703: None More Black

Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and Jason DeFillippo discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's to blame. Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks. I'm Jason DeFillippo.

And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Exciting times over here, Jason. My kid is having his last day of school today. One of his best buddies. Also, it's his birthday. So after school, he and a bunch of his friends are going over to a pool party. And we have our suitcases out because we're about to start packing to go to Los Angeles, where my kid gets to go to Disneyland and hang out at my mom's and do swim classes in the heat and an outdoor pool.

He's living the life of Riley. I would long to have my child's life. I was going to say, that sounds pretty sweet. Yeah, he's got a good thing going. And, you know, he still just complains when we cut him off from his Nintendo. So that's that. But the point of all of that is there will be no show next week. It's the 4th of July and travel and all of that sort of stuff. So no show next week.

Marica! Might be the last one. Yay! Or, you know, I'll land and be sent back by ICE agents. We'll see what happens. That's true. Where you might be sent back to, nobody knows! That's true, considering I am a U.S. citizen and not a Canadian citizen. Huh. A man with no land, Jason.

Deportation roulette. I'm going to study up on my Tom Hanks stuck in an airport movie. There you go. So somebody I know was deported this week. Isn't that great? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. My electrician's assistant, Octavio, who has been here for about 30 years. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Went to the local liquor store to pick up a 40 after a long day of work. A 40 of what, Jason? Because apparently it wasn't a 40 of freedom, Brian. Okay. A 40 of fucking terrorism. That's what he was picking up, goddammit. That's what it was. Yeah.

So they scooped him up, and then within a couple of hours, he got to make one phone call. They haven't heard from him since, but he made one phone call, and he was already in San Diego. Wow. San Diego. Mm-hmm. It's a whale's vagina. Yeah. So it's – yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. It's nuts. I'm curious to see. It's going to be interesting to have boots on the ground, as it were. Traffic's better. Yeah. All the gardens are overflowing, but, you know. Yeah. Yeah. They come, and they go pretty quick. My guy kind of shows up at odd hours now, let's just say that.

So, yeah. It really sucks. It really sucks. The other thing that sucks is after we, you know, had our little flyover of Iran last week, the first thing that I noticed on Sunday morning when I opened up Instagram is I got a metric shit ton of how to survive a nuclear explosion video.

Yeah. My reels are all prepper shit right now. Yep. All of it. And just going back to ice real quick here, I was thinking, I'm like, there's got to be ice trackers out there. And I started to look around to see what I could find. And basically, people are trying to use social media to track people.

And it's really hard to do. It's whack-a-mole. Because these guys shuck and jive. They move and they shoot and scoop. So it's really hard to find them. But I did come across while I was looking around, I found fucklapd.com, which lets anyone use facial recognition to instantly identify a cop.

So if they've got their badge number taped over, if you can still get a photo of their face, you can run it through this thing. And it runs up against a public database of 9,000 LAPD officers. Yeah, but they're not really the problem, are they, Jason?

Because these guys are not hiding their identities. They have badges. The problem is the fucking secret police force that's running around. At least the Nazis have the decency to wear brown shirts. Yeah, at least we can point them out. Well, these guys wear brown camo and balaclavas and all sorts of shit.

It's camo clan is what they are. They're the camo clan. It's flabbergasting to me that people are not, to use a bad turn of phrase right now, up in arms about this. These are secret police. We don't even know if they're police.

We don't know who the hell they are. Nope. And that is not America, people. That is... It is now. I guess it is now. Yeah. You're going to be real surprised when you come back, Brian. I'm sure I will. Real surprised. Yeah, but the thing is, these guys roll up with AR-15s and there's like 20 of them and they are just, you know, they're like ex-special forces guys.

You're not going to mess with them. Yeah, what are you going to do? They're terrifying. Yeah. And if you do try and mess with them, boom, you're in the van too. And you're up on assaulting a federal officer charge, even if you don't know if they are or not, because they don't fucking identify themselves. Yeah. Awesome. America.

Yeah. Oh, I'm sorry. We're being political again. Hey, no, I tied it into a website. Fucklapd.com. That's true. Tech. There you go. Yeah, there's another one that he did called Ice Spy, which is kind of out of date, but so it doesn't really work anymore. Why aren't people using Citizen? Oh, wait, too busy talking about Lady Gaga's dogs.

Yeah, well, Citizen's actually gotten somewhat better. You can get accurate information. It's still, it's about six hours late now. It used to be 24. When the helicopters were overhead, we'd be like, let's check Citizen tomorrow to see what happened. And it turned out that's kind of how it works. But they've been getting a little bit better, a little bit better.

