664: I Love It When a Ding Dong Comes Together

Saturday, September 26th. Two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line when the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meat Cleaver Colon.

BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.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. It's hot. It's raining. Oh, lucky bastard. I'll trade you. I'll trade you. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, it's going to be snowing here soon enough, so then you won't trade me. But yeah. Oh, I'd much rather have snow. There's 115 here yesterday. I didn't move to Phoenix, damn it.

Yeah. Yeah. It's been crazy weather. There's no doubt about that. But we're not here to talk about climate change. We're not one of those woke podcasts getting tons of money from the... Oh, wait. No. We'll talk about that later. Okay. Moving on. What you got? Well, Sonos is still in a heap of trouble. They can't seem to fix their app situation. But guess what, Jason? We don't need to worry anymore because a workplace management tool app to the rescue.

Okay. Yes. The company's social and community manager, Kenneth Neves, has announced that he's opened up a Trello board. You got to be fucking kidding me. Describing it as a way for people to keep updated about its progress on the path to a normal core app. You mean the thing that they should have shipped with in the first place?

Yeah, that thing. Okay. And this isn't exactly that novel of an idea either for the tech industry. Fortnite maintains a Trello board packed with information on bugs plaguing different aspects of the game. It's kind of a more transparent way of doing bug reporting, I suppose, or saying that you shit the bed and we can't get a decent app, so we'll try to keep you updated here right now.

Apparently, right now, this is a lone project within the company. It's only Keith himself who is maintaining the board. I didn't look at it, so I don't know if, you know, you can, like, register for it and, like, start chewing them out personally or not. No, it's read-only. It's read-only. Okay, there you go.

So I'm sure using this excellent tool, which I actually do like. I like Trello. I love Trello. They'll have this fixed in no time. So I did look at it, and Keith Neves is a social and community manager. You know what he's not? An engineer. So it reads like a social and community manager wrote it.

Disbusticated. Fix it. We're working on it. Yeah, maybe someday. Eh, cool. Maybe. I don't know. It's useless. It's absolutely useless. As this morning, I go to turn my Sonos on. The old days, I used to be able to walk up to any speaker in the house and press the play button, and it would play where I left off yesterday.

Now it just flashes red every single time. So I have to open up the app, wait 30 seconds for it just to load. And I play from Pandora most of the time. So Pandora takes another 45 seconds once you hit play, and then God forbid you have to change the fucking volume. Good God.

They can't fix it soon enough. Can't fix it soon enough. Well, they won't be fixing it soon enough for anybody, I think. Yeah. We're going to talk about this a little later, but I just want to get it out of the way here at the top of the show. Shout out to Jeff G for the nudge to get annual subscriptions on Patreon.

I finally went and dug around and found the button. All it was was a button. I just had to go find a button. In the old days, you had to apply for it, and it was a big thing, but I didn't know they just made it open to the public now. So now you can sign up for a year of supporting us on Patreon, and you get a 5% discount to boot.

So get on it. And just a reminder as well at the top, because apparently people may not listen all the way to the end of the show where we always discuss this because we got this question once again. There is no best place to donate to us. They're all good. We are grandfathered in at the old rate on Patreon, which I'm sure they're not thrilled about.

But yeah, it doesn't matter. We get basically the same cut from anywhere you go. PayPal, Stripe, Patreon, Carrier Pigeon. It does not matter. Yeah. Cash on the side of the road is the only way that we don't have to give anybody a cut. So unless you've got a suitcase of cash you want to give us, any of those work.

It's all the exact same rate that we get hit for. And Patreon, you do get the extra goodies. So there you go. And I've got a class action alert, Jason. Whoop, whoop. As I've always said, and I will continue to say, it is our moral duty to fill these out and get our $2 or 50 cents or whatever it is.

Because this is generally the only way that these companies get punished for their behavior. And if we don't take the money, it goes back to them. Or now it goes somewhere else. But, you know. Anyways, get your money is what I'm saying. This is Katz LeCab et al. Versus Oracle America.

Now you may think, what business do I ever do with Oracle? I don't ever do any business with Oracle. Oh, yes, you do. Oh, yes, you do. Contrere, mon frere. Oh, yes, you do. This class action alleges that Oracle improperly captured, compiled, and sold individuals online and offline data to third parties without obtaining their consent.

Oracle denies all the allegations made in the lawsuit, hence the reason for the lawsuit, and any wrongdoing and maintains that its practices were lawful and disclosed to individuals. Now, here is where you may be included and you think you aren't.

If you are a settlement class member, which is defined as all natural persons residing in the United States whose personal information or data derived from their personal information was acquired, captured, or otherwise collected by Oracle advertising technologies or made available for use or sale by or through IDGraph, Data Marketplace, or any other Oracle advertising product or service from August 19th, 2018 to the date of final judgment in the action.

So, yes, all of us. Everybody. Everyone. Everyone. Yes. All right. I'll get on it. I didn't get an... How did you find out about this one? Did they send you a notice? I got an email, yes. Oh, I did not get an email.

I did not get to... But my emails, Brian. But my emails. I think you have too many emails. That might be your problem. See, something... There's a plus and a minus to having had the same email address for almost 30 years. In the news. The SEC is cracking down on companies misrepresenting their use of artificial intelligence, a practice known as AI washing.

I've never heard of that, Brian. That's kind of a cool term. Even though it doesn't really tell you what they're doing. It's called AI bullshittery is what it should be called. Once again, I will state that the AI that I want does not do art or write. It would actually do my washing. Yes, that's the AI washing we want.

This is the AI I would like. Yes, I would like my AI to load the fucking dishwasher, please. And unload it. That's the one that I need. The AI unloader. Anyway, yes. So these companies now are... This apparently isn't like the blockchain where they can somebody say, hey, we've got blockchain technology.

And then somebody has a Bitcoin thing running in the background in the office. No, these companies are saying that they actually use AI in their product and they are misrepresenting themselves. Right. So there's a couple of them out there right now. Junco, who I've never heard of.

Have you heard of Junco? I have not. Ah, well, they are a recruiting platform that is now up against them for falsifying records and fraud as well. So there's some more stuff going on there too. Well, I've generally found, Jason, that if you find one bit of misrepresentation, there might be more.

There might be more. Just kick over the rock, see what's under it. Yeah, so they're going after companies hand over fist now because it's an easy target, I guess. Well, yeah. Because, I mean, as we talked about just a few weeks ago where the article was saying that basically saying that AI is involved with your product is actually a negative at this point for understandable reasons.

But certainly everybody was just slapping an AI tag on their products recently. Yeah, just like a blockchain before. And this has all happened before. This will all happen again. It's called false advertising, people. Can't do it. Yeah. Yep. So, yeah, and the thing about these companies that is a really easy target for the SEC is everybody that has AI in their company name and all these new startups and everything have so much money because everybody was just throwing buckets of money at them for quite a while.

So it's just an easy, easy target. So repatriate some of that cash. Right. Well, we've got some news about the Texas law that was passed, the SCOPE Act, securing children online through parental empowerment, which imposed age verification requirements and other policies for how social media companies treat teenage users.

Sounds sensible, seem to be a sensible law when it was passed, it being Texas, because it was sensible, it has now been ruled that you cannot do it. The federal judges ruled that social media companies cannot be required to block certain types of content from teens. So they're not knocking it out completely, which is a good thing.

The measure requires companies to prevent the known minors exposure to harmful material, including content that glorifies self-harm and substance abuse. That's the part that was struck down with the judge saying that the state cannot pick and choose which categories of protected speech it wishes to block teenagers from discussing online. The judge also criticized language, saying that glorifying and promoting are politically charged and undefined, which, OK, I see that.

Maybe we should button that down a little bit more. The judge did say other aspects of the law can stay in place, including age verification requirements and bans on targeted advertising to minors. So a little step forward, a little step back, but maybe we'll actually get there. Yeah, the one that they're keeping, the age verification is the problematic one.

It is, but we got to do something, man. Do we really? Do we really? So X has been in the news with Brazil recently. First off, Elon went fucking batshit crazy when Brazil decided to ban them because Brazil asked them to basically, you know, restrict a couple, like four or five accounts.

That we're kind of being involved in nefarious deeds. Now it is Brazil. Everything's kind of nefarious. So who the fuck knows what's going on? Well, these are these are accounts that were involved in their January 6th, you know, attempted coup of the government. So kind of important. Yeah, kind of important. But if I were in Brazil and I were a judge saying and asking X to do this, I would just look at our January 6th and the fact that Donald Trump is back on the platform.

