580: #DystopiYAY!

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. Brian, I have to say, and we're going to start off this show real quick, Claritin is my hero. Yay, pharmaceuticals. Oh my God. For the past three months, like two to three months, I have just been going slowly downhill and I couldn't figure it out.

And I'm like, what the hell's going on? I have no energy. I can't think. It was getting bad. And I was trying to do boot up at the same time and I just couldn't do anything. And it turns out I had a very slow creep seasonal allergy. I was about to say seasonal allergy, right? Yeah. It's killing me. It was killing me.

Even in LA. Even in LA. We have the worst air in the country. I mean, come on. That's not surprising here. And fortunately, I mean, unfortunately for him, fortunately for me, friend of the show, Chris Lockhead, was going through the same thing and he got his fixed.

And I'm like, wow, he's just like medicine. I'm like, okay, let's try medicine. I got an appointment with my doctor next week, but in the interim, I grabbed a big box of Claritin and I swear to God, it was like, you know, I went from like, you know, my phone was at 3% and I put in a quick charge and it was back at 80% overnight.

It was incredible. I'm going to throw this out there. Maybe this applies to you. Maybe not. My wife never really had allergies. She got them when she came to LA. You know, you change the system. You change all the stuff you're breathing in, all that sort of stuff. And she was going, she went like to every doctor known to man. She went through the whole process. What she ended up finding out is she has, she's got a dust mite allergy and they have, they have a treatment for that now.

Wow. So you might want to get yourself tested, Jason. You never know, because it was definitely like, it wasn't a year round thing. It was definitely, it presented as seasonal allergies for her, but like really bad. Then she just went and got the allergy test, found out she was allergic to dust mites, little pills she's taken. She, you have to take it for like almost a year or something like that.

She's ending the course and she's a thousand times better. Oh man. Okay. I'll check. Definitely talk to my doctor about that. This is why this is now grumpy old geeks. The old people, you know, the stuff that you just brushed off it because as a 20 year old, because you were too busy downing a entire bottle of whiskey and you didn't really notice or care.

Yeah, no, no. It's just like, I got 12 pills just to get, you know, get to breakfast. It's crazy. Yeah, but Claritin is my hero. There you go. It's good stuff. Yeah. Oh my God. I can breathe. I can breathe. And so I just want to, we're going to, we're going to roll into this real quick, but I just, this is driving me crazy.

Elon is, you know, being Elon as usual. And I just, I posted this the other day. Actually, he's kind of Elon plus right now, like Disney plus, Paramount plus. He's Elon plus. No, he is Elon plus plus. He is, he is as hated as C plus plus at this point.

Oh, but yeah, he's definitely, uh, he's, he's doing, he's Elon extra, I guess maybe too. Yeah. So I, I wrote this last week. I'm like people asking for Jack Dorsey to come back or the same people that said George W. Bush was a great president compared to Trump.

No, Brian, they were both shit. They were just different varietals, but still shit. Ev, Ev on the other hand, was at least smart enough to go out and fail at something else. Medium, which he has, I guess recently left. I think he left that. Yeah. He's just, he's just growing a beard now. He's, he's cultivating a beard and he's going to enter beard contests.

Yeah. No, I still like Ev. Ev's a good guy. Uh, Jack, yeah. Jack and, and, uh, Elon can just get in that rocket and get the fuck out of town as far as I'm concerned. But, uh, yeah. Oh, you know, Twitter's still there. It is sorta. It's kind of there.

Fox, blah, blah. I'm just going to hold polls that don't have anything to do with anything to decide what, what's going to happen on Twitter now. Yeah. Um, there's an, there's an op-ed over at the New York times, uh, that I linked to. It says, I was the head of trust and trust and safety at Twitter. This is what could become of it. Well worth the read. And I say, screw it. Let's just dive into the news.

Okay. Let's do it. In the news. The big bomb at the beginning of the week was Elon Musk reinstated Donald Trump's Twitter account. Um, and Donald Trump said, no, thank you.

I'm going to China. So, or, uh, and, but I just, I love the, the, you know, there's a giant document on Twitter, on the blog still titled the permanent suspension of at real Donald Trump. Well, much like self-driving is used completely incorrectly. So is permanent. Now words no longer have meaning for the Muskster.

No, no, it's just, he's definitely on, on, uh, the Trump train, I guess, or, uh, Trump's not. No, he, he said, fuck off. He's sticking with his true social because, you know, a lot of his money is rolled up in there and the donors are coming through there. So he doesn't, he doesn't need the, he doesn't need or want the attention right now. Believe it or not. He wants the money.

Also, I don't know if you knew this, but there's like an SEC ruling against him that says he can't post on, he can't post the same content on another social network for like six hours. So even if he posted one thing on truth, he'd have to post something different on Twitter. He can't post the same thing or he's going to be in violation of SEC rules.

I think it's SEC, maybe it's FTC. I don't know. Donald Trump, you could, you know, buffer. That's what you can use. Just use that. You'll figure it out. Oh, Donald Trump. That's right. He has patience. I forgot about that. He can, he has so many, he has so many patience. Yeah. He's got all the patience. He's got the most beautiful patience.

Yeah. He's got huge patience, huge patience. The best patience, all the good patience. That's what I've got. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, Twitter has continued to be a train wreck. There's an, sadly, that Rolling Stone's journalism is really falling down. Unlike BuzzFeed, which would be doing an updated, ongoing list of celebrities who've quit Twitter because of Elon Musk.

Rolling Stone published once, Set and Forget. So this is just a partial list because many more people have quit since then. But Shonda Rhimes, Gigi Hadid, Tony Braxton, Sarah Bareilles, Eric Larson, T. Leoni, Whoopi Goldberg, Jack White, and Trent Reznor have all left Twitter, according to Rolling Stone.

There's an awful lot of other people. A lot of people are straddling the fence saying, oh, I'm over on Mastodon, but can't quite figure it out. Yeah. So I'm posting that I'm here, but probably leaving if I can figure out Mastodon. My Twitter feed – and again, I recognize that this is because I am a cis white old man.

It has not changed at all. I have a curated feed of smart people and journalists and scientists and things of that nature that I enjoy, and they're all still there and still posting. But again, I'm a cis white male that doesn't get abuse or rape threats or racist attacks all the time.

