570: Allegedly

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 nighttime. It is nighttime. It's the right time. The nighttime is the right time. I am knocking back some Lagunitas hop. It is a hoppy refresher with zero alcohol.

Oh, really? Okay. I've got a glass of a lovely red from the vineyard that we stayed at over Labor Day weekend. So I'm going to enjoy the show with a little relaxer after a day full of basically every window in our house being torn out and being put back in.

So good times. Home improvement. Good times. Yes. Let's talk about some not good times, though. Sure. Let's talk about some not so good times, but not as bad as it sounded initially. Maybe. This is an ongoing and developing story, but a hat tip to Vincent Lee for sending in this particular link from The Verge.

Patreon is laying off 17% of its workforce and closing offices around a week after it laid off its security team. And as we recall, the security team layoff was shrouded in controversy. And he said, she said postings, none of which were verified. So we waited to talk about it.

And Brian, I have to say that I think that Patreon has succumbed to the GOG curse because as soon as we mentioned it, it happens. Well, I mean, right now, all we know for sure is Patreon is laying off 80 people, which is about 17% of its workforce.

It's closing its offices in Dublin and Berlin. A post from CEO and co-founder Jack Conte says the cuts are happening because the company is changing its plans after trying to rapidly grow during the pandemic. And failing. So, well, yes and no. I mean, every other tech company in existence is also pink slipping people.

So this is not unusual in the sector at all. And in a downturn. And in a downturn. So everybody's doing it. Why not Patreon? Now, as far as their five-person security team, and by the way, five-person security team, that was pretty small to begin with.

I think there was some outsourcing already taking place. In terms of security. So they had a few people internally. What he says in his post as well was that these layoffs were part of a longer-term strategy to continue distributing security responsibilities across our entire engineering team.

Oh, they're fucked. The company is continuing to work with external security experts and has said the new approach will increase how much Patreon invests in keeping the platform safe. Oh, they're fucked. So you think right now it just has much ado about nothing except the company.

The company is really not doing that great. So they've got to downsize. Here's the secret language that is embedded in this missive from Jack Conte. Part of a longer-term strategy to continue distributing security responsibilities across our entire engineering team.

Well, let me explain how this works. Do some mansplain in Jason. I'm going to nerdsplain on this one since I have been in this position before and I have seen what happens and I know why this happens. When you start distributing engineering responsibilities across other people in the department, that means you're broke as fuck.

You can't afford the high-end people. Yeah. And yeah, you can't afford the good ones. So you just have everybody do it. Well, I'm going to tell you right now that UX guy is really not a DDoS expert. He does not understand SQL injection. So he does not know how to craft his JavaScript for his form.

And you're going to rely on him to cover it probably at the front-end level and then, you know, maybe put it off to the back-end level. Here's the point of it. It's a really bad move. If you really want a secure platform, you want a security team. You want a really good security team when your entire job is moving people's money from the customers to the customers.

That's all your job is. You take a cut and you have a website. That's it. And maybe you have a CDN on the side. It's not like the site's very good. The site sucks. The app sucks. Damn near everything about it sucks. So maybe that's why they're losing money because, you know, platforms like Memberful, which we'll talk about in a second, are coming to eat their lunch, you know.

And who knows? All those podcasts maybe have moved to OnlyFans. We just don't know. Well, according to my advertising on Facebook, fitness experts, musicians, and everybody else are on OnlyFans. That's right. I got a new trainer this week, and I swear I've seen him on OnlyFans.

All right. So that's the skinny right now, and I agree with your consensus. It's a move of a company that is not on the up and up and going well. It is a move of a company that is on the down and down and doing poorly and probably will not be around for too much longer.

So I 100% agree with that. Now, more rumors are buzzing around about Patreon right now. And I was loath to discuss it, but I see that you have links in the show notes, so we will discuss it. We will discuss it. Fuck you, Johannes, for sending me this one on Twitter because I was ignorant of this entire problem until you brought it up.

So thanks. That's because you haven't logged into our Discord. No, I haven't. I've been busy. I'll talk about that later too. So he sent me a link from Tizzy Ent, who is a director and editor for TV films, music videos, winner of Things You've Never Heard of, Project Greenlight Greenies nominee.

I do remember Project Greenlight. Ooh. And I give greenies to my dogs for their teeth every day. So he's got 279,000 followers. You don't get that many followers without having at least a modicum of skill in whatever you talk about. We're having Matt Damon. Yeah.

That's true too. That's true too. I'm Ben Affleck. So. Ben Affleck. The Patreon problem. Who is subscribing to these children's accounts was the first video that came across. And it is Tizzy Ent talking about how there are these strange accounts with underage children being pimped by their quote unquote parents on Patreon.

And he sent out many, many notes to Patreon and got some insider info. There's all sorts of stuff going around. What the whole allegment is here. I don't believe that's a real word, but I'm trumping it up. The allegment is that Patreon is basically facilitating child porn imagery.

Well, or CPM, child porn material, whatever they call it these days. Yeah, CPM is I believe what they're calling it. Or cost per melee if you're in advertising. So if this really is a thing, it is a bigger problem.

There would be screenshots, by the way. If this were a thing, people would know. Why hasn't he subscribed to any of them? Just to check. I'm not saying that there might be one or two or three or four.

I'm guessing it's not rampant, but the question people are asking and the allegations, which is, I think, what you were searching for earlier before you decided to trump up your word, seems to be that it was an unofficial policy that they would turn a blind eye and not take down anything until somebody basically issued a request or a demand that something be taken down.

And the other allegation is that is the engineers quit in protest of this unofficial policy that that is the scuttlebutt currently bouncing around. Now, is any of this true? Now, is any of this true? Why did they say so? Why did they not say so?

It just seems that we're embroiled in like a two-week Patreon masterclass in how not to handle crises from Patreon side of things. And we're also like, there's an awful lot of allegations being tossed around, some of which have seemed to be true, some of which aren't, but we don't know.

Like, I don't know what's going on yet. I can tell you one thing. If that is the unofficial policy and this comes out, or even if Patreon is riddled with CPM, we're off the fucking platform immediately. But right now, we are embroiled in Schrodinger's Patreon.

We do not know if there is or is not this rampant CPM on the platform. I think you need to investigate, Jason, because my reputation can not handle it. It ain't gonna fucking happen, dude. You know the deals I got going on right now?

I am not going, I'm not going anywhere near this. The old me would have been on this like flies on shit trying to prove a point or not prove a point or send some people to jail. Let's get Eric Hundley on the case. That seems to be his milieu. Eric, get on this and let us know what's going on because, yeah, we are, yeah, we can't do that right now.

No, no, I cannot. I gotta pay for these windows that were just installed. The fact that I'm even talking about this is bad. Oh, yeah. Anyways, we don't know. I guarantee what always happens is basically as soon as we hit stop on recording, there will be breaking news.

There will be breaking news. Yes, yes. So we may or may not be on Patreon tomorrow. That would really kind of ruin the weekend because, you know, yeah, that would be a hit as they say to the pocketbook because that is our main platform.

But we are looking at other places right now to do the things that Patreon does. And like I said before, Memberful is making its headway on basically every tech podcast I've ever heard saying, come join Memberful. I'm like, I would love to.

But you know how hard it is to port 570 some episodes? I know. Really hard. It's hard. And although if their pitch was if their pitch was just come join Memberful, we don't have child porn. They should be working on ads.

I'm just saying. Yeah, they really should. Let's get on that. That will be your category definition. Membership without kids. Kitty porn, whatever. CPM. I'm just so confused about that. The thing about sticking your head in the sand that I just wanted to say real quick to the CEO of Patreon who I know is listening to this show.

He's been a fan for a long time, old Jack Conte. Well, no. He liked us when we were younger. We're too old now. Oh, zing. Shit, man. You need wine more often. Oh, he's like the Leo DiCaprio of CEOs. Oh, it's your 25th birthday?

See ya. It's a good thing. Our show art are cartoons because he probably thinks we're a kid's show. That's why he hasn't kicked us off yet. Allegedly. Allegedly, people. Allegedly. I used to work for one of those AVSs back in the day, the age verification services.

Oh, I remember. Yeah. I worked for one called Keys, K-E-Y-Z dot com. I was just doing website design, UX and logo design until one day when my check didn't clear and I found out that the lovely people of Texas who hired me, a husband and wife couple, had been sentenced to basically the equivalent of life in prison for having members of their age verification service who were actively distributing child pornography.

Well, turns out, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, they were nice people. They were nice people. He was quiet. He didn't talk to anybody. He was a loner. Well, yeah, it turns out that- Every movie. Yeah. Every, not even every movie, every local news report. He was such a nice guy.

Such a nice guy. Before he knifed all the kids. Kept to himself. Hoarding all those weapons and bullets. Yeah, well, they turned out to actually be horrible people, but they were really nice on the internet and on the telephone when I talked to them. They paid their bills on time except for that last one, but they were relying on, it wasn't even safe harbor, I believe, at that point.

It might have been safe harbor, but they were just saying that, no, it's a platform and people are posting stuff on it, so we're not responsible for it. Well, yeah, that doesn't really fly in some cases. Not when you're making money, no. Not when you're making money and when the Justice Department subpoenas your emails where you're telling people how to get around it.

So, yeah, they were actually horrible people and they were just taking the money. But Patreon, you know, they, this is one of those areas where you want to get in front of it, not behind it. Take that, that was not a pun, that was nothing, I didn't mean it that way.

Let's just say you want to fix it. You want to fix it. So, let's fix it, Patreon, so we can all get back to work. Yes, please. Speaking of pink slips, there's a few more coming at Amazon pretty soon.

Amazon is buying a company that makes pallet stacking robots. They've agreed to buy Kloosterman's, a company that makes robots capable of stacking pallets in its warehouses. They're already using their tech, which can also package products, which leaves not much left for people to do. Well, somebody's got to pee in the jars when they can't get bathroom breaks.

Well, luckily, Kloosterman's working on that as well, a peeing robot. Yes, the mobile urinal will be coming your way. One with a curtain for the ladies. Yes. But they said, Brian, they said that, yeah, we're not getting to full automation until 2019, so where's, what's the...

No, they said in 2019, because that would be in the past, Jason, so there would already be no employees. I meant 2029. The company said in 2019 that automation isn't expected to replace human workers at warehouses for at least a decade. But guess what, Amazon shareholders? It's coming early.

Christmas is here, Santa's sleigh bells and the robot reindeer. Yeah. So if you're an Amazon employee right now, I highly suggest you basically sink your entire paycheck into Amazon stock because it will go through the roof as soon as you all get fired. Well, you're going to get fired once you unionize.

That's really what... Well, that's basically a thing. Yeah. The more people that unionize inside of Amazon, the faster the robots get here. So I think that's the point that Amazon's trying to make. Yeah. You want to unionize? Well, say hello to Mr. Roboto over here.

Speaking of Mr. Roboto, Elon Musk is kind of in the news. He's sort of. Twitter shareholders have voted, which was the last step in the Elon Musk takeover of the company. They said, sure, we'll take $54.20 a share.

It's better than what we got now. Yep. Yep. It's a little over $40 right now. What's interesting, though, is you can... I have to credit Scott Galloway for this one. You can tell the faith that people are putting into the deal actually going through because the stock price does not match what the buyout price would be.

Right. So it's closing... The other day it closed at $41.70. I didn't check today since this has closed. So that's a $10 difference. So theoretically, you could make $10 a share right now if you just bought Twitter. Yeah. But if everybody started buying Twitter, then the price goes up.

But, you know, it'll go up until it hits like, you know, $53.20 or $54.10. You know, people want to make money. I wish I had some. I would invest, but I don't... Because it would have to be crypto money, money that I would just like to pee on or burn.

Yeah. Yeah. Because I don't believe it would come back. Last time I invested in Twitter, when we had our contest, do you remember what Twitter was trading at when we had our contest? $14 something. I bought it $13.70. Yeah. Yeah, $13.70. I haven't bought Twitter since then.

So every share of Twitter I own is like around the $12 to $13 range was my buy-in. Yeah. See, I sold mine because the joke was over. So I got rid of it because, yeah, whatever.

Anyway, we'll see how this goes because the trial is coming up next month. Yep. Yep. We'll see. We'll see. Elon Musk is also probably having a problem over at Tesla because the Tesla zombies are starting to rise against him saying, hey, this full self-driving shit that you sold us, what you called an autopilot, doesn't.

Yeah. And you made us pay a lot of money and you've been pumping it up for years and years and years. So, I mean, everybody from the National Traffic or Highway Traffic and Safety Administration are going after him. I mean, basically anybody that's ever overpaid for, quote, unquote, autopilot, everybody's pissed about it.

They're like, dude, you know, put up or shut up. Well, I mean, you know. Can you blame them? I don't. Yes. They're dumb. It's obviously never been an autopilot, a true autopilot. Now, Tesla has a really easy fix for this.

Rename it. Yeah. Cruise control. Something we've had since the 60s. There you go. Just rename it and you're done. It's so ridiculous. Anyways, I want to skip ahead a little bit in the news because there's two stories that I wanted to have tied to each other and you put a couple in the middle here.

So, just jumping back to Twitter really quickly, I wanted to talk about, you know, why that stock price is probably pretty low because the pinnacle of Twitter's evolution and innovation right now is guess what Twitter is doing now? They're rolling out podcasts to blue subscribers.

Yeah. I've seen it. I've seen the future. So, you can now listen to a podcast in Twitter because… But not ours. You can't. You can't even listen to ours. Twitter every week. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. Jack put out a fatwa, a twatwa on us. Yeah. So, that's the pinnacle of Twitter's innovation right now. You know, I've always said that Twitter was way outsized in terms of their promotion and their space in the world for what they actually do.

And there you go. Now, a much maligned company compared to Twitter would be Facebook or Meta. And let's just… Obviously, we spend a lot of time crapping on them as well. They're a horrible country. Country. Country. They might as well be at this point. Yeah.

You know what I mean. They're horrible in their own way. But in terms of innovation, here's what they have in comparison to adding podcasts to a subscribing part of your shitty platform. Okay. They're spinning off the PyTorch framework into its own AI research foundation.

Yeah. Because they actually have innovators and people that have built stuff that is actually real that doesn't just involve putting podcasts into Twitter spaces. Six years and 150,000 projects from 2,400 contributors later, Meta announced on Monday.

They say that the PyTorch project will soon spin out from the company's direct control to become its own entity, the PyTorch Foundation, a subsidiary within the larger Linux Foundation nonprofit hegemony. Okay. Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Meta, Microsoft Azure, and NVIDIA are all a part of the governing board of this new company.

So say what you will about Meta and Facebook. They actually built some shit. And you know why they're giving it away? Because it didn't make any money. Exactly. That's why they're giving it away. They're like, we don't want to pay for this shit anymore. It's research. Get it out of here.

Yep. You know, let the Linux Foundation pay for it. And then when they open source their next version that may, I don't know, work, then we'll take it back. Yeah. Or we'll buy it back if it actually looks like it could make money or challenge us because that's our business model. Have you seen the news about Adobe buying a company that I've never heard of called Figma?

I have because we use Adobe XD an awful lot at my company. And I got a couple notes saying, I guess we're going to have to learn Figma now. Okay. Well, what the fuck is a Figma? Did they tell you? I mean, I kind of know what it is.

It's basically UX design software that you can collaborate on. You can do collaborations for building out, you know, scales and mock-ups of things and all that sort of stuff, which is exactly what we use XD for. But then, you know, I just wrote everybody back and I was like, take a deep breath, fellas.

It's not like XD isn't going to be around for like three more years. They're just going to not continue to build it anymore. They'll offer Figma. XD will still be, it'll still exist. It'll still be supported for an awful long time. Nobody has to learn anything tonight. Just tell them, just, just explain to them how long Flash lasted.

Yeah, exactly. There's still sites built on Flash on the web. I know. Yeah. But you have to take a train in China to get to them. Oh, that's right. Yeah. I mean, this was, this was pretty surprising news because XD is actually a pretty decent product, I think.

So, and, and that's all I can, all I can really see is they're buying this company to replace XD with this. Unless they've got a bunch of really good engineers over there. Probably good engineers because from what I've seen, it's a better product, at least for what it is.

But there, there's a couple of things here. It's like 50X revenue of what they're paying for, which is just insane. Yeah. You know, the numbers do not make sense whatsoever for this buy. And when it comes down to antitrust, it's like, well, somebody please investigate this because this is Adobe buying up one of its biggest competitors.

Like, okay, Figma today, Canva tomorrow. You know, because I don't know about you. I don't even touch Photoshop 90% of the time. I do everything in Canva now because it's just so easy. Right. So, yeah. I mean, we'll see. I mean, come on.

Antitrust. Until we get President What's-Her-Face from Minnesota, there's no antitrust. Well, this is exciting, Jason. I know you're going to be a big fan of this. Starbucks, the company on every corner, unless they decide to unionize and then they shut that one down.

Yep. Yep. That's what happens there. Are launching something called Odyssey, an upcoming extension to its popular rewards program that will allow customers to collect NFTs. Not fucking tasty. That's what Starbucks is to me. I do not like Starbucks.

Points value based on its rarity, and as you earn more tokens, you'll unlock new experiential rewards. I would just like to point out that at this point, NFTs are nothing more than a fucking Monopoly game at McDonald's. Mm-hmm. That's what they are now. Yes, which we know how that ended up. We saw that movie.

Yeah. Yeah. You know what you get as an NFT that you have to buy like 400 lattes to get? Key to the bathroom. That's your NFT. You get a key to the shitter. See, the difference between it being a game versus a promotional rewards program is that instead of like being legally required to basically offer the McDonald's things for free, if you ask for them, you can purchase limited edition stamps directly through the Starbucks website.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, fucking lawyers. This is what NFTs are now, people. Hey, man, but I don't know if you've heard, you know, Ethereum has had the quote-unquote merge. They have moved from proof of work to proof of stake.

You know what I would rather spend my money on? Stake. Yeah, me too. It's supposed to be greener, but nobody can really seem to explain how or why. I've read many an article that told me how this is good for the environment, and I ended up scratching my head at the end going, what? No.

Well, here's the deal. It doesn't take as many GPUs, that's for sure. So I haven't looked at NVIDIA stock today, but I bet it's probably down. Or maybe it's up because now people can buy them again. Oh, wait. Yeah, nobody cares about Ethereum as much as they do Bitcoin. That's right.

Never mind. Yeah, never mind. I looked at my Ethereum today, and I'm still down 60% from my purchase price, what, about eight months ago? Yay. I used to load up Coinbase once a day just to see where I was at, and I've actually stopped.

In fact, I've got on my phone right now, I'm opening it up, I'm looking at it. Yeah, I've got the green dot that it's a new app that I haven't opened in a long time, or the blue dot next to it. Yeah, so I just don't give a crap anymore. I'll just let that sit until I hear something in the news. I didn't know you actually still owned any.

I thought you unloaded it. No, no. Or did you buy the dip? Because you'd still be buying if you're buying the dip. No, I'm not buying anymore. I'm hodling, Jason. I'm hodling. Oh, you're hodling. Yes. I'm just going to let it sit. Yeah, I'm hodling my ETH, too.

My $250 is now down to $109.54, according to MetaMask. Yes. And speaking of phrases like hodling my ETH, Miriam Webster has just yeeted a bunch of internet sling into the dictionary. Thank God hodling my ETH isn't in there yet, but oh my gosh.

So we've got a whole bunch of new words that are now legit words, as they say. And this is, here we go. Metaverse, of course, coming as no surprise, seeing as companies like Facebook have been all about the virtual environment that doesn't exist. So, yes, we have a word for a place that doesn't really exist.

Meatspace is a term now, which should have been a long time ago. Altcoin has been added to describe. All of these should have been, like, 10 years ago. Laggy is good. Pwn. Pwn. Come on. Come on. That doesn't need to be an official word from the dictionary.

But that's from the 90s. That's from the 90s. Fine. Virtue signaling, greenwashing something, of course, as well. Sus, which came from the Among Us game, which destroyed my old band's web popularity, not that we had any to begin with.

Luke, as in fashion looks, is now officially a word. We hope nobody cringes or yeets whatever it is they're holding. But adorkable has also been added to the dictionary. Adorkable. Adorkable. Booster dose is its own thing, as well as false positive and false negative.

Now, false positive and false negative should not be in the dictionary because they are two words that already have definition. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, those are. Yeah, that's bad. Right. Okay. Well, none of these are good. Go ahead. Finish up. We also got shrinkflation, pumpkin spice, and birria.

Oh, side hustle as well. Yeah, yeah. You missed side hustle. Fuck side hustle and fuck you, Merriam-Webster. I'm going Oxford all the way.

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From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com. Lord of the Rings, the rings of power, Brian, on your recommendation, I did go and partake of the first two episodes.

Mm-hmm. Awesome. Right? Just awesome. Just awesome. It's just great. They're really good. I know we're going against the grain of our Discord channel, which are very much fans of Game of Thrones' new one and don't really like Lord of the Rings, but I fucking love the new Lord of the Rings stuff.

