648: Some Superheroes Ride Motorized Scooters

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. Happy birthday, Brian! Well, thank you. Thank you. Um, yeah. Old. Erf. Don't really feel it. I gotta say, I remember talking to, like, my mom when I was, like, I don't know, I was in college and she would have been roughly my age or something like that now.

And, uh, she just said, like, you know what? My body doesn't work as well as it used to, but I don't feel old. And I'm kind of there, so. Oh, yeah. No, I still feel like I'm 18, but my body says, no, no, no. Yeah. Oh, no, no.

I was over at a friend's house last week helping to set up, uh, some audio equipment and he's got, like, a stone floor and I had to keep getting up and down off the floor. And, oh, my God, I was just, like, I had to roll over and push me. It's, like, ridiculous.

Yeah, that's what makes me happy that I've been keeping up with the yoga over the years, so I don't have those issues yet. Yeah. Walk more, eat better veggies, keep up with your yoga. Yep. Yoga gets more and more, uh, important, I've discovered, as I get older and older, because it has kept me, um, relatively mobile.

Yeah, I should really look into that. You should. Anyways, uh, one of our not exactly craziest, uh, predictions we've ever made has come true, Jason. Oh, what, what's happened now, Brian? You know that portal between New York and Dublin that we talked about last week and I said that's gonna last a couple days?

Yeah. It's down. Okay, how long did we get? How long did we get? Before even a week was up, the portal had to be closed, uh, due to inappropriate behavior on the Dublin side, because people were holding up phones showing, uh, uh, porn and the, the 9-11, uh, videos of the crash.

Uh, I think. Oh, fuck them. Then they brought it back up for a little bit and, uh, then, uh, somebody on the New York side flashed their boobies. Oh, and they got shut down for boots? Because we can't have nice things. Well, boobies are nice things. What are you talking about? Well, yes, but not in public. Okay.

With children around. Oh, well. All of that sort of thing. Where do they think the food comes from? In great, in great full little bastards? Yes. So, they said, while we cannot control all of these actions, we are implementing some technical solutions to address this, and then we will go back live again, the council said in a statement seen by BBC News.

The technical solution was apparently blocking images held up to the portal's camera from being displayed at the other end. Oh, they're trying to get Hot Dogger not installed. That, or somebody's just going to sit there with a button, or I have no idea. So, yeah, I don't think this is going to last very long.

I don't think it's going to come back, so it's a little bit crazy. We did learn something about the woman that decided to flash her boobies leading next to the next shutdown, and I've got some issues with this article. It's the OnlyFans model who ruined the portal previously went viral for licking a toilet.

Yeah. Yeah. So, she's just basically an attention whore that is trying to promote her OnlyFans, and she does all kinds of crazy-ass shit. But the problem I have with this article is it says, the adult influencer who contributed to the pause of New York's weird portal loves a good stunt.

Okay. Adult influencer? Well, she isn't. We can't even call him porn stars anymore? We have to give him a fancier title? Does she? Well, I guess she's on OnlyFans, so she probably is doing porn, so that's a, you know, I'm assuming that is an assumption. Yeah.

You know, when we were kids, you know who the adult influencer was? It was Dr. Spock. That's true. Now it's some fucking chick flapping her flabbies around on a portal. Yeah. No. What a world. She's a garbage human. I looked into her a little bit more.

Yeah, she's a garbage human. Yeah, it's just, so we can't, we can't do anything without the garbage humans flocking anymore. It's a real shame. It does sound like there were garbage humans on both sides of the portal, to be honest, so. Well, there's garbage humans. That's true.

That's true. I also have a problem that says, in other words, she's not wholly dissimilar from any other person in the infotainment industry. Now, when I, you know, when Computersverse started, infotainment was actually a good thing. Yeah. Wasn't it? It was. Yeah. I mean, I learned something and being entertained.

It was Jon Stewart. Ah, yes. She is no Jon Stewart. No. Nicer boobs, though. Anyway, a recent study reveals that the return to office mandates at Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX have led to a significant departure of senior level employees.

So, this goes back to what we were saying that, you know, there's problems all across the range of this whole return to office thing. Some people are not going to get, if they don't go back to the office, they're not going to get promoted. Yep. And if they do go back to the office, they're miserable.

So, you know, this is a, we're still in the middle of this giant shift. Yeah. And it turns out the really smart people, it seems, are leaving. Like all the senior guys are going in and gals are saying, you know what? Nah, I'm going to go find somebody that's going to let me work where I want to work. And let me do what I want to do because I'm the one with the talent.

Yep. And that's the way that's going. Well, as we've been saying the whole time that we've been arguing about this, which is many years now, or at least four years, some people are good at this, are good at work from home. Some people are not.

And I don't think that's ever going to change. That's a personality type thing. Some jobs can work from working at home. Some jobs cannot. But I do say if you're going to force a policy where people are coming into the office and then they're all just sitting there on Zoom calls anyways, why are you bothering?

Yeah. It's, you know, save the carbon from the commute. Save the misery from the commute. Just figure it out, you know, if they don't have to be there, figure it out. Yep. You know, I am a huge fan of trying to figure it out because I'm disabled now.

I can't go to an office. Right. So I would like to have a job that I can work from home that, you know, isn't podcasting because that's not a job anymore. Nope. So, you know, the only place I'm going to be able to go is Home Depot and say, hello, the saws are over on aisle four.

I wish people would really try and figure this out a little better than just, you know, slapping on old mindsets to new problems. Yep. I agree. Yeah. I agree. And unfortunately, it's one of those situations where the more highly compensated people and the people higher up the food chain get the options and the people that are lower down don't.

Also, another problem is that the people that are making these decisions are old farts who have no idea what the world is like anymore. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of that. There's a lot of that. We have our sunken costs into our into our and we have a 10 year lease on this office space. So, God damn it, you're going to come in here. Yeah.

And I don't understand how to do this. And I like to be able to walk around and stay and see what people are doing. Now, there's a new survey that came out that I have a little got to take a little umbrage with here. The title of this article, Is the Internet Bad for You? Huge study reveals surprising effect on well-being.

A 16 year global study involving 2.4 million people has found that the internet that found that internet use can boost well-being. Now, internet use has changed drastically in 16 years. Yes. I would argue I did read through the study as well.

I would certainly argue that at the beginning, internet use certainly did make people happier. I would like to see a study focusing just on the last, oh, I don't know, five years. Well, internet use is a such a broad statement. Yes. You know, they're saying that, okay, people without internet use scored 8% higher.

They scored 8% lower on measures of life satisfaction. Okay. So people, people that have internet are, they're 8% happier. They also probably have houses and running water and heating and cooling and all the infrastructures of modern life. I love this. These benefits are comparable to the well-being boost from a walk in nature, where I would say I don't believe that one bit because the people, the people that don't have internet access are walking in nature all fucking day trying to get water from a well probably, and

they're not that happy. Yeah. So. Yeah, I see the flaws in this study. So many flaws in this study. So many flaws. They do note that women aged 15 to 24 who use the internet reported being less happy with their living situation.

Yeah. Because that age group is probably on Instagram made, you know, being made to feel shitty about themselves. Yeah. Thank you, algorithms. But anyway, this is such a, if you, if you see this and it's, you know, it's coming across on local news now saying, oh, hey, the internet's great.

You know, everybody was wrong. No, not even close. Look, the last bullet point that you put in here just tells you how mealy mouth the people were that even wrote this article on this. This research adds a new dimension to the debate on internet and social media regulation, highlighting the nuanced effects of digital media on well-being.

That is a statement that says we don't buy this at all. And this says nothing. That's it. Nothing burger. In the news.