Also, I never post, so I don't give a shit. Well, there you go. That's the thing. As soon as you post, you start to lose followers and gain hate. So the real trick is to get an account, follow a bunch of people, and just let it sit. As soon as you tweet something, boom, here come the unfollows. Here come the hate.

So it's just set it and forget it. So I wanted to dive a little bit further into the musicians leaving Twitter just because that's kind of the world that I live in and what I've lived in for 30-plus years. Jack White has made it clear that he's leaving Twitter due to Elon Musk's decision to reinstate Donald Trump's account, which kind of looks silly right now since Donald Trump didn't exactly come back.

Trent Reznor has closed his account as well. He said the billionaire class basically took a swipe at Elon Musk saying this is just ridiculous that billionaires are taking over all these means of communication. It's a negative climate and social media in general. We don't need the arrogance of the billionaire class to feel like they can just come in and solve everything even without him involved.

I just find that it has become such a toxic environment for my mental health. I need to tune out. When Trent Reznor says for his mental health he needs to tune out, we should probably be paying attention because this dude has had some fucked up shit going on in his life. I don't feel good being there anymore.

Elon, of course, replied by calling him a crybaby, saying too bad because I quite like his music. What an ass. And then said he might be better suited to being on Etsy, which actually is kind of funny. That's pretty good. That's a good zing.

Joe Bonamassa, who is somebody I don't really know terribly well, but he's a very well-respected guitarist, is also left. And the irony of all these things is these announcements about leaving social media go viral on social media.

So, yeah, he posted this big thing on Instagram just saying, like, I'm sick of people just dunking on you all the time. To your point, Jason, as soon as you post, you get the hate. And, you know, so a lot of musicians are starting to question the value of being on social media at this point, which I think is correct.

It's so funny. Well, here's two funny things about this. Trent Reznor bitching about billionaires. How many hundreds of millions does he have? He's not broke. Oh, but not a billionaire. Not a billionaire, but still better off than almost everybody else. All of us combined. Exactly. So, yeah, pot kettle black, Trent.

And I was talking to my brother last night. I'm like – because we put up all these, you know, different giant blow-ups. I've got like a nine-foot blow-up dreidel in my front yard. I've got a black angel. We've got all sorts of different cross-religious things that we put up in our front yard.

We are the most obnoxious people at Christmas. And he's like, oh, I got to see this. I'm like, oh, yeah, just go check my Instagram like a year or two ago and we've got pictures of all that stuff up there. And he's like, I don't really go on Instagram. I'm like, why not? He's like, because every time I do it, it makes me sad. And I'm like, okay, there you go.

Don't do it. Yeah. I mean, you know, yeah, that's just – I like the fact that a lot of smart people and a lot of people that have been using it to promote their careers are now taking a pretty critical look at it and saying, do I really need this? Maybe it's time to do traditional marketing again.

Who knows? Or, you know, focus on your website. They're there. Yeah. Yeah. Let's take it all back. Take it back. Exactly. So Twitter is now engaging in Dick Move 101. Actually, this is definitely a page out of the Donald Trump playbook.

What do you do when you want to save money? You don't pay your bills. Yep. I thought the same thing. Same thing. Yeah. Donald Trump infamous for not paying his contractors and paying anybody anything once they've done the work. Elon Musk is now refusing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in travel bills accumulated by Twitter employees before he took over the company.

He has issued orders to slow or even halt payment to vendors and contract services. Dick Move. I wonder if he did the math on this on how much it's going to cost in lawyer fees when all of these people sue him. I don't think he did.

Well, you'll be paying pennies on the dollars trying to get the money back from these vendors. But the lawyer fees are probably going to kill him. Yeah. Kill him. He's going to be drowning in lawyer fees anyways. Already is. I'm sure. Plus the and of course. Yeah. The bow on this particular present that he is gifting the world, especially at Christmas time.

They have not delivered checks previously promised to charitable organizations. Oh, damn. Yeah. Okay, Scrooge. Scrooge McMusk. That's who he is. And we might have a show title.

Except we've had Elon Musk as like the title. I want to do a non-Musk title, damn it. I know. I know. It's hard though. It's so hard. It is hard. He does suck all the oxygen out of Mars. Yeah, and let's just say there's a new website called Twitter is going great that's a ripoff of Web3 is going great.

I hope it has the blessing of Molly from over there because it's the same thing. It's also run by a woman. That's great. But that's just – it's – something I would do in my 20s is rip off another site like that because you took the look and feel and everything. So hopefully there's a blessing there.

But if not, either way, just go there for the Twitter news. I got one more Twitter story here. Sam Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk apparently had some secret text messages going back and forth. And there is a rumor that Elon is denying but kind of the evidence is there that Sam Bankman-Fried put in $100 million into Twitter.

So he does own a little tiny chunk. So the hits keep on coming for FTX, especially their celebrity promoters who we've always said were probably going to get in trouble. Well, the roosters are coming home to roost. Is that what it is?

The chickens are coming home to roost, however they call that. Something like that. Tom Brady, Shaq. What's his name from Curb Your Enthusiasm? I'm not sure he should actually get one because the entire commercial he was like, meh, I don't know about this. I was thinking the same thing.

He was kind of like – he was kind of taking a piss out of it. Yeah. Yeah. But Gisele Bundchen, Steph Curry, Shaq. Yeah, all these people. Kevin O'Leary too. You know, Mr. Wonderful is not so wonderful anymore, which we all kind of knew. As soon as I saw him getting into NFTs, I'm like, oh, here we go.

Here we go. So many people jumped on this bandwagon. A paid advertiser? Whatever. Come on. I don't know if they can be sued. Whatever. Well, here's the thing. It comes down to if they disclose the fact that it was a paid placement, which obviously they're in the fucking Super Bowl.

Who's going to be – who's going to think that they're not doing paid placement? Yeah, I don't quite understand that. Look, if you get sick eating a butcher box steak, we're not liable for that. It's all I'm saying. And you never will because – And you never will because they're wonderful advertisers. You never, never will. Ever.

Ever. Should have picked somebody that dropped us a long time ago, but, you know. If your Eero drops connection, it's not our fault. There you go. And that happens to me frequently. Yes, but 30 seconds ago, as a matter of fact, we restarted this damn show. Anyway.

Anyways. All right. Oh, here's the thing. Here's the reason that these people are doing it because they're assuming that these celebrities are just going to settle and they're just going to get a payday. Yeah. They're like, oh, you know, they don't want the publicity. They don't want the hassle, so they're just going to settle. Well, you know, since it was a paid placement, I'm on the fence about this.