You know what it's like? It's like Star Trek Brave New Worlds. It's like seeing an old friend done properly. Right? Yeah. Especially after the disappointment of the Hobbit and the six hours of that. This is just great. I am thoroughly enjoying it.

Slow burn. Wonderful. Yeah. It wasn't even that slow of a burn for me. I thought it was moving at the proper pace. Yeah. Maybe it's just time for me to move to the Shire, I guess, but I thought it was moving along at just dandy. We get second lunches and we get lots of beer.

What's wrong with that? Well, I get non-alcoholic hops, but it's close enough. It's close enough. No, I'm thoroughly enjoying it. I couldn't give any fucks less about Game of Thrones, but so far, this is just extremely well done, I think.

You know what I think part of it is, Jason, and we've been talking about this for an awful long time, Game of Thrones or House of Dragon or whatever, sadness porn, Lord of the Rings, delightful, hopeful. You're rooting for good guys. There are good guys.

Yeah. There's not these gray area anti-heroes or whatever. Yeah. It's like, you're a good guy or you're a fucking bad guy. Yeah. Yeah. It's straightforward and you know the good guys are going to win eventually and the good guys are actually really good guys and it's great and it's not sadness porn.

Yeah. I don't know if you remember, Westerns were definitely good guys, white hats, black hats, bad guys. You watch something like The Way of the Dog and it just ruins Westerns because there's no good people in that entire thing. So it's like, I'm tired of watching that stuff.

This, yes, I think you've nailed it. We want a binary good and we want a binary bad. There we go. We don't want any trans. Don't take that wrong, people. Well, you're going to, well, you're going to, you're going to, we're going to talk about that in a second, I guess.

Jeez. Wait a, wait a, okay. Let's talk about She-Hulk, attorney at law. Yes. This does kind of blur the good and bad lines a little bit. So I am thoroughly enjoying it. I got caught up last night and as we sat down to record this on Thursday night, I got a notification on my watch that there's a new one out and I'm like, maybe we can push for half an hour.

So I know I'm hoping we have a short show because I want to go watch it, man. I love the show. It's hilarious. It is so tongue in cheek and funny, but funny. Well done. Look, the MCU is just moving towards standup comedy.

We get it, but this is just, it's well done. It's funny. So yeah, I am in on She-Hulk, attorney at law. Yeah. Those are, those are my shows right now, man. It's all about Lord of the Rings and She-Hulk. And I am actually very much enjoying Lower Decks being back as well.

So yeah. Waiting on that one. Well, we have some Star Wars news. I was hoping to wait until we were with Dave Bittner, but the schedules, did not allow that. So we should talk about this because D23 was underway last weekend and they dropped three trailers at the expo.

We got the Mandalorian season three trailer. Did you watch it, Jason? Okay. I have not. It looks, it looks good. It looks good. You can't really tell what's going to happen, but we'll see. It's dark. It's a lot of action. I'm very much looking forward to it.

The first two seasons were great, so can't complain. We got the trailer for Star. Well, two and a half seasons when you count in Boba Fett. So it was kind of two and a half seasons so far. Okay. So two really good seasons and one mediocre one or half a mediocre one. I thought the stuff on Boba Fett was pretty good.

You didn't like it? I felt hit or miss. I think we talked about that a bit, but I mean, not bad. It's good. You know why I think I was so excited and I thought it was a better Mandalorian? It's because I didn't have to watch Boba Fett. Okay. That's true.

I thought Boba Fett was falling flat until they brought in Mando to save the day. That's true. Star Wars Andor trailer dropped. That will be out September 21st. So what? We're about a week off from that debuting. Looks phenomenal. I agree.

Looks really good. Yep. Can't wait. And they dropped a trailer for a show called Tales of the Jedi, which will be animated. This also looks really interesting. I did get into some of the animated stuff like the Clone Wars and things like that, and they were all very good. And this seems to follow and tie up some plot lines about characters from the not so great.

I guess we're going to have to call them the first three movies, even though they're the second three movies. Yeah. Yeah. We know what you're talking about. But it looks good. So we'll see. I mean, Disney Plus is killing it with the Star Wars content. Not going to lie. I am worried about them oversaturating, but we'll see.

Yeah. We're waiting for the Discovery version of Star Wars, I guess. Or maybe the Picard. The Picard. They're going to bring back an old Luke and it'll be depressing. Yeah. Oh, wait. They did that already. Yeah. Yeah. They did. I'm in with what they're doing with Star Wars.

It's, yeah, the oversaturation problem could be a problem because all they see are, you know, dollar signs. It's like, okay. Yep. The more we do, the more we make. So let's just keep making some more. But so far, it's all been quality. It's all been quality so far.

No missteps yet. Yeah. All right. Well, we have a good, we have a good year to look forward to. Now, speaking of our previous topic, I watched the film Kiki, a 2016 film about the dragon voguing scene in New York City. And it was a fantastic film.

It was. Cool. Yeah. It's, I mean, it covers the whole, you know, the whole underground scene with, you know, because there's the ballroom scene that came out from Harlem, like, you know, way back in the day. Yeah. And the Kikis are the kids who are kind of the new and upcoming kids who are kind of keeping the whole ballroom scene alive.

Cool. And it was just, it was, it was a really kind of touching documentary about like, you know, just how shitty these, the lives of these kids are because they all get kicked out. You know, they're gay, trans, you know, the whole, the whole shebang. And, you know, the ballroom gives them a place to go and gives them a home and gives them, you know, opportunity.

So it's a really good, really good film. I fucking, I love subcultures. I love little subcultures like that. The world needs more of it. We're all too mainstream and all too the same right now. I love that. That's great. Well, you are, you and, you and I are on the same team right now because that's exactly why I'm talking about this stuff because I'm, I'm working in the, the, the ballroom scene with one of my new clients.

And, uh, so I am also going through pose. I am almost like I had to come in here to do the show where I was going to finish the last episode of the first season. We've been binging it at the house and, uh, it's so good. Jesus. The acting in that show is just incredible.

And it's, I mean, it's a great story. It's, it's a really great story. It's about the ballroom scene in the late eighties. You know, it goes into, you know, all of the gay culture, the trans culture, the, you know, the AIDS epidemic and all of that stuff. It is just, uh, I mean, it's just, it's heart-wrenching most of the time, but other times you just like, you know, crack up because it's just so fun.

And finally, I, this all came about because I, I know Brian that you probably maybe remember when I, uh, reviewed legendary from HBO max on the show and you were like, huh? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah. You're pretty much like, huh? Um, so, uh, I'm working with one of the people on the, the cast of legendary for a set of new shows coming up.

So that's why I'm getting into this stuff. And I am just getting more and more enamored in every subculture I can find because, and especially this one, because it really helps people get off the street, get their stuff together and deal with, you know, it gives them a fresh new family because they just had a really crappy one for many different reasons.

Subcultures are so important for so many reasons. Uh, it's, it lets you experience the world. You realize that everybody's different. Everybody is their own special snowflake. And that's what subcultures give you. When we live in this fucking monoculture that we've been stuck in for at least a decade now, people start to feel really left out and it's not everybody.

We're not all Kylie Jenner's. Ups and doodads. Brian, I canceled my Apple watch ultra. Can you believe it? Nobody else can. No, I can't actually. Cause yeah, this is, this is your new, your new thing is, is to buy and then not get.

Well, that was the thing, but there was another thing that came up. I was talking to my dad on, on FaceTime and I was telling him about the mash thing and you could tell he was just kind of, kind of, kind of bummed and jealous that he didn't get to go. So I canceled my watch, took the money that I was going to spend on my watch and bought my dad a plane ticket and he gets here tomorrow morning.

That's awesome. So he's going to come tomorrow, going to get him a cab from the airport because I don't know if you've noticed this, Brian, but the fastest way to get anywhere from LAX nowadays is a cab. So yeah, I did notice that last time I came in. I'm like, would you like to spend an hour waiting for an Uber or would you like to go downstairs, find the man in the nice yellow car and get in it and get to where you're going faster, cheaper, a lot cheaper.

And in one piece and without getting raped. So all of those go with getting a yellow cap. So I just put all that together and I'm like, come on out. So Saturday morning, my dad is going to join me and our friend Brian Blondell and we're going to go out to the 4077th and have a nice morning.

You know who else is feeling a little sad and left out that he won't be there? Who? Send me a plane ticket, Chase. Yeah. Well, you get half of this Patreon money we're about to lose. We're about to lose. Yeah. I'm going to be stuck out on the ranch because I can't get Jeep in this goddamn tank of a giant gas tank.

Sell your car and take taxis, Jason. I think you found your solution. I think I have. I think I have. I do have my Sonos Ray that I have to review real quick. This is going to be the super fastest hardware review of all time, which is what I think people, I think this is what the peoples want.

It sounds really good and it integrates with my Sonos perfectly. That's it. It's cheap. It sounds great. And it's easy to use. If you need a soundbar, go with Sonos Ray. Does it come in black? Well, that's the color I got.

Okay, good. Because the white one's very ugly. Oh, God. Who has it? Why would you put a white soundbar anywhere? Because it's going to be by your black TV. Click on the own review that you put in the link and it is a white soundbar. Ew. Yes. Oh, my God.

It is a white soundbar. I didn't even notice. I don't see color, Brian. Okay. The whole thing. The whole. I know. I know. Send your emails somewhere else. That was supposed to be a joke. Yeah, this thing was terrible. That's okay. I did a trans joke earlier, too. We're going to get lots of emails because nobody has a sense of humor anymore.

All right. So, iOS 16 is now available. In addition, watch OS 9 and Monterey 12.6 came out. The theme of iOS 16 is something that I never thought Apple would embrace and something that you and I have often bemoaned. It's personalization.

You can actually start to tweak your own device to make it the way you want to look. Sort of. Sort of. Look, we're not talking res edit level shit here, okay? But it's better. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we aren't the show to go to for this.

You can click on the link in the show notes if you want the play-by-play of everything specific. But the update went fine. It looks a little bit nicer. I tweaked my home screen. I added some widgets and stuff like that. It's fine. It's great. The watch update was also fine, although they did change my default and standard.

And I've used forever a particular watch face. And it's different now. And that angers me. But such is life. Oh, mine came. Mine was exactly the same. One of my secondary screens was a little redder than I wanted it. But otherwise, it was fine. My happy places for this are medicine tracking.