But I did go to ring it back into tech a little bit. I talked about Warby Parker before when I got my last pair of glasses. I raved about it. I'm like, oh, my God, this is the best thing. The tech is great. Oh, app. They got the little swipey things. It's fucking phenomenal. Well, and the other thing, the thing that really made it phenomenal is they were about a third of what my glasses would cost at LensCrafters.

And, you know, I examined $2,000 and all that shit. Well, it ain't that way no more, Brian. What? They pulled an Uber? Yeah, they kind of did. They kind of did. I think I walked out of there for like for $400 for my two pair of glasses last time.

With all of the fixings, you know, all of the coatings and all the other crap on it. Take a guess at how much it cost yesterday, Brian. Let's go $800. $990. Actually, $995. That could be the tariffs being passed down to you, Jason.

I thought Warby Parker was American. Nothing's American, Jason. Nothing's American. That's right. That's right. So the thing that made Warby Parker great is no longer making it great again. So I think I might just... And the thing is, the glasses that I got for them are basically falling apart.

The older pair that I got from LensCrafters, the expensive ones, still are like in mint condition. So I don't think I can really... Justify it anymore. Yeah, I can't. But I can't really... Yeah, I can't really... I'm rescinding my recommendation for Warby Parker is what I'm trying to say.

So that whole try it on at home thing, you know, that kind of went the way of the Dodo once they got brick and mortar. So I don't know. I don't know. But running it back to what we were talking about, the mall was empty. Empty. I mean, I know malls haven't been really full for quite some time, but compared to what this usually is, it's about 90% less foot traffic.

Insane. And the U.S. is getting less foot traffic, especially from Norwegian tourists like Mads Mikkelsen, who says he was turned away at the border because of a photo of J.D. Vance on his phone. Well, that's kind of up for debate. You know, it's a lot of he said, she said going on right now.

But it's been in the news, so I just wanted to bring it up. But there is no real definitive answer on what happened. The government says it's because he was a junkie. He says it's because of Vance. Nobody really knows. But at least it got, you know, pictures of J.D. Vance looking like a big fat baby out there in the public even more.

So, when? I can't believe we're here, but here we are. So I was... We're getting ready to travel. Coming from Canada. And Canada has a guide to phone security if traveling to the USA, which is linked to the show notes. Here's a guide to locking down phones and other devices.

I have scanned my phone to ensure I did not have the J.D. Vance meme on it. And my wife and I will both be turning off the facial recognition features. And so it's passcode only, which they cannot compel you to give them. Correct. Yeah. So, Jesus fucking Christ, Jason.

You might want to delete all of the show art you made for this show for the past year and a half. Show art is not on the phone unless they open up Overcast and get... I guess they could be thought police, too. Well, they could be checking your text messages because you do text them to me and they could look there. I will delete our text thread before I get on the plane, Jason.

That's fucking sad. It is. It's sad. It's just... It's sad. In the news. Well, Jason, in all my life, I never thought I would read a headline like this.

The tyranny of big balls has come to an end. Great headline. It is. Edward Coristein, the 19-year-old given unprecedented access to some of the most private information on Americans, has reportedly quit his role at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, according to Wired.

Of course, you know, Elon was his daddy. And when daddy goes away, people tend to leave as well. So, Dodge is now a sinking ship, I believe. And so, he got out while the getting was good. Yeah. So, he went by big balls, hence the headline.

He was officially an employee of the GSA, but was working across multiple government agencies, according to Wired. He was rooting around in government systems for USAID, the Department of Education, the small... All the shit that we've been talking about for weeks now. So, eventually, he has basically said he's out.

So, he's no longer there. Big balls has left the building. Just when you think I'm out, they pull me back in because you can't keep the balls down. Big balls is now at the Social Security Administration, Brian. Yeah. Well, to quote the rise of Skywalker, somehow, big balls return.

Oh, he's bringing it back to Star Wars. I love it. Dave would be cracking up right now, Jason. He would. Too bad he doesn't listen to the show. Oh, well. Yeah. Speaking of Elon Musk, this is another good one. Shockingly, another lawsuit.

This guy's got like 19 of them going on at any given time. He's got more lawsuits than kids. And that is a tough putt, my friends. Yeah. Well, he fancies himself the innovator of our time. Disrupt could be his middle name. Technology, it seems, is in his DNA, which is spread to at least about 17 kids at the moment.

