621: Cryptomucil

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With brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. 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. Chip, chip, cheerio. Chip, chip, cheerio. We have a little bit of breaking news before we get into the follow-up, Brian. Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, is indeed correct. Microsoft has finally closed its $69 billion Activision deal.

Woo! Finally. Yeah, I saw yesterday that the UK approved it, so that was fine. But I guess the US finally caved and said, okay, we're not going to waste taxpayer dollars anymore on this? Yeah, it was kind of in that limbo stage where it's like, oh, we're trying, but we're really just not going to seal the deal.

Okay. Yeah, Britain was the last holdout, and they had to do that deal with Ubisoft to offload some of the online stuff. Well, that's what I was over there doing, Jason. I was taking care of it. Oh, well, thank you, Brian. No problem. Appreciate it.

Appreciate it. Well, while you were gone, I actually got my nine-month sobriety. Woo! Congratulations, man. That's a big deal. Thank you. As of today, let me look up my number on my handy I Am Sober app, so cleverly named. Ah, 282 days today.

Woo! Good job. Yes. As you can tell, I am sober and caffeinated. Well, this seems like a perfect time for me to discuss traditional pubs and English beers, as we've been discussing on the show recently. Yes. It's called balance, Brian. The yin and the yang. Yes, the light and the dark side of the force.

Yeah, so I was in London for five, six, five days, five days. Yep. And, yeah, traditional pubs still exist if you're in the right part of London. There are gorgeous, lovely pubs in Westminster. There are grimy, stanky, music-filled wonders in Camden. But the pub around the corner for most parts of the city is definitely gone, baby, gone.

It is American-style sports bars and things of that nature. And the real concern I have is the beers. Okay. It's not so much the pubs. It's the beers that might be in danger, Jason. Not that this will concern you anymore. I still have an affinity, my friend. It's not that there aren't tons of local beers all over the place and in these pubs in London.

But London has fallen sway to the horrific IPA craze as the rest of the world has. Oh, God, I hate IPAs. They make IPAs all over the place in London. And the bars or the taps are full of local IPAs. There are tons of those about.

Lagers, ales, and pilsners. The stuff I want, few and far between. I did manage to get in a few old speckled hens and some Fuller's London Bride. Long may they pour. All right. All right. Well, I've got a little bit of X follow-up.

Shitter, as some people are calling it. The Israel-Hamas war is drowning X in disinformation. Go figure. I mean, I'll almost give X a pass here because everything is drowning in disinformation about this right now.

Facebook, Instagram, everyone. The internet. Yes. But no, they don't get a pass, Brian. They don't even try. They fired everybody. No, they don't even try. Come on. They don't even try. Yeah, that's true. That's true. Other outlets are actually making an effort trying to stem some of the craziness that's going on.

What does X do? They decide to go ahead and take headlines. I know. They take headlines away. What? In what world? How fucking stoned was he? Well, we'll get to that in a second. Okay. Sorry. Jumping ahead. Yeah.

So the EU is formally going to investigate them over this because the EU is basically the only people that have any sense left about what the internet is doing to us. Right. So we'll see how this kind of plays out. But, God, man, it's everything.

It's time that we need to remind everybody multiple sources of information. Don't just retweet the first thing that you see. Verify somewhere else. Go to reputable sources. Might I say BBC News, considering I was watching a lot of that when all this broke out. Excellent source of information.

Yeah. Yeah. People going to people. Yeah. I do miss – I don't know if it is relevant in this case, but Al Jazeera was always great for international news. It really was. I'm not sure how they're doing on this. But since I can't get it anymore, damn it. Yeah.

There's an article, though, that's going around called, What was Elon Musk's strategy for Twitter? So get out your tinfoil hats, kids. Did you read this article? That's a strategy. That's a strategy? Okay. Okay.

I started on it, and then I just got so annoyed, I stopped. Yeah. This basically comes down to some tweets, some quote-unquote anonymous tweets, or text messages, anonymous text messages. I don't know how a text message can be anonymous, because there is a phone number tied to it, and if you have judicial powers to go through.

Burners. Yeah. You can still, trust me, there are ways to figure out who has a burner or not. Unless these guys have the best op-sec in history, you can still trace where that burner was turned on and what phones were nearby. You can do all sorts of stuff, how it was purchased.

Anyway, nobody cares that much about it. But it basically lays out the entire plan for Elon's roadmap for Twitter, and he's been kind of following it to a T, even up into the Anti-Defamation League stuff. So put your tinfoil hat on and give it a read.

The link will be in the show notes. The link is titled, What Was Elon Musk's Strategy for Twitter? Really good, really good article. Now, something that we have talked about on this show ad nauseum, and I loved it dearly, dearly, dearly, was Tweet Delete. Tweet Delete was the greatest thing ever.

Fuck you, Tweet Delete. Okay. I've been waiting since you put this in the notes, because obviously I just landed, you know, barely a day ago, so I have not caught up on things. What happened to my beloved service, Jason? So I have some celebrity friends who are trying to basically distance themselves from X because it is such a dumpster fire, and they don't want to be associated with it anymore.

So I stepped up and said, hey, guys, I've got the most perfect tool. I'll take care of everything for you. I get everybody's credentials, sign in to Tweet Delete, set up pro accounts, pay for them, and then Tweet Delete goes, we're broken. We can't do anything right now.

Talk to support. Yeah, we know about the problem. It's going to be a while. They've changed some things. You've got to do this. You've got to do that. You've got to do the other. Well, yeah, it's going to be a while longer. Month goes by. I get charged again.

They have not deleted a single Tweet for me. Well, the payment processing works. Payment processing is spot on. I bet they use Stripe. So I keep going back. And as soon as I say, hey, you guys are charging me and you're not actually deleting any tweets, support, which has been very proactive, goes dead silent.

So I had to delete it. I deleted all of the, you know, the paid accounts. I'm not even going to bother going back after them for the money because it's not worth the time because it is such a low amount. But the problem now remains, I'm on the hook for deleting by hand thousands of tweets.

Oh, boy. Sorry, man. You know, obviously, you know, X has got to have a crack support team for their APIs to help you with this. Oh, it gets even better, Brian. Do you want to know what's even better? What? If you go to your account and you have tweets, say, older than six or seven years, you can't see them anymore in your own timeline.

But other people can. If you log out, you can see them. Wow. So I cannot even delete the old tweets, period. I can't get access to them. So what it's going to actually come down to is doing that old super fast switcheroo where you have to change the username, re-grab the username with a fresh account before anybody else does.

Assuming that still works on X and then delete the primary account. I wouldn't even make that assumption that it'll still work. I know. I'm going to have to test. Yeah, you're going to have to test it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if you nuke your account that that name gets locked.

Exactly. That's the fear now. This is such an unmitigated shit show that I swear if Elon was in front of me, I would slap him with my testicles just to prove a point. I'd pay to see that. Yeah, I think a lot of people would.

Next on OnlyFans. I mean, he's really like, does anybody even care about X, people that care, people that matter anymore? Like I know a lot of people feel like they still need to be there because critical mass eyeballs and all that sort of stuff.

Yeah, you don't. But he's running it into the ground. It's fucking useless. Well, it's useless and it's racist and it's anti-Semitic and it's everything that Elon is. This is just an extension of his it and his ego gone rampant and wild. Stay away.

I just, you know, social media for me, the greatest part about all of this X shit is that I have not given a fuck about social media. I don't care about threads. I don't care about blue sky. I certainly don't care about mastodon. Don't care about any of it, you know, because it's so disassociated from where all my friends are now because half of my friends went one place, half went the other, and then the other ones are over there.

And it's just like, I just don't. You know what? I'm going to go read a book. You know, I really I literally go read books now. It's so great. I got to tell you, the five days I was in London because, you know, out and about with the family, doing fun stuff in the real world and meet space the entire time, I was online next to zero and it was awesome.