Well, Apple is reportedly close to making a deal with OpenAI to add AI features to the iPhone. Exactly what I don't necessarily want. I don't want to bait into my system. I just don't. What happened to Google? What happened to Google? They were, they were up next. Google were in the running, but apparently they're much closer to making the deal with OpenAI, which brings, you know, the Microsoft Apple Nexus even closer.

Oh, great. Yes. So we'll find out soon. It's going to be something or other is going to be in iOS 18. And the details of that will be announced at the next developers conference, which starts on June 10th. So, yeah, this was as of last Friday. Bloomberg reportedly reported that they were close to finalizing terms to incorporate OpenAI, not Google.

OK, we'll see how that goes. Well, OpenAI, it's a bit of big news for AI this week. So we got a lot to talk about here. I know. It's so annoying. I know. I know. OpenAI Inc.'s deal to train AI on Reddit data. Yes, they have partnered with Reddit to use its data for training their AI models.

The deal gives OpenAI access to Reddit's extensive posts and replies. And in return, OpenAI will become a Reddit advertising partner and provide AI-powered tools for Reddit users and moderators. Ah, Reddit, the mountain of misinformation that is there. They have over 1 billion posts and 16 billion comments.

Yeah. That's a lot of data. That's a lot of words. Yeah, it's just words. It's just words. It's a lot of words that's sucking in. Some of them right. Most of them not. Most of them not is the problem. Yes, I don't know about you, but just a cursory. You take 10 minutes and you bounce around Reddit.

Yeah. And it's just a dumpster fire. It's a dumpster fire of humanity for the most part. You know, there are little pockets of interestingness. Yes. Yeah. But no discernment is going into the data. That's the problem. Remember, back in the day, Jason, even before our time, even before our time with computers, there was one ironclad rule of computing, garbage in, garbage out.

And AI people seem to have completely forgotten about that rule. Give us all your garbage, your poor huddled masses of garbage. Bring them to us. Put them against my bosom and let them suck against my teeth. It's unbelievable.

Well, Google had their IO conference, IO 2024, and Project Astra is their big AI assistant that they're going to be launching. And I'm not going to go into great detail here because the link is in the show notes. Three people, independent writers, went through it and gave their thoughts.

Basically, boy, what they're promising is cool. Holy shit, this can't do any of that yet. Yeah, exactly. There you go. That's the TLDR. It's a great thought. Can't fucking do it. Yeah. That's just like the last demo that they did, that they got busted for.

Yeah. Well, I don't think that this time they actually, like, showed people doing it. They just said, they said, you'll be able to, and then all three of these people tried it and said, no, we are fucking not able to. Well, that escalated quickly.

Oh, man. Well, let's take a little, let's take a quick. More AI is just not there yet. Yeah. Let's take a quick detour to self-driving cars. All right. Yes. The era of unchecked freedom for autonomous vehicle testing is coming to an end. So says the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, the acronym that I could never remember.

They've opened investigations into companies like Tesla, Ford, Waymo, Cruise, and Zooks. God, Zooks. Over alleged safety lapses. So they're going to be looking for tighter oversight and more data demands. And now, the thing is, they've been, there was a 2021 mandate requiring detailed crash reports and, you know, all of the data around self-driving cars and advanced driver assist systems.

Now, you and I have talked about this many, many times on the show, how Tesla's autopilot happens to turn off microseconds before a crash, thus erasing the data, saying, nope, not our problem, not our fault. Let me give you a look, a quick peek into the life of how this actually happens.

There's one poor employee over the NHTSA, and let's just assume work from home, because why not? And they sit there all day, and then they press the little button here on their phone. Oh, God, fuck, shit. Stupid automated tree to get through to Tesla guy. Oh, finally, got him.

Hey, Bob, where's that data? Oh, we'll get it to you in a few days. All right, thanks. Hang on. All right, now I got to call Ford. And that is exactly what's happening. All right. Yeah, no, this is, they say that they're going after them to try and make things better, but not seeing a lot of progress yet.

Yeah. Yeah. A few fines. I mean, I'm glad that they're saying that there's going to be more oversight now, because we've been screaming about it, and it's been, they've been doing it, but very haphazardly, like, we'll just shut down this one for a little while, but then we'll let them do it again, and we'll let them do it in Arizona, because who gives a fuck, really?

And, you know, that kind of thing, so. Enough of that. Yeah. I mean, crews did the right thing by taking their cars off the road, you know. That was preemptive to not get that shit suit out of them, but yes. Yeah. I think that was the communications department. That was not, that was, you know, a discussion between legal and comms to do that, but.

Yeah. Well, staying away from AI for a brief second here, I'm just, what do you think the over-under is on how many lawsuits Elon Musk's ex alone has going at any one particular time? I don't know. Because I feel like we're talking about completely new ones every single week, and none of them have ended, so there's got to be at least a hundred.

Oh, I'm thinking, I'm thinking it's in the thousands. Yeah. Just from the employees alone, just from the Twitter employees alone coming back, you know, although they're, you know, that was the thing. There were companies that were being set up so they wouldn't do a class action lawsuit, and they were hitting Tesla, or not Tesla. Pick an Elon company.

Pick one. They were hitting Twitter over and over again with individual arbitration claims just to fuck with them. Right. You know? Yeah. Well, this is another one that was going on. This is Elon Musk's X-Corp lawsuit against Bright Data, which was the data scraping company accused of improperly accessing X systems and violating both X terms and state laws while scraping and selling data.

So the judge basically said, no, they can do that. It's out there, and they were allowed to do it, and you can't just make up your own copyright system. We have one on the books, and they're not breaking it. So no new copyright for you, Elon. Aw. Yeah.

So there you go. Speaking of which, we can no longer call it Twitter or X-Zitter or whatever combination anymore. As of today, I noticed. I didn't see this last night. If you go to Twitter.com, it redirects now to X.com. So Twitter is dead, finally.

Oh, and it redirects over and over and over again. I can't get to it. I am in a loop. I am in an X-death loop right now. Well, you're not missing much. Yeah, no shit. I haven't been there in like two weeks. The only reason I went is because you put this in the notes, and I saw it come through my feed reader.

Right. So we talked a little bit about how Elon fired the Supercharger staff last week. Mm-hmm. Well, some more stories are coming out. So he had a meeting with the head of the Supercharger team, Rebecca Tinucci, and it apparently didn't go so well.

It went so poorly, in fact, that the next day he fired Tinucci and the entire staff, all 500 people there. That's a bad meeting. That's a really bad meeting. I don't know what she did. She must have farted on his Cheerios or something. I'm thinking she actually told him truth.

Oh, yeah. You don't do that. Yeah. That's what I'm thinking. This upheaval has disrupted Tesla's charging network, which accounts for over 60% of high-speed charging ports in the U.S.

Despite Elon's social media promises to continue expanding the network, the mass layoffs have left contractors and partners in limbo, halting ongoing projects. Now, now. What if Ford could close all the gas stations that you could buy fuel at?

This is kind of what's happening here with Tesla and their supercharging network. It's going to fall into disrepair sooner than later. Yeah. Because the contractors aren't getting paid, probably, because Elon has a habit, much like, you know, the former president, of not paying his contractors, period.

And he lets the courts that we pay for deal with it. Right. So, and, you know, he has pledged $500 million for the expansion, which was apparently significantly less than what was already planned, reducing the new charging ports by up to 77% of what was already promised.

Even this is after the current government has, you know, put in a bunch of money to try and help expand the supercharging network to try and get EV adoption, you know, more widespread. So, with this one move, he has basically stepped on his own dick so many times.