And yet, Elon Musk apparently, supposedly, has a secret Luddite streak. He says he does not use a computer. Then how does he play all those video games that he says he's so fucking good at, Brian? Hold on a second, Jason. Okay. That revelation did not come from a biography or a tell-all interview.

It actually did not even come from Elon. It came from his lawyers. It came from a legal filing in the high-stakes mudslinging lawsuit between Musk and OpenAI, where the future of artificial intelligence is on trial and hopefully everybody loses. In a legal letter filed on June 22nd, Musk's legal team pushed back against accusations from OpenAI that they were failing to turn over relevant documents by stating that Mr. Musk does not own a computer.

So we can't possibly hand over anything or any documents because there aren't any. No laptop. Nothing. Okay. There's one problem with that claim, Jason. Oh, okay. Go ahead. Go ahead. The mountain of fucking public evidence, including from Elon himself, that suggests otherwise.

Employees at X told Wired that Musk primarily works from his phone, but they also note that he has been seen using a laptop. More pointedly, Musk has referenced owning a computer in his own social media posts. On December 2024 post on X, he shared an image with the text, this is a picture of my laptop.

More recently, in May 2025, when asked about his gaming setup, Musk replied on X that he's still using my ancient laptop. Okay. Okay. There you go. There you go. I'm sure the, you know, his lawyer is named Grock.

So what's the easiest way to tell the judge that Elon can't give him any documents? Well, just tell him he doesn't have a computer, sir. Actually, Elon is not using Grock because Grock is famously anti-Elon. Although that could be the problem. That could be what's happening here.

Yeah. Sabotage. Well, going along the Elon path a little bit further, Tesla's inaugural robo-taxi rides have started in Austin, Texas. How's that going, Brian? Oh, just great if you don't like Elon or Tesla. Yeah, I know.

That's fucking phenomenal. The company launched its fully autonomous ride hailing service in Austin with a Tesla safety monitor accompanying the first riders, according to email invitations sent out to early access riders. It's unclear what capabilities the safety monitors have, but they will sit in the front passenger seat of a self-driving Model Y.

There are several parameters involved in this, including that users are limited to a geofenced area that excludes airports, could run into unavailability due to bad weather, and can only hail a robo-taxi between 6 a.m. and midnight. This restrictive launch will reportedly offer only 10 cars and come after a delay from the initial launch date of June 12th.

This is laying the groundwork for the eventual Cyber Cab release, which will never fucking happen, but it isn't expected to start production until at least 2026 now, according to the company. They are, of course, facing competition there from Waymo, which started offering its competing services in March to Austin residents and actually uses technology that works.

Now, how's it going, Jason, you asked? Yes, I am asking, Brian. At least one robo-taxi attempted to drive on the wrong side of the road, based on video posted to X and spotted by Bloomberg. The ride video shared by Rob Maurer is largely uneventful, with the Tesla navigating turns and lane mergers with few issues.

It doesn't say no issues, it says few issues. Except for around seven minutes or so into the ride, when the Tesla's wheel starts jerking back and forth, then the ride briefly crosses onto the wrong side of the road. A honking horn can be heard as the Tesla re-enters the correct lane over the double yellow line, which drivers aren't supposed to cross.

The Tesla may have corrected itself on its own or under the influence of someone monitoring the ride remotely, but we don't fucking know. That's not the only instance of potentially unsafe riding that Bloomberg has spotted. Early riders have shared multiple instances of robo-taxis going over the speed limit, though that might be more of a reflection of the cars driving around Tesla's vehicles than their collective need for speed.

And I did see this on X as well. Folks are building lists of all the Tesla robo-taxi failures, and it's important to remember what we're talking about. A fleet of less than 20 vehicles in under three days, in one of the smallest and easiest geofences possible, based on coverage from 100% fanboy influencers.

So it's not going well. No, it's not. It's not. I checked out Reddit last night, and there's just, yeah, the list is growing. 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 Meek Cleaver Colon, BKFC 94, Till vs. Romero.

Watch it live, only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com. And as I noted, both Uber, Waymo and Uber have launched their robo-taxi service in Atlanta now, as well as Austin.

Those seem to be going better because they use, you know, technology that works better. Not perfectly, but better. Yeah. And in continuing news along that vein, starting September 1st, fully autonomous cars will require a permit to operate in Texas. Yes, Texas, where you go to not have to deal with any government.