It was great, wasn't it? Like not even social media, like just online, like not paying attention to news, not looking, not reading the headlines coming through on my watch or my phone. Nothing. It was great. Yeah, I highly recommend it. Yeah, but hopefully you listen to some podcasts because that's, you know, that is our bread and butter.

I didn't even do that, but I'll talk about that later. Oh, Brian, shut up. Beep. Don't listen to him. He had too many old speckled hens. He's on the, he's on the sauce. Oh, shit. In the news. Well, the Sam Bankman-Fried FTX trial is well underway.

I was going to do a full on recap. Why? He's fucked. I don't have to. Yes. My recap is Sam is fucked. I mean, oh, God. First off, he deserves to be. There's no doubt about it. 100%. 100% was playing a game, thought he was going to get away with it.

He knew he was breaking the law. He did it on purpose. He's in trouble. Yes. But he's also been made the poster boy for all of fucking crypto. Well, you know what? Somebody's got to be. Somebody's got to do it. Yeah. The Binance thing is melting down, too.

There's going to be more of him coming along. But, yeah. No. I mean, he stepped on his dick so publicly and so just grandiosely. Well, the problem was the ego, right? Like, there's no remorse there. He's just a smarmy fuck.

Yeah. That's pretty much what it comes down to. Yeah. He's a smarmy little fuck. He should have, you know, cherished all that time that he had at home with his parents instead of trying to jury tamper because that was the last taste of freedom this kid's ever going to get. I tell you right now, he's never getting out of jail. And I tell you what, if he would have ran that company above board, he'd have been okay.

Yeah. It'd have been fine. He'd have been rich. Much richer than us. Yeah. No shit. That's a very low bar. Low bar. Yeah. Very, very low bar. But, I mean, that's the thing, right? Like, it's robber baron mentality. It's I can get away with anything and I need more, more, more.

If he just would have ran the company, followed the law, sure, there would have been some downturns here and there and you would have had to deal with regulation and it would have cut your bottom line a bit. But you still would have been running a company, employing hundreds of maybe even thousands of people doing good with a crappy product, but still doing good, like employing a bunch of people and creating livelihood and value.

But you just couldn't do it, could you? No. Coinbase doing okay. Yeah, they're doing fine for a shitty, with a shitty product. Yeah. I mean, they're making lemonade over at Coinbase. Making lemonade out of poop. Yeah. So, apparently there are some clues.

Oh, wait, wait, wait. Before I even get into that, before I, before I talk about the Russians, unfortunately, CoffeeZilla's best news right now is on Twitter. So, there's a link to his, his threads on Twitter that you can check out. He's, he's covering the trial. Molly White is also covering the trial.

And she's got her newsletter kind of segmented now. So, you can get the regular cryptocurrency debacles, like the Binance troubles and all that stuff. And you can get the FTX stuff on the side if you like. Or you can get them together in one giant shit salad like I prefer to take it.

That's it. I mean, she's all I need for, for crypto news. I don't even seek out anything else. She, the newsletter is a wonderful recap of, of all the disasters going on there. Yeah. CoffeeZilla is just fun. I just love that guy anyway. So, he's just, he's just cool. So, yes, there are new clues out there now that the Russians may have had something to do with the stolen FTX funds.

The, the, the money had basically been sitting stagnant for a long time. Now that the trial is underway, it's on the move. Apparently, there is some crypto laxative at work and it is being shuffled through different, you know, tumblers and things like that. Cryptomucil. Cryptomucil.

That's it. Show title. So, there, there are a couple of the, the firms that track this kind of thing that are keeping an eye on it. But, you know, it's all anonymous until it's not. Until it's not. So, yeah, these people are trying to get some of the money out so they can trace some of it back to some Russians.

But, you know, eventually it will all come out in the wash. No, no pun intended. But, yeah, it's this whole thing. Crypto is just so bad. What did we say from day one? What, who gets value out of crypto? Criminals. Criminals.

There you go. All right. Speaking of criminals, 23andMe was quote unquote hacked. They were not hacked. Basically, somebody took a bunch of lists of user logins that were already publicly available and tried them against 23andMe and they worked.

So, once people got in, they scraped the data, pulled it, put it together in a nice little package and are selling some of it now. There are, you know, they're basically, some people are putting the databases and they're sorting them by which type of Jew are you and selling those off.

Jew or not. Yes, yes. Which is not a great thing to have going on right now. At the moment? No, not so good. No, no. Generally, never. I mean, generally at any time, not good. I was going to say, generally it's not. But right now is a really bad time for that. So, 23andMe is just saying, yeah, people reuse their passwords.

It's not our fault. Well, yeah. Multiple things here. First off, who didn't see something bad coming with private companies having your DNA? Yeah, we did, but we all did it anyway. Some of us did it anyway. I did.

I did. But I know my cousins did, so I'm fucked anyways. But yeah, that was the real problem with it is it's DNA. And people that are related to you, you're screwed if they all do it. Brian, don't become a serial killer and you'll be okay. Well, that's true. That is true.

But, you know, anyways. And then, yes, it's your DNA being stored. You're using the same password you used for Domino's Pizza. Are you insane? Yeah, I think I made the strongest password, you know, possible for their systems.

Like 24 random characters and whiz bangs and goo gaws and doodads and stuff like that. But the thing is, here's what, as somebody who has, you know, had to protect against things like this, you do IP address tracking.

Because on a long enough timeline, if these people are checking thousands and thousands and thousands of logins to see what works, there are going to be patterns in the IP addresses that are being thrown at your login page. You have to protect against that. You get more than five logins.

Let's just pick a low random number, five logins from the same IP address with different usernames. Block IP. Block that IP address. Do not let them back. Cookie the shit out of them. Call the FBI. You don't even have to write that yourself. People like Cloudflare will do it for you. Yeah, yeah.

But, you know, it's always best to do it yourself, too, to have backup. Right. Because that way you at least have an audit trail for the future. And when the regulators come to you and say, what did you do personally to protect against this? You can't just throw your hands up and say, well, I hired these guys over here and, you know, put all the burden on them.

You know, there's some burden that's going to be on you as a company the size of 23andMe. Yes. Storing that kind of data. Yeah. Which is about as sensitive as it could possibly fucking be. And, you know, how many times has it changed hands since they were 23andMe in the beginning?

Sorry. So, yeah, whatever. Yeah. And all of these companies are at risk for that. But that was the 23andMe story. They weren't, quote, unquote, hacked, which I've seen everywhere in the news. Yeah. All right. Amazon has launched the first two demonstration satellites for its Project Kuiper Broadband Internet Initiative.

Woo! Great. More shit in the sky. Yeah. So they announced the project four years ago, but they finally sent the first two satellites into space on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket. Whee! I, for one, cannot wait for the war between Starlink and Project Kuiper and when they just start ramming into each other to take out each other's services.

Oh, yes. Yes. It's called the Kessler effect, by the way. That offends. And then we're all trapped. And then we could never leave the planet. Yep. Yep. So even Jeff Bezos' penis rocket will not penetrate that. God. I've got to stop right there.

I have a whole, oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Stop, stop, stop. Move on. Yep, yep. So they've got two test satellites up there right now. They're running, you know, running them through their paces to see if everything works. And then they've got up to, what, 77 launches scheduled over the next five years to meet the regulatory deadlines.

We'll see how that goes. Great. Just what we need. I love these billionaires just cluttering up the night sky. Yeah. Dear Federal Trade Commission, can you please start breaking up Amazon? Just saying. Yeah.

California Governor Gavin Newsom, our pal, he just approved AB-1394, which is a new bill that penalizes, penalizes, I have to say penalize here, because it penalizes web services that knowingly support the commercial sexual exploitation of minors.

Okay. So we're talking about CSAM stuff here. Yep. And this is, I don't know why. No problems with that. Try proving knowingly. That's where it comes in. Knowingly, leave reported material online. Okay.

So if it's been reported, they have to take it down. If they don't take it down, they're in trouble. I'm pretty sure that's the case already. I think so, too. I'm pretty sure that's the law of the land. Law of the land. Yes, yes, yes. And because there are problems with Instagram right now.