It's like, okay. I mean, I do think Matt Damon should spend a decade in Leavenworth for that crypto.com ad just because it was so terrible. But, you know, the Larry David ad was kind of funny. The Larry David one was funny. And, again, you know, that Matt Damon crypto ad was terrible.

But, again, the producers of the ad, he was just – he's just walking meat that's been paid to stand there. Yep. Fortune favors the vapid celebrity product placement. By the way, if you're dumb enough to buy anything that Matt Damon tells you to buy, it sucks to be you.

Moving on. So there was some good news, I thought, that came out this week about crypto and mining in general. Governor Kathy Hochul, I believe, New York, has signed legislation restricting crypto mining, making it the first state to clamp down on the practice. It's an environment-focused law, no shit, that establishes a two-year freeze on new and renewed air permits for fossil fuel power plants used for mining that uses demanding proof-of-worth work authentication, which is the really bad one that basically uses all the power.

Bitcoin. Yeah, Bitcoin and all that. So anything that uses the power of Brazil, basically, to mine your stupid Bitcoin. So, yeah, they're basically putting a lockdown on this and no more. And it's insane to me. Mining outfits in New York are building natural gas-based power plants to sustain operations.

Yes, of course this should be restricted. Yes, of course this should be banned. Are you fucking kidding me? Anyways. But what really drove me nuts is the very last sentence in this article. There's also the question of effectiveness. New York's law might drive some miners to states with looser policies.

Okay. Don't we need to start somewhere? If we have a law about not fucking 12-year-olds, should the line in the article be, people might move to Nevada to go fuck 12-year-olds? We better not pass this law. Somebody needs to tell them the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.

I mean, you know, let Texas be Texas. Let everybody move there like Elon did. But we got to start somewhere. And the EU has confirmed that there are multiple ongoing investigations going into TikTok's data practices. So there are a lot of questions about TikTok's data practices.

It goes into the black box we call China. And nobody knows what's really happening over there. So we'll let the EU take the charge here because at least they've got GDPR that's backing them up. But, you know, it's going to end up being TikTok is going to go, don't like it, don't use it.

And we'll see how that goes. Mm-hmm. So, yeah. Yep. All right. Well, speaking of don't liking it, Elizabeth Holmes probably isn't liking her sentence. She got over 11 years. Good. For her four counts of fraud. Good. No, it is good.

She's like next to none of it. And she conveniently managed to get pregnant right about the time that she knew she'd be getting convicted. So that will get pushed off a little bit and then she'll go in for a little while and then she'll smile and claim that, you know, pretty people deserve better food. And she's a horrible person.

I'm glad. Well, good. Here's the law of unintended consequences. The judge basically threw the book at her because she got pregnant and she was so unlikable. So backfire. Yeah. It's just – again, I think it's worth repeating here. This isn't just a little bit of fraud.

This isn't a light dusting of fraud. These were false medical tests. Life or death situations for people, testing, surgeries, treatment, medications, all these decisions were made by doctors based on false fucking blood reports.

Yeah. So that is the very good point here because everybody in tech is just like, oh, there's so many other bros out there doing so much worse stuff. And it's like – Yeah, but that's crypto. The consequences for them are different. The consequences of their service are different than the consequences of her service.

Like you said, it's medical. It's different. But – and here's the thing. Hopefully her beau gets like five times as long because I don't want the precedent to be that it's just the chicks that do it because he is just as – Oh, yeah.

He needs to get sentenced as well. Just as or worse than she was. Just as culpable. Yeah. Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Foxconn's largest iPhone factory in China has been hit by worker protests including violent confrontations. Videos show hundreds of workers marching and confronting a manager along with several instances of violence.

Employees are reportedly upset over lesser benefits and longer wait times for bonuses according to videos posted on Weibo and seen by Engadget China. One clip shows workers shouting defend our rights, defend our rights while confronting police. Another person says I'm really scared about this place.

We could all be COVID positive while another adds you are sending us to death. Sounds great over there. Sure glad we're getting those new iPhones. No, you're not because the downside of that is all of the stuff that Foxconn had promised the employees, the hazard pay and all that crap.

Well, they kind of reneged on all that stuff. And then they gave them an out that said that they will – for a pay-related technical error, they're going to offer like $1,400 to the protesting people. And if they don't want to take it, they can quit.

Well, about 20,000 people have quit already because of that. Right. Which is a lot. That's a lot. So they're saying – it's a lot. So they're saying that the iPhone 14 availability is going to be down about 30% just because of this. Some people are saying, no big deal, no big deal.

Big deal. Let's split it in the middle here. Let's say it's even 15%. 15% already based on the downsizing of their orders. It's – yeah, if you want an iPhone 14 Pro, get it now because it's probably going to be a while. Yeah.

I'm just waiting for the 15. I got a 13. It's fine. All right. And finally, we have some real news coming out of the FCC that has actually done something. They finally cut off a voice provider for failing to protect against robocalls. Global UC has finally been – failed to meet requirements for protecting against spam robocalls.

And they are no longer in the robocall mitigation database, which means other carriers, including intermediaries, will have to stop accepting its traffic. They finally did something, Jason. We got them this time. Ding, ding, ding. No. Finally. Keep it up. I mean, you know, this has been years in the making.

Finally. Good. Decades. Decades. Decades. We're going to have self-driving cars before they take care of these calls.

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Now, Brian, I put in this first movie because I am so on the fence about this. It's a Christmas story Christmas. The new version of a Christmas story. I had to go look at Rotten Tomatoes. So it's got a 75% tomato meter rating.

That's good. In an 82% audience score. That's very good. I'm still on the fence. I want somebody I trust to go watch this first because, you know, a Christmas story is a Christmas story to us. Classic. It's like. Classic. It's a classic. Yeah. Yeah.

Frigile. Come on. I just, I don't know if I want it ruined. Yeah. I'm just, I'm not sure if I'm ready for a Goonies story Christmas. Don't touch the Goonies. I mean. Well, think about like the Ghostbusters, the latest Ghostbusters. That shouldn't have been made.

Period. It was okay. It should not have been made. It was okay. There was that little bit at the end where it tugged at your heartstrings when Venkman was back, you know, and all that. It was nice. It was nice. But it wasn't worth it. The juice was not worth the squeeze. And I'm really worried about it. I do love that saying.