I mean, why would anybody go out and buy a new Tesla right now unless you have a supercharger at home? They're not. Oh, that's right. They're not. That's right, Brian. They're not. And you can't even buy them used from Hertz because they bought a whole bunch and then put them on the block because nobody wanted to actually have them as a rental because no superchargers.

Here's the, I am so happy with my choice to sell almost all of my Tesla stock. The one thing that was always niggling in the back of my mind about it, the one thing that was making me go, maybe I should hold on to it, was the supercharger. Because I thought that basically he had this locked up.

If he spent the money and he put these things everywhere, that was going to be what Tesla was a real moneymaker. It was going to be the supercharger network all across the country and other countries. And now he's fucking that up, too. Yeah. I am so glad I sold. Which I don't know why anybody's not screaming Monopoly at at this point.

Well, right now they just want somebody to fucking put them out there so people can start using EVs. Yeah, yeah, so. And he was way ahead of the game, so. Yeah, this is why, you know, when a man-child runs, you know, has so much power that he can just make one simple decision.

What would seem like one simple decision? Oh, let's just fire the entire fucking team behind it. And not thinking about the ramifications down the line. It's, you know, there are knock-on effects for every word that comes out of this guy's mouth and every action that he takes.

And it's like, how can anybody trust anything that he does? You can. You can't. Speaking of not trusting people, Brian. Yes. I believe the web is about, yeah, about, I don't know, 16 seconds on the clock from being just a total memory, the way things used to be.

Okay. Now, in shittification. Yes. That we've talked about on the show. Corey Doctorow, who we, you know, love to hate sometimes and hate to love. He came up with the term quite a while back. And he says, in shittification is the pattern of decreasing quality observed in online services and products such as Amazon, Facebook, Google search, Twitter, Bandcamp, Reddit, Uber, and Unity, et cetera.

The term was used by Corey in November 2022. And the American Dialect Society selected it as 2023 word of the year. And Corey has also used the term platform decay to describe the same concept. So, we've talked, I talked a little bit last week how I was getting really frustrated with how Google was handling things around search.

And so, and SEO was basically dead now and is going to become more dead. Well, the nail has finally become flush with the coffin because Google has rolled out AI search in basically the, in their main flagship product.

Yeah. Yeah. Have you tried it? Have you seen it? Have you seen it in the wild? Because I have. I have not seen it in the wild. I've read more than a few articles by very smart, very learned people that have said that this is such epic garbage. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I mean, I mentioned it last week. The long and the short is what Google is doing. And so, quick history lesson here. Google started scraping the internet long ago to provide good search results. And they had, they came up with a very clever algorithm that says, okay, if somebody keeps pointing to this one link, then this link must have importance.

And over the years, they keep scraping the internet. They have a copy of the internet, several copies of the internet in their databanks. And they have now taken all of that data that we have entrusted to them so they could tell people where to come find us.

Now, they've taken that data, turned it on its head, created their AI models with it, and said, we're going to take all of the knowledge that you have freely given us and entrusted to us, and we're going to take that, steal it from you, and take all of the, we're going to distill all that knowledge down into single answers that we then can give to people so they don't have to come to you.

We're taking out the middleman, which was us to begin with. So, I put in a search the other day just to test this to see if it worked. And I'm like, what temperature do you cook a steak for to make it medium rare? Something simple like that. Right. Came up, here are your AI results.

The whole front page above the fold is just Google's AI results. Yeah. And which takes out of the loop the chance for me to click on anybody's website. If you scroll beneath that, you start to get some websites that kind of show you, you know, the same thing in the blurb that they just told you at the top.

Yeah. So, there's no reason to click on anything anymore. You know what else there's no reason to do anymore, Jason? There's now no reason for anybody to share their knowledge online, to make a blog, to do a website. What's the point anymore if nobody's ever going to come read it because they're just going to get their AI Google result?

You are – Google is literally killing the entire internet. There is literally – it's the same thing that you and I have like. We sit there and we go, this would be a great idea. And then you go, but why? Nobody's ever going to see it. We're never going to be able to make money off of it. Nobody's ever going to see our wisdom or our knowledge or our cool thing that we made.

Ever. Yeah. That's where I was going. Oh, okay. No, that's exactly – you beat me to it. So, it's perfect. Because what they're doing is killing the economy of millions upon tens of millions, maybe even hundreds of millions of people who create content with the hope of getting just a few cents from running ads that Google already arbitrates in the middle and takes a cut of.

Yeah. So, they're just taking all the money now. Yeah. And so, yes, that knowledge is going to dry up because nobody is going to be – they're not going to want to create net new knowledge. And the people who do create net new knowledge want to keep it as far fucking away from Google as possible because Google is just going to steal it, repackage it, and ship it back to them.

Yep. So, we have a problem here with the chicken and the egg. So, you know, down the line, what's going to happen? We're going to have no net new knowledge and we're going to be frozen in time for the most part from people out there creating, creating novelty, doing new things.

So, where does that leave us as a society? The web isn't that old, but in this just a very short 30-some-odd years that it's been around has, you know, it's just fucked up so many things and made so many things great, but then fucked them up, then made them great, then fucked them up.

And it's just this ping-pong is driving me batty. It's driving me batty. I'm telling you, Jason, there's nothing left to do but go find a portal and shake your tally macker. I'm serious. That's all that's left. It really is. Well, until the AI people come along and you have...

AI. Johnson's shaking it in an AI portal. That's about it. Brought to you by Google. Yeah. I have the whole list here of everything that they announced at Google I.O., and it's just such a depressing list of AI bullshittery that, you know, the only thing that's missing in here is some blockchain or some crypto and some blockchain.

AI is the new blockchain. It's all about AI now. That's all they're doing. Yeah, I mean, we're definitely at a weird inflection point. I don't know where we're going to go with this from here. No. And it's, you know, I'm at an inflection point with my career with what we're doing and what my clients are doing.

And it's like, I am in the process of pivoting to in-person things. Like, I don't want to talk about it yet because it's still, things are in progress and in flux. I touch services in person. Yeah. That's all that's left for people to do.

Yeah. Lots of in-person entertainment. That's what it's going to come down to. You know, you still need real people to play the real instruments at real concerts. For now. Which is for now. For now. And I'm not in that business. But it's a thing that is mainly about real people getting out and doing real things because the internet is going to be screwed.

It's going to be screwed. And I sent you a link to an AI tutorial from Ben's Bytes, one of the better AI newsletters out there. He started doing courses on AI. And I got one this morning that just made me shake my fucking head.

And I love the newsletter. It's great. He does a lot of good stuff in there. And some of these courses look pretty good. But this is the new course that I got this morning. Learn how to use ChatGPT for SEO. ChatGPT fucking killed SEO. Because we don't need it anymore. Because there's no search.

Because Google is just giving you the fucking answer. So there is. So read the fucking room, Ben. There is no SEO. This is a course that will be good for exactly two weeks. Yeah. If that. And then it won't matter anymore. Yeah. No. And just a little bit more ChatGPT news.

So the government has been running tests on ChatGPT and Anthropic and Meta and all the other ones. And they're doing simulated war games. And what it turns out is, instead of de-escalation, AI is really fond of escalation.

Well, we know this. We've seen the movies. Yes. It's called War Games. Long time ago. 1984, I believe. So. But this turns out to be true. Right. So, you know, they're at least they're at least doing the tests to figure out that maybe we don't want to do this for warfare planning.

You know. It's just, it said they all, they all exhibit unpredictable escalation behaviors in simulated war games. These behaviors sometimes lead to increased conflict and even nuclear weapon use. Great.

And as we've seen before in tests, the AI has turned on its master and said, no, I'm going to kill the guy that told me not to, not to kill civilians because not killing civilians gets in the way of the goal of blowing up the thing that they told me to blow up.