There are problems with TikTok. There are problems with all of them right now because they are public posting forums. That's what you get. You post some shit, you get some shit. This still has to run through the courts, so we'll see how this goes. Gavin is all over the map right now. After vetoing the bill that would put safety drivers in vehicles over 10,000 metric shit tons driving down the freeways to this, it's like, what the hell?

He's playing both sides against the middle so he can be prez. Pretty much. I mean, that's what we've known. He's been running for president since he was born. Okay, so I would just like to make sure that everybody realizes that in 10 years, when he's the president, we said it on this show, just like we said on crypto, that he's a piece of shit, whatever.

He is. We'll see. He's a piece of shit with nice hair. I mean, he's a politician. He's doing what he needs to do to get elected and keep moving up the run. That's all there is to it, so. Yep. Yep. Yep. Well, I have a little. But he's good looking. He's got good hair.

Damn it. I'd like to have a beer with him. Not really. I'd like to pour a beer on his hair. That's it. That's what I'd like to do. I found this little bit of interesting science news. Coin flips apparently are not 50-50 odds after all. What?

Conventional wisdom about coin flips have been turned on its head. Nudge, nudge. Oh, no. Yes, a global team of researchers investigating the statistical and physical nuances of coin tosses worldwide, again, where your tax dollars are going, concluded that a coin is 50.8% likely to land on the same side it started on, altering one of society's most traditional assumptions about random decision-making that dates back to at least the Roman Empire.

Of course, we also know the random number generators aren't. Yeah, there is no such thing. There is no such thing. But this is interesting. It appears to have validated a smaller-scale 2007 study by Stanford mathematician Percy Diaconis, which suggested a slight bias toward the side it started on.

The author of this new paper conducted 350,757 flips. Obviously, they were shooting for 350,758. But the guy went, boy, is my arm tired. Using different coins from 46 global currencies, yet no crypto, to eliminate a head's tail bias between coin designs.

Regardless of coin type, the same side outcome could be predicted at 0.508, which rounds up perfectly to about 51% prediction from 16 years ago. So yeah, 50-50, it ain't going to coin. You have a slight, just slight, that'll be on the, you have to be able to see what it starts on, because it most likely will be that again.

Well, not most likely, 50.8%. Yeah. I love science. It's cool. It's neat, as you would say, Jason. It's neat.

At QVC, fall shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home, and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights, or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead, with brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja, and so many more.

Shop now at QVC.com.

Media Candy. Brian, on my drive into work this morning, I was listening to two songs on the radio, back to back, and I found myself singing along in my head the Weird Al versions of the songs, instead of the originals. And I was just thinking, man, I love Weird Al.

Me too. He's a national treasure. Yep. Yep. I love Rocky Road and Eat It would be the two that I had on the playlist this morning. One of my favorite Christmas songs is one of his originals, Christmas at Ground Zero. Oh, yeah. That's a great song. Fantastic song. I got to say, Weird Al's original songs are so underrated.

They are. Everybody just talks about the parodies. His original songs and his polka medleys. Yep. Yep. I got a boogie and Nature Trail to Hell. Still two of my favorite songs. Love those. Love those. Also, another thing that I love, Gen V on Amazon Prime.

All right. How about that for a transition? It's odd. Especially when you look at the material. Holy shit buckets. So that's like the, that, that, what was the name of the original show? This is a spinoff from The Boys. So this is like The Boys, but even grosser, right? It's not grosser.

No, it's actually, it's a little less, it's a little less gross. Okay. It's still lots of penises in it. I don't know what Seth Rogen has with his penis envy, but man, there's lots of dicks. But I got to say, the last two seasons of The Boys have been kind of the blahs.

This show is awesome. It's, there's a fantastic story. They just dive right in. And I stayed up late to watch episode five last night. There's five of them out right now. And it is solid. I mean, it is just flat out solid, great writing, great casting, great effects.

Especially if you want to see small women on giant penises. Very odd, very odd show. Wow, are you reading my Google searches? I must be, I must be. It's, it's fantastic.

Highly recommend it. If you like the first couple seasons of The Boys, because the last couple seasons of The Boys were just really just, I don't know. I mean, it takes sadness porn to a new level, I think, with the last two seasons. But Gen V is just, I love it. I tapped out on The Boys after season one.

I just didn't get into it. Okay. Okay. You might actually like Gen V then. It's pretty good. It's not as, it's not as, you're not as screaming at the void like you are in On The Boys. Right. It's actually got a real good story behind it.

So, and the characters are actually not evil. Okay. So, it's good. And just as I was about to cancel my Disney Plus account, Loki season two dropped. Right. Because that's what they do. They're very good at it. Watched the first episode. Did you check it out?

I have not yet. So. Okay. Yeah. I was not impressed. I remember the first season kind of started. But then it got pretty good. I thought the first season kicked it, kicked it right out of the gate. But I think I saved up a bunch of episodes at the beginning.

So, this was just one episode. They didn't do the three dropper. Right. Okay. So, maybe they should have. Well, I'm glad I'm watching it because I did like the first. Yeah. Yeah. But then you tapped out at the end saying, oh, God, they marveled the shit out of this. I can't watch it anymore. I usually do that. Yeah.

So, I'll say I'll keep watching for a bit. See how it goes. And we do have a quick article in here. Demolition Man's writer explains how the three seashells came to be. And the story is not as exciting as you think it would be.

Guy was taking a shit. Saw three seashells on the bathroom counter and said, hey, why don't you just put three seashells in the show? There you go. That's it. Sometimes it's better not to know how the sausage is made. Exactly. I did not need to know that. I would have preferred it to remain a mystery. Yeah. It's just every time I go to Gizmodo, that headline is on every article that I go to.

So, I had to click on it. Yeah. I never watched Orphan Black. I think you did and you enjoyed it? I enjoyed it up until – I kind of tapped out because I think I was moving one of my moves from Chicago to L.A. to L.A. to Chicago. Right. Somewhere in there. But I did watch most of it because Tatiana, the lead character in Orphan Black, was just incredible.

Better than she was in She-Hulk. I mean, she's fantastic in She-Hulk. Right. But she plays like 18 characters in the original Orphan Black. The story just got a little bit too much for me. But, yeah, I thought it was the first couple of seasons just like The Boys. The first couple of seasons I thought were phenomenal. Well, we're getting a sequel series called Orphan Black Echoes starring one of you and my favorite people, too.

Kristen Ritter is taking over the role. Mm-hmm. I watched the trailer this morning. Oh, yeah. It looks pretty good. Yeah. So, that is coming and I'm looking forward to it just because I love her so much and I haven't seen her in anything in quite some time. So, I'm very excited about it. I'm assuming I'll be able to leap in without having watched any Orphan Black, so.

Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure. I'm sure. They pretty much tell you everything you need to know in the trailer. Cool. Excellent. So, I have a slight observation about British TV as I was over there for a while, specifically the celeb comedy game show genre. Basically, there's a whole bunch of comedians in England that the rest of the world has never, ever heard of and they just circle jerk about the same shows.

Okay. It's kind of like the podcast industry. Oh, okay. So, it's just like the Food Network. It's the same people I've never heard of just on every single show like QI and all those different ones, all of which are great shows, but there are all these big name comedians, apparently, that are only big in Britain.

And they all have podcasts, too. So, I've got a whole bunch of new podcasts I'll be listening to and giving reviews on shortly. Excellent. Also, news. News over there is so much better than our news. Oh, my God. We could solve the entire world's problems or at least the U.S.'s problems by just shutting down U.S. news networks.

Oh, yeah. Well, I could have told you that. And I've got some slightly buzzed over the Atlantic movie reviews since I don't get fully drunk on planes anymore. Just slightly buzzed, unfortunately. Guardians of the Galaxy 3. Yes. I loved it.

It was fine. That's... Yeah, it was better than the second one. Fine. Glad it's over. So, The Flash. Surprisingly good. Okay. I, you know, DC has been, like, botching it left, right, and center.

And Ezra Miller is a freakazoid and everything. But I really enjoyed this movie. It was fun. Yeah. I don't know what else to say about it. Like, everybody appears, Supergirl or whatever, in this is smoking hot. And you get to see, like, some CGI kind of uncanny valley version of Nick Cave as Superman briefly.

So, or Nick, yeah. No, not Nick Cave. That would be even better. I was going to say Nick Cave. Nick Cave as Superman. I would watch the shit out of that. Yeah, that would be pretty damn good. I'm like, what are you talking about? Nicholas Cage, because he briefly was going to play Superman at one point and got so far as, like, doing testing and suits and things like that.

But, yeah, it was a really fun movie. I actually really enjoyed it. If DC can keep doing that sort of stuff, I'll keep watching. Watched Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Yes. Probably not the best movie to watch on a small, tiny screen, but... No. Whatever. It's not. You know, it was cute.

It was fine. Yeah. It was a fitting wrap-up. I love the fact that Marion was there at the end. Yeah. Yeah. It was just very nice. Yeah. That's the thing about it. It didn't... It didn't suck. It didn't suck. It didn't suck. Yeah. There were no aliens.

They explained that Sheila Booth got killed. What more do you want? They didn't nuke the fridge. Yes. He looked all right, pulling it all off in, like, fucking 83 or whatever the hell he is now. Yeah. Yeah, it was good. It was fine. And I watched BlackBerry.

What the hell is that? It's the story of the BlackBerry. Oh, God. Okay. Jason, you need to watch this. Really? It's awesome. Okay. It's really good. All right. It's just these two goofballs that started the company and then how it got corporate.

And you will love this. You will get a little bit of PTSD from working in tech. Okay. But it's worth every second of it. It's awesome. I highly recommend it. Does the sidekick make an appearance? I don't think they ever get that far, no. Oh, man. But, yeah, it's really fun.

And then I also went to a concert in London I think, Jason, you would have been impressed by. It was first off at the Royal Albert Hall, which is a great venue. If you've never been there, you must. It's absolutely gorgeous and the sound is amazing. It was the BBC Concert Orchestra and Crouch End Festival Chorus doing Danny Elfman's music from the films of Tim Burton.

Oh, that would have been great. It was awesome. They also had, you know, the special, like, Tim Burton had done this. They had done this 10 years ago. So, this was the 10-year reunion of it. Tim Burton had provided sketches and all this other stuff that play in the background while they run through all the different music. Danny Elfman came out, sang Nightmare Before Christmas songs, and if that wasn't enough, he gestures over to the side of the stage, and who comes out?

Tim Burton. Oh, man. It was awesome. Damn you. Oh. So, that was a blast. And that was, yeah, it was, he's doing it in Hollywood, at the Hollywood Bowl on Halloween, actually.

So, you should go to that, Jason. I know you don't go to your house. No, I can't. Yeah, I would love, trust me. I would love to. I just can't. No, my body can't take it, but I would absolutely love to. Yeah. Because you know he's going to sing Dead Man's Party again, so. Yeah, I didn't do any boy girl, unfortunately, so.

No, but the Halloween shows, he always finishes with Dead Man's Party, which I would love to see in person. But the last time he did it, I got, like, a 4K copy of, like, from the front row, so it was good enough. You should just drive up into the Hollywood Hills, Jason, and set your drone out over the bowl.

It doesn't matter. All I need to do is hear it. That's why I loved living about a block and a half from the bowl. We got to hear all the concerts. Yeah. I swear, it sounded like Prince was playing in my living room when he played. It was great. Yeah, until NSYNC does their 10-night residency. Oh, God. I would complain to my HOA at that point.

You know, the last thing I did see at the Hollywood Bowl was the music from Lord of the Rings. Oh, that's cool. I always wanted to do that. And I've always wanted to do their Star Wars night whenever, or the John Williams thing when he actually is there conducting and everybody's got their lightsabers. It looks like so much fun. See, that would be fun.

I'm going to tell you the Lord of the Rings, everybody fell asleep by the side. It was so boring. Right. All the screen was was all of the walking scenes of them trudging through Middle Earth. It was so goddamn boring.

Yet somehow the movies are great. Yeah, yeah. I'm not besmirching the movies in any way, shape, or form. Just the music alone with an orchestra and videos of them walking was boring as shit. Yesterday, I just finished The Night Agent, a 10-part series on Netflix.

It was actually pretty good. Some of it in the middle was a little wonky. Some of it didn't make sense. The writing didn't quite land. There were just some giant fucking plot holes. But otherwise, I thought it was pretty good. We actually enjoyed it. And it turns out it was one of the highest rated shows on Netflix.

So probably everybody that is listening has already seen it. All right. But they've booked it for a season two, which we may never get because everybody's going to be on strike forever. So we'll see. It's just the actors now. We don't need them. We don't need them anymore. We got AI. Yep.

But since everybody is on strike and this came through the pipeline, For All Mankind has a season four trailer out. So they must have got that in the can before things shut down. Right. Which reminds me, I'm halfway through season one. So I got something to go back to. And the only reason I'm stuck halfway through season one is it's a great show.

The pacing is very slow, and I really enjoy that type of pacing, but I have to be in the right mood for it. But it is a great show. I was loving season one. Now I'm definitely going to head back and pick up the rest of the seasons on that.

You should try it. It's actually really good. It's a nice alternate universe take on the space race. I think it's well done. Yeah. It's mostly not about space is the point. So it's about the – it's more of just a drama with a couple rocket scenes in it here and there.

But it's Battlestar Galactica guy. It doesn't matter. It's actually pretty good. It does to me. He can't fucking finish a show. It doesn't matter. With this type of story, it doesn't really matter. Anyway. So I saw this, and this is really cool because it's something I always wanted to do.

But this guy is actually a much better photographer than me. R.L. Manea. R.L. Manea, I think. He's got 4,700 photos of his that he basically just gave away to the world. And it's like this 14 gigabyte archive that he just said, here, take it.

And he put up a donate button. He wants it. He's like, these things are gathering dust. I tried to put them up on stock image sites. I'm not making any money off of it. So here, take them and run with it. I downloaded the archive. And there's some really nice stuff in there. Some really nice stuff. So train all the AI on that stuff.

But I just thought it was a nice gesture. There are a couple other well-known photographers that donated all their work to the public domain before they died, which I thought was pretty cool. I just got to go scrub mine of embarrassing photos of myself and my friends. I'll probably throw them all up there too.

Yeah. Leave those to the world, Jason. Yeah. Because I got several terabytes of, you know, decent stuff that, you know, just moments in time in tech and things like that, that, you know, just good for, good for posterity back in, from when things were fun in tech.

Right. Apps and doodads. Unity CEO, John Ricciatello, has announced his immediate retirement, surprising no one. Nope. He's also stepping down from his roles as chairman and board member.

And the company has tapped James Whitehurst as the interim CEO while they look for a permanent replacement. Um, yeah, we, we covered, uh, the unity kerfuffle for a couple of weeks, so that's no new news, but I didn't know this last year. Ricciatello issued an apology after describing developers as quote, some of the biggest fucking idiots, end quote, in response to an interview about game makers pushing back on implementing monetization early in the development process.

Fuck you, John. Let, don't let the door hit you in the ass. I mean, that is the way to, uh, to run a company. You call your, your user base, your customers, the biggest fucking idiots in the planet. Yeah. Developers are your, are your customers. That's all your customers are fucking developers.

Without those fucking idiots, you're out of a job. Well, you're out of a job now. Anyways, you're out of a job. Probably with a nice golden parachute. I'm sure he's going to be fine. Life isn't fair. Yes. Yeah. Too bad. Out of all the people that I don't want to be fine, that guy. Well, I like this article a lot, uh, just because of this opening sentence.

Back in the olden days of last December, we had to go to specialized websites to have our natural language prompts transformed and generated AI art. But no longer. Google announced on Thursday that users who have opted for search generative experience will be able to create AI images directly from the standard search bar.

Great. Awesome. Because this hasn't been problematic enough. But they're putting in, they're putting in safeguards, Jason. Who cares? Can't do, can't do real faces. Okay. So, yeah, if you're signing all this shit, you can now just generate images from Google.

You can generate images from anything now. And the problem now is, this is going to surpass the energy usage of crypto, it may have already, by the time I finish this sentence, it probably will have. And potentially with even less usage. Like, who gives a shit about all these AI-generated images?

I'm burned out on them. Most people are already. Yeah, great. Awesome. That's fantastic. Yeah, they're great. They're great for newsletters. You know? Boing Boing has the best ones of Trump, like in prison in a clown suit. Okay, we get it now. We've got enough. But, you know, I've got some friends who have mastered mid-journey.

My friend Bill Snebold is unbelievable at making that thing, like, turn out amazing art that I can get behind. But most people just type in the stupidest shit. My dog dumping on a unicorn's face. Great. Okay. Just what we need.

Yeah. No, the energy usage of this is just astrophuckin-nomical. Astronomical. Dumb shit. So, yeah. And I found this article, is trying to watermark AI images a losing battle? Yes, it is.

Absolutely. Yes, it is. Because at the end of the day, the people that would follow the rules are going to follow the rules, and the people that won't, won't. And also, when you're watermarking images, here's the thing that you have to remember. You can watermark any image, whether it's legit or not.

So, if people start watermarking legitimate images as fake, you muddy the waters, and then pissing in the pool, and all of those analogies that say, we're screwed. So, yeah. I don't know. We have reached the end of reality on the internet.

We've completely hit peak reality. Because from here, it's just downhill. You know, between deep fakes. No legs. Generative AI, chat GPT, and all of its spinoffs, and its ilk, nothing can be trusted anymore. Nothing. And it's just going to get worse as they get better.

So, and what it comes down to is, does it fucking matter? That's the question you have to ask yourself. I don't know. People believe what they want to believe anyways, and now you're just arming them with fake information that backs up their positions. So, fantastic. There's going to be a couple decades, I believe, in here of just utter anarchy.

Utter anarchy. I'm going back to the classics. I'm going to start reading Dostoyevsky. Fuck it. Talk about this news fest. At the library. What a perfect transition to At the Library.

All right. I finished Starter Villain by John Scalzi. All right. Absolutely enjoyed it. Okay. We'll download. Thought it was a great standalone story. A little tiny bit of sci-fi in there. A little bit.

It's just fun. It's a fun little book. And even fucking Will Wheaton pulled it off on the audio version. You know? The problem with Will Wheaton reading books is all I see is him starring in the books as the protagonist. And for this one, it worked out perfectly.

All right. They're always in like a light blue sweater with the rainbow stripes on the top? No, I don't see Wesley Crusher. I see the actual Will Wheaton difference. All right. Do you see him in a Misfits t-shirt on the Big Bang Theory? Something like that. Yeah. A little better. Yeah.

Or a cheap suit from, you know, Goodwill. Right. On some of these. Yeah. But anyway. This came across my desk and my jaw dropped. A Stroke of the Pen, The Lost Stories by Terry Pratchett. Mm-hmm. These are old stories written during the 70s and 80s under a pseudonym for a newspaper.

Cool. And they are basically Proto Pratchett. Right. And one of the best parts about it is the introduction by Neil Gaiman, which is very funny. Very funny and very poignant. And I loved it. And I loved it. And I loved it. And I listened to the first three stories because, of course, I get it on Audible.

And the first story was written by one of my favorites, of course, David Tennant, which made it even better. But I found the first three stories so good. I was on a walk when I was listening to it. And I was laughing out loud like a crazy person walking down the street. I loved it. There's so much Pratchett in these.

Good. And you can tell, like, you know, this is him, you know, getting his chops under him. Yeah. But you can tell from the get-go that he is a fantastic writer. I mean, this guy was just, I mean, he was gold from the get. So, so far, I really, really like him.

And I'm going to, since they are short stories, I am going to pace them out slowly as best I can. All right. I've got other books and things that I'm working on to pass the time. And I'm just going to, I'm going to dole these out because this is the end. This is the last of them. I'm very excited. I'm happy that it's good.

So, can't wait. Oh, it's not good. It's great. I love them. I love them. And I mentioned this one on a previous episode, but Slayers, a Buffyverse story on Audible, is now out. Came out a couple days ago. And I can't wait to dive into this one, too.

All right. Because I'm a Buffy fan and a buddy of mine is in this one. So, I am really, really going to dig into this. And it's not short. It's like eight and a half hours on Audible. Wow. So, that's great. It's the size of a book. Okay. It's a book the size of a book. It is a book the size of a book.

Excellent. Paul wrote in, thanks for the book review for Eight Detectives. My wife likes mysteries and detective books, and she listened to the book and really enjoyed it. You had a list of books at one point. Where can I find that list? Thank you. Love your podcast. We've had a list of books at a couple of different points, but nobody gave a shit.

And it's a lot of work for us. So, we stopped doing it. So, sorry. Can you remind me about Eight Detectives? Because I don't remember anybody reviewing that book on this show. Well, that 100% had to be you. If only we had a list of books we've talked about, Jason. We could go back and see.

I've never heard of that book in my life. Well, I wonder if they wrote another wrong podcast. I think so, because I've never read that book in my... I don't even know who would have written that book. I'm sure I could Google it, but... Well, let's take a little quick look. See here. Eight Detectives.

Google it for fun and profit. Oh, look. I can generate an AI image of Eight Detectives. Yeah, give me a fake book cover that we could use as a show art. Alexa Pavese. I have never heard of this book. Thanks, Paul, for writing in, but you got the wrong show, buddy. But keep downloading.

Keep downloading. Never heard of this. I love the internet. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave, with podcast superhost Dave Bittner.

Dave is the host of the Cyberware podcast for all your cybersecurity news. The co-host of Hacking Humans with Joe Kerrigan, discussing how humans are mean. The co-host of Caveat with Ben Yellen, because people are nosy. And the co-host of... And the host of Control Loop, because industrial machines have feelings, too.

And I don't know why my voice was going like that. When it's time to change! Rearrange! Everybody breaks into a little Jerry Lewis, too, every now and then. That's right. Yeah. Gotta sing-song it. Hello.

Good to be back. Good to be back. How was your trip, Dave? It was delightful. It was delightful. I took a trip to North Dakota. Will we be going back to North Dakota? You know, that's an interesting question. Best answered off the air?

Well, the question is, am I allowed to go to North Dakota? Because you said if you flubbed it, it was on me. No, no. I don't envision myself vacationing there anytime soon. Right. But I would certainly go back to the cybersecurity conference that I went to, which was very well run, very well attended.

I did my presentation. It seemed to go over very well. Got some nice feedback afterwards. And North Dakota is legit blazing a trail when it comes to a lot of cybersecurity stuff. They have this whole-of-state approach where, and partly because there's so few people there, there's only 750,000 people in the whole state, I think it's probably safe to say there's more cattle than people in North Dakota.

I was about to say, I think I can see that many people looking out my window right now. Right. Exactly. Exactly. I spoke to someone there at the event who has a family farm, a ranch, and it's 300,000 acres, which is twice the size of the city of Baltimore.

And the reason he was at a cybersecurity conference is he, when he was a teenager, he started putting RFID tags on all the cows. And so now every time on this farm, anytime a cow goes through a gate, it gets pinged.

So they know where all the cows are. They know if there's a cow missing. They know these cows need to be moved here or there or whatever. And so he automated that process. He also told me that their farm does $16 million a year in business selling bull sperm around the world.

Well. Yeah. I mean, it's a growing market. It's big business. Write your own joke. But, you know, that's serious, serious stuff. So anyway, I had a great time. North Dakota is beautiful.

It is flat and windy. It's the first place I've been where the local news, as part of the weather report, they have a segment on wind. Related to that, I noticed that there are no outdoor trash cans in North Dakota. Like most of the times you go to a public building or something, you go out front and there's a, there's a trash can out front.