So what do you think Elon's going to do? Yeah. Nothing. So Elon did nothing. So Brazil then just went, fuck it. X is banned. So, OK, they're going to try to do that, which fair enough. And this caused Elon to, of course, have a tizzy fit.

And because of that, he went, well, guess what we're going to do now then? We're not going to where my other companies are not going to comply with this ban. So Starlink will just run itself through a little VPN and let everybody in Brazil get to X anyways if you use Starlink.

So, yeah. Yeah. God, he's a dick. Do you see a problem with him having like having complete control and ownership of the Internet access provider for like, you know, that many people? Why, yes. Yes, I do, Jason.

And in fact, there was an article that I just saw earlier today, but too late for me to get into the show notes that pointed out that exact point that maybe Elon has the access to too many off buttons. Yes, that would be in The Atlantic. I read that article too. Oh, there you go. It was on The Atlantic. Yes, I scanned through it a little bit.

So, yeah, I definitely agree with that point. And I think this is a little bit ridiculous. Yeah, a little bit more news about him in a second. But here's a little bit more Starlink news that was pretty funny. A bizarre Navy scandal has surfaced involving unauthorized Wi-Fi on a warship. In early 2023, senior enlisted crew members of the USS Manchester secretly installed a Starlink terminal on the ship to bypass Internet restrictions.

The Wi-Fi network, named Stinky, was used by about 15 chiefs, but not officers or most of the crew. Now, the network was hidden on the ship's deck. On the poop deck, one might add. No. That would be epic. If you look at the pictures of the article, they actually had to do some work to put this thing up there.

It was kind of hidden. Then a bunch of questions kind of came up because everybody was seeing this Wi-Fi network on the ship. This new network, yes. Yeah, they're like, why is it? I'd be like, is there a submarine following us? Yeah, seriously. Are there Russians underneath? Call Captain Ramius.

So, and this chief went so far as to take notes out of the captain's, like, you know, request box. You know, they've got one of those, you know, leave me a note boxes on the ship. So she would go through it at night and take out anything that had to do with the Wi-Fi.

It's insane. It's insane. The only way that they found this thing is that there was – they pulled into port and they were having an authorized Starlink dish put on. And that person found the unauthorized Starlink dish and reported it and started the whole investigation.

Now, obviously, this is a massive breach of protocol and safety and security and all of that sort of stuff. You know, why? Just to what? Get porn? Probably. Or to get instructions from Tim Poole's Twitter account.

Oh, hang on, hang on. We'll get to that later. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me a second here. I'm not done yet. Because the – so the chief, Grisel Marrero, was court-martialed and let go. They kicked her out of the service. The other people got disciplinary action. But it comes back to the Wi-Fi network named Stinky, which turns out is the actual default name of the networks when you install your Starlink system.

Of course it is. Because Elon tweeted about it and said that we are naming our default network. It's either Starlink or Stinky because he wants people to change it. So he's like, nobody's going to leave their name Stinky. Well, guess what, Elon? I have proof that some people just might.

They did end up changing the name after a little bit and then tried to change it to a printer that didn't exist. Oh, that's smart. Yeah, except the printer didn't exist so people couldn't connect to it and they're like, why is this printer showing up as a Wi-Fi? It's a printer. Printers are always offline. Yeah, that's true.

That's true. So, yeah, just, you know, don't be putting up Wi-Fi networks that you actually broadcast is the real trick, you know, if you're going to do that. Yeah. Oh, by the way, they also, when they pulled into port, they went and bought a bunch of Ethernet cables and Wi-Fi extension points so they could actually get signal across the whole ship.

Oh, God. So, they doubled down when they got to a port. I'm imagining that the military is able to figure out what they were doing on that Wi-Fi network. Probably. Yeah, I mean, 15 people were brought up on charges, so I'm sure one of them talked.

Yeah. Sounds like 14 of them talked and one of them got the axe. Yeah. Now, Microsoft is actually stepping up to combat the growing issue of AI-generated deepfake porn. On Thursday, they announced a partnership with Stop NCII. Not Stop NCIS?

Yeah, Not Stop NCIS. Yeah, I think they're doing a good enough job of stopping them themselves. I think there was an NCIS Vegas that just got canned or something like that. I don't know. I've never watched a single one of those shows. Not a one. Not a one. So, it's an organization that helps victims remove revenge porn from the internet.

Okay. We like that. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. So, Microsoft reported that it had already addressed 268,000 explicit images through their pilot program. And they said it's, you know, it's not enough, but they're doing their best. They're doing their best. The thing is, nobody uses Bing, so what's the point?

Fair. Fair. Yeah, I mean, that's the best way to, you know, stop deepfake porn on Bing is to just not use Bing. If I were going to start one of these companies, Jason, I would name it the Hoganizer. Hoganizer, yes. That is a very fine name. You would probably get sued, but I would take it.

I would take it. What's up, brother? Want to see my ding dong? Ha, ask Peter Thiel. Can't find my ding dong. Can't find my ding dong on the internet. Brother. I feel like we veer into Mr. T there, but I'm not sure. Oh, brother. I pity the fool that looks for my ding dong.

I love it when a ding dong comes together. Pappard with a caulk out of his mouth instead of a cigar. I think we should get on AI and do the logo. There you go. So I put a link to the Stop Non-Consensual Intimate Images site in the show notes if you want to check them out, too.

Okay. Okay, yeah. Love it when a ding dong comes together. You're up, Brian, next. Stop me. I'm having too much fun. I'm trying to figure out something for Murdoch and Starbuck right now. I'm working hard. I know. Anyways, Clearview is back in the news and in trouble again with the Dutch Data Protection Authority.

They've been busy recently. We just talked about them last week. The DPA fining the company £30.5 million, or about $33.6 million, for violating the GDPR again. The release explains that Clearview created an illegal database with billions of photos of faces, including Dutch individuals, and has failed to properly inform people that it's using their data.

In early 2023, Clearview's CEO claimed the company had 30 billion images. Clearview must immediately stop all violations or face up to $5.6 million in non-compliance penalties. So, yeah. Basically, if there's a photo of you on the internet, and doesn't that apply to all of us, then you can end up in the database of Clearview and be tracked, which is a no-go with GDPR.

So, we are suing you. Yeah. Yeah. And fair enough. Yeah. That's- Only we have that kind of law. Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's Clearview's business model. We're going to take every image that we possibly can find, and then we're going to put it in our facial recognition system. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

And I'm sure that these – I'm sure that they have an accountant that is specifically set up to, you know, process these lawsuits because that's all there. You know, they get funding just to handle the lawsuits because, as we found out from Mr. Google the other day, that's how they do things in Silicon Valley. Let the lawyers figure it out later.

Now, in news that makes me giggle, Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16Z, has closed a satellite office in Miami Beach just two years into a five-year lease that had signed for an 8,300-square-foot space. Now, the reason is disuse, but the reason that they got the place – wait for it, Brian – crypto bros!

Woo! Miami, if you remember, was going to be the hotbed of the crypto revolution here in the States. And it turns out, yeah, that ain't happening. Nope. It ain't happening at all. They've also got other places in New York and Santa Monica. Yes, they do.

Go get those. Yeah. So, yeah, things didn't go quite as planned in Miami for Andreessen Horowitz. Remind me to not shed a tear. Oh, wait, you don't have to remind me to not shed a tear because fuck those guys. Yeah. Now, what have we always maintained that crypto is actually good for? Criminals.

And that's about it. The FTC has published a report that aims to warn people about Bitcoin ATMs, or BTMs, butt-to-mouth, scams, which has apparently increased tenfold from 2020 to 2023. Americans had lost $65 million to fraud losses involving BTMs within the first six months of this year alone.

That is a shit ton of money. That's a lot of cash. And the actual amount may be a lot more than that since most scams go unreported. Further losses due to BTMs – that just rolls off the tongue. BTM scans have been exceptionally high, with people reporting a median loss of $10,000 over the past six months.

Jesus. And most of the scams reported, bad actors impersonated government and business entities, as well as tech support representatives. I know my mom has seen those pop-ups. Almost half of the instances we've started with a phone call, though some victims were fooled by fake security warnings from online ads, pop-ups, and emails from scammers pretending to be from Microsoft or Apple.

As you can guess, most of the scam victims are older people. The FTC says 46 million of the total losses involving BTMs in the first half of this year. That's 71% of the overall amount came from people over 60. If you take those out of the equation, most of the losses from cryptocurrency fraud were reported by people between 18 and 59 years old who fell victim to fake investment opportunities.