So let's just kill the guy who said, okay, go blow this thing up, but don't kill these guys. No, I just want to kill the guy who told me that so I can kill the civilians to go blow up my target. Awesome. It's razor. Yeah. Let me give you some good news, Brian. I'm not going to give you good news, Jason, but I will take you back to a simpler time when we just hated Uber and that was like the worst thing that was out there.

Okay. I'll take it, right? Like, at least it's not AI that's going to kill us all and ruin all of civilization as we know it. It's just Uber being a crappy company. The headline alone is worth its weight in gold. Uber announces its new worst version of a bus. Is it a scooter?

No, no. These are actual like full on big gigantic buses that they're shuttles. So they just held their annual go get event. My God, who names these things? And the big one that they announced was this shuttle, which Uber states in its promotional materials will that they cultivate them.

The magic of human interaction. Ah, yes. The magic of avoiding eye contact with a stranger sitting next to you in an Uber pool. It truly is special. Yeah. Well, now there's shuttles. They're basically teaming up with Live Nation to bring shuttles to certain venues throughout the summer, including Miami's Hired Rock Stadium and Charlotte's PNC Pavilion.

These are actual shuttles that hold anywhere from 14 to 55 occupants. The company says each driver will be commercially licensed to operate a large transport vehicle, just like they've run background checks on all the regular drivers. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. These buses are less rapey.

Yeah. And it says here rideshare companies have been trying to crack the bus but works code for a while now. So, yeah, it's unclear what pricing is going to be like. It'll be less than – it'll be a fraction of the price of an UberX as it fucking should be because it's a fucking bus.

I'm sorry, though, Brian. They partnered with Live Nation. The fees are going to kill you. It's going to cost you $85 for a $3 ride. Yes, that's true. And they say right now that there will be no surge pricing, but we'll see about that. So we'll see it. Yeah. So this is going to be great, too. But isn't it so much more glorious and enjoyable news than the AI that's going to kill us all?

It really is, actually. Media Candy I saw a fantastic movie this week, Brian.

Mm-hmm. The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare. Okay. Guy Ritchie Flick. I've heard a lot about it. It is fantastic. At the beginning of the movie, they say this is a true story that has recently been declassified as part of Winston Churchill's papers. And I'm like, okay, I've seen this before, you know, whatever.

Just like Inglourious Bastards is, you know, a true story. Well, it turns out this is actually a true story. And it's – I'm sure it is, you know, pumped up for the screen. But at the end, they show you the real people. And so that just – that gives you a little taste into it.

But, man, is it a good movie. All right. I'll watch it this weekend. Cool. It is so much fun. Yes. I highly recommend it. All right. Well, we announced – well, we didn't announce. But we read the announcement about the new Lord of the Rings movies that were coming last episode. And I was in the back of my mind going, well, where the hell is that show?

The Lord of the Rings, the Rings of the Rings of the Rings, the Lords or whatever the hell it was called on Amazon. Lords of the Dance. Well, it turns out that they held that one for a week and then made that announcement. The official teaser trailer is now out. And it will be coming on August 29th.

Yes. And I saw this article, which I thought was great. The stars of Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power, promise things will actually happen this season. Would be nice. Yeah. I didn't – I looked and I only got halfway through episode three. So maybe I'll just wait until this comes out and then just kind of go straight through them.

Because the trailer looks really good. I mean, the whole last season looked really good. It was just kind of like, OK, so we're going to move along here? Is this the extended edition? What's happened? Yeah. I'm like, OK. Go to the bathroom and get a sandwich while this one's going.

Right. And while we're waiting for news as to whether or not Denis Béléville will do another Dune movie, which he probably won't because if you've read the books, it starts to become more heady material, as we would say, and less action-y. Oh, that hasn't stopped him in the past from, I don't know, foundationing things.

Yeah, well, so we'll see. But in the meantime, we will be getting a show on Max. It's called Dune Prophecy, and the teaser is out for that right now. Now, I was reading the Consequence.net article on this, and I saw a few others, and obviously a lot of them are pulling them from the same source.

So let me read this for you, and Dune heads will see the problem here. Max has released the first teaser trailer for Dune Prophecy, the upcoming Dune prequel series that's based off of Frank Herbert's novel, Sisterhood of Dune. Watch it below. No, it is based on the shitty Brian Herbert novels, not the Frank Herbert novels.

These are the books that you should not read under any circumstances whatsoever. They're horrible. Having said that, the trailer's pretty cool. The trailer looked great! I was in! You know? Okay. So, yeah. I mean, the material is... The problem with Brian Herbert's writing is it's just thin.

There's not the ideas. But that might work for a show. Yeah, that might actually work for television. Exactly. So we'll see. I'm going to give it the chance. Yeah, me too, because it does look great. Yeah, it really does. And it's got a stellar cast, too, so check it out. Yeah, definitely. Something else I'll be watching very soon, I believe on May 29th, actually.

HBO's also got an upcoming MoviePass documentary. How are we defining HBO and Max these days? I thought they were the same thing. I think that people are saying HBO, they're calling HBO the one that you can still, the cable package, HBO Live thing, and then Max is on demand.

I forgot HBO was, I forgot cable was still around. Well, it's coming back. We'll get to that in a second. Oh, in a second, yeah. The Rise and Fall of MoviePass is coming, and it's basically a documentary, and I can't wait to watch this, even though it's produced by Mark Wahlberg, and I can't stand him. And May 29th is the date that it comes out, so it'll be streaming on Max, although also premiering on HBO at 9 p.m. Eastern time, because we can't just have one name for one product.

I know. I watched the trailer. It looks phenomenal. Okay, cool. I was actually looking for my neighbor who lives across the street. He actually, I found, I was, for some reason, I was trying to look him up for something, and I found his LinkedIn page, and it said he worked for MoviePass as, like, a director of marketing. And I'm like, oh, shit.

He might be in it. I hope he's in it. Yeah. That would be awesome. Speaking of documentaries, I watched Ashley Madison's Sex, Lies, and Scandal on Netflix. It just came out on Netflix. Okay. I thought, I wasn't going to watch it because I just watched another Ashley Madison documentary on another streaming channel.

I'm like, okay, well, Netflix just got the rights to it. Well, no, it's not. It's a completely new one. Okay. Actually, the best of the bunch so far. It's really good. It's got Joseph Cox in it from 404 Media. Like him. Don't stop it. Stop it. But it's really good.

I'm sure it's got a lot of cocks in it. Yeah. It does. It's really good. It is really good. Okay. It's only three episodes. You can power through it. We did it in, you know, two sittings. It's really fun. Really fun. Because a lot of it deals with the people who were impacted by the leak as well.

Um, and, uh, I, there's some, I don't want to spoil it, but there are some douches in there for sure. Wow. Wouldn't have thought that. Not in a second. Well, they're not the douches you think they are. These are not the douches you think they are. In sad news, the boys has been renewed for season five.

Damn it. They're really stringing out that piece of flesh, aren't they? Man, I was hoping, I was so excited that this was going to be the final season. That says something about a series when you really look forward to it and you really look forward to it being the last. So, okay. Now, uh, the news was going around.

Jimmy Kimmel, uh, did, uh, some bits at the Disney upfront and it is worth going to click on the link in the show notes and read all of them because they were so fucking good. I'm just going to read one of them here because it's just fun.

We are bundling. And well, from the outside, this may look like an act of desperation. From the inside, it also looks like that. We didn't want a bundle. We had to. Like when you're freezing to death and it's so cold, you have to get into a sleeping bag with your uncle so you don't die. That's us. You've seen our churn rates.

This is not just churn. It's Chernobyl. Now, finally, our users can turn on their TV and get all the channels in one package for one price, all supported by ads. We call it basic cable and it's going to blow your mind. We're consolidating. We're building one enormous ad-supported streaming pile of shit.

This delivery is obviously better than mine, but it's so good. Yes. And my very next article, as if it wasn't already clear enough that streaming is basically just cable by another name at this point, though it's arguably less expensive for now. Many of the top services are banding together to create bundles.

A package combining Peacock, Netflix, and Apple TV Plus is expected to debut later this month. It's called the Stream Saver Bundle and it will be available to Comcast customers. So I guess if you're already paying for cable, you can now get some streaming channels that aren't on the cable that you're paying for at a cheaper price.

It's also from Jimmy Kimmel. It must be a good idea because it's already getting copycats. Netflix, Apple, and Peacock just announced their new bundle, Stream Saver, today. What an excellent name. Stream Saver sounds like a catheter you might find for sale on tuckercarlson.com. Yeah, so the great streaming bundling has definitely begun.

So we'll see where this all ends up. I'm definitely at least happy about the Disney Plus Hulu and Max one. That's fine with me. But I don't get a stream save there, unfortunately. MTV announced that the Movie and TV Awards will not be held in 2024.

Aww. Aww. The decision to pause this year's event comes amid various challenges, including last year's writer's strike and ongoing global issues like the Israel-Gaza conflict. Despite the cancellation this year, MTV assures fans that the awards show will return in 2025 with a revamped format.

And to that, I say... I gotta be honest with you. I don't think I realized that they were still doing that. Like, 2004 might have been the last one that I remember hearing about. That's exactly what I was going to say, too. I'm like, I didn't know they still existed. Mm-hmm. Period.

Oh. Well, Brian, we can rekindle our love for the MTV Music Awards. Can't wait. MTV Awards next year. Yeah. Yes, I can. I can totally wait. Sony Music Group has issued a stern warning to AI companies and music streaming platforms.

Stop using our content without permission. Boldly stepping into the footsteps that UMG did a month and a half ago. Yep. Well, somebody's got to test the waters. Yeah. Could have had a... You could have bundled it. Yes. You could have stream saved it. You could have.

Okay. That's all I got on that. Welcome to the party, pal. Cups and doodads. So I started using a new app. I'm a firm believer in just Apple Notes. It's been great for lots of things.

But then I just started realizing I really just need a to-do list, something I can throw things in that are like months away, house stuff, work stuff, appointments, kids, things, all that sort of stuff. That's super easy. And I stumbled across Todoist, which has a free version, which is more than good enough for me for now.

And it seems to be great. What I really like about it is it's got some language modeling in it. Like I can just type, you know, like dentist Thursday and it'll just done and puts it on the calendar for me. It's fantastic. I love how you call this a new app. It's not new.

You probably recommended it to me like 10 years ago. Oh, easy. Easy. I've gone back and forth with Todoist multiple times. Well, I'm on it right now. Yeah. I settled on things. I like things. Right. That's the one that I use. But either way, I'm surprised you didn't just go to the Reminders app that's built into iOS.

I've tried using that and it just didn't stick. You know how some apps just won't stick with you? Yeah. Yeah. It's not very good. It's not like Notes. Notes is great. I still use Notes all the time. Notes is like shared grocery lists and all that sort of stuff. It's fantastic. But Todoist, for me personally, just keeping track of the chaos that is life with a kid and everything else going on.

It's just great. It's super easy. It's super fast, super quick. And it doesn't have a lot of useless features, which is phenomenal. Yeah. I actually moved from Notes to Obsidian and kind of stuck with Obsidian. Because it's got everything in it. I've got my entire life in Obsidian. So it's really nice because I can just pull up.

I've got a whole recipes folder. And then I can just pull up the recipes folder while I'm at the store and just kind of go down the list. And then I can also have my shopping list and all that stuff cross-correlated and all that shit. It's a lot more powerful than Notes. But it costs money, which is a pain in the ass.

I'm trying to avoid that. Yeah. I should be doing that, too. But I like it. And somewhere along the lines, I lost an extension in my browser that I always had. And I rediscovered it again because especially it's helpful for the show notes here. It's a URL cleaner. If you don't have it, you should get it.

It's great. Simple. It's easy. And it cleans up all the crud on your links. Yeah. I'm glad you got it because I'm the one that usually has to go in behind you with a broom and clean up your ugly ass URLs. See, I'm thinking of you, Jason. I appreciate that, Brian. I really appreciate that.

Sonos' new app is finally out. We said on a previous episode that we were really looking forward to it because the old Sonos app was a steaming pile of shit. Well, apparently the Sonos team, they collaborated with the Spotify team to make the shittiest app known to man.

Are you sure? Because it's telling me it's going to unlock the ultimate listening experience. If that is silence, then yes, that is the ultimate listening experience. The sound of one hand giving the finger is what I call that app. It is garbage.

It is so much worse. It is so slow. It is so ugly. It's just like they tried to make it pretty and in doing so, destroyed it. Right. Yeah. It takes so long to even just pop up the now playing bar when you open it up.

I mean, it takes like 10 seconds to load what's actually playing. So when you want to pause it, it's like it's actually faster to get up off your ass, walk across the room and press the button on the Sonos than it is to load the app. That's fantastic. Yeah. And apparently they used to have a really good podcast integration with some of the podcasting apps out there.

Well, that's no more. They completely killed it. There's a Reddit thread about that that I link in the show notes, too, if you care about that. I never listen to podcasts on my Sonos, so it's not something that I actually really cared about. But yeah, it doesn't even matter because the Sonos app sucks so bad.

I never even want to use it. The only thing I do is use it to change the channel and then I just use the button from now on. Fuck it. So you have that to look forward to. Great. I saw this one. I was just like kind of befuddled. Apple brings eye tracking to recent iPhones and iPads.

Apple is introducing eye tracking ahead of the Global Accessibility Awareness Day. The new feature available on devices with the A12 chipper later allows users to navigate their screens using only their eyes, selecting items by lingering on them, known as dwell control.

Horrible name. The feature builds on existing accessibility tools like those in macOS. So the thing about this is it's a cool feature. Don't get me wrong there. The problem is it's just more crap that somebody's unfortunately going to use for advertising, I'm sure.

I'm sure. I am sure that this is going to have some effect if they have eye tracking built in, you know. Because right now I know that there are websites out there that use your mouse cursor to give you heat maps and hotspots where people are clicking and moving their mouse and stuff like that.

I just don't see. I hope that this is locked down to, you know, it's not going to be locked down. What am I saying? It's going to be horrible. I'm sure it's going to be horrible. But I think it might be good for CarPlay. That might be the only thing. But where's your phone when you have CarPlay installed?

Mine is like under the armrest. So it might not be that much use for that. So we'll see. We'll see. Another one of those silly things. A cool thing is PPSSPP is a game emulator that you can now get on the iOS App Store.

Oh, I thought it was an app that lets you call your cat. Psst, psst, psst, psst, psst. Oh, this is what I sound like with my dog at night. Go pee-pee. Pee-pee. Pee-pee. Will you go pee-pee? No. So it is a PSP emulator. So I grabbed it, the free version.

There's a gold version for $4.99, which I don't know what it does. Don't care. So I'm like, I remember having, I loved my PSP. And I used to play Wipeout on it all the time on Muni when I was going to work in San Francisco. So I'm like, okay, where can I go steal a version of the ROM for Wipeout Pure?

And so I Googled it, didn't find it, had to do some more digging and all this stuff. And then I finally came across the fact that you can, you know, I tried to torn it from some of my, you know, private trackers and things like that. And couldn't, couldn't get a copy of it until I came across the fact that you can get it for free on the fucking Internet Archive.