Like, enough of this shit. Where Elon moved a lot of his operations because no restrictions and no regulations. They are going to require restrictions and regulations on autonomous cars. Good for that. Yeah. Causation, correlation.

Yeah, well. Okay. All right. Moving on from all that crap. Now, I'll talk about something that used to be in our security, ha, segment before it became Star Wars, ha. The supposed mother of all data breaches has occurred, Jason. Basically, all data on the internet has been breached.

Yeah, supposed is the key word in this headline. It has been dubbed, as I said, the mother of all data breaches. The breach is said to involve some 16 billion user credentials and impacts a vast number of accounts on platforms like Facebook, Google, and Apple. This breach was initially reported by Cyber News, a site that focuses on web security, calling it one of the largest data breaches in history.

Actually, if the numbers are correct, that would be the largest data breach in history, at least that we know of. So, but other researchers are basically saying that this is just a meta collection of all the breaches that have occurred over the past some odd years, all just collated and smashed together.

Much like that, I could say that I have a mailing list of about 30 million people if I got together every single mailing list I collected from all the artists I worked for in my 20 plus years working in the industry, and if I smashed them all together and assumed any of them still worked. Yeah, yeah. And then called it a breach.

This is not a breach. This is basically a bunch of cyber criminals just putting all of their lists into one spot and passing it around. Yep. And yeah, it's been making the news. And it's, these guys at quote unquote cyber news need to get a fucking life because, yeah, they shit out this story.

They were the only ones to follow it. This really reminds me of, what's it, Ryan Holiday's book about how to, you know, how to game the news. Right. This, this story completely took over the news cycle for a couple of days. This, this actually hit the news before we did our last episode.

And I've been kind of watching it spread its tendrils around and it is fake news, fake news. It's, it's definitely not a, not a new breach. It is just a collection of all this stuff. But when you think of it, 16 billion user credentials in one spot is a pretty big thing to be able to find.

Yep. And yeah, I'd like a copy of it just to see. So I can, so I can remember some of my old passwords. I know. I haven't been able to get into Reddit for years. I know. Dave might be able to get back. You might be able to get on our fucking Discord channel.

Yeah. Somebody hand that over, please. Friend of the show, Fogarty sent me this and I thought it was beautiful. This is a, a post on blue sky from someone called Casey explosion. I'm going to be honest here. I think AI is going to do so much damage to the usable internet that even after it's inevitably crashes out, it's going to take years to disentangle from every space.

It's polluted like digital asbestos. It's going to be time consuming effort and likely expensive venture. Just apparently English, not first language, but the, the digital asbestos I think is the perfect analogy to what AI is doing. It is going to be a fucking mess to clear up and cost a fortune.

So I like digital asbestos. Yeah. If we even bother, let's just, if I get cancer, cancer, everybody get some cancer. You'll get some cancer. You'll get some cancer. Y'all get brain cancer from the digital asbestos. Yep. And in useless news, the meta oversight board is once again in the news because they can't really do anything.

They're completely unenforceable. Everything they say doesn't matter. And Zuck just ignores them anyways. Best job ever. But they are once again criticizing the social media company over its handling of AI generated contents, writing in its latest decision that its inability to enforce its rules consistently is incoherent and unjustifiable.

So what will be done about it? Nothing. Nothing. But yeah, it's all over the map. And it's, of course, being done without human review more often than not. And sometimes they'll label a post, they'll, they'll take down one post, but if there's been reposts, they'll let those keep going or vice versa.

It's just all over the map. There's, there's no consistency whatsoever to anything that they're doing over there. No, not at all. No. But it's par for the course. It's par for the course. Yes. It's what they've always done. So it's what they've done about everything and nothing ever gets better. And we just move on to the next problem.

I still want that job though. God damn. I know. I want to be on that board. Anyways, Anthropic has received a mixed result in a class action lawsuit by a group of authors who claim their company used their copyrighted creations without permission, which they did. On the positive side for the artificial intelligence company, Senior District Judge William Alsup of the US District Court for the Northern District of California determined that Anthropic's trainings of its AI tools on copyrighted works was protected as fair use.

Their ruling is one of the first that will likely set the foundation for legal precedents around what AI tools can read, what can and cannot do, which basically looks like it's fair game out there for all these AI companies to use whatever they want at the moment. Using copyrighted materials can be deemed fair use if the output is determined to be transformative or not a substitute for the original work.

So because it's not spitting back the book that it stole to do it, but just using it for training and using it for pattern recognition, that's fine. Yeah, there's two cases this week, the Anthropic case and the Meta case. They both just got handed down yesterday. And, you know, there's a lot.