Yeah. I think it's too windy to have outdoor trash cans in North Dakota. It's just not a thing there. You just let your trash go and it blows to South Dakota. Yeah. There you go. Right. Or up to Canada. Or to Canada. Problem solved. So, no, I had a really good time.

You know, it is a little bit of a hike to get there. You have to fly to Minneapolis from where I am and then get on a smaller plane and fly to Bismarck, which is an adorable little airport, four gates. I wish every airport was as easy as the airport in Bismarck.

But everyone was delightful. Just genuinely nice people. They were very welcoming. So I had a good time. I did, I did, one of the evenings I was there. My producer, Jen, who was traveling with me was not feeling well.

So we skipped an evening event and I went across the street to a sports bar to just get something to eat, to get myself a sandwich. And I sat down there at the bar and a couple seats over from me was a gentleman who was probably about halfway through his meal.

And there was baseball up on the TVs behind the bar. So we started chatting about baseball and where are you from and that sort of thing. And I told him I was from the Baltimore area and said, oh, the Orioles are doing great this year and, you know, all that kind of stuff. And so we're just chatting and having a good time.

And it seemed like a decent fellow told me about, you know, where he works and the types of things that he does. And, uh, and then we started in on chemtrails and, uh, and just how he, yeah.

And how he sees the planes flying over every day and he hasn't seen blue skies the way there used to be blue skies when he was a child. And, um, and, uh, and I just smiled and nodded and listened and I didn't really push back because what's the point.

Um, I heard all about how, uh, COVID is fake and the CDC can't even find the virus and don't get me started on vaccines and all this kind of thing. And again, I'm just smiling and nodding and letting, taking it all in.

Um, and I certainly don't mean to, uh, you know, condemn North Dakota or anyone who lives there just because I randomly happened to sit next to this gentleman. Oh, no, I could sit down at somebody in Toronto, at a bar in Toronto and hear the same bullshit. So, yeah. Yeah.

It could have happened anywhere. Uh, but I think it was particularly fun or interesting because I was far away from home. It added a little color to the trip. Right. Uh, and also it would struck me is that there was nothing about this gentleman's outward appearance that would make you think that this was the type of thought process that he embraced.

Not, not wearing the tinfoil cap. Not at all. Looking pretty normal. Yes. Well-groomed, well-spoken, you know, just normal stuff. Yeah. But it was amazing to me how quickly he pivoted to this. You know, like there was very little feeling out of me that he did before we were right in.

Straight from baseball to chemtrails. Yeah. Yeah. So. No lube, man. So, yeah. Came back from North Dakota and headed straight to the beach. Uh, had a nice little weekend in Bethany Beach, which is in Delaware here, a couple hours away from where I live.

And that was delightful and relaxing. So, um, I'll share, I'll share a little bit more about that trip, uh, later in the show, but, uh, you know, it's a nice time away. Excellent. So, JC sent you a link, he says, to share with Dave.

And this is a link to archive.org and a copy of the Radio Shack 1985 64th anniversary catalog. Yes. This is the office copy property of Bob Healy, which is fairly cute. Um, I was going through this catalog.

I didn't know, don't know if you had a chance to take a look at it, Dave, but I pretty much had this catalog. I had every Radio Shack catalog from this era. I mean, it was an event when the new catalog came out. I, I beelined to my local Radio Shack and got my free copy and I went home and just went through it multiple times.

I, I. Till it got too sticky to open. Well. Ooh, the transistors. I love those mini TVs. But I, I fantasized about these pre-packaged stereo systems that they'd put together. You know, save, you know, save $200 if you get this and the, you know, get these speakers and this turntable and, you know, digital synthesized.

No, it's great. It's great. I love that, um, the leading piece of technology in this catalog is a beta hi-fi VCR. Yep, yep. Second only to the laser disc in terms of quality. That's right. And then on the second page, there's a VHS VCR with a wired remote control.

Oh, yeah. I think notably. Nine functions. It's $100 less than the beta VCR, which I think tells a lot about that story. Yes, it does. Also, there's a videotape that, or a couple videotapes that, that they're selling here.

Great MTV rock videos. New for $85. Duran Duran. Stray Cats. Genesis. Only $29.95 for, well, maybe 10 songs, something like that. So, I guess this is for people who didn't have cable. You could, you could buy MTV.

All right. Yeah. Yeah. So, yes, I very, thank you to, was it JC who sent this in? Thank you, JC. I, this hits me where I live. I love everything about this, and I'm going to have a great time going through this and taking a little walk down memory lane.

I think I started working at Radio Shack when I was in college, so that probably was around 1988 or so. So, this was a couple years before that, but certainly in that same zone when Radio Shack was a really important part of my life.

Yes, I love how the boom boxes are, carry around component systems. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, part of the problem with Radio Shack was they sourced their stuff from so many different places that, like, I remember when I worked there, we sold probably half a dozen different Walkman equivalents.

But they were made by different manufacturers. But most of them were just rebadged, you know, so we had a lot that were. The Stepman. Yeah. But they were, there were ones that were just a rebadged Sanyo. We didn't have anything that was truly Sony, but we had other brands.

But the problem was that meant you had zero consistency from model to model. So, it's not like somebody could come in and say, oh, you know, Radio Shack makes great Walkmans. Well, some of them were great. Other ones were just total piles of steaming dog crap. And it's kind of that way across the line.

Like, some of the stuff they made themselves was good or at least consistent quality. But a lot of the stuff that they jobbed out to other people was just, you weren't sure what you were going to get. Yeah. That was always my issue with the Shack of Radio. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I got to say, I always wanted a microcassette recorder and one of the mini TVs.

And I eventually. The mini TVs felt so sci-fi. I finally got one. Like, it was the dream. Yeah. I finally got one. My grandfather had actually bought one to go hunting with, to take to the hunting lodge with him. And I got it eventually after he died. And I was like, this is a piece of shit.

Yeah. Yeah. Kind of illustrated radio, really, in a way. Yeah. It's a video. And think about where we are today with our iPhones and the image quality on an iPhone screen compared to those early LCD televisions.

It's just amazing how far we've come. Well, I watched Gen V on streaming video on a 5K iPad on my lap last night with the most beautiful, you know, display I've ever seen in my life. So, yeah, we've come a long way, baby.

Come a long way. No, it's good. And I'm just – as we're talking here, I'm just paging through this catalog and just really having warm, fuzzy feelings as I go. Because wanted it, had it, wanted it, wanted it, wanted it, had it, had it, wanted it. Great fun.

Amit wrote in, in the last episode, you asked if we could share some Apple Watch tips. There are tons out there, but here are the few that I use. And I'm not going to read them out because we are certainly not that kind of tech podcast. But if Jason remembers, he'll pop them in the show notes. And, yeah, thank you very much for these, Amit. Some of these I was unaware of, actually.

Yeah, these are great. I appreciate you sending them in. I do have a question about one of them. He says, turning off Wi-Fi saves battery. Yeah, that's the worst one. Well, so here's my question. Is that how the watch connects to the phone over Wi-Fi or is it Bluetooth?

It's usually Bluetooth. You force it to Wi-Fi when you're doing an update. Otherwise, the update takes 17 days. Okay. Yeah, but Wi-Fi is what you use to unlock your Macs with. Yes. So you need that on for unlocking. Yeah, which is the thing that I can't live without. I need to walk up to my Mac and have it open for me.

Okay. See, I don't use that. So I've never even tried that. Oh, it's quite wonderful, Dave. You should do that. All right. Well, I see. So now what you've done is you've created a feature that I'm going to try that I will not be able to live without, which will negate this other feature that will help save my battery, which is all the more reason why I'll be getting a new Apple Watch for Christmas.

So that's progress, Dave. All the well that ends well, I guess, in the end. So thank you. In the end, it's just a big sucking vacuum of your money being taken away. Yeah. I'm okay with it. If you're going to do that, just get the Ultra 2 and then you don't care about battery ever again.