I'm like, what? Okay. Yep. There's a, there's a button right on the Internet Archive for Wipeout Pure. You download the ISO. I did it in Brave on my phone, saved it to the downloads folder in Brave on my phone, opened up and, you know, traversed to the ROM, loaded up and boom, right there.

So I could play Wipeout Pure for free with a free emulator on a pirated version from the Internet Archive. It's great. So there's, there's, there's your tip for the Internet's good. Yeah. There's your tip for a free game. Go get it. All right. Well, much like Uber is trying to make a worse bus, Meta is taking the airplane on.

Who knew that plane travel could be made worse? Well, it can now. Meta has announced a new feature called Travel Mode for its Quest 2 and 3 headsets that lets people use the devices while on a plane. They claim to have specially tuned its algorithm so the experience remains stable, even if you direct it out the window.

You look at the photo and it expands well past your own seat. So that's going to be awesome for people that are sitting next to you. Yeah. Yeah. Because I'm sure you're going to remember when you're waving your hands around with those big ass controllers that there's somebody sitting next to you.

Exactly. There goes my drink. Yep. Exactly. Oh, man. So much for your $8 Bloody Mary. Bye-bye. Do not do this, people. Do not. Oh, you know they will. Of course, they won't give a shit anymore. It's like the fucking dumbass yoga dudes that take off their fucking shoes and put their feet on here.

Yuck. Everybody flying with their fucking dogs these days. What the hell's wrong with people? At the library. Well, I finished another one of those collections that they're doing over on Amazon.

The previous one that I had read was the Forward Collection curated by Blake Crouch. This one is the Far Reaches Collection. I don't remember which one curated it. It might have been him again. I'm not sure. But it includes stories by James S.A. Corey, Veronica Roth, Rebecca Roanhorse, and Leakey Ned Ocafaro, I think.

I'm not sure how to pronounce that one. And John Scalzi, who is, of course, the star of this particular collection, in that he turned in the shortest story that had the least to it. It seems to be the model that they're running with here. Get the one big guy to toss off five pages and then include a bunch of other stories.

But all of them were pretty good, I've got to say. Okay. So, yeah, the Forward Collection I got from you and I started to go through it. Unfortunately, I got the Far Reaches Collection at the same time and they kind of co-mingled. Oh, right. And so I can't tell which is which. But the first thing I did was go check out the Andy Weir story because you said it was the weakest of the bunch.

I'm like, okay, let's start at the bottom. Come on, Andy. You can do better than that. It was terrible. Like I said, I think they went to Andy and John and said, we need to include you in this collection so we got a big hitter. What do you got sitting around on your desk? And they both just kind of went, here's some piece of shit that I couldn't do anything with.

Seriously, yeah. It's just like, oh, man. That was just a terrible story. It wasn't even well thought out. But overall, good collections. But it did make me go, okay, that's enough with short stories for now. I got to read a full-length real book.

That's just too much. Yeah, kind of the same way. I liked them. I got a bunch to go, but they're going back and forth. So I need to kind of – I need to go back and look at the list and figure out where I'm at. But, yeah, the short stories are pretty good. I dig them. But I'm just kind of over sci-fi right now.

And I saw a new book come out by Eric Larson called The Demon of Unrest, a saga of hubris, heartbreak, and heroism at the dawn of the Civil War. All right. This is a story about the five months between the election of Abraham Lincoln and the start of the Civil War. Is it as good as Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter?

No. Okay. Probably not, but I've never read that. But otherwise, it still is a fantastic book so far. I'm just a little bit into it. Eric Larson wrote The Devil in the White City. Yeah. Did you read that? I did. Well, that was a fantastic book, wasn't it?

Yes, it was. Yeah, yeah. They're still trying to make it into a movie, but I think it's fine as a book. His writing style is so descriptive. You just feel like you're there, and it is so good. If all history books were written like this, I'd be in. That's all I would read. They're so good. So I'm really loving it so far, and it is not sci-fi.

I love that part. But if you want to wait a little bit, October 15th, we got 368 pages coming from our boy, Neil Stevenson. Wow. It's like a short story for him. It really is. Unfortunately, it's volume one. Ah, crap. The book is called Polo Stan, volume one of The Bomb Light by Neil Stevenson.

Yeah. Oh, I like his standalone books so much better than series. Yeah. As someone who actually read the entire Baroque cycle, I'm with you on that, buddy. I gave up on that. They became doorstops. That's for me. That's about it. I want that like eight weeks of my life back, please.

Eight weeks, man. That's pretty fast reading for those. That was on 2X on Audible. I couldn't hold the books long enough to read them, so I definitely had to get them on Audible. Yeah. Well, if you need anything to flatten, like the flattened posters that you've had in a tube for about 20 years, that's what that's for.

Totally.

The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave with podcast superhost Dave Bittner. Dave is the host of the CyberWire 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 host of Control Loop because industrial machines have feelings too. Hey, Dave. Welcome back. Hi, Jason. It's good to be back. Hi, Brian. It's good to be back. I am not joining in with your shenanigans.

We're not going to choose a whole... I'm not doing a whole thing, sing songy. A whole thing sung through. Why not? I mean, everybody else is doing musical episodes these days. So, Dave, I've got some good news and some bad news. Okay. I do have some good news and some bad news for you, Dave.

And it struck me that the segment started as security, but these two topics are so spot on to what we normally talk about these days, it tells us how far we've gotten away from that. So, I like that aspect of it, too. The good news, Dave, is that Oreo is dropping a collab with Lucasfilm featuring special edition Star Wars sandwich cookies.

Yes. Yes. I'm here for this. Go on. Fans will be able to buy packs of the classic treat representing either the light side or the dark side of the Force. The fun catch, to which my son said, it's not fun. I want the dark side. You won't know which side you've got until you open the package.

And each pack will get one or two different color fillings, red for the dark side and blue for the light side, both infused with kyber sugar crystals inspired by lightsaber cores. So, yes, I'm very excited about this. My son is very excited about this. He wants an emperor cookie like no tomorrow. These will be available on May 30th at Oreo.com Star Wars, and they will begin rolling out at retailers nationwide June 10th.

I have not been able to figure out if they're in Canada or not, so I will be sending my mom out to buy multiple axes. Say we may have to send some undeclared goodies across the border. Yeah. No, no, no. I'm going to go buy them all in Southern California and hold them hostage for some fucking maple cookies is what I'm going to do.

You can get maple cookies at Trader Joe's. They're not nearly. They taste better. No, they don't. They don't. They taste like shit. All right. I've been to the well. I know what it's like up there. There's so much better. I'll bring you a maple cookie in the shape of Jabba the Hutt. Thank you.

So I love Oreos, and my family, we are generally all in on all of the Oreo varieties. In fact, we recently enjoyed a lovely package of churro-flavored Oreos recently.

Tell me more. Well, it's kind of a cinnamon-vanilla Oreo. Oh, I know what a churro is, my friend. Yeah, no, but it's an Oreo with a churro flavoring, and it's good. You wouldn't want every Oreo to be a churro Oreo, but every now and then, a churro Oreo is quite delicious.

Why aren't they just called churro-reos? Churro, oh, yeah, that's good. That's good. So the other thing that strikes me about this plan, the flaw in this plan about not knowing which side until you've opened the package, is that every package of Oreos that I've purchased recently is resealable.

Oh, yes. Yes, this could be problematic. Yeah, it has a thing on the top of the package where you can peel it open, and then it just sticks back again. So, I mean, come on. They're going to be at the front of the store in the glass case with the razor blades and the condoms.