I mean, the copyright wonks are blowing up about this. I've read so many articles. As they should be, because let me finish the ruling on this first one before I move on, because the one thing that he did say was that Anthropic is actually in trouble because they didn't pay for the copies of the books to begin with.

They used pirated copies. That's the no-no. So all these companies have to do is basically buy Barnes & Noble. They're fair game. Yeah. They just have to buy a copy of each and every book. That's where Anthropic is in trouble the most is because they – I think Meta's was on a couple hundred thousand books and Anthropic's on seven million.

And then we get to the movies and things like that. They have to buy copies of all this stuff is what it's basically going to come down to. So everybody that's ever published a book gets – Everybody gets $2. Two cents, dude. It's book royalty. Come on. I know. If anything. I know. But, you know, that's going to come up to some substantial money.

But, yeah, that was the only good news out of that ruling. Yeah. And the same thing with the Meta case. And that was the Sarah Silverman case. Yeah. They're saying that, yeah, it's transformative enough to meet the rules of copyright to make it fair use. And they're saying it's because of just how they've formatted their argument.

And they couldn't show harm. They couldn't show that it actually decreased sales of their book. It's all just speculative is the problem. They went to court too early because they didn't show that, oh, our book sales are going down faster than they normally would, which, you know, is a hard case to prove.

Yeah. It truly is a hard case to prove. And, but the fair use side of things, it's, you know, that is a gray area. And I read a really, there's some articles I linked in here from the EFF that are really worth going back and seeing what the EFF stance on it is too.

And they say, yeah, it is actually kind of fair use for a lot of this stuff. The, yeah, the fact that they stole the books outright, that's, you know, straight up, yeah. You can't, you can't do that shit. So that's going to, you know, Meta's going to get dinged for that. Anthropics is going to get dinged for that. And, oh, somebody might not get two cups of coffee at the, at the, you know, commissary this week for whatever fines they're going to get.

It's going to hurt Anthropic a lot more than it's going to hurt Meta, obviously. Yeah. But, you know, the case to keep an eye on right now is the Disney Mid-Journey case. Yep. Because there, you know, with words, it's, it's kind of tough to be able to show with the words.

Considering it's just pattern recognition. Again, you can't ask any of these things, spit me back Sarah Silverman's complete book. It's not going to do that. Right. It could, but it won't. The thing is, what the, what another side effect of the case is, is that the prompt engineer who creates something that is very similar to what Sarah Silverman's book would be.

And if they get it close enough, the prompt engineer who actually asked for it is the one that would be liable for the copyright because he is, he or she, or they, or them, is actively trying to create a derivative work from it that is not far off the original.

So that's, it's the, it's the, it's just a tool argument. We're just a platform. It's just a tool, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So yeah, this is going to be a lot to, a lot to digest over the coming days because that, the Disney one is really the, the real big one.

Yeah. And as per usual, I mean, again, it's, it's, it always comes down to, it's, it's not, it's not the written word. It's, it's when you get into visuals and when you get into Hollywood and you want to get, when you get into gaming, because that's where the real money is. Yep. And they have to be able to show harm. That's the, that's where you got, like, is this really fucking with our business?

Yeah. Cause if it's not, you know, and, um, what was it? The, uh, the training data, if you look at the training data, like some of these places have pulled in like 500 million images, right. But they distill that down to like anywhere between five, three and five terabytes of data.

That is like, you know, less than almost a bite per image when it comes down to it. So they're not, they can't actually store any of the original pieces of artwork in there. It's just descriptions of the artwork, which, you know, right there says, well, we're not creating a copy of it.

We're just, we're literally creating something new from it and we're learning from it, but we don't actually copy what you've created. So, you know, that's, that's, that's where this all is just a mind fuck. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's, it's going to be a mess.

It is going to be a fucking mess. Yep. So, uh, YouTube is going to add an AI slot button to their, to their site because they're going to turn on a feature in VO3, which is the new video tool, which is really kind of creepy to play with.

I've been making some stuff with it just to see how, how good it is. I mean, if that thing could get characters to, uh, have persistence between videos, Jesus Christ. Yeah. Goodbye, Hollywood. So, but you're going to be able to make, uh, shorts, YouTube shorts straight from VO3.

Right. Straight out of nothing. So it's just going to flood YouTube with the garbage that, uh, is just going to come out of this spreading. Yeah. Yeah. Too much asbestos. Uh, John Oliