, I've got to say for the first time ever, Android users have a point. The iPhone has just stolen stuff that they've had forever.

Of course, our phones don't get owned all the time, but, you know, just every now and again. And Ivan wrote in, Hi, listening to episode 473 about Twitter enforcing you to have a strong pass. You can actually do it with a part of the hash being have I been pwned service.

Then they won't know that pass is weak or not, but there is a good chance that if it was in there, it was in some breach before. I doubt that they're actually going to those lengths to actually run it past have I been pwned. They're probably just, they've got a plain text copy somewhere. They could do that, but they aren't.

Yeah, maybe they kept metadata on it. It's four characters and sounds like a dog. Something like that. Travis writes in, I'm interested in flinging a couple hundred dollars of cryptocurrency investing. When you can, would you guys talk about it a little more for us non-techie folks?

Well, we've spent a couple of years talking about cryptocurrency. And if you'd like to throw your money away, can I recommend GOG.show slash donate? At least you'd get the knowledge and you'd keep us going longer. If you must, you can use Coinbase. It's a decent app to invest in any range of sketchy as shit cryptocurrencies that will get shut down immediately by most governments if they actually get any real traction.

Yes. Skip the crypto. Give us your money instead. It will actually do better for you. I'm telling you right now. Good luck. And JC writes in, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. This loser has to watch what he says now that his ass is owned. And this is a link from Vanity Fair.

Joe Rogan apologizes for spreading bogus wildfire conspiracy. I fucked up. Yes, now that he has corporate masters that have paid him tons and tons and tons of money, guess what? You can't just say whatever you want anymore. Well, he can. He just has to go back and fix it later. But, okay, and if this was retroactive, he would never get to do a show again because he would have to go back and fix it.

And apologize for every single episode. And DST writes in, but I thought my phone wasn't spying on me. And this is a link to Bloomberg. Facebook accused of watching Instagram users through cameras. No, we said they weren't listening to you. Yes, we never said anything about watching.

That's why we all have tape over our cameras. Yeah, they are being sued again for allegedly spying on Instagram users, this time through the unauthorized use of their mobile phone cameras. The lawsuit springs from media reports in July that the photo sharing app appeared to be accessing iPhone cameras, even when they weren't actively being used.

Facebook has denied the reports and blamed a bug, which it said it was correcting for triggering what it described as false notifications that Instagram was accessing iPhone cameras. New Jersey Instagram user Brittany Conditi contends the app's use of the camera is intentional and done for the purpose of collecting lucrative and valuable data on its users that it would not otherwise have access to.

By obtaining extremely private and intimate personal data on their users, including the privacy of their own homes, they were able to collect valuable insights and market research, according to the complaint. No, they didn't. No, they didn't. Sorry, Brittany. Yeah. You post the inside of your home already.

I know. What else do they need? You give them everything they want. That's why I don't believe any of these things. I actually believe if it did happen at all, it was a bug because you willingly give people, you were willingly handing this over. They do not need to hack their phones and open themselves up to lawsuits.

The fact that you installed Instagram right there is proof positive that your lawsuit has no legs to stand on, period. No, none. Yep. Whatsoever. So you invite Dracula into your home. He's going to bite you in the neck. That's how it goes.

Yeah. So I don't think that they're going to win that lawsuit because I don't think that's actually happening. No, no. And over at GOG.show, Kevin writes in, in case Brian hasn't taken the time to watch this guy's videos on various bands and genres, I'm sure he'd enjoy them. And it's a YouTube link. And he says, keep grumping.

Did you get to watch it? I checked it out. It's pretty interesting. Good deep dives on stuff that I'm kind of into. So I will keep a bookmark of this and probably, honestly, I'll totally forget about it and never watch it again. That's the reality. You should subscribe and get notifications. I don't subscribe to any YouTube channel.

Oh, that's not true. I subscribe to a bunch of kids' channels because that's what I watch a lot of. That's what you're going to do nowadays. NoSec writes in, this feels so fucked up that I can't even describe it. What the fuck? Gig economy company lunches Uber, but for evicting people. Yeah.

Yeah. This is, here's the thing about this. It's a company called Civil, C-I-V-V-L. And they say evicting people is the fastest growing money-making gig due to COVID-19. And these guys are, they're go-betweens. They're in-betweens. Right now you can get process serving gigs or somebody who is basically helping take granny's furniture out of their house.