Thank you for the win on the medicine tracking. So, I put in all my medications because, you know, old. It's really nice to not have to have my own. Because I had, you know, notifications and beeps and bobs and different apps. So, I'm just like, okay, let's unify it inside the OS.

Better. Also, let us not be remiss in mentioning, we could also bring this back up again in security, but we'll just do it here. Medication tracking with Apple's built-in security and not sending it to the government or having it go into an app that is selling the data to the government.

Correct. All on device. All on device. But I do have to say, when it comes down to personalization and customization, I'm fine with it. But when you can pick the shape and color of your pill and the pill background, that's a little weird. That was very weird.

So, I don't know where you're going with that one. What would you make your Anima pill look like, Jason? Oh, man. It's, I'm not even going to do it. I'm not even going to do it. Eggplant? Nope. Their haptic keyboard is also really nice.

So, if you haven't turned that on. Thank you for putting that in the links, because I turned that on immediately, and it's beautiful. It is great. It is great. Battery percentage is back in the battery icon. Hallelujah. Wow, thank you, God. That is so much nicer, because you don't have to swipe down to the little control panel to make that work.

A couple of camera reviews are out now for the iPhone 14 saying, it's okay. It's okay. And I saw this article that, this is over at Business Insider, who I usually like quite a bit. Here's the title of the article.

I deleted and edited my text with Apple's new iOS update, and it's the coolest thing the company has done in a long time. Then they always have the three bullet points of, you know, they basically TLDR their own article, which is fantastic, because I don't want to read the whole thing anyway.

The third bullet point is, trying it out made it fun for me to use my iPhone for the first time in a while. So I read the article, no mention of any of this, you know, exuberance and jubilant behavior. It's just like, yeah, it worked.

It was kind of cool. But if they don't have the new one, it won't work. That was the gist of the article. So the SEO bots have taken over basically everything. There's nothing in the article about jelly beans and rainbows every time they edited their own text. No, just eggplants.

Okay, there you go. Just eggplants. There's a show title. I got a link in here, too, to how to remove the search button from the home screen, if you care, because it's stupid and redundant. If you want to search, just swipe down from the middle. It's the same thing as swiping down from the middle.

It's fine. It's a good use of space. It switches to the things when you move over. I kind of like it as a UI thing. You keep it if you want to. I will. You do you. I will. Okay. What Apple is not going to do is unfortunately keep Dark Sky alive.

They have taken the worst parts of Dark Sky and ported it to the Apple weather app. And the best parts of Dark Sky they have left on the floor to wither and die. So thank you for Sherlocking the greatest weather app ever made, Apple.

It really was. It really was. There's no doubt about that. And I found a new feature in Draft, the app that I use for instant capture. There is a way to use their quick capture link in a share screen in iOS.

So because I use the Brave browser and it's always a pain to get my stuff where I need it to go when I'm looking at links and all that. Drafts quick capture does one thing very well. It puts the title and the link inside of a new draft and shares it with all your devices. Okay.

It's awesome. The way I was doing it before, I had a read later with reader link in there. So it would save it to my iOS copy of reader that I could use on any of my computers, which was okay, but not the best. Readers read later for me now has 700 articles that I really want to get to sometime before I die, which doesn't really help me when I'm trying to do this show every week.

So Drafts quick capture is awesome. Highly recommended. One quick software update. IZotope RX 10 is out for all you podcast nerds out there. I ended up upgrading to it. It's phenomenal.

But Eric Hundley, who we mentioned earlier, pointed something out to me. It's like, oh, you can get the everything bundle with your loyalty pricing for $299, which will give you RX 10 plus everything else. Or you can spend $149 for RX 10 and not get the stuff, which I, so me being me, ended up spending $149 for the RX 10 upgrade, then $299 for the everything bundle.

And now spending three days on the phone with iZotope trying to get that $149 back because I really want it back. There you go. And I had some Discord news that I thought was just funny, but I wanted to take a brief sidebar. We have a Discord channel. It's actually pretty happening.

It's fun. It's nice. Lots of people in there. A lot of people in there. An awful lot of people in there. And I know they're all listening right now. And since we're about to lose all of our sweet Patreon cash because of fucking child pornography, thanks world, I would like to just have a call to action for our vast amount of Discord followers, please give us a buck or something.

We're going to need to make up for our highest source of income, which has a high probability of going away very quickly. And, you know, you're all enjoying the community space. Give us a buck a month, a buck a show, something, please. Something. Thank you. Pretty please. Now let's talk about what Discord is actually doing, and we will not be adding to our Discord channel.

Discord has decided to revolutionize online conversations with forums. Yay, forums! And the very first bullet point on this article, what has happened before will happen again. Yep. So Discord, the social messaging service that helped to displace old school internet forums, now wants to bring them back.

They've announced forum channels, which are exactly what you'd imagine, forums. In Discord. Um, okay. I'm just, I, I'm at a loss. Threaded conversations, I suppose, is the, I don't know.

It seemed to be working fine to me, but okay. Well, Brian, they fixed IRC, so I guess news, news groups are next to fix if you're going backwards. The crucial thing here is they're compatible with Discord's auto-mod, which is very nice and can help clean up discussions.

And moderation was, of course, the downfall of poorly run forums. Might I suggest you guys go after comment sections next? So, Brian, I got two new books this week.

I got the status game on human life and how to play it by Will Storr. And I got Chatter, the voice in our head, why it matters, and how to harness it by Ethan Cross. Storr and Cross should start a band. Chatter, the voice in our head, why it matters, and how to harness it. You are a golden god.