So I just don't think a Christmas story Christmas is going to be that. So listen to the show. I'm going to watch it, Jason. I'm going to watch it. Oh, you're going to watch it? Okay. I can't guarantee when we're in the midst of World Cup fever here, but I will watch this before Christmas.

Yeah. Well, we got a little ways before Christmas because, yeah, I wasn't even going to watch it now because I'm like, ah, Christmas, Christmas time ain't here yet. So I'm waiting for the joy and the cheer. But I think that – I don't know. I don't know. Maybe a couple gummies and a night where there's literally nothing to do will be a Christmas story time.

I'll be drowning in eggnog. Yes. Yeah, exactly. This is not something you need to watch with a full deck. I'm saying. Yeah. I did finish Slow Horses Season 1 last night. Okay. Slow Horses is the spy show with Gary Oldman on Apple TV+.

Trailer looked great. Dude, so fucking good. Cool. So good. Good to know. It's like – it's a spook story, lots of spy stuff. Gary Oldman plays the old spy master in a house of rejected agents who have basically gotten kicked out of MI5 for kind of being crappy and it's awesome.

It's only six episodes, so it's short. I mean the short episodes, highly, highly recommended. And yeah, the new season drops on December 2nd. I thought it was December 9th, but I guess I put it in here. So it says December 2nd, so I must be right, I guess. Or not. Or not.

But either way, go watch Season 1 because, man, it's good. It's really, really good. Cool. All right. And The Peripheral, I just finished the latest episode last night. I know you said that you were going downhill with it. Yeah. It has found stasis for me.

I have reached homeostasis with The Peripheral where it's just good. It's good plus. Strong start, good. Okay. Yeah, yeah. I'm enjoying it. It's just – and the latest episode is the best in a long time. So I don't know how many there are total.

So this was Episode 7, I believe, for the latest one that came out today. I'm guessing we're getting 10. That would be my guess. Yeah. I'd like it to be 12, but as we discussed last week, but I'm guessing 10. I didn't watch the latest one. I had a choice. I watched Andor finale or watched The Peripheral, and I went with Andor.

Satisfying. Yes. Yes. Very satisfying. We'll talk about that in Star Wars, ha, shortly. Maybe. In three months when Dave catches up, you mean. Yeah, exactly. Now, I did manage to get an entire movie under my belt this week.

My wife and I's schedules finally aligned, and we watched Downton Abbey, A New Era. Okay. Enjoyable. Enjoyable. Look, the music is there. The faces are there. The costumes are there. The silly dialogue is there. It is everything that you – I would much rather, rather than the, what, three movies or two movies that we've gotten, I'd much rather they'd have done an entire another season.

I think the show – it's more enjoyable in bite-sized 45-minute snippets, 10 to 12 of them, than a movie. But for what it was, I'm very happy. I watched it, and I hope they never do another one. Good. Because I couldn't – the problem with me was I started to watch it, and I had to turn it off because Maggie Smith's eyes were so buggy and just like, you know – She's old.

She just – she's old. She's really, really old, and she reminded me a lot of my grandmother, and it was just like – there was – I was triggered, Brian. I was triggered. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. You might – okay. Well, you know, pop a few gummies, get back in there. It's worth it just to finish out the story. Well, I think that was the problem.

To finish out the story. Well, I think her eyes were a little too buggy because I had some gummies when I watched it. I'm like, whoa. All right. Then dial it back and give it another go, Jason. Okay. Maybe I'll try the eggnog. I'll do the eggnog with Downton Abbey, and I will do some gummies with a Christmas story.

It's a nice, satisfying conclusion to the entire thing. And you are left going, okay, that's it. We're done. Okay. I was left with that last time, so. This time, really. I don't know if I need it. Okay. I think I know what you're saying on that.

Okay. And speaking of classics being revisited here, the Love Actually cast is reuniting for a 20th anniversary TV special. Don't they have to, really? You know what? This is my wife's – one of my wife's favorite traditions, Christmastime. Love Actually always gets put on.

And I've been with her for a long time, so I've been through many years of watching Love Actually around Christmastime, and I've come around to it. I get how the young Gen Z might look at this and go, oh, boy, that is so unwoke and problematic. Oh, fucking lighten up. It's fun.

See, I just never liked it, so – because my family had the same fucking tradition, and I just never liked that movie. It's just – no, not for me. Look, if nothing else, you've got to enjoy Billy Mac, which is Bill Nye's character. It's just – he's the best. Like how she was – how – what's her face?

I'm sorry. You just mentioned her name, the old one from Downton Abbey, and I'm totally blanking. Maggie Smith. Like Maggie Smith was the sugar in the pill that got me into Downton Abbey. Bill Nye is the sugar in the pill that makes Love Actually palatable for me. He was fucking awesome in it, and it's just amazing.

So I'm excited. We'll be watching this. It's just interviews with some of the people involved, so they're not going back and revisiting, which is great. Okay, because, you know – I'm sorry. Bill Nye, for me, his best role ever, Shaun of the Dead. Hands down. That's it.

Oh, he was great at that. But his best role is Billy Mac. Sorry. You're wrong. Okay. Okay. Well, agree to disagree. Moving on. And some media news. Bob Iger, shock returning as Disney CEO. They're swapping Bobs. Bob Chapek out. Bob Iger back in. As a longtime Disney officiato, this is good news for me.

Also, I think most stockholders have agreed. The stock has taken a definite bounce since this. I just think he gets Disney better, and we'll see. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, as long as right now what he's working on is a successor, fixing the little problems that we got and finding somebody who can actually do the job without his ego being involved, we'll see how that plays out.

But, yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't have any Disney stock, but I thought it bounced back up, but I thought it came back down like the day after. Probably did. You know how these things happen. It's like all of a sudden, hey, great news. Oh, streaming is still not making any money anywhere.

Dead Mickey bounce. Dead Mickey bounce. I saw this this morning. Amazon is planning to invest $1 billion a year in movies for theaters. So they're going to try and make between 12 and 15 movies a year that will get a theatrical release, which will put them on par with Paramount.

I don't know if $1 billion for 12 to 15 movies. That is not very big movies, I'm thinking. No, but my guess is they're shooting for Oscars. Right. So it's going to be meaningful, low-budget movies. They put in theater for exactly one week, so it's Oscar eligible.