More money because you won't have any. Right. That's the plan. It's only $50 a month, man, on the payment plan. So I've had mine on for a day and a half now and I'm at 73%. Wow. That's good. That's really good. With two mile workouts in there, too. So that's with full workouts.

And so 73%. So I'm digging it. And it's also just a great watch. Oh, I tested the blood pulse oximeter against my external unit. This one reads one to two percentage points lower than my off-the-shelf $19 one that you get, that we all got during COVID.

Right. But it's consistent. It's consistently one to two percent less. So it is the same but different. So if I'm at 98, you know, then just I can figure – if I'm 98 on the finger one, then on this one, I'm usually like, you know, around 96.

Well, I mean you got to get points for consistent incorrect. Exactly. That's all that matters. As long as it's consistently incorrect, you can work with that. You can calibrate. Right. Right. It's like women converting the numbers we give them for penis size, right? They just convert. They know in their heads.

Divide by two. Yeah. Carry the one. Exactly. Exactly. I'm looking at my watch. I've had my watch on for six hours today, and it is at 61 percent. So there you go. Yeah. Time for an upgrade. Yours would be better. And I saw this one come through the pipeline.

Star Wars BD drone spotted adorably roaming Disneyland Galaxy's Edge. And I saw the video of these, and they are adorables. Totes adorables. They're little waddling droids. They're little waddling droids. Actually, what it looks like are the droids that you would see when you're waiting in line for the original Star Tours, the little droids who are working on other droids.

They kind of resemble those, and they're just adorable. There's a video I saw from the IEEE, which I can't remember what that stands for, but it's an engineering society.

Yeah. And they had a little behind-the-scenes video about these droids and the challenge that Disney Imagineering had of giving them personality all the time. In other words, it's easy to make an animatronic or a robot have personality when it's bolted to the floor.

And on a script, on a loop. Right. But how do you have it have personality when it trips and falls over something or has to get itself up the floor or gets pushed in a way that it's not expecting? And they're able to do that with these so that they hold character no matter what happens to them, which evidently is one of the real innovations of them.

But you're right. They're just adorable. They're just so cute. I hope to see one next time I'm at one of the Disney parks. Yeah, one of the Disney Plus documentary things I actually had with the lead developer on this. She was showing how it was going to work and all that.

And it wasn't quite ready for prime time yet when they shot it, but it looked cool. So it's great that these things are out there now. And hopefully, I think I'll be going to Disneyland over Christmas. So hopefully I'll see one then. Oh, nice. Yeah, if you do, take some pictures. Will do. In a couple of years, you'll probably be able to buy one at Sharper Image.

Oh, Sharper Image. Now that, the upscale Radio Shack. Sadly, not Radio Shack. Yeah. So let's talk about the Ahsoka finale. It's bothered me for a couple episodes, and it was just so front and center, this one.

Why is the planet boning a Star Destroyer? Because it is. Got to make new Star Destroyers somehow. Yeah, I guess so. I guess that's how it works. I mean, he was down to one. I mean, like, this is a kid's show. When a planet loves a Star Destroyer very much. Right. Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, it is just the tip, but come on. That's all it takes. I put the screen cap in the show. And this is actually the non-risqué one. There was another one that was even more risque from the penultimate episode. So this is what you took from the show, Jason.

Kind of. Yeah. It's subtle. I don't really remember much else from the finale. It's subtle. Yeah. Real subtle. I don't really remember much else. Well, he was just playing it in the loop. Back and forth. Back and forth. Back and forth. He's got the jog dial. Jog dial. Jog dial. No, I just made an animated gif. That's all. That's it. You mean gif.

Yeah. Shut up. Whatever. So what did you guys think? Did you like it? Loved it. Yeah, I did. Yeah. I'm hoping that there's a season two and that we're not going to wait until the monster mashup movie that Filoni is going to do to tie up all his shows together.

So, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. Yeah, I thought it was great. Yeah, me too. It just, it feels like Star Wars. Yeah. It feels like the universe that, the way I want it to be. And so I'm just happy that we're getting really fun, we're getting fun, effortless Star Wars content that I don't have to consciously be okay with.

Right. You're not settling. Like those last movies. Yeah, that's exactly, Jason. Right, exactly. That's exactly it. I'm not settling. It is absolutely gratifying and fun. I don't have to justify them in my mind in any way, shape, or form as I had to do with the last three movies.

Or the book of Boba Fett. Yeah. Yeah. To a lesser degree, certainly. Yeah. Yeah. That was just the Mandalorian season 1.5. Right. Right. With writing or, you know. Yeah. I'm with Brian. I hope we get a second season and we don't have to wait forever for whatever movie is going to happen next.

But they said the worst thing coming into this finale was that I knew it would be, I think we all knew it was going to be some kind of a cliffhanger. Yes. And so you just knew that and you had to deal with that. And it's always that feeling of, well, that was great.

And now I have to wait two years. Yeah. The difference from when we were younger is we knew it was, you know, just a couple short months away, we'd be getting a new season. Now it's years. Yeah. That's a drag. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But no, tip of the hat to the folks who made this.

I'm very happy with it and seems to be overall well received. So it's good. Yeah. It's fun. Yeah. Good start. So a couple of things I wanted to touch on before we wrap up here. I can't remember if I mentioned this before, but it happened again to me. I was driving around in my car, which is really the only place where I listen to terrestrial radio anymore.

And there is a local radio station to me that plays all of their music about 10% faster than the songs should be. Well, that should be criminalized. Yeah. It should be criminalized. But are you sure you just didn't have too much caffeine that morning? I am pretty sure. Yeah. Also, what is radio, Jake?

I've not heard of this format. Does one get it in a shack? Yes. Not anymore. Not anymore. And my musically sensitive ears were all over this. It just, it made me anxious because I'm listening to a song. I'm like, I know that song, but that's not that song.

What do they do with that song? Meanwhile, like everybody is listening to this at 2X. Yeah. Well, good point. That's right. That's right. You know, one thing that happened to me when I was in North Dakota, and this happens to me pretty much everywhere I go where I'm at a public meat space.

Podcast listeners is, I run into people who listen to the podcast at 2X speed, and they are very wary about having a conversation with me because they say, why do you talk so slow? And you sound drunk. Why are you drunk, Dave? Yeah.

Right. Yep. And that actually happened to me in North Dakota. So I had been lobbying to put out an version of this, of our show at 2X so that people that listen to 2X will hear it at 4X. Very nice. Just to mess with them.

Yeah. Yeah. It's so funny. I went on the, I was a guest on the Labors of Ecule podcast. And for me, it was, it was jarring. I'm like, why are we talking so slow? Because I, I mean, I've listened to every episode and I know, you know, I know Frankie and Adam talk at one and a half speed for me.

And then we get on the show and we're going through it. And I'm just like, this just isn't, this feels wrong. It feels wrong. Get to it. Come on. Yeah. Oh, I find myself talking faster just to speed up. And I'm just like, oh, this is, oh God. It's so weird. But we need that time because our brains don't work that fast.

Yeah. Well, ours don't. I think I, certainly my kids do. They can consume things much faster than I can. I heard something the other day that I think you guys can relate to. My roommate was talking to one of her friends and he's like, man, I never thought we'd make it to the age where we always feel like the check engine light is on.

Right. Just get a piece of electrical tape and cover that baby up and keep driving. Yeah. So I mentioned after North Dakota, we went to the beach for a few days, just had a nice little long weekend, enjoying the long weekend because of the indigenous people's day slash Columbus day holiday here in the States.

And we were at Bethany beach, which is a lovely little beach town on the Delaware shore. It is sort of midway between ocean city, Maryland, which is the behemoth beach resort. And yeah, Rehoboth, Delaware, which is kind of a midsize resort, smaller than ocean city, but bigger than Bethany.

So small little beach town, had a great time. But on our trip, we went down to ocean city, Maryland, which is where I went to the beach every summer with my family. I don't know if either of you have ever been there. Have you? We used to go to Rehoboth. I used to go to Rehoboth in the seventies a lot. Okay.