But you have to pay $35 just to sign up for their service as, you know, the sign-up fee. And people are complaining that they're not getting enough work being horrible human beings. So, yeah, all around this is just kind of gross. But, you know?

Yep. It's all they're doing is basically, you know, they're an app for what most people usually do Craigslist for. It's like we need process servers and we need people for evictions. Yep. They're just trying to, you know, make it more techy. They're web 2.0-ing it. Yeah. And the way they make their money is that $35 sign-up fee.

So, you know. Yeah. Yep. John writes in, hello and thanks. I was cleaning up some really old bookmarks. Most of the sites have since disappeared. But TalkShoe.com is apparently still a thing for podcasters. As experts in podcasting, any thoughts about using TalkShoe?

I'm sure Jason has a thousand, so let me try to beat him to some of the main ones. Define still a thing, first off, because is it still a thing? I don't know. I looked, I loaded it up. I don't, I've never heard of any of those shows. Most of the show artwork thumbnails are pixelized.

That's not a great sign. I'm sure it's fine if you just want to get a podcast out there, but I'm sure it's mostly crap if you're going to be serious about podcasting. Learn the basics. Go with best in class. Not a super cheap all-in-one solution. You'll generally get what you pay for until you're paying far too much, of course.

For instance, transcription of all your podcasts is included by TalkShoe. We've looked into transcription. It's incredibly expensive. There's no way that's free. No, it's not. This is a garbage site. Just skip it. I'm just going to tell you right now, skip it. Yeah, transcription is going to cost you.

If you want human transcription, it's going to cost you a lot. If you want machine transcription, just go get Descript and go from there. There's all sorts of stuff here. But all you have to remember here, just to your question, because we could talk for hours on this, TalkShoe.com is still not a thing for podcasters. Move along.

There you go. Ralph writes in, hi, Grump. So sorry that California is still burning. Wish we could share some of the cool, moist weather here in Baltimore with you. Maybe Dave can arrange to bring you some on his next visit. It looks like YouTube has delivered a win to humans over AI. And this is a link from Mashable.

YouTube puts human content moderators back to work. So they're actually hiring some people again. At the start of the pandemic, YouTube had to reduce the staff and workload of in-office human moderators. So rather than relying on the 10,000-person workforce, the company gave broader content moderation power to automated systems that are able to recognize videos with harmful content and remove them immediately.

If that were true, we wouldn't have had so many stories about it over the past few months. So that led to the removal of 11 million videos between April and June, a higher number than usual, because they erred on the side of caution, which meant they removed more videos that actually broke no rules.

So yay. Woohoo. And apparently they're just basically starting to bring back in some of that workforce and bring back in some people. So that's nice. AI is people. AI is people. Barbara writes in, a couple of shows ago, you were commenting about social media and suicide. You said, if they take the post down and the person kills themselves, that the platform would be facing lawsuits.

My question, under what law? As far as I know, they are in the clear. Precisely the problem with no regulation for cyberspace. However, this is a time when I would love to be wrong. I bet the response will be grumpy, right? Stay safe and wash your hands. Thanks. Yeah, I don't think there is a law.

And the argument is always, they're just a platform. They're just a platform. You know what though, it opens them up for some precedent setting law because if that happened to me, I would sure as hell sue the shit out of them under whatever grounds I could find. I would say, hit the library, guys.

Find me something that I can take these guys down with. But if there are any lawyers out there who have any insight to this, that would be nice. But yeah, I think Barbara might actually be right and I might have been just talking out of my ass. In a hopeful way.

I was being optimistic for once and it turns out I'm not good at being optimistic. Yeah. Keep in mind that we just talk shit here. We don't actually have any basis for anything. It's a podcast. We're just a podcast. Sometimes we've got some insight.

No, I seem to remember that conversation and we were just kind of spitballing it that surely you would think that they would have some responsibility for this and somebody could sue. But you're right. It's just a platform. We all click OK on the EULA. And Drawer writes in, thanks for keeping it up.

I bought another Echo to use as a stereo pair. A bit disappointed on that. The stereo works only on music from within the device, not when the lady in the tube speaks and not when using it as a speaker for my phone. It just keeps on using a single speaker for those. It's a huge disappointment for me. I should have bought the cheapest Alexa and a soundbar for the same money, I think.