Exactly. And trying to go for the prestige here. That's my guess. Yeah. Because it's a very Jeff Bezos thing. I want to be respected. Yeah, yeah. Well, and they also own MGM now, so it kind of makes sense, you know? Yeah, yeah. Billion seems a little low, though. It does. Because, I mean, that's only four Avatar 2s.

That's one episode of Lord of the Rings. Yeah. It really is. You might get a panning shot of Mordor for a billion dollars nowadays. Yeah, yeah. Jeez. Yeah, but, you know, it says that Avatar 2 cost $250 million.

Or did it? Because there's another article with James Cameron coming out saying that Avatar 2 was very fucking expensive. And, you know, the budget to shoot it might have been $250 million, which I think is low, low, low.

The marketing is always twice the budget of the movie. So he's saying that it has to be in the fourth or fifth highest grossing films of all time just to break even. And, yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know anybody that cares about Avatar, but the re-release got them another giant bucket of money.

That's what I was going to say, too. It's like, I seriously do not give a shit about this movie. No. I think we're definitely in the minority. We also don't go to Marvel movies either, you know? Yeah. Like, yeah, we're old and we don't give a fuck. So, I mean, like the top – out of the top five, most of the movies are Avengers movies.

So, yeah, what the hell do we know? Yeah, we obviously do not. No. And Ariel sent us in a warning. Do not watch 1899. No spoilers, just a word of caution from a disgruntled Netflix viewer. This was supposed to be a sci-fi, mind-bending thriller, and I stuck through the entire eight episodes, hoping that this prolonged agony would be reworded by an epic ending and a huge revelation.

This is rarely the case with your typical shit shows, and 1899 is no different. Acting. Mediocre at best. Camera work. What camera work? Soundtrack. An array of eerie sounds and drone tones. That is it. Narrative. To avoid spoilers, I will just say that there is nothing new here. And what pissed me off the most is that the main plotline character setting timeline, basically the entire show, could have taken place anywhere else.

It is so poorly written and executed that it really does not matter. You have been warned. Okay. Well, thank you very much, Ariel. Wasn't going to watch it anyways. I was tempted because it's in my queue. I threw it in my queue because I read something and I just put it in there because the – I think maybe it was because the artwork was nice.

But, yeah, it was probably never going to get seen. So now it's definitely never going to get seen. Yeah. I started listening to Planet Money again because I haven't listened to it in a long time. I haven't listened to that in like five years. Yeah. It was just – it was still in my shows that I listened to but it wasn't being updated.

So I got one on Sam Bankman-Fried and the spectacular fail of his Crypto Empire FTX. Link for that will be in the show notes. Great episode. Great primer on everything that happened with FTX up until the point where they did the show. So – but it has the back story. So it's worth it.

I got to say Planet Money was always solid. It was a great show. I don't know why it dropped off my radar a long time ago but it certainly did. Because I think the main guys left. That's when I quit. You're right. Yeah. The guys left and then now it's like a bunch of people I've never heard of. But they did a really good job.

So yeah, it was good. It's definitely well worth the half hour just to get – if you want to get caught up on the FTX thing without having to go find all the articles or listen to our show or go to our show notes. Or read. Or gog.show or read. Yeah. It's good. It's good. So you know I'm a fan of Burt Kreischer.

Yes. And I know – it's a strange thing. Most people don't like him except for the millions of people that do. He does a cooking show. It was basically in his house. He set up a little cooking studio in his house. It's called Something's Burning. And he started selling the back catalog of that.

It was like 15 bucks for a year access pass to the first two seasons. So I got it. Yep. Because I wanted to see them because they're fun. I listened to the – he will put the entirety of the recording in his podcast. So I'll listen to some of it but I'd like to see it. That's one of the ones where I'd kind of like to see.

It's a cooking show. And they just had Jim Jefferies on so I'm like, OK, let's just – let's roll the dice. Fifteen bucks. Fuck it. He uses this thing called in-player which is the jankiest ass shit that you've ever seen. I mean this is – like we're talking real player like levels of shit here.

And so to play it on your TV, you have to launch the in-player player in your browser and then cast it to your TV. Right. And I'm like, you know we can still steal this shit, right? Why not just give us the fucking videos? So I don't know.

It just drives me crazy when – Somebody built his site and said this is how we're going to protect it. Nobody will be able to download this and get access to it. You'll get your 15 bucks. Yeah. His buddy Tom – what's his name? Who does all the other streaming stuff I'm sure is the one that turned him on to this.

But it is awful. The in-player ecosystem is fucking awful. So that brings us to ScreenFlow Pro 10, which is what I use all the time to rip this shit.

I'll play it in my browser. I'll capture the screen. I will have it saved to a file and then put it in my media library so I can watch it when I want. You can just do this all day long. I do this with webinars that I want to see that I don't want to sit through so I can like, you know, play faster later.

Anything that you can capture, Zoom calls, anything. ScreenFlow Pro 10 for the Mac is awesome. It just captures everything. But here's the other cool thing about it that I use it for all the time. It is a great, really fast video editor. So you can drag in sounds.

You can drag in video. And you can cut and just move everything around super fast without having to know like the super ding-dong apps like Final Cut or Premiere. If you want to be able to capture and edit really quick, really powerfully and do a ton of shit, ScreenFlow Pro 10 is awesome.

This is not a paid endorsement. I've been using them since version 4, I think. And, yeah, I just love that app. Love it. Cool. Now, I saw this one Thanksgiving morning. And it's, Tesla's full self-driving beta is now available to everyone in North America. And I saw this from a tweet from Elon Musk.

Yeah. And he says, you can do that. Congrats to the Tesla Autopilot AI team on achieving a major milestone. So my reply was, if you see a Tesla on the streets this holiday, flee! That is, if you want to really see Christmas, because beta software will kill someone this holiday.

Hashtag dystopia! Yeah, I mean, you know, we talked about this when the limited self-driving beta was released. I don't want anything that can actually kill people in beta. Yeah.

On the roads. Out, on, on, on, in the holidays where most people die from traffic-related accidents. Let's just put out a beta version of our fucking Christ. This is so like- Read the room. Read the room. Well, read the room. But also, I can't help but feel not very far in the future, maybe 20, 30 episodes from now, we're going to be talking about criminal negligence.

Oh, no, no. These people never get fucking go to jail. I know. No. Unless you're, you know, Elizabeth Holmes, nothing's going to happen to Elon. Yeah. Ever. I know he's being investigated for it and all that shit, but, Jesus.