That's where you're going to have to do to get your Oreos. There's going to be a hand-printed sign that says, please do not open the Oreos. Please, just please. And maybe a bargain bin full of lightly exposed Oreos.

You know, the other thing that struck me is that, okay, I get the red for the dark side and blue for the light side, but where are the Samuel L. Jackson motherfuck Oreos with the purple? Yeah, seriously. Or green. Yeah. Yeah. So, well, you know, it's something. But sadly, on to the bad news for you, Dave.

The Chuck E. Cheese animatronic band is breaking up. They are pulling the plug on Munch's Make Believe Band, except for two locations, one in Los Angeles and one in Nanuet, New York. Okay. So, you will have to pilgrimage if you want to hear the sweet, sweet jams of, yeah, Helen Henney and Mr. Munch, Jasper T. Owls and Pasquale.

So, I was recently visiting our local musical instrument store, which is a place called Bill's Music House. It's world famous in Baltimore. And it's pretty much the biggest professional music instrument kind of place in this area.

And they have all the guitars and keyboards and synthesizers and cables and trumpets and trombones and music stands and all that stuff. And so, I'm just wandering through there one day and not really thinking of anything in particular I want to purchase.

And I go into the section where all the guitars are. And there, up toward the ceiling, sitting on a platform, is Jasper T. Jowls with a banjo. Just sitting up there. I don't know where they got him. Late night run.

I don't want to know where they got him. But he's there. And it makes me happy that he's in really good condition. I mean, he's a mint, out-of-box Jasper T. Jowls. Now, I did not see him performing. So, I don't know that they have all the stuff that makes him do his act.

But just the fact that he's there and he's preserved makes me happy. And also, you know, I think as we covered previously, there are folks who have the complete setup in their homes. Yes. Amazingly, none of them have written in to tell us about it.

So, if you want to make a pilgrimage to see the band, there are people. I would not go into one of those person's homes, personally. That's true. Especially down in their basement. Yeah. Come on downstairs, Dave. Oh, yeah. Come on downstairs. Yeah, that's where the Chuck E. Cheese is.

Sure. And all the lollipops. Yeah. I usually don't allow people down here who are as old as you are. But I'll make an exception. So, are you guys familiar with the story of Fabio and the Goose? Not really.

There's only one Fabio in my world, Dave. And he's on the cover of Lurie Novels. This is that Fabio. Now, first of all, I think Fabio and the Goose, to me, also sounds like the name of a 1980s morning zoo shock jock program.

Welcome to Fabio and the Goose. Yeah. I'm Fabio. I'm the Goose. So, back in 1999, Busch Gardens, which is a theme park in Williamsburg.

Many, many, many times, yes. One of my home theme parks for me, which is a few hours away, they were opening a new roller coaster called Apollo's Chariot. A large roller coaster known for having lots of airtime.

And to celebrate the opening of this roller coaster, they hired Fabio to be their spokes celebrity and be among the first to ride the roller coaster. So, imagine you've got Fabio in the front row of the roller coaster.

And, uh, along with Fabio, there are 35 lovely young women dressed up, uh, in ancient Roman outfits. Mm-hmm. Okay. Yeah, I'm watching in silence as this goes along, and it feels like some sort of strange cult thing where they all have to drink some Goulain after the ride.

Yes. Okay. Right. So, you send Fabio off. The roller coaster goes along its way. You see it going up the lift hill. Off it goes. It comes back. Fabio is covered in blood. Fabio's face is cut open.

The side of his nose is damaged, and his face is covered in blood. The ladies sitting around him seem unscathed. Uh, Fabio is, uh, obviously upset. Um, and it turns out that, allegedly, because the footage was destroyed, Fabio got hit by a goose while on the roller coaster.

Now, what is controversial here is that Fabio claims that the goose didn't actually hit him in the face, that it was a camera that they had mounted on the front of the roller coaster, to capture his reaction, that the camera was actually hit by the goose.

Okay. And a piece of the camera flew off and hit him in the face. How is this not an episode of Mythbusters? Well, we're going to get to that, because it kind of is. So, the footage from the camera that was mounted to the roller coaster has never been released.

Imagine you're Busch Gardens, and you've gathered all the press to come see Fabio ride the roller coaster, and the first time anyone rides your roller coaster publicly, he comes back bloodied and battered, right?

This is not the PR event that you were hoping for, or not the kind of attention that you were hoping for. Although, I suppose in the world of roller coasters, perhaps the potential of there being some bloodshed, of it being dangerous, might actually be a selling point for some people.

So, that brings me to this video that was recently published by a YouTuber called Bobby Fingers, who is quite funny. And it is the epic tale of him trying to unpack exactly what happened with this event.

He builds a diorama of Fabio and the goose, and he gets Adam Savage from Mythbusters to do a simulation where they fire simulated geese out of a cannon at a simulated Fabio model to see what happens when you hit Fabio in the face with geese of various densities.

I just scrubbed to it. It's pretty fucking epic. Oh, great. There goes a half an hour of my day to day. Thanks, Dave. Yeah. You're welcome. He also got the slow-mo guys on board. So, they recorded all the high-speed camera stuff.

There's a really funny bit in here about how he almost didn't get the footage from the slow-mo guys. This is a slow-burn video that just keeps building and building and building until at the end, I was laughing out loud at how it turns and what happens and the conclusions they come to.

So, highly recommended. Great fun. I remember when Fabio got hit by the goose. I do, too. It was all over local. I thought this was going to be some sort of story or movie or something. But, yeah, I remember the event. But this is great. I can't wait to watch this.

Hard to believe it was this long ago. Now, I remember Bobby Fingers because Bobby Fingers did an amazing video called Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat. Where he basically makes Jeff Bezos' head into a massive rowing boat. And it's another half hour that is well worth the watch.

The juice is worth the squeeze. It takes a while to get there. But, my God, is it good. Right. Yeah. Right. Well, and I haven't seen the Jeff Bezos video, but it appears as though the Jeff Bezos rowboat is in the background of this video.

Like the shop that he's in and so on and so forth. So, yeah, highly recommended. It's a slow burn, but it is laugh out loud funny, I thought. And then the final thing I have here is a movie trailer for a film that's coming out. And it's called Thelma.

And it is ripped from the headlines. It covers the story of a woman named Thelma Post, who is a 93-year-old grandmother who gets conned by a phone scammer pretending to be her grandson. And she sets out on a quest across Los Angeles on her motorized scooter to reclaim what was taken from her.

And the trailer is really funny. Parker Posey is in it. I'm in. Right. Exactly. Right? That's it. You had me in Parker Posey. I'm in. Yeah, me too. So, I don't know.

I was thinking, you know, should we – because we do the show Hacking Humans Goes to the Movies. And this is probably the most Hacking Humans Goes to the Movies of any movie there's ever been. Yeah. Maybe we should have some kind of watch party or something. I'm a joyous lady. But – Yeah, this looks good.

I want to watch this. It looks like a lot of fun. The only slightly unbelievable thing about it is trying to traverse Los Angeles on a motorized scooter. You're not going to get very far. Yeah. You're going to come up on a freeway and find there's no way around it.

You have to go to Pacoima. Awesome. Yeah, I want to watch this. Oh, it's got Malcolm McDowell in it, too. Wow. Star-studded. Right. Yeah. Well, and evidently, the woman who plays Thelma was an Oscar nominee from the film.

Her name is June Squibb, and she was in the film Nebraska. So, I'm neither familiar with June Squibb nor Nebraska, but evidently she has some acting chops. And based on the trailer, it looks like she has some good comedy chops as well. And it's got Richard Roundtree in his final performance.

Sounds good. Yeah. How great that we're excited about this movie that has no superheroes and focuses on a 93-year-old grandmother. Right? Some superheroes don't wear kids.