That is disappointing to hear, but maybe they'll solve that in the next iteration of the software. Who knows? On a different topic, I hate Apple new watch SE. It's destroyed the secondhand market for me. I have the five previously to upgrade to the six. I knocked 30% off, sell the old one, and buy the new.

Now 35% off is the price of a new SE. Oh, damn. No one wants to buy a used five if they can buy a new SE. Trust me, I'm trying. The best offer I got so far was less than 50% from the price I paid less than a year ago for me, so no upgrade. Keep up the great work.

Although it took forever, both the mugs and masks arrived and are great. You're an Israeli fan, not on Spotify. Oh, man, I didn't even think about that. Oh, because what I generally do is when I do the Apple watch upgrade, I send in my old watch and do the trade-in program.

And just take that, and they take it off the other one. But the six has nothing over the five that I really care about, so there's literally nothing in there that makes me want to go, ooh, I really need that. Right. So, whatevs, whatevs. Quibble writes in, you guys have seen this, right?

Tesla owner in Canada charged with sleeping while driving over 90 miles an hour. And this is from The Verge. A Tesla Model S owner in Alberta, Canada, was charged with dangerous driving after being pulled over for sleeping while traveling at speeds of, 93 miles an hour. The case raises a question about Tesla's partially automated driving system, autopilot, and driver complacency.

And the funny thing about this is they were, the car sped up when the cop got behind them and flashed the lights. It's like, I'm out of here. Fuck this noise. Yeah, interesting that it would do that. And here's the problem that I had. And yes, of course, obviously, we as consumers and as humans should be less stupid.

But if you look around the world, we're not. And if you call it autopilot, and it's marketed as a self-driving car, what the fuck are we actually supposed to expect from people? Words matter. Don't call it autopilot if it's not an autopilot.

Don't call it a self-driving car, because if we're not supposed to use it as a self-driving car. People are dumb. Of course they're going to do it. Of course. Yes. Assisted lane keeping, perchance, or something like that. Words matter. Well, they used to. They used to.

They don't anymore. They literally don't matter anymore. And Barrett writes in, Who would have guessed that Sheriff Joe was a Yiff lover? Joe Arpaio welcomes furries to Arizona, then is told what furries are. This is very funny. Former Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

I always get his, I can never say his name right. He's Arpaio. I want to say Arpeggio every time I see it, but that must be the music background. So now himself a convicted criminal is among America's most plain-spoken racists and bigots. So it was a surprise when he issued a warm personal welcome to visitors hoping to make it to the 2021 Furry Convention in Phoenix.

Awesome. Hey, good luck organizing the Arizona Furry Convention, he begins, though he pronounces it Fury, suggesting he's not totally certain what he's been asked to talk about. It's for animal lovers, he adds by way of an explanation. Nice. Oh my God. This is like the greatest trolling of all time.

I wonder if somebody just did like take out an R when they tried to get it through. It's a Fury Convention. You are full of rage and fury, my man. This is right up your alley. That's right. Wow. Scott writes in, if you have not watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix, it's a must-watch for anyone that gets on the internet.

It's 100% of everything you've been saying since the start. Keep up the great work, guys. You're the only sanity that I can find in my life each week in this world that is just going insane. Now, I love when we get these notes in, and I think we need to actually preface this. We usually take these out when somebody writes in a response to the show that is not the latest and greatest one.

We get these all the time. So we have to send out lots of emails and say, yeah, yeah, we covered that in the latest episode. And they're like, oh, there's a new episode? Which means everybody, go to GOG.show slash subscribe. So you get the latest and greatest episodes as they come out. That's all I'm saying. And we have a couple more comments about old episodes, so let's just throw them in really quick because I thought two of these were funny.

Ron Lanier writes in, that awful Lanier guy in Social Dilemma does not represent all with the last name Lanier. Yes. And Aaron writes in, Jason, thank you for your mouth noise editing. You're welcome, Aaron. And Jason writes in, episode 472, you mentioned how AI is so bad at recognizing sarcasm.

In human terms, loss of the ability to recognize sarcasm can be an early sign of dementia. Apparently, it takes fairly high-level cognition to recognize the subtle humor sarcasm brings. Yes, that's a compliment. So AI isn't non-functional. It's demented.