No, it's, it just drives me mad. It's depressing. It really is. It really is. So, on the, on the news of Elon there, we've got a couple new social networks we're going to talk about. Since everybody's fleeing Twitter or trying to anyways, and it's become obvious and very, very clear that Mastodon is not going to catch critical fire here.

It's just, it's too difficult for people to use. It's not going to happen. So, no Mastodon. So, there are some other options out there, Jason. Yeah. I tried Hive Social yesterday. Hive Social is written by two college students. And for what they, I mean, for what they've, you know, put into it, it's pretty decent.

They've got a couple people on. They got a little bit of money in now. But, I mean, this came out a while back. I think it hit in 2021 in February, I believe, if memory serves. They hit number one on the App Store for downloads. It is garbage. It does not work.

It has been, you know, because they did not expect to scale this fast. And it does not load. There's a lot of dicks. A lot of dicks on it that just come through the main feed. You know, I think that is a sign of a healthy new network when there's porn involved.

But I just, I would like, you know, the no hot dog filter, please. Yeah. On the main Discover page when you just go in and it's just like a series of cocks. You need the hot dog or not API plugged into that. Yeah. Seriously. Seriously.

I just, yeah. I just, yeah. Okay. Yes. Dicks, no. Yes. You need the male cis version of that. So I gave Post a try. Post is gaining some traction, particularly among the journalists that I follow on Twitter. A lot of them are going over there.

Waitlist. You know, again, the big, the hard part about social media is scaling. And so when you get your first hit, that becomes problematic. It's very Twitter-esque. It looks like Twitter, except, you know, absolutely zero design. New York Times fonts, that sort of stuff.

It's very journo. Seems okay. I got through the waitlist in like three or four days, signed up. But it's basically full of posts saying, it's my first post. Now what? And absolutely none of my friends and contacts are on it at all. Just some journalists that I follow on Twitter, they've gone over there.

So I'll keep my eye on it. I'm not going to load it very often, but it's there. Okay. Yeah. I'm on the waitlist. I'm like 95,000 in line on the waitlist. So. It seems fine. Like if enough people go, if they get critical mass and they can scale, I could see this being a replacement Twitter.

We'll see. We'd be remiss in not mentioning Pine, done by a friend of the show, Trent Hamilton. This is an Instagram replacement. And if you know Trent at all, basically he's rude, I think would be a good way to say it.

Rough around the edges. But he is promising, you know, we're not collecting any data. We're not selling any data. None of that shit's ever going to happen. Seems okay. Yeah. Again, I'm not. It's okay. I'm not a big photo guy anyways. So a photo specific social network isn't too big of a deal for me, but he's doing a good job with it.

He's rolling out updates. He's certainly working hard on it. Yeah. No, I talked to him on Instagram about this. I owe him a, basically a deep dive on it. Just because I was going to go through his onboarding process needs work. There's some things that definitely need a lot of work on it. So Trent, I owe you a thing, but I was sick all week.

Thanks to the other thing that we talked about at the beginning of the show. But hey, Claritin. So now I can get to it. I've got an account on there. No posts. No posts have been made yet, but it's nice. I'm sure I posted one thing on there, but he changed my username.

Because when you sign in, you only get, it's four character usernames. So I'm like, dude, come on, look a brother up. So I'm JPD on Pine. I'm probably the only three-letter username on Pine. And there's also Hey Cafe, which was created by our buddy Anthony Lee from Note Host, which is, it's nice.

It's getting there. You know, he's working on it. Yeah, he's working on it too. Again, the problem for me, and sorry everybody about this, is my friends aren't there. And I don't know how to get them over because Jason and I are early adopters and we're dumb. And we go and sign up for new things like Ello.

But my friends don't. Which is still alive, by the way. Yeah. After all of our joking, it's still standing. You can still get a shirt. Maybe you can go back. Yeah. Because I'm not going to Mastodon. But here's the thing. All of these new services, what they're really teaching me is, I just don't need social media.

I think that's the lesson I'm learning too. It's like, I'm okay with just nothing. I don't need Twitter replacement. Yeah, I'd rather hang out in real life and get my job done early and stop dicking around, seeing how many likes I got or posting pictures or whatever.

I'm just like, I text pictures to my friends now. And yeah, I'm taking Premiere classes so I can learn how to edit video. There you go. Which instead of doing all the other crap, I'm like actually getting back into the creative side of things. Awesome. Yeah, I'm just like, I'm kind of done with it at this point.

I don't really care that much. I'll pop into Twitter every here and there. But I've seen a definite lag in – well, there's almost nobody posting in my thread anymore because everybody is ski-daddled. And when I get likes, it takes them like – I'm starting to see the cracks in the infrastructure show up.

Likes are starting to show up way late and things like that. So I think it's starting to strain because what Elon said that they were getting 20,000 tweets a second during the World Cup and it was still staying up. I'm like, good luck. The faster people tweet, the faster that thing is going to break.

Yeah, they're definitely throttling stuff. They're definitely – posts aren't making it through. Specifically with the World Cup, I expected to see a lot more World Cup stuff in my feed. I'm not, which is weird. Yeah, who knows? Circling back to your dystopiae, I saw this article and my jaw dropped.

Rule number one from Mythbusters was let's not put weapons in the hand of robots. The San Francisco Police Department is currently petitioning the city's board of supervisors for permission to deploy robots to kill suspects that law enforcement deems a sufficient threat, that the risk of loss of life to members of the public or officers is imminent and outweighs any other force option available to the San Francisco Police Department.

So, yes, they are seeking permission for robots to have deadly force. Having never seen any sci-fi movie ever. Yeah. Yeah. There's one episode of Black Mirror I can point them to that will just totally change their mind. Yeah. So, obviously, some people have come out and said, hang on a second.

That's a really fucking stupid idea. But they're definitely pushing for it. Well, didn't Oakland try and do this already too? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can we get robots that can just pick up man poo? It will be fine. I will say at this point, if our police officers are as good as the ones in Texas that did not go into the school, maybe we do need to arm a fucking robot.

That's true. Because if you aren't doing your goddamn job. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Well, what are you going to do? Dystopia. Finally, just a short story. Well, not a short story.

This is a very long article. Barrett sent this over. Amazon Alexa is a colossal failure on pace to lose $10 billion this year. So I went through all of this and basically they have not figured out how to monetize voice assistants. And it's not just Amazon that's having this problem.