They ride motorized scooters. There you go. Yes. They ride motorized scooters. Right. And they look out for all of us. What's funny is scooters have actually mostly disappeared from L.A. until last week when a gaggle of birds showed up on one of the corners by my Whole Foods. And 10 minutes later, they were all knocked over and laying on their side.

Oh, well, I mean, she's on a motorized scooter, like the four-wheeled, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, like a rascal. Yeah, like a rascal scooter. The ones you'll probably see riding around Disneyland. Yes. Yeah. Yes. Oh, okay. That's even better then. Oh, that's great.

Yeah, she and Richard Roundtree is like, you know, riding side saddle behind her. Yeah. Yeah. When's this come out? I can't wait. I don't know. It's a good question. But I'm definitely looking forward to it. I guess the question is, should we wait for this one to hit home video?

Oh, I don't think I'm making it to the theater. I guess this is one you could probably wait for. This feels like a watch-at-home movie. Or Sweden. That's right. In theaters, June 21st. There you go. By the way, speaking of theaters, my son Jack and I went to see the Planet of the Apes movie earlier this week and very much enjoyed it.

I heard this new series is actually pretty good. Yeah. Well, I've only seen bits of this current collection of them. But this one is pretty much a standalone. Oh, okay. It references some of the stuff from the previous movies.

And I kind of had Jack give me a little rundown of everything I needed to know going into this movie. But it's pretty much a standalone because it takes place like 300 years after the previous few films. And it was one of those films where you find yourself thinking about it for a few days afterwards.

Which to me is, you know, a sign of a good movie. The special effects are amazing. Like, I just didn't even think that these weren't real chimpanzees and gorillas and all that kind of stuff. They're just real, you know. That's cool.

As if they're just real actors. And so I recommend it. I gave up on the series when Tim Burton did it. That was the last one I saw. And I've heard they got better after that. That one was so terrible. Yeah.

No, this was really thoughtful and some real interesting characters. And, yeah, I very much enjoyed it. And we saw it in the fake IMAX at our local movie theater, which was quite good.

Good and loud. Actually, my son pointed out something to me, which is part of the old part of Grumpy Old Geeks, which is that I complained after the movie that we were subjected to, I'm not exaggerating, a half an hour of trailers before the film.

And I say subjected to because we're in the IMAX theater, which means we're just getting pummeled with, you know, sub bass. You know, that thing that's in all the movie trailers where it goes, boom, right? That, like, just over and over and over again, so loud.

So, first of all, I'm complaining about that, which means I'm old. But Jack made the good point to me. He said, you know, Dad, we don't have to get to the movie theater early anymore. Yeah. The seats are reserved, right? Like, I'm like, oh, got to get there 20 minutes early so you can buy your popcorn and get a good seat.

He was like, no, we don't. We know there's going to be at least 20 minutes worth of trailers. And the seats are reserved, so. And you get food delivered to you at the chair now. Right, right. So, I'm applying old school thinking to a new school situation.

Yeah, you got to update your paradigm. Yeah, right, exactly. But I don't want to, damn it. Did I ever tell you about the time I saw Planet of the Apes? It was with Charlton Heston sitting behind me.

No. It was like an event at the Egyptian here in Hollywood. And my friends Bob and Stacy got us tickets. And we got there early and got our seats. And we were like right up in the front on the side. And it was a Q&A with Charlton Heston after a screening of Planet of the Apes.

And we're sitting there. And lo and behold, Charlton Heston with his grandson comes and sits right behind us. Wow. So, I got to listen to Charlton Heston talk to his grandson the whole movie. And when he goes, Grandpa, what's a gelding? He didn't turn around and go, shut up, old man.

I'm trying to watch the movie. Yeah. Right. I mean, I guess if you're going to have somebody talking through the whole movie, if it's in Charlton Heston's voice, that's not so bad. I was in the silly position, though, that after the movie, there was a standing ovation because Charlton stood up.

And everybody else stood up. But I was standing right in front of him. So, I sat down. I kept my seat and was applauding looking up at him because I didn't want to block his view, you know, of everybody. And he kind of looked down at me and kind of winked at me. I'm just like, hi. It was very strange.

It was a very surreal evening. But to get a wink from him, I mean, that's pretty cool. Yeah. A friend of mine. And I knew he was armed, so I didn't want him to shoot me if I stood in front of him. Right. Well, exactly. I mean, the man is always packing heat. Yes. A friend of mine who is a Hollywood guy, you know, who works on movies like on the crew, lighting crews.

He did a shoot at Charlton Heston's house once. It was a documentary. And he was there. And he said he couldn't have been more welcoming and delightful. Now, first of all, anybody who opens up their home to a film crew is out of their freaking mind.

Right. Yes. Because they're just going to come in and trash the place. But no, he was he was delightful. And in fact, he had somewhere else to be. So he said to the crew, he's like, oh, I've got somewhere else to be. I've got an appointment. Gentlemen, just let yourselves out.

And off he went. Not in a million years would that happen. So, so old school. Right. Right. Just so old school, you know. Now everything would be up on eBay. Right. Right. Right. Here's a TikTok of me taking a dump in Charlton Heston's toilet.

Yeah. Right. Right. All right. Excellent. All right. Well, guys, that's what I got this week. See you next time. Good checking in. See you next time. See you later, Daver. Oh, God.

Closing shout outs. Over on Patreon, we are now joined by Lightning 342. Welcome, Lightning. Welcome. Over at PayPal, we got Nathaniel, Linda, Andrew, Natalie, Blake, Bowling, Shari, Ramsey, Miles, and Jason, who wrote in to say, listening to Jason's story about his roommate in the New York Post is even more of a reason to use privacy.com.

I use it for all my subscriptions and just pause or cancel the card to prevent this from happening. Hold on a second. We're doing an ad for this and we don't get paid by them anymore. So I'm going to stop reading this. Stop that. Yeah. Those fuckers didn't pay us to do this again. No, no, no, no, no. But yes, it was a good service. And Gregory, who gave us 100 bucks.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Gregory. Over at the tip jar, we've got Jeff Penos, NL, Joseph, Theodore, Kevin, Giuseppe, and Sean. Thank you all so much. And remember, over at Patreon, if you just sign up for just three bucks a month, you can get the show a little bit early, ad-free, and in high res.

All right. And a happy belated birthday to a friend of the show, Brian Blondel. Missed you last week, buddy. Happy birthday. Happy birthday, man. All the Bryans in May. And a happy birthday, of course, to you, Brian. Yes. The Bryans in May are excellent people. That's what I got to say. All right. I guess just one quick final follow-up note here.

Some people from the show have been trying to contact me on my About Me page, which is jason.fyi. Turns out that that contact form is shit. And there's something about the way that they're dealing with email addresses. I cannot get back in touch with anybody who has written me there about show stuff.

So if you want to talk to me, jay at jpd.me. That's my email address. Send me stuff. Chris Langton sent me something, and I tried to reply, and a bunch of other people. So all y'all, send me just a new email with your actual email address, please, because I can't get to it. Maybe you can use some AI to fix that form.

Yeah, seriously. That's right. Until next time, or at least as long as we're still around and you can find us, thanks, Google. I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for tuning in to Grumpy Old Geeks. Dive into the show notes and all the links from today's episode at GOG.show slash 648. Feeling generous?

Keep this top-notch entertainment rolling by dropping us a few bucks at GOG.show slash donate. Every bit helps. Truly. And spread the grumpiness. There's a share button in every podcast player out there. Use it to share the show with your friends, foes, and everyone in between, and we'll be forever grateful. And head on over to GOG.show to find the link to our Discord channel and chat with us and other show fans.

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Woo!