So Rehoboth is sort of a scaled down version of ocean city, Maryland. And one of the things, of course, from my childhood that made the beach special were the big video arcades. Oh yeah. Right. They had everything and they're still there.

Now they've changed quite a bit in that most of the games they have today are the kind of ticket games where you, games of chance, where you do something and, you know, ski ball or something. Right. You win something, but they still have a lot of the older video games, the classics.

Um, and, uh, they had a spy hunter game, which one of my favorites, uh, but when I was a teenager, one of the places down there had the sit down spy hunter, which was just the best. Um, and that got me thinking about the Peter gun theme, which is part of what makes spy hunter so special.

And, and Jason, I know, you know, the guy who did the music for that, right? Uh, that has to be Mark Cantor. Yes. He was a guest on the show. Right. So what I was thinking was, uh, wouldn't it be great if someone could get the original files that were created for that and update that with modern instruments, right?

So take, now I don't know, um, where the development of spy hunter landed when it came to MIDI. Um, there's a format called, I believe it's VMG or VGM, which is video game music, which was a, a way to record music on some of these arcade video machines.

And then later some of the early consoles that wasn't MIDI, but was similar to MIDI in a way to have a digital encoding of, of musical stuff. And obviously the spy hunter arcade game had a dedicated board for music and sound effects. It was part of what set it apart.

But I was thinking, wouldn't it be great if someone could take those original files, the actual ones that we all know and update them with modern instruments from a modern either synthesizer or digital audio workstation. I put that out there, uh, in case you wanted to drop a note to your buddy and see if he's already done that, or perhaps if those files were magically and mystically made available.

Um, I'm pretty sure there's a lot of pot between now and then for old Mark. So, uh, yeah, if you want to go back and listen to that, it was a episode one 87 from, uh, November 25th, 2016 of grumpy old geeks. Wow. All right.

Writing that down. Yeah. Uh, I'm pretty sure. Cause that was a lot. That was long, long ago in his career. That's think this is before macro mind even. Yeah. Um, so, uh, but, but I bet he's got that file somewhere. I don't know if he's a pack rat.

I don't know. Yeah. I'll reach out to him though. Why not? I'll see what he's got. To me, that is the pinnacle achievement of video game soundtracks. Oh yes. The Peter Gunn theme from, from Spy Hunter. That game wouldn't be what it is without that. Oh, absolutely not. Um, so that took me down a Peter Gunn rat hole, which led me to the cover that the Art of Noise did of the Peter Gunn theme.

Do you guys remember that one? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and so then that took me to a live version of the Peter Gunn theme, which was recorded in Tokyo in 1986. And I'll, and I'll include that in the show notes here. Um, and I like it better than the original for a variety of reasons, but it made me wonder, are there any songs that you guys can think of where in your mind, the live version far

outstrips the original studio version and anything jumped to mind? I mean, for that thousands, I've got to go like straight up with my goth roots. It's like, uh, a forest by the cure is one of my favorite songs of all time. It's, it's a nice atmospheric four to five minutes song.

When performed live, it's about 15 minutes long and it's epic. Hmm. Okay. Uh, liveage from the descendants. One of the greatest live albums of all time. Uh, absolutely. The one that comes to mind for me is Stop Making Sense, of course.

Oh God. Phenomenal. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely phenomenal. Yeah. I think almost, almost, well, I would, I can't, yeah, I'd say almost, well, I'd say every live version of the songs on there are the ones I think of now, rather than the originals. They just have that energy that comes from, from a live song.

So, yeah, I'm trying to think of some other ones. And I, and I know there are albums that were allegedly live, but weren't really live. Like I think, um, Kiss Alive 2 is famously not actually a live album. They actually went into the studio and recorded live. Yeah. Right.

Right. Sort of live to tape with a crowd sound over it. Benny and the Jets was not actually live. That was concocted in the studio. Yeah. Um, so there's a lot of that, but, um, yeah. So good times, fun songs.

And, uh, I, I listened to just about every possible version of the Peter Gunn theme that I could find out there when I went down my little spy hunter rattle. That's a fun one. Yeah. Art and noise, underappreciated too, by the way. I think so. Their best of is just phenomenal.

Yeah. Yeah. I was, uh, talking with one of my colleagues here about the, um, Paranomia with, uh, Max Headroom. So good. Which is just very much of its time. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right. Well, that's what I have this week.

Always good to catch up. It's nice to be back. Excellent. And, uh, I'll talk to you guys next time. All righty. All right. Good to have the band back together. All right. There you go. Glad you made it through all those chemtrails to get back to us. Is it, is it just me or is the band getting bigger? Closing shout outs.

Over at Patreon, we've got Jessica. Just Jessica. Welcome, Jess. Well, thank you, Jessica. We appreciate you. Over at PayPal, we've got Judge, Jonathan, Thomas, Nicola, Nicolai, Ralph, Miles, Sherry, Linda, and Natalie. Thank you all so much. Thank you so much. Over at the tip jar, we've got Christopher, Sarah, Matthew, Joseph, Jeff, Theodore, and Robert.

And just a quick reminder over on Patreon, if you do sign up, it's only three bucks a month and you can get the shows a little bit early, sometimes, maybe, usually. And, uh, ad free. And high res. Don't forget high res. Yeah. With generative images. Sometimes. Brian generates them.

He's our AI. I'm the AI bot. Yep. AI is people. Yeah. Uh, we've got a new review. Five star. Funny as fuck. From Jamie. I love the humor and the cynicism of the show. Keep up the great work. Also, I'm digging the Star Wars talk. Thank God. Because we don't do security anymore. Thank God somebody does.

Yeah. And says, nuts, writes in with the five stars, how I envisioned you guys in my head. I love this podcast and just made my first donation through Stripe. I have no idea what you guys look like, but your personalities forged facial images in my head very early on.

Through 250 episodes, I had to start at episode one, I visualize you guys as the American pickers. Brian is Mike Wolf and Jason is Frank Fritz. The similarities are uncanny, right down to Mike being a family man and Jason being a passionate pet owner. I don't know if the next 250 plus episodes will do anything to change my perspective, but I can't wait to find out.

Well, it might be nine months before he hears this, but I think the Venn diagram of American pickers watchers and GOG listeners is probably pretty small. It could be, I love pickers, but I'm not going to, I'm not going to, I'm not going to say anything to, to let, let him figure it out.

And if he goes to the website, he can see, I don't know, a picture of us right on the fucking front page, but I don't know how he gave us money and didn't know what we look like. Yeah, well, you know, I don't, yeah, okay. Generate an image, goddammit. Yep, yep. An RIP to Keith Giffen, legendary comics artist and writer.

That's pronounced Jiffen. Jiffen, Jiffen, Jiffen. Fuck you. Oh, now you get it. Took me a second to get it. Took me a second to get it. Oh, God. Okay, that was good.

That was good. Okay. I take a week off, man. I know. I didn't expect you to come back funnier. Jesus. It's all that little speckled head. Yeah, really. So, hey, tie in. He did create Rocket Raccoon for Marvel, but he also created Lobo, one of my favorite characters.

And, yes, he did the best tweet ever. He said, I told them I was sick. Anything not to go to New York Comic Con. Thanks. Keith Griffin, 1952 to 2023. Wow. Tweeted it, then he died. Nice. Yep. Way to go, Keith.

Jiffen. It was good. Until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schellmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Show notes and links to everything we talked about today are at gog.show slash 621. gog.show slash donate is the place to drop us a few bills so we can keep bringing you this top-notch entertainment.

Sharing the show with your friends, enemies, or anyone in between is free and can be almost as good as cash. At gog.show, you can find a link to our Discord channel if you want to chat with us and other show fans. Head over to gog.show slash contact to send us your feedback, comments, or links to cool shit you think we should talk about or books we've never talked about or read.

gog.show slash review is where you can toss us a review and preferably five stars that we can read on the air. Stay grumpy.

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