Everybody is having this problem because it's a voice assistant and it's not a fountain of eternal money. It is a helpful, small thing. That is great. We discovered that most people are just using their devices to play music. No shit. And it's great at that.

And we ask it questions. And kitchen timers. Kitchen timers. Kitchen timers. Yes. Weather reports. Things that you would use a voice assistant for. It is a great voice assistant. What are you expecting from this? I still go back to the original Alexa commercial where the stupid dad goes, Alexa, how many teaspoons in a tablespoon?

And I just screamed at the TV, three. Dumbass. Should have taken home ec in high school. Well, everybody was too busy ducking under their chairs because of an armed shooter going through the school. So I missed the conversions. Okay.

Anyways, so I just – I read this article. I scratched my head and I was like, we're getting a billion interactions a week. But most of those conversations were trivial commands to play music or ask about weather. They're not monetizable. Yeah. That's the product you make. Yeah.

It's an add-on. It's very convenient. It's very nice. I like it a lot. Don't kill them. Just stop expecting them to make you billions of dollars. Yeah. I know they wanted everybody to shop through their Alexa. But guess what? Nobody wants to shop that way.

Nobody. Nobody trusts it. I want to see – I want to see the list of where it's going. I want to see when it's going to be delivered. I want to know everything about where that – where my money is going to. You know? It's like I need to know every single detail about who's getting what because I'm like, what address are you sending it to?

What's the default address? You know? No. No, no, no, no, no, no. But for the most part, you know, okay. It's fine for what it did. But yeah, you're not going to – look. Alexa 2 was perfect. The Alexa 2, the trash can was the best one they ever made.

It sounded the best. It worked the best. It had the best microphones. And ever since then, they've just been fucking it up. So what do you expect? Well, and they've been doing – they've been doing tech, you know, tech 2.0 tactics, which is let's price them so low and flood the market. While Apple – now, admittedly, Siri is the worst of the lot, right?

But they've done it correctly. They priced their stuff high. Plus they baked it into everything else that you were buying anyways. It's on your watch. It's on your phone. It's on your laptop. All the stuff that you're going to buy anyways baked in. And if you want the little speaker system too, we priced it – we priced it high enough that we're not losing money on it.

Yep. Done. Now, if only their stupid assistant worked as well as the other ones. Yeah. Well, can't have everything, can you? Nope. Security? Ha! Brian, I saw this next story and it just – it just made me happy.

Okay. Husband lured wife for a selfie on Cliff Edge before killing her. Now, it made me happy – Do we need to delve into why this makes you happy? It makes me happy because this dumbass got caught. Oh, well, that's good. I'm with you there. He got caught and he got life in jail. Okay.

Good. So that's why it makes me happy. Yeah. It was just – this happened in Turkey. It happened a while ago. I think we actually covered it when it first happened because I think back then we didn't know it was a crime. And then we found – there was some video that somebody else was taking up the hill because what you have to remember is almost everywhere at all times, you're going to be on camera no matter what.

So somebody else caught this guy taking his wife down, taking the pictures and just throwing her ass off a cliff. Well, so there's that. The funny part about this article – and, you know, I say funny because – That's a funny ha-ha.

Well, schadenfreude. A little bit of schadenfreude going on here because I got this article off of Petapixel and they say earlier this month, Petapixel reported that more people in Australia are dying after accidentally falling from cliffs and experts believe the rise of selfies are behind the growing trend.

The data has raised fears that more Australians are risking their lives to take daredevil photographs for social media. Culling the herd is what we call that. That's what we call culling the herd. So, you know. Yeah, yeah. Like, look, I don't have any particular fear of heights.

I do have a fear of falling. Yeah. No, I have a fear of landing. That's my problem. I have a fear of landing. So – I would not be taking any of these photos and, yes, if you are doing this dumb stuff for the lulls and the likes, well, it's fair enough.

See you later. Yeah. I mean there's a reason that I skated street instead of vert, you know, because I like being on the ground. Yeah. Oh, no. So, yeah. I just thought it was – I thought it was interesting. This guy finally got caught and is going to jail for the rest of his life.

Well, there you go. All right. Well, I guess without Dave here, we'll actually do some security stuff. We're not even going to get into all of our Thanksgiving talk. But – I know. We had all things planned. But, yeah, no Bittner today. Oh, you're right. Actually, you know what? I do remember Dave said he wasn't going to be here. There's a big Thanksgiving family stuff that he's doing.

Oh, okay. Well. So, yeah. Oh, well. There you go. All right. Well, hey, you want to talk about Andor? It's a great ending, man. I loved it. It was a fantastic ending. I'm in for season two. Me too. Me too.

And, you know, we knew that they were building parts for the Death Star. Of course they were. It's a full circle. Makes sense. Yep. Yep. So. All right. Code sleuths at MISC are challenging Apple's vaunted focus on privacy. They are claiming that Apple's anonymous usage data for some in-house apps includes a directory services identifier uniquely linked to your Apple ID and iCloud data.

So Apple could potentially use this to pinpoint your app store browsing habits, according to MISC. This seemingly contradicts Apple's assertion that none of its data is personally identifying and appears to extend to iOS 16. This feels a bit nothing burger to me. It feels a lot nothing burger to me.

Okay. So, yeah, they can, if they wanted to, they could tell what I'm looking at on the app store, which they could probably tell anyway. They could do anyway. Yeah. If I download or purchase them. Right? Yeah.

No, that's what I'm saying. This makes no sense. It's like, yeah. Okay. Of course they can. Of course they can. I've got another story about later on that's, of course they can. Yeah. I think the, I think the thing about Apple is that they don't share that data with, other app owners.

That's the whole point of the do not track, you know, in the apps. But yeah, this is all, we're all, this is all going on faith. You know, you click a button and you just have faith that they're not going to do the things they say they're going to do. Brian, you and I have built things where we, the powers that be may have lied to the public and still collected the data and use the data.

So not of what you speak, Jason. I was not involved in those decisions. We were not involved in those decisions, but we probably may have been involved in the code that created the backend to do them. Well, at least I know I was, but yes. Yes. I, I stated my grievances, but I, we were the ones in the meeting going, you were not supposed to do that.

Yeah. And they're like, uh, well, Joe over here, we'll do it. Do you want to do it? Or do you want Joe to do it? Because I need to pay my rent. I'll do it. That's exactly it. Oh, there's, by the way, I just want to, I want to circle back to one thing we didn't talk about with the, uh, the Twitter fiasco and all of the engineers.