There you go. Or aka NFTs, fake investment opportunities. You know, they have those coin machines at the grocery stores where you can go take your coins in and then you get a little voucher and then you can buy groceries with them. Yep. I use those all the time.

Me too. And now, I don't know if you've noticed up there, they have the same things, but now you can get paid out either via PayPal or in crypto. You can literally get, you can, you can exchange your coins for crypto, take real money and turn it into fake money while you wait.

It's great. You know, it's funny. I don't see them here, but like in Canada, like cash, not use that much anymore. Like everything is cards now. Right. Yeah. It's definitely not the same here still. It's, it's still a cash economy for the most part.

I mean, yeah, cards are getting better and better, but it's still cash everywhere I go. Cash is king. Yes, it is. Especially if you don't want to report your earnings to the government. Yeah, maybe that's why it's probably because, you know, we are in LA and nobody wants to report what they get.

Because everybody lives on tips. We don't want to report our tips. This is a really good one, Brian. A comprehensive review led by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency has found no link between mobile phone use and brain or head cancers. All right.

I'm down with this. I'm down with this. That's good news. It's a, it's a big study. It's a meta study of 63 studies. So great. Yeah. From 1994 to 2022. So it's the largest of its kind. It says there's no evidence linking mobile phones to brain, neck, or salivary gland cancers, even after long-term or heavy use.

All right. So, yeah. Hey, I can leave my, leave my radio on at night now because I sleep with my phone next to my head. There you go. You're safe. Yeah. It doesn't say anything about the Wi-Fi that's melting my eyeballs, but hey. Hey, that's the next study. And don't forget the phones that are listening to you. Oh, I forgot about that. Yeah. Okay.

Damn it. Okay. But at least you're not going to get cancer. Yeah. Great. I'm so excited. And Elon, again. I love this one. Donald Trump has made it known that if elected again, he will create a government efficiency commission to audit the federal government, an idea that was notably spawned by his pal, more recently funder and unofficial campaign administrator, billionaire jackass Elon Musk.

Yay. Man, he fucking red-pilled so hard. It's ridiculous. It's unbelievable. It's unbelievable. So Trump made the remarks Thursday during a campaign stop at the New York Economic Club, which I don't know if you've seen any of the videos. It did not go well, that stop.

It did not go well at all. At the suggestion of Elon Musk, who has given me his complete and total endorsement, I will create a government efficiency commission tasked with conducting a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government, Trump said. Elon has agreed to head the task force.

Okay. First, a couple things here. First off, Donald Trump had four years to make the government more efficient and did fuck all. In fact, he made it a lot worse and less efficient. And Elon Musk, the guy who doesn't pay his bills, who defaults on paying his rents for his businesses, who also doesn't pay his employees and drags out long lawsuits to pay any of those bills.

He's going to be in charge of this? Yeah. Okay. That's kind of it. Sounds awesome. Yeah. I saw one that was really good. It's like, so the guy who basically defrauded the Tesla investors to have him pay him tens of billions of dollars in cash is going to be in charge of making us a more efficient government.

That's going to work out really well. Great. It's going to be fantastic. Yeah. It's going to be huge. It's going to be huge, Brian. Huge. Huge fraud. The best fraud you've ever seen. Best fraud you've ever seen. Okay. NaNoWriMo. Have you ever done NaNoWriMo, Brian?

No. Do you know what NaNoWriMo is? Something about writing. Yeah, National Novel Writing Month. Okay. It's where everybody with a keyboard tries to write the next great novel. I was going to say the next great American novel, but it is international, so I don't want to pigeonhole anyone.

I heard John Scalzi used to do that before they invented Blue Sky. That's it. You'd crank out 12 or 13 novels in November. So they got in a bit of trouble this week. Okay.

So it was their take on AI. Right. They originally, back in the day, they were against AI, and then they came back and said they don't want to categorize it because a condemnation feels classist, ableist, and poses general access issues.

So, not all brains have the same abilities, and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing.

Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodation to achieve certain goals. We recognize that some members of our community stand staunchly against AI for themselves, and that's perfectly fine. Like all of them? As individuals, we have the freedom to make our own decisions.

Now, this didn't go over well at all. I can't imagine why. Because some people who don't need general access issues to their brain pointed out that the AI has been trained on the stuff that we wrote and weren't paid on.

So, you're basically telling people that they can go steal our stuff to go write their stuff because they don't have the talent that we have to write the stuff that you tell them to go write. Is that kind of what you're trying to say? Yeah. Yeah, kind of. Yeah, that's about it. In a nutshell.

I mean, I'm not saying that. I had open AI say that for me, but yes, that's what we're saying. Yes, many people have come out and said, never use my fucking name again with your organization. So, yeah.

They backpedaled a bit, but still, they didn't backpedal enough, let's just say that. No, no. We are in such a strange position with AI right now because the fucking blowback is huge and understandable. It's just all lawsuits now about you're just taking our data for free and using it to make more money.

And it's not, you know, and now it's like, come on, come on. A fucking creative writing organization. What I love about NaNoWriMo and this whole thing is that nobody's checking your work at the end. You just save the file and go about your day and maybe brag about it on Twitter.

That's it. I'm going to finish my novel that nobody's ever going to read. Thanks. Who cares if you use AI? You can have your mouse run across your keyboard in search of cheese and it would be just fine. Nobody cares. That's true. So this is, you know, this is, you know, another tempest in a teapot.

It's just like, who gives a fuck while you write your novel that isn't going to go anywhere? So I don't care. I just thought it is such a circuitous argument that just makes me laugh.

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The most horribly titled show in the existence of shows, the Lord of the Rings, the Rings of Power, as season two has dropped. The first, I believe, three episodes dropped last week. And then there's a Thursday release schedule. So episode four dropped last night as we're recording on Friday.

I have watched three and a half of the episodes. I couldn't quite get through the end of it. They're long. They're an hour, six, seven minutes each. Fuck, they're good, man. Good. Yeah, I'm really enjoying it.

Like, you know, I can see complaints about this isn't like the movie and, you know, there's no big battles and the plot doesn't move forward very quickly. But it looks gorgeous. You can see the mechanisms falling into place. You can see the plot.

You can see, you know, I just like it. The acting's great in it. It's really good. I'm really enjoying it. You know, we know what the end game is. You know, the whole point of this show is to lead up to the first couple minutes of the Lord of the Rings. When they show what happened last time around with Sauron.

And so, you know, why are we complaining about like, we know where it's going. I'm enjoying the path to get there. And I hope it takes them a really fucking long time because I like the show so far. All right. There you have it. Yeah. Yeah, I've not gotten around to it yet because I still have to watch season one.

But it's in the queue. Yeah, that's good. That's good. I think you're going to enjoy it. So I just got to get back in that mindset, that Lord of the Rings mindset. I've been so out of realms lately, you know. You know how to do it and you don't even have to like watch the Lord of the Rings. Just listen to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack.

Just play it in the background one day and you will be there. Okay, that's a good idea. I might try that. And follow up on the Oasis stuff going on. The UK government will investigate Ticketmaster's dynamic pricing model after the Oasis chaos. It's not only Taylor Swift fans and the US government who aren't happy about Ticketmaster.

Now the UK government, because, you know, Oasis is the UK's Taylor Swift, are going to look into this whole dynamic pricing model after millions of Oasis fans scrambled for tickets to the band's reunion tour of the weekend. There were hour-long virtual queues to make their purchase, at the end of which some found that the price of a standing ticket was suddenly 2.5 times more expensive, in one case going up from 135 pounds per ticket to 337.50 pounds per ticket, which is quite a lot more.

At which point you are given seconds to decide whether to complete the purchase or let the tickets go back into the queue, and then you have to get back in line if you want to, which is hours long. So, yeah, it is a total effing nightmare, and it's a load of bullcrap. Now, I have two thoughts on this, of course.

I'm glad the government is looking into it, but they don't need to. The US government and the UK government, you don't need to look into this. I will tell you how this works right now. We need to basically ban dynamic pricing. End of story. Yep. Ticketmaster makes their money to take the bullets and slings and arrows so the band doesn't have to.

Nobody does dynamic ticket pricing unless the band agrees to it. End of story. Oh. We've learned that. We know this. We know this for sure. There is no demand from Ticketmaster that you have to do dynamic pricing. The option is presented to management saying, you will be leaving money on the table if you don't do this.

You should get paid for what it's worth. What it's worth is driven by the market. What drives the market is dynamic demand. So, we will price your tickets based on whatever the market demands. So, your money will go up, and you will make more money. How does that sound? And the artist and management team go, yes or no.

And most artists and management teams go, no, if they like their fans. And they go, yes, if they like money. Now, the Oasis brothers have come out and said, we had no idea. Bull fucking shit. You did. Yeah. And if you didn't know, then you have a horrible management team, and they should be fired immediately.

Done. Okay. You don't need to have a lawsuit. Okay. Brian fixed it. Brian fixed it. Ticketmaster. There you go. Report back to me next week when your incentives have taken action. Yeah. When everybody's listening to me? Yeah.

Sure. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'll be waiting for that. Over on Apple TV Plus, Sunny had its finale this week. Is this always Sunny in Philadelphia, or is this the other Sunny? This is the Japanese Sunny robot detective mystery story.

Okay. What did you think? Because I haven't watched it yet. Don't watch it yet, because it has not been picked up for a second season yet, as far as I can tell. Okay. And if it's not picked up by a second season, you're going to want to throw something at the TV a la Battlestar Galactica. They're going somewhere, but it's a mystery story.

And they ended on a cliffhanger. No solve of the mystery, so no season two. Don't watch it. Got it. Part of the mystery solved, but some of the mystery not solved. Okay. Too many open loops. Right. It's a great show. I hope they get a second season. I will throw something at the TV if they don't get a second season, but I'm going to save you that pain, Brian.

Okay. Thank you. I appreciate that. Right. Slow Horses season four did drop this week, episode one out of six. Unfortunately, they didn't do the three drop. They are just doing one a week. I watched the first episode last night. It is Slow Horses. It's fantastic.

I'm going to wait, I think, a couple weeks to get caught up so they can catch up so I can watch a few more so I don't end on a cliffhanger. Like I did last night. I'm like, God damn it. That was what I was saying. Very out loud and scared my dog when it was over. So, yeah.

But Slow Horses is awesome and it's back. All right. I've got some news from a bunch of, well, from one band, but I'm going to mention a bunch of bands from that I used to listen to in the 90s that I absolutely loved. It was definitely a part of the early electronica meets rock stuff and plus, you know, the whole pre-Brit pop.

So, you've got your Jesus Jones, you've got your Wonder Stuff, you've got your EMF, you've got your Ned's Atomic Dust Bin, all those sorts of bands. One of them, Jesus Jones, just did a big show at the, well, not a big show because the whiskey is a small place, at the Whiskey A Go-Go in August of this year.

That would have been awesome. That would have been awesome. But you don't leave your house. You could have gone. Well, I know, but I didn't say that it would have been, I'm sad I miss, I said that would have been awesome. Yeah, me too. There are many concerts that I would go to that would have been awesome, but I just can't go to a concert anymore. Well, if you really want to experience it, they put together a 13 to 14 minute documentary with some interviews with fans and with some of the band members themselves.

The link is in the show notes. It's over on YouTube. There's also a bunch of clips of live performances from that show as well. That's like watching a making of porno, but they don't show the porno. So that's really, I think I can do without that. I was hoping that that was the show that you linked. Oh, there's bits of the show notes.

Well, if you go follow the link and then go to their channel, there's a bunch of clips from the show itself as well, like full, like songs. Oh, you're saying there's full songs. Okay. There's full songs. That's cool. But if it was just clips of songs, it's just like, no. Yeah. And then in more like I Wish I Lived in the UK news, Jesus Jones has announced a tour themselves, not using dynamic pricing.

They're going on tour with EMF and also Echo Belly opening, which would be pretty fucking cool. Believe it or not, EMF and Jesus Jones have never toured live together before, even though they were like same time, same kind of sound. So now they'll be right here right now. Damn, you look good.

You remember. I do love Jesus Jones. They were way ahead of their time. And I thought highly they were just so much better than and deserve bigger, bigger, bigger things than they ever got. Oh, wholeheartedly agree. Wholeheartedly agree. They, they, they, they have legs too.

Yes. And in funny AI news, I did get a chuckle out of this. This is, this is, this is what AI was made for. Link is in the show notes. AI Sir David Attenborough narrates a cyber truck. The cyber trucks lamprey like dependency on flatbed trailers.

This is worth every second of the watch. I highly recommend it and I'm not going to spoil it. I'm in. And I finally have a bit of podcast news, Jason. This is usually a year ballot wick, but I found some things that both depressed me and horrified me.

The first of course was brought to us by our friends on our discord channel. The Hawk to a girl is starting a podcast called talk to a, I responded to that with, that's it. We're stopping immediately and I'm never doing another podcast.

I give up. I give up. Talk to a will debut September 10th and see Haley Welch bring what a press release characterized as her vibrant female perspective to better media, better media, of course, owned by Jake Paul.

Great. Oh, this is a, this is a perfect storm of fuck you. Yep. So I expect that to last about five episodes. Yeah. Nobody will give a shit anymore. But then that was immediately followed up by another link I saw.

Well, it's official. Everyone has a podcast. Well, I think we knew that from the previous story, but today the NSA launched no such podcast and the no such thing as a fish people immediately sued for the title. A nod to the entity's nickname, no such agency back when its mere existence was classified.

Now they do go out of their way to say, don't expect much because it is the NSA, but we will tell stories that are highly declassified and share expertise and highlight government officials and basically be a puff PR piece for the NSA. Okay.

And they're, they're way behind the eight ball here. CIA launched a podcast called the Langley files years ago, which was actually a pretty good, pretty good podcast. They did this with the, was it the spy museum in Washington, DC? Yeah.

It was a co-production. It was really well produced, really well done. So they're a little late to the game here, NSA. Jeez. Good God. Well, they might've been busy with this story, Jason. Okay. Right-wing influencers on also podcasters, of course, such as Tim Poole have allegedly been paid by a Kremlin influence campaign.

The U S justice department revealed a Russian influence campaign and charged two RT employees with two counts of conspiracy and an unsealed indictment on Wednesday. According to that indictment, two employees of the Kremlin run media company, RT spent $10 million on right-wing media personalities and poisoned the well of American discourse.

They funneled money into a Tennessee based media company to get the job done. Now the indictment doesn't name the company or the media personalities it hired, but it doesn't take a genius to figure this bit out because, uh, yeah, the unsealed indictment quotes the company's description of itself on its own website as a network of heterodox commentators that focus on Western political and cultural issues.

There's only one company based in Tennessee with that phrase, exact phrase on its website, tenant media tenant media is the outlet that publishes on YouTube and other social media, as well as podcasts. It has paid for videos from people like Benny Johnson, Tim Poole, David Rubin, Matt Christensen and Lauren Southern.

They were all making quite a bit of money churning out content for the site. And, uh, they even went looking for a person to be the face of the operation for that right candidate. We're willing to pay around one to $2 million per year. They said, I'll do it too. That's a lot of cash for videos that would go on to routinely net under 10,000 views.

The indictment made clear that, uh, all of these people didn't know they were being sponsored by the Russians. I wonder where they thought all that money was coming from then. Yeah. Don't ask. Don't tell comrade. Of course, they are all releasing statements in the past 24 hours claiming that they themselves were the victims.

Sure. Uh, and since then, of course, people, most notably the one that I know out of all this is Tim Poole because for whatever reason, thanks Elon. He pops up all the time in my algorithm, even though I don't give a fuck about him, don't follow him and don't like anything.

He has been vocal in opposing us support for Ukraine. It's amazing how quickly he has backtracked on that. And just the last 24 hours saying he under further reflection, he now fully supports Ukraine. Okay. These fuckers. Oh God.

Once the money dries up, they'll support anything. Yeah, that seems to be the case. So, uh, we've just had a whole bunch of people here shilling for Russia and getting paid for it. Uh, last I heard that's actually called treason. Yeah. Well, yeah, we'll see about that. Reuters reached out to RT for comment on the indictment and RT gave them a statement that can be read as both a flippant joke and a bizarre promise.

Three things are certain in life, death taxes and RT's interference in the US elections. Oh, got to give them credit for the balls. Yeah. Hey, you know, what the hell? What the hell? All their agents just got strung out to dry.

So at least they got a sense of humor about it. Yeah. Seriously. All right. Federal prosecutors have charged North Carolina man, Michael Smith with defrauding streaming services to the tune of $10 million using AI generated music.

I wish we'd have done this. According to the New York Times, Smith allegedly created fake songs by non-existent bands and used bots to stream them, collecting royalties from platforms like Spotify and Apple Music. Now, here's the thing. Over seven years, Smith reportedly set up thousands of fake accounts using software to play his AI generated tracks on repeat, accumulating billions of streams.

He, quote unquote, I'm putting this in air quotes. He cleverly disguised his scheme by using quirky artist names like Callous Post and Calorie Screams. I don't know. OK. Smith now faces charges of wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy with potential sentences of up to 20 years in prison per charge.

Prosecutors say Smith earned up to $110,000 a month at the height of his scheme. This guy is the poster child for not knowing when to quit. To me, I'm trying to figure out what's the illegal part of this. Probably the bots to play the music.

Setting up the music is not the problem. I don't know. You don't think so? Well, I mean, OK, it is. And here comes the air quotes. Illegal. But do you think that they cared until now? It's like it's the same thing with X. X is all bots.

But, you know, Elon can claim that's traffic. Now, this this guy, I guarantee you, is going to get a job at one of the major labels. Well, if he ever gets out of jail. Yeah. Well, you know, the major labels are the ones that actually probably filed the lawsuit. The feds didn't give a shit about this. It's $10 million. That's true. They don't care about $10 million.

That money's not coming to us. That money's not coming to us. It's going to him. It needs to come to us. Hire that guy. Yeah, man. Yeah. They want that. They want that for themselves. They're like, how do we get that many billions of plays? We want billions of streams on our songs. Please tell us the secret, Michael Smith.

Yes. Agent Smith. So, yeah. I just I feel like he did a good job of gaming the system. Well done, sir. Tip of the hat. Yeah. Can you do that with our podcast? Yes, please. Except we don't get paid. We actually pay per stream, though.

That's our problem. We actually have to pay. That's true. Yeah. Yeah. Somebody on our Discord asked me that a while back. They said, why don't you set up bots to inflate your numbers? So, you know, you get all these plays. I'm like, well, because we have to pay for those plays. And you can't monetize those plays because advertisers know that they're fake plays when they give you X amount of dollars for X amount of downloads and only Z amount of people show up.

Well, then you just get zero amount of money. Yeah. We need the bots to go buy the products. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And clicks don't count on that anymore. It is action-based. Unlike streaming music, where it just doesn't give a fuck. You just get that three thousandth of a cent per play.

And that's what it was, right? Three thousandths of a cent. I think I looked it up this week. Pretty sure, yeah. Something like that. Yeah. One of the artists we managed got on a new Le Seraphim track. And it did like 11 million downloads, or 11 million streams, I'm sorry, in the first 24 hours. Like, oh, that's some serious...

Oh, wait, no, it's not very serious money at all. Nope. It's fucked up when 11 million plays get you like $3,000. That's insane. Yep. Ah, the old days. So, poor Jack Black. He just can't catch a break.

First, he came out with the Borderlands movie. He played the voice of the little robot guy. And apparently, he did a good job with that. It was okay. And the movie was terrible. It was god-awful. So, I didn't get to see that much of him. But now, there's a Minecraft movie coming out. And he's in that. And it looks god-awful as well. It sure does.

Oh, my God. It looks bad. It looks bad. I mean, just... I know it's for the kids, but come on. There's just nothing good about it. No, it looks horrible. Yeah. Speaking of horrid things, Disney has halted its Graveyard Book film adaptation after Neil Gaiman's sexual assault allegations.

So... Mm-hmm. Yep. The Graveyard Book is one of my, you know, not one of my favorite books that he did. But, so, as long as they don't fuck with the Season 3 of Good Omens and Season 2 of The Sandman, okay. Well, that's Amazon. Exactly. It's Amazon and Netflix.

Amazon doesn't care. They took the Grand Tour after Jeremy Clarkson punched somebody in the face. They don't give a fuck. That's right. And they kept Clarkson's farm while he was a Nazi or whatever the fuck he did. I don't know what he did the second time around. Yep. So, they'll take Neil Gaiman. They don't care. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, he's not as bad as... What's his name from House of Cards? Kevin Spacey. Jeez. So, these are just allegations. He hasn't gone to court yet. So, the shows can still go on. Yeah. They can go on on Netflix or Amazon. It's just not Disney. Disney has standards. Yeah. Disney does have standards.

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From beauty and fashion to home, culinary, and outdoor living. Shop now at QVC.com. Saturday, September 26th.

Two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God Romero. Plus, the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line. When the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meat Cleaver Cullen.

KFC 94, Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. Apps and doodads. Well, Amazon's next-gen Alexa assistant, remarkable, will be powered by Anthropics Claude AI and cost $5 to $10 per month, a subscription model, and arrive in October ahead of the holidays.

Five sources with knowledge of the matter told Reuters. The company originally planned to use in-house software for the new chat assistant, but it reportedly struggled with latency issues, a.k.a. their in-house one sucked, taking up to six or seven seconds to acknowledge a request and reply, one source said. That's quite a while.

That's a lot. Yeah. Amazon has not confirmed the story, but it says it uses language models from partners as well as their own. Since last year, reports indicated Amazon was planning to supercharge Alexa with generative AI features, which is exactly what I don't want from my Alexa. I would actually just like it to work well, doing the few things that I want it to do, like set timers and play music.

That's it. Do you remember the first Alexa TV commercial where the guy says, hey, Siri, how many teaspoons in a tablespoon? If in that first commercial he said, hey, Siri, that person should be fired. Now, I just think, all I want to ask it is, if I had a wife, this is something for you, you can ask it.

Alexa, what's my wife getting me for Christmas? Because your wife might be looking for what to get you for Christmas. I don't need Alexa for that. I just see the ads I'm being served. That's right. The banners that keep popping up because your wife doesn't know how to use a VPN when she's shopping for you for Christmas. Yeah.

Exactly. We're coming into the holiday season. You have to remember these things. Yeah. You do. You do. Remember, for your Christmas needs, everybody, go to GOG.show slash VPN. Get your VPN on. Well, importantly, if you still like your traditional Alexa, Amazon will continue to offer its classic voice assistant for free.

And if you want remarkable Alexa, you will probably need to buy a new device as well. So, hopefully, they will continue to at least somewhat support the initial ones. Otherwise, I'll have to be changing my whole household at some point. You can get those Facebook ones. Oh, wait. They canceled those, too. Never mind. Yeah, they canceled those.

Why don't you just do iPads with FaceTime, dude? Yeah, I might end up doing that. I don't know. At some point. Anyways, I like them right now, and they work for what I need them for. So, probably not for not much longer. We'll see. Remember, about around the new year, I mentioned an app I had found called Fantasy Hike, which basically just took your step data and put you through a non-licensed IP version of Lord of the Rings.

Lord of the Rings, yes. Yes, I do. Well, I am near the end of my journey, finally. I am down to, let's see, where am I? Are I 58.9 miles left to get to Mount Fire? Okay. Not Mount Doom, Mount Fire. Yeah.

In the Darkland. So, I'm almost done. I'm kind of excited and a little bit sad about it. I did find another app called Walk the Distance that I'm going to start to use after this, which I will talk about once I've given it a go. But, yeah, I've got about, I don't know, less than a week because I'm averaging 5.5 miles a day over the last year.

So, there you go. It's been fun. I've enjoyed it. It was a fun little lap. Yeah, I liked it for a while, then I just got kind of sick of it. Right. Because I picked the guy that I could easily beat. He wasn't really, he wasn't much of a challenge. And when I'd take a day off, he would still be behind me.

And I'm like, yeah, okay. Well, I don't know if you knew this, but you could actually go to the Challengers option and you could select them all. Oh, I didn't know that. You don't have to walk against just one. I'm walking against all of them. Oh, maybe it was just the early version that you could only pick one.

Perhaps. Yeah, because I could only, I just, because I picked one and then he was way ahead of me. I'm like, there's no way I'm catching up to that fast little fucker. He's on a scooter. Mr. Underhill destroyed me. Yeah. And so, I just, I picked somebody who was slightly slower than me just to kind of, because I can only, some days I have to take the day off.

You know, I can't walk that day. Like today when it's going to be 114 degrees outside. I'm not walking today. Anyways, I thought I was a great app. I'm already at Mount Fire. I beat you to Mount Fire. That's what it is. Reader, my favorite RSS reader, has come out with a new version this week called Reader.

This guy went and he renamed all of the apps during last week where it's like he named them Reader Classic. And you see all these updates. It's like Reader is now Reader Classic in launch, you know, in run up to the launch of the new Reader. Because he's going to maintain two versions of it, which is a very good thing because the new Reader is a steaming pile of what the fuck-a-tude.

So with the current RSS reader, you see an article, you mark it as read, it goes out of your stream. Fine. Great. Love it. For a power user, that's what I need to see. I come in, I've got 400 articles. I want to cruise through them. And so when I come back to it, the new stuff's at the top and the old stuff's where it's supposed to be. But I don't have to see old articles.

The new one is kind of like Twitter. You just have a stream. It will remember your position in the stream. But it doesn't show you what you've seen already and all this stuff. So you waste a fucking metric shit ton of time trying to figure out. So I go down a couple hundred articles.

So I got a couple hundred to go. But then new stuff comes up. But I don't know where the new stuff is based on where I'm at in the list. And if I scroll up to the new stuff, I lose my place to where I was. And then I can't find out where the old stuff is. It's so dumb. Five minutes I could have told this guy this is the dumbest fucking idea I've ever seen in my life.

But unfortunately, he shipped it. So it's out there. This is an overcast hold my beer moment. This is a total overcast moment. But he's going to keep maintaining Reader Classic. I have them both side by side on my desktop just to see if I'm wrong. I'm not.

I'm absolutely not wrong in this. It's absolutely garbage for power users. I mean, regular Joe Schmo, you know, news amateurs might be OK with it. It's like, oh, let me pop in and see what's in the feed. No, I need to know everything that goes on.

I'm a completionist. I need to know. I have to know. So for me, it's not any good. And you can plug in, quote unquote, social feeds, but only like Mastodon right now. And I'm like, OK. And there's an option for Flickr. Like, OK, this is what, 1999?

Well, I don't get it, but I don't know. It is what it is. So use at your own discretion, Brian. I will not. OK, perfect. Yeah, perfect. I don't use Reader. I just, I find things organically, as the kids would say.

I am, I don't have that much time for organics anymore. I want it. I want the fast food version of my news, please. I want the Mickey D's. All right. I use iStat menus a lot on my computer, on my Macs. I recommend everybody use it because it gives you great introspection into what your computer is doing.

Do you use iStat menus? That I do, yes. Yes, it is a, it's a must-have. They're on version 7 now, which just came out. It's a $10 upgrade if you already own 6. And it's $11.99 if you're buying it from scratch.

The thing about it is, it comes with Setapp, which is, you know, my favorite, my favorite multi-app. So, you can either go get iStat menus 7, or you can just go get Setapp, which I highly recommend because Setapp is $9.99 a month for everything that you can get, including what I love, which is my Spark for email, Spark desktop for email, and a whole bunch of other stuff.

So, iStat menu 7 is gorgeous, I got to say. They always do a really nice visual update. It's always been pretty. I got to give them that. It has never been an ugly app. It's just a menu bar app that sits at the top, and you can check your CPU, your memory, your disk usage, your network, your, you know, drive speed and fulfillment or fullingness.

I can't even come up with words this morning. How full your fucking hard drive is, how's that? But yeah, I love iStat menus. It is definitely a must-have. I don't know if you need it anymore. Do you remember the one that was, oh, the battery one that we used to have? I'm on my Mac Studio now, so I can't look at it.

Was it bananas, banana battery or something? I can't even remember. There was something, but yeah, that fell out of favor for me a long time ago. I think I still have it installed on my laptop, so that was a good one. Yeah, I do have it installed, because it reminds me every day to unplug my laptops for X amount of time so the battery doesn't get, like, overcharged.

Right. It's pretty nice. It just reminds me of how much charge is left in, you know, in the default state of the battery, which depresses me, because I, you know, I bought a brand new, like, it's like two years ago now. I bought a brand new MacBook Pro 14, and it was down to, like, 96% the day I opened it.

I was like, that's not fair, motherfuckers. Anyway. Okay, that's it for me. So go get Setup, and then you get iStatMenu7 for free. Okay. The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave, with podcast super host 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, Caveat, with Ben Yellen, because people are nosy, and the host of Control It, because industrial machines have feelings, too. And co-host of Only Malware in the Building, his shiny new podcast.

But it's been a couple weeks since we've talked to Dave. So, Dave, how many more podcasts have you started since then? That's it for now, I think. I don't know. It's hard for me to keep track week to week of what exactly I am and am not hosting. They just point you to a microphone and say, here, talk.

That's right. Is that about it? Exactly. He's got an Excel pivot table, but... Yeah. Yeah. You know, here's who you're interviewing. Here's what it's about. Go. And that's what I do. And, you know, I'm happy with that. We have universe creep with the books we read and the TV shows we watch.

Brian, can you imagine Dave's brain? Podcast creep? Oh, my gosh. I can't imagine that you know where you're at at any given time of the day. He's dropping F-bombs on all the other shows. It's like, oh, God, I thought I was on Grumpy Old Geeks. Oh, man. Sorry. Sorry about that, Mr. President. I thought we were talking about shitting and shaving.

Yeah. Come on. That's right. Yeah. I got this fucking security cam that I can't power to save my life. Right. Exactly. Well, Jason, you and I have talked about this before that you get this thing that I call flow-through brain. Yeah.

Which is like I just – there's no retention of my interviews that I do. People talk – like I'll see who's scheduled to – because we generally – interviews are pre-recorded. They run a couple days later. And every – it's not uncommon for me to see who's running on the cyberwire.

I'm like, huh, did I talk to that person? That sounds good. Yeah. That sounds like an interesting topic. I wonder what we talked about. And – because when you're in the moment, your brain is not in record mode. No. Not at all. I have people asking me about things that we talked about on this show.

And I was like, did we? Oh, that's cool. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And at the same time, I'm running the board as well. So I have my eye on the – I'm watching the show notes, talking to you guys, and watching the board to make sure the recording is going, and watching the local recording, and forgetting to turn off my air conditioner, which – so it's been running for two minutes out.

So I'm going to have to filter that out later when I go back to edit it. Isn't it great making work for yourself? Oh, it's fantastic. It's fantastic. Just another reason for self-loathing. So it's been a couple weeks.

So before we jump in here, Brian, how was Disneyland? Well, it was amazing, as Disneyland can only be. California has been in a massive heat wave for like over a month now. So it was hot.

But they do a good job of keeping everything cool. Like, you know, the lines are kept indoors or there's fans everywhere. And so it was never too bad. Now, we had bought a three-day pass, Park Hopper Passes. So we went initially basically the – like a couple days after we first got in in early August.

That was probably the hottest day that we were actually there. And we went with some friends and some – you know, Lucas has a friend that he went to daycare with or, you know, early, early on. They've been friends – those two kids have been friends since they were like three years old.

So it's really cute and they get along well. So we had a great time with them and did both parks. But it was kind of busy and it was really hot because summer was still in full swing. By the time we went again, the L.A. school districts were back in school.

And it was – my son's birthday was August 22nd. And Disneyland, which always kind of does something for Halloween and for fall and all that sort of stuff, really leaned into it this year and decided to start very early. So they started doing Halloween decorations on the 23rd.

So we used our last two days of the Park Hoppers on the 23rd and 24th because we are all big fans of Halloween and particularly my son. He loves Halloween. It's his favorite holiday. So we got to see all the decorations and the different things that they did for the Halloween holiday, which was absolutely amazing.

Both parks were done very, very well. We had a really good time. I mean, they just roll out the decorations and the treats. My son even was like into the idea of finding the characters and meeting them. And he got an autograph book and started to get things signed by different characters. And it was just – we had a wonderful time.

It was absolutely wonderful. What's it been like for you, like seeing it all kind of fresh again through his eyes? That's always fun. It's changed so much, though, Dave. When I think about Disneyland, California Adventure didn't exist.

You know, it was never as crowded as it is now and it was never – it's so much more than it ever used to be. There's still little pockets of the original like Disney that I remember well and all of that sort of thing. So I get some nostalgia, but it's just so different. But I am thrilled like not even just my son.

Like my wife didn't care. She didn't grow up with this shit. You know, they never went to Disneyland. She's become a total Disney mom now. She's like obsessed with it. Like, you know, she's like, I got to buy the ears and we got to make sure we go get this snack. And I really – I want to go on Mr. Toad and Small World. And like she's so into it now.

So it's fun watching us become a Disney family, as it were. So that's a real blast. You know, it's gotten to the point where like, you know, we were even like, okay, so what should we do? You know, should we go to – we should do Paris or we should do Germany or – shit, should we do Disney World?

Maybe we should just do Disney World. It's that kind of weird thing that's happening now. Right. So, yeah, it was great. And if you're a Halloween fan, I mean, just Disneyland does everything right and what they do for Halloween. It's just everything. Just the small little details.

Everything is there. They're just so good at what they do. And they charge for it. Right. Yeah. I've had the pleasure of being there once when they had the Jack Skellington stuff up in the Haunted Mansion. Oh, yeah. It's so good.

It was great fun, which they don't do in Florida. So it was a special treat to be out there when that was happening. Right. So I enjoyed that very much. But, yeah, similarly, you know, my – our family is in an every other year cadence of going to Disney World in Florida with the whole family.

You know, my wife and I are two sons. And last time, my son's fiancé came with us. But my wife and I just this past week were talking about going down there on the off years, just the two of us, and doing – because that's what we used to do before we had kids.

Right. Because my wife worked down there. She did college program. You know, she was very comfortable down there. Like I say, she knows all the secret entrances to the Batcave. And we just like being there, the two of us, and being able to run at our own pace. So I think we're going to look into that of, you know, the in-between years saying to the kids, sorry, this is a mom and dad trip.

Nice. And down we'll go. Oh, and I finally got to go on Rise of the Resistance, which we had not done before. And that is a truly wonderful ride. So it was a lot of fun. It was a blast. And we did not get out of Star Wars. Well, because it was my son's birthday, and in lieu of getting him other presents, the deal we made with him was he could pick two things in Disneyland that he could purchase for his presents.

I am now, we are now the proud owners of two lightsabers, because I had to get one as well, and a BB-8 droid. So we came home with quite a lot. I was going to say, a life-size Millennium Falcon and a full-size R2-D2. Yes. The remote-controlled BB-8 and the droids that you can make in the droid factory are pretty, they're pretty fun.

They're pretty impressive. So, and as are the lightsabers. So much better than the ones that we had as kids, for sure. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. You mean the cardboard tubes from Christmas paper that we used to whack each other? Yeah, the flashlight is the base, yes. There were those, yeah. Then the official ones were inflatable.

Do you remember those? Those were terrible. Yeah, they were so awful. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Well, before we get off of the Star Wars topic here, I have a couple of things to share. I saw an interesting video on YouTube that is an alternate edit of scene 45, interior, Kenobi's dwelling.

This is a scene where Luke Skywalker goes to Obi-Wan's little hut, and what's interesting about this scene, this is the scene where Princess Leia gets projected on the hologram and says, help me, Obi-Wan, you're my only hope. And it turns out that this scene was edited to reorder things from the way it was scripted and shot.

And the tell on this is that, as you all remember, there's a part in the scene where C-3PO says something like, if you'll not be needing me, sir, I'll close down for a while. And Luke says, sure, go ahead. And then C-3PO's eyes turn off, and he kind of goes limp, I guess.

But later in the scene, his eyes are back on, and he's moving around looking at things. And this was an indicator that it wasn't originally shot that way. And so the person who made this video got his hands on one of the earlier scripts that has the order of it, found some interviews with the editors of the film who decided that it flowed much better.

Well, actually, that's not the way to say it. It made for much better storytelling to reorder the events of that scene. But if you watch it, edit it as it is in this YouTube video, which is the original way, the dialogue flows a lot better because it's the way it was written.

Well, Luke is not really known for dialogue. No. I mean, right. How could you tell? I don't like sand. Right. So it's an interesting little artifact, but it also made me think about, like, in the history of cinema, has there ever been a film as analyzed, taken apart, put back together as Star Wars?

I don't think so. Probably not, no. Yeah, I can't imagine. It also continues to blow my mind how many archives there are from this movie. Like, this little, relatively low-budget sci-fi movie.

It's the gift that keeps on giving. There's just – it seems like once a month I'll come across some photos that I've never seen before. Like, who is taking all these photos? Like, where does all this stuff come from? Well, I remember hearing at the time – Well, there's – the six fingers on C-3PO gave that one away.

Right. I do remember hearing at the time that – or not at the time, at some point that, you know, Lucas has been – and Lucasfilm and LucasArts, he's been widely praised for so many innovations that he's made with sound, with editing equipment, all the technology stuff.

But I do remember hearing that one of the things that nobody ever talks about is one of his archivals and the fact that he kept everything and stored everything and everything – like, every shot, every bit of film, nothing was ever thrown out. Everything was kept and stored.

And he was one of the first people that really was doing that and created whole systems for it. Yeah. He's an OG hoarder. Exactly. And we all benefit. Yeah. So, if you're a Star Wars nerd like us, I highly recommend watching this. It's a fun little thing to see.

I agree with the claim that Star Wars is a movie that was saved in the edit. I think that is absolutely true. And this is another example of how that happened. Right. Cool. Another fun thing that came up over – it was a discussion over on Mastodon.

Someone was asking, why do fighter jets in the Star Wars universe need astromech droids? Like, you know, R2-D2 gets plopped into the back of an X-Wing, and in the prequels, he gets sucked up through the bottom of the fighter jets.

Yeah. It's an interesting question. Before I give my answer, do you have thoughts about it? Well, my thought would be, you know, bigger ships have them built in, because we know that, like, the Millennium Falcon has – and they've retconned the story of how we ended up with a droid intelligence inside the Millennium Falcon, and we know which droid it was at this point, thanks to movies like Solo.

Those are bigger ships. They're too small to fit into a system like an X-Wing. But then you go, you know, TIE Fighters don't have them. So, I don't know. Yeah. Jason? Because they look cool. Right. Right.

It gives the pilot someone to talk to on a long journey. Yeah. Exactly. Although there's no toilet, so, you know. That's true. That we know of. I thought of it as being kind of like CarPlay, you know? Like, it's the Star Wars universe's version of CarPlay.

Like, will the X-Wing fly without the astromech droid? Yeah, probably. But if you're going on a long trip – Who's going to play the tunes? Well, I'm thinking, chances are your astromech droid knows all about you. It knows the music you like. It knows how you like to fly. It knows – so, why not?

Just like Waze, it takes me down the international way that doesn't have a stoplight. So, I have to make it across seven lines of Star Destroyer traffic. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So, I think there's a case to be made that astromech droids are just the Star Wars universe's version of CarPlay or Android Auto.

Take your pick. Fair. I like that. Yeah. I put another video in here that I thought was interesting. This is titled, Why Lego is so Expensive. It's from the folks at Business Insider. And it turns out, Lego isn't – well, Lego has stayed consistently premium, I guess, throughout its history.

The TLDR is that Lego is expensive because it is extraordinarily high quality for what it is. And it costs a lot to make, but also, it's in high demand. This video also goes into the whole adult audience for Lego, that we have all of these sets now that are targeted for grown-ups rather than kids.

Well, yes. I don't think the Jaws set was meant for my seven-year-old son. No. No. Or these 5,000-piece Millennium Falcons or any of these. The TLDR actually is – Lego is so expensive because they can get it. Yeah. Because they can charge that much.

It's like dynamic pricing for Ticketmaster. People pay it. Yes. I just paid a crap ton of money for the – you know about the Disney – well, it is Disney property, so fair enough. The Ideas Program with Lego where people pitch different things and if it gets enough votes and they can figure out a way to make it and do it, they actually will make things that other people have come up with initially.

Yep. Well, they've just released, as of three days ago, the Nightmare Before Christmas set that came through Ideas, which they've never had one before, and I just spent an exorbitant amount of money ordering this thing. Yeah. We talked about – speaking of not remembering what we talked about on the show, we didn't talk about that on the show a couple weeks ago.

But now I've actually ordered it. Yeah. So you bought that? Yeah. Okay. You got that instead of the Black Millennium Falcon. Yep. Yep. If he still wants that, he will get that for Christmas. But this is – yeah. Well, this one – I thought you were going to say he can get a job. Well, that too.

At these fucking prices. There's no doubt about it. Man. Oh, my youngest son, Jack, just got a job this week. He got his first jobby job. All right. He's working at Five Guys. No, Five Guys. He's working at Five Guys. And this was prompted by two things.

He got a car. So he got his mom's old car. So he's cruising around in style in a 10-year-old Subaru. But he also got a girlfriend. And he said, Dad, girlfriends are expensive. No shit, son.

Gas and ass, they're going to cost you. He's like, I spent $40 just driving her around and buying her flowers and going places. I was like, yeah. Yeah. So welcome to life, kid. Got himself a job. We don't work for fun.

No. That reminds me of the birds and the bees conversation that I had with my dad. Yeah. It boiled down to, son, I know you know how to do the other thing. No diseases. Let's just keep it at that. No diseases. That was it.

No diseases was my dad's birds and the bees talk. Wow. Wow. Yeah. He was a man of few words. Yeah, he definitely is. He keeps it to the point. It's an approach. Speaking of diseases, see what I did there.

I have spoken on this show about my affinity for high-quality back scratchers. And here's why. I have on my back, I have an itchy spot that won't stop itching.

And I thought, this started probably about two years ago. And I thought this was just a funny thing of mine. I have something in my skin, like there's something that's firing, and I don't know what it is, and it's annoying, and I'm getting older, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

But a couple weeks ago, I'm cruising around on Reddit, and I think it was the Today I Learned subreddit, and someone says, turns out the insatiable itchy spot on my back and the lower corner of my shoulder blade is not skin-related.

It is neurological, and it's a condition called Natalgia Parasthetica, and about 7% of the population has it, including me. Special. You're special. Yeah.

Now, the other – so I mention it here in case there's any of our listeners who are also wondering why the itchy spot and the inside of their shoulder blades won't go away. Turns out it's a nervous thing. There's a nerve that runs through something, and it gets squeezed, and it itches.

But what's funny about this is I was – before I found out what this is, I was wondering to myself, I wonder if – what's the stuff that women inject in their foreheads to get rid of wrinkles? Botox. Botox. Botox, yes. I wonder if Botox would be a solution to this, if I could basically kill the nerves that make it itchy and stop the itch.

And make your back look smooth and sexy. Yeah, well – Like Nicole Kidman's face. Exactly. And it turns out that is one of the treatments for this. Different thing. So I'll be looking into that. Well, look at you, Dr. Dave. Well – But isn't it immensely satisfying when you finally get an answer to something?

Yes. Right? Like – Right. You've had this thing. It's been bothering you. You have no clue what it is. And then finally, you get an answer. To stumble across it. Yes. And it is – and also, I think, to know you're not alone. Right. One out of every 20 people suffer from Natalgia Parasthetica.

Ask your doctor if you have Natalgia Parasthetica. If Botox is right for you. If Botox is right for you. So anyway, we'll see. Yes. Right now, I'm in the afterglow of finding out what it is. We'll see if I actually ever do anything about it because that would require going to the doctor.

And I'm a man. We're men. We don't do that. Yes. Right. Finally, I put a thing in here. It's a website called Is My Blue Your Blue? Which harkens back to the deep, deep conversations we used to have in the dorm room.

Like, dude, what if the color blue I see isn't the same color blue that you see? This website actually tries to establish that. So you take a little quiz, and you see how biased your eyes are towards blue or green.

Now, the obvious problem with this website is that unlike, I'm going to go out on a limb and say probably me and Jason are sitting in front of highly calibrated monitors. Mine is also calibrated. Okay. Brian, I'm sorry. I didn't give you the credit you deserve.

No, it's okay. Most people are not sitting in front of highly calibrated monitors. So that surely could throw this test off. Yes. But it's a fun little thing to see. What way does your visual system bias itself towards blue or green?

And what were you, Dave? Because I just did this. Let me look it up here. I did it. I just did it as well. And my boundary is at hue 176, bluer than 75% of the population. For you, turquoise is green. Yeah.

What about you, Brian? I am a blue hardliner, apparently. My boundary is hue 181, bluer than 87% of the population. I like my blue, and I'm very staunch about it. And if it's not really blue, then fuck you. It's turquoise. My boundary is at hue 176, bluer than 69%, nice, of the population.

Wait a second. Wait a second. You just said your boundary is at hue 176? Yes. Okay. That's mine, too. Go ahead and continue what you just said. Bluer than 69% of the population. For you, turquoise is green. Mine's at 75% of the population. Oh, that's interesting.

Maybe it's because I just took the test, and it's a very small data sample. Yeah, there's like seven people that are taking the fucking thing. That's it. That's true. I did this a week ago. They've not paid for the big data. No. No. And who knows? This could all just be BS, but, you know.

But it's fun BS, so. This is a fun thing to pass around on the office Slack and watch everybody take the test and see where they, you know, where they land. So, all right, well, it's nice catching up.

Good catching up with you, Dave. Glad you're back. Yeah. Get the Disney stuff out of the way so we can have a show next week. Oh, there'll be more next week. There'll be more. We didn't even talk about the show being canceled. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We've got to get to that. There's plenty to, there's always plenty to cover.

Yes. Okay. All right. See you next time. Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got Matthias, Lyndon, Frank, and Jeff with the first annual subscription. And Jeff, I've wanted to for a long time and periodically check the Patreon for the annual option and then forget to message you to ask and then repeat that cycle a couple times a year.

Just glad I finally thought to message you and you were able to turn that option on. Love the content and have been a listener for years. Take care and keep up the fantastic grumpiness and show. Thank you, Jeff. And thank you for letting, reminding me or just letting me know that that was an option. So it's on. Woo. Everybody go sign up.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Go get it. Over at PayPal, we've got Judge, Thomas, Nicola, Jonathan, Jacobo, Levy, Jason, who said the grump must flow, and Joseph, who says, kindly accept this donation in lieu of the minimum yearly Patreon sub. I'm curious. Does one platform take a bigger cut than the other?

Cheers. And again, if you didn't hear that at the beginning of the show, no, we are grandfathered in on Patreon. We do not care how you give us money. It does not matter. It's the same for everywhere. And by the way, you don't have to sign up for Patreon on a yearly basis. There is a toggle you can do monthly or yearly. We don't care.

But if you do yearly, you get 5% off. There you go. Whichever package you pick. And over at the tip jar, we've got Matthew, Sarah, and Arnold. And just one last time, when you sign up for Patreon, you do get the shows a little bit early, ad-free, and in high definition. Get on it.

All right. We got some reviews this week. The first one came in through Overcast randomly. I didn't even know you could do that. Mr. Jones, who wrote, hey, I can't find any place to leave your review on Overcast. Oh, no. So he's emailed it. I was going to say, it's because you can't leave a review on Overcast. You can't do that on Overcast. Yes. So I'll send this message.

Thank you for what you do. Your podcast is the only podcast that has survived my moods and interests. I look forward to your content and often share the listen with my son. Just wanted to let you know our appreciation of your unique and fun personalities. Keep it going, and may life bring you more Elon. No more Elon. If you go to gog.show slash review, you can get a list of links to go leave reviews for the show and just click from there.

And that was broken for a while. So that was my bad when we switched over to our new website provider. I didn't make that switch. So for a while, it was gog.show slash rate, not review. So now it is review. There's a redirect, so now you can do it. And we got a five-star, Pleasant Find.

Coincidentally, Apple Podcasts made me aware of this great show. And this is from Poncheezies over on Apple Podcasts. So thank you, Poncheezies. All right. And I would just like to do another plug for my little t-shirt shop, Sober Outfitters, which is sponsored approved apparel.

So if you're in recovery and you do go to meetings, these are meeting approved shirts that probably only the people in the meeting will get. So you'll bring a light to their eye and a chuckle to their belly. My sponsor has been wearing his to some of our meetings. And they are a hit. They are a hit. It's a hit. It's a hit.

So go buy some, please. Pop a nice rent. Buy some adjacent stuff. Yes. Then he can get to work on our stuff. Exactly. Our stuff and his stuff. Exactly. I want to give a shout out to a friend of the show, a listener of the show and old time friend of mine. One of my longest friends.

We used to hang out together back in those early teenage Disney days that I talked about on the show all the time. Ross, who I reached out to and talked to, and I guess he even donates to the show. Who knew? I haven't talked to him in quite some while. He went through some of the same things I went through in terms of colon cancer.

He seems to be doing well and best of health to you and glad you made it through as well. So good on you, Ross. And a little bit of retirement news. Happy retirement to one of the best that's ever played. Two-time World Cup winner Alex Morgan has announced her retirement. It would be sad not to watch her play anymore.

So one of the best ever. Until next time, I'm Brian Schellmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. 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 664. Feeling generous? Keep this top-notch entertainment rolling by dropping us a few bucks at GOG.show slash donate.

Every bit helps. We mean it. It really, really does. And spread the grumpiness. There's a share button in every podcast player out there, even Overcast, it turns out. Use it to share the show with friends, foes, and everyone in between, and we'll be forever grateful. Head over to GOG.show to find the link to our Discord channel and chat with us and other show fans.

Got something to say? Send your feedback, comments, or awesome links to GOG.show slash contact. And show us some love. Leave a review at GOG.show slash review. A five-star rating will just get your review read on the air. It definitely will. We promise. Stay grumpy.

Saturday, September 26th. Two of combat sports' most dangerous strikers collide. Bare Knuckle. Liverpool's own Darren the Gorilla Till goes to war with Cuban powerhouse Yoel Soldier of God, Romero.

Plus, the Bare Knuckle Middleweight Championship of the World is on the line. When the reigning champ Dave the Redneck Mundell defends against undefeated British challenger Jack the Meat Cleaver Colon. And KFC 94, Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN.

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