You are a golden god. Shoot everyone. Okay. What's Canada's 911, Brian? I think I need to have an intervention here. Okay. These books are fantastic.

The thing about them is they really go together really well. The status game is not what you think it is. It does talk about how we strive for status in our daily lives, but it gets really fucking existential really fast. And it is really good.

Chatter also talks about, yes, people who want to shoot people, which is very bad, but it also explains why they want to and maybe how we can fix it. And both of them cover a lot of the same topics and a lot of the same ground. So maybe next book they can get together, but I guess they wouldn't get twice the money.

So maybe not. Okay. Maybe that's their whole thing. But I highly recommend both of these books. It could be. The problem with books, and I don't have the link for this, and I meant to put it in, but I totally forgot about it and I'll try to find it again. I was reading an article about books and about the number of books published per year.

And do you know what the average number of copies of a book published, if you take every single book published in a single year, what the average number of copies bought is? I thought it was like 54 or something. 12. 12. 12. Okay. That's about it.

Okay. This is why nobody writes books. Well, no, people write books. People, no, it's not like people don't, the problem is people don't buy books. Too many people write books, but they, nowadays, people write books to do, you know, podcasts and speaking tours.

Yeah. So, you know, at least we get a year of them being quiet so we can have our podcast while they're off writing a book. But yeah, no, books are, if you don't do it right, it's hard to do. And there are very few people doing it right. Well, just saying not enough people fucking read.

That's a big problem. And I'm apparently one of them right now. I have not been reading, but I did want to mention, I figured out why I've been avoiding my Kindle. I realized the book that I got stuck on, and it was one that you recommended, Jason, but I apparently just can't get into. The Dawn of Everything, A New History of Humanity by David Graeber.

I'm not getting the aha moments. I'm not getting the, ooh, I didn't realize that. I'm getting, he just keeps restating the same premise over and over again with nothing interesting. Am I stuck too early? Did it happen later?

What's going on here, Jason? Do you even remember? Probably not. Yeah, it's David Graeber and David Wingro. There was a duo that did the book. Yes, the two of them. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Here's the thing. I don't remember. I don't remember a bit about that book. When you put it in the notes, I remember reading it and going, oh, that was kind of a good book.

And there was something about it that I really, I thought I enjoyed the beginning very much and I probably fell asleep for the second part because that's how I go through books. And then I have to rewind and find where I fell asleep and all that stuff. But yeah, this one, I can remember about, you know, a little bit of it, but I thought it was good.

Okay. So you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to apply my life as short. Not read any of my books. No, no, no. But definitely I'm giving up on this one. I'm calling it a loss and moving on. So I'm going to head back to Eyes of the Void, the final architecture book two by Adrian Tchaikovsky. I really enjoyed the first one.

I had started the second one and then I had switched over to the dawn of everything and then I stopped reading altogether because apparently I hate that book so much. Okay. Well, so here you go. So I now have my revenge for discovery. This is awesome. We have cleared the slate.

We are back to zero. You kept me from my favorite activity for at least a month now. So feel vindicated, Jason. Closing shout outs. Here's a big surprise. Nobody at Patreon signed up this week.

Fuck. Wait, somebody named Krusty the Clown signed up. Wait, hold on. That can't be right. Jared, the subway guy. And Jared, damn it, we're going to lose so much money. You know what happens too? The real problem is if we shut down our Patreon, which we'll have to on ethical grounds if all this is true, one-tenth of those people are going to come back and give us money on other platforms.

We're going to lose so many people. Brian, do you not realize that this is, you know, just poetic justice for us? I know. We have built, we have built our livelihood in someone else's backyard. We have built ourselves on somebody else's walled garden. Yes, I know.

I know. I know. I mean, we can't, we can't, you know, predict which one is going to take off and which one isn't. But, um, will you still love us if we're on OnlyFans? We can't predict who's going to have child porn and who isn't. Most of the time we can.

We're pretty good at that. Patreon is fucking out of left field. Come on. We usually have pretty good CPM, Dar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. Anyways, over at those other areas that people send us money, thank you so much to everybody over at PayPal.

Miles, Shari, Linda, Natalie, Nathaniel, Dag, Edward, and Jason, who sent us a whopping 100 bucks. Thank you. Thank you very much. Over at Stripe, we've got Anne Q, Theodore, and Sean. Thank you all so much. You might be the, the savior of the show in the next couple of weeks here.

And in sad news, Patreon died this week. Oh, sad Christmas. Oh, well, it was nice getting that beer money every month. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo.

Check me out on LinkedIn.com. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoy the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help us keep some of the fuck. I'm going to have to take the link down. We're going to have to fix that one, too.

Thank you, Patreon. Jesus Christ. Okay, well, go there and find the, find the non-child porn version of, uh, allegedly. Allegedly. Allegedly. We hope to come back to you next week with good news. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 570.

From there, you can find links to everything we talked about in this episode, as well as links to our swag and Discord channel. If you want to buy some stuff or chat with us and other show fans, or give us a dollar, you can also head over to GOG.show slash contact and send us your feedback or questions that we can read on the air. And if you're so inclined, please head over to GOG.show slash review and toss us a snarky review and preferably five stars.

Stay grumpy and just put down the CPM Patreon. Come on. Come on. Brothers gotta eat. Allegedly.

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