Somebody made a really good point about why a lot of those engineers stayed their visas. Yeah. Because if they quit, they're basically going to get deported if they can't get another job in like 90 to 120 days. So they're basically, you know, uh, indentured servants to Elon at this point, if they can't find another job.

So that there's another angle to that, which I thought was fairly interesting that people aren't really following. So, yeah. Yeah. Okay. What do we got next? Well, talk about just clicking a button and kind of hoping for the best and that people aren't doing what they're not supposed to be doing with the buttons that have been clicked.

We've talked about this before. It's gotten a little bit worse. Uh, tax prep websites have been sending sensitive financial data to Facebook. Yes. And this is all done through pixel pixel, the wonderful tool that is supposed to be restricted greatly. It only sends certain information, but actually works like a sieve.

Yeah. Like I just said, it's all, it's all about, it's all, everything's based on trust, trust. Well, sometimes just because tax prep services put Facebook pixels on their site because Facebook told them, this is a great way to get your demographics and get all your statistics and know who's using your site.

Uh, they sometimes passed on income data, filing statuses and even kids college tuition grants to Facebook. Yep. Yep. Yeah. Especially if they use query strings, which, you know, anybody nowadays shouldn't, but this is a tax prep, you know, website.

So I'm guessing that these guys aren't the, the savviest on the backend as far as the website stuff goes and may still have query strings that have potential data in them that can get passed along with that tracking pixel. And meta rightly or wrongly. And I suppose when we could say rightly, we'll say, well, you're not, you're not implementing the tool correctly and causing the problem.

And you're not supposed to be including these query strings and you're not supposed to have it be on login pages and you're not supposed to have it. Um, so whose fault is it? I would argue 50, 50. Yep. That's where I'm going to go at the tools too damn powerful to begin with.

It should never have been able to do all the things that it's both. It can do should never been able to pass all the information back and forth that is capable of passing back and forth. And it's also on the people that built these sites for these tax, uh, and everybody, you didn't read the fucking manual.

Yeah. Yeah. It is funny. Because like 20 years ago, I built blogrolling.com that had, you know, a JavaScript embed in it. And that gave, even, even before that, even I knew the tracking pixel because you get all of the HTTP request data, which gives you IP address, browser, all sorts of stuff.

And then as soon as I put in JavaScript, I'm like, holy shit, the data that I got was just ridiculous. I could follow everybody. And I'm like, this is not good. This is not good. So I purposely being an ethical programmer did not track any of that stuff, you know, because you shouldn't.

But the fact that you get it is out of your control. That's one of the things it is completely out of your control because it comes in the HTTP request header because you need to be able to send data back to that person. So you have to know their IP address. You have to know what they're doing and all this other stuff. I have to know their kid's tax status.

You know, it's how it is half and half because Facebook should, I'm sorry, meta, should not be doing anything with that data. It should have been, you know, dumped on the floor. Yep. It's meta. Do we think that that data is dumped on the floor? No, no, it's with a bread and butter.

Yep. Yeah. Yeah. And this just gets us to the next one, which is MetaMask is going to start collecting user IP addresses and Ethereum wallet addresses. And this is just because there's a new basically terms of service update from the company that owns MetaMask that says, hey, yeah, we're just going to we're going to tell you about this now, even though it's it's one of those things that they get the data and everybody's like, how is this decentralized?

Oh, my God. And at least the smart people are saying decentralization and privacy are two different fucking things, guy. Not the same. Not the same at all. Not even close. No. Decentralized means even more people can get your data. Means everybody can.

It's called the blockchain. Everybody can look at it. What the fuck? Chat sheet with all your information right there. Yeah. Whatever you give them goes right in there. Yeah. And honestly, I would I would like MetaMask to collect the user IP addresses attached to those Ethereum wallets because at least you have some recourse.

If somebody is stealing your shit, you at least know where to start looking, where you can start your investigation. If somebody takes your your board fucking squirrel NFT, you know, you need somewhere to go. So the fact that they're tracking that is actually a benefit for you, the user.

So shut the fuck up. And if you really care, gog.show slash VPN. Yeah. I still get at least maybe two, one email a day about my MetaMask wallet and I need to click on this link to take care of it. I've never, ever opened a MetaMask wallet.

Don't. No. Yeah. No. No. I still have my MetaMask wallet because I have, you know, that $250 in Ethereum I bought to do the first NFT project that I just didn't give a shit about. So it's been sitting there losing value. I think I'm at $120 now.

So. All right. Yeah. Yay. Crypto. Stopi yay. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got AJ Scoggs. Welcome, AJ. Thank you. And just a reminder to everybody, if you do sign up for our Patreon, we get the same cut as if you did PayPal, but you get shows ad free and a little bit early when available.

Yes. Yes, you will. And over at PayPal, we've got Brian, Andrew, Mike, John, Tom, Joseph, Mark, John, Andre, and Humphrey. And over at our tip jar, we've got Roman with 50 bucks. Thank you very much, Roman. And we've got Caridor. Caridor. This is where my dyslexia kicks in. Sounds like a Harry Potter character.

Yes. Welcome to Caridor. Or just the new land of Middle Earth. Karen and Theodore. Then Ross, Sean, Ashley, and Daryl. And we have a new five-star review from Aaron, Weekly Medicine. I look forward to tuning in every week when the latest episode drops on Patreon.

Hmm, callback. Jason's free spirit attitude and Brian's down-to-the-earth focus pair up to form an extremely entertaining hour every week. It's Pinky and the Brain all grown up with a soapbox speaking aloud the thoughts I have daily on the tech chaos of our time. Albeit, I will state that Jason is much more intelligent than Pinky, but just as crazy nonetheless.

The Grumpy Old Geek Show is something I look forward to every week. Much appreciated, guys. Keep them coming. We will for a while. We'll try. We'll try. Keep signing up for Patreon, and we definitely will. That's true. Until next time, I'm Brian Schallmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo.

Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. If you enjoyed the show, visit GOG.show slash donate to help us keep the lights on, and we'll love you forever. You can also help us out by sharing the show with your friends and enemies. It's easy and absolutely free. Just look for that little share button in your player and send it to somebody. Just one person this week. Please.

We will give thanks to you. Show notes for this episode are at GOG.show slash 580. Wow, that's a lot of episodes. 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.

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