Stay grumpy and sarcastic. It's good for you. Thank you. Thank you. And another Jason writes in, or maybe the same one, father of the year that I am, I heard you say that it was funny to try to have the lady in the tube translate 100, 100, 100 in Welsh, so I tried it. Now, my nine-year-old is asking me what that word means.

Oh! Yes. Be careful around the kids with the lady in the tubes. All right. And Gabriel writes in, spider webs on drugs. Wish there were more pics. And this is a link to medium. A spider on LSD and a journey to build the perfect web. Now, this thing is ancient.

This is like recycled news because this is like from back in the 80s. Yeah, this is back in the 80s. And I see this pop-up every now and again where somebody rediscovers it and they see the pictures of, you know, they put spiders on all different types of drugs. And look what it did to their webs.

You know, it's cute. It's cool. It's cute. It's cool. I like it. Yeah, yeah. And it's fun that it keeps coming back up because it means it has legs. Eight of them, actually. So go check it out. And Signals Are All Red writes in, me again, I heard you talking about the sunken data centers on the show.

And Jason wondered why they put it in the ocean rather than just keep it on land and pump water around it. My cousin is actually involved with some of this in his career, according to him. One reason they are looking into putting data centers deep in the ocean isn't just for cooling. It's an attempt to protect critical systems against outside threats, mainly natural disasters such as EMP geomagnetic radiation, like what happened in 1859 with the Carrington event.

We are overdue for another, but also man-made threats as well. I don't know too much about these projects, but I do know that major tech companies and government entities are researching it. And as an interesting side note to that, because my kid is so into space right now, he comes to me every morning and wants to go look at the new space news, daddy.

So I bring up like space.com and we see if there's any new news. Our sun has started a new cycle, which means we're overdue for some solar flare storms, which can fuck with our electronics. So it makes sense. Yes, they can. And you know what else can fuck with a data center underwater?

A chainsaw. Just cut the tube. Cut the series of tubes that go to it. The EMP won't matter if somebody just comes along and goes snip, snip to the cable. But yeah, I'm just saying they're there. They might be protecting against one thing, but are they protecting against the other? Ah, but they've got trained killer dolphins, Jason.

Oh yes, killer dolphins. Over at iTunes, Aaron the Thomas writes in with a five star. Love the show. It's the highlight of my week. Jason and Brian provide a bit of relief in these crazy weird ass times. Love Bittner's contribution. And when Seth pops by, love the TV. And movie reviews and moron of the week.

Stay grumpy, friends. I'm sorry. Stay grumpy, fiends. That's right. All right. And Makito 1085 gives us another five star rating. Most entertaining tech podcast. Have been listening for years. These two bring a much needed sense of reality to tech news and life in general. I look forward to the shows every week.

Keep up the excellent work. We shall. And if you want your question or comment read on the show, head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback, your questions that 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 if you're listening to us on the overcast player, click those stars.

We're moving on up. Closing shout outs. I got a closing shout out to our friend Michaela over on the Discord channel and listener of the show. Long time listener. Michaela really helped us out with all of the technical setup for Discord because we're just old dumb fucks and can't figure out what's what.

So thank you, Michaela, for getting all of that in order. We really appreciate it. We do. And you are much more woke than us. So thank you for keeping us on our toes with that as well. Because, you know, we're old. My shout out, I guess, is for Major League Baseball, believe it or not.

I'm shocked we're in the home stretch here. They've managed to do a, well, not a full season, but a shortened season, not in a bubble without too much problems. So I'm pretty impressed and kind of looking forward to the World Series and the playoffs and all of that sort of stuff, even though it's a miracle it's happening, I suppose.

So, yeah, it's something to watch. Okay. I was watching, we turned on football the other day. There were a lot of people in the stands. Yeah, I don't know how that one's going to go. I don't know, man. It was like college football. And we're like, is this an old game? And then I'm like, no, look at all the spaces there. But then we were like, they panned to the end zone and the end zone was like full.

And I'm like, what the hell? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's football. Yeah. Fuck it. We're all going to die anyway. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFillippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. This 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.show slash 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.

And the show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 474. And 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 stay six feet away from other people at those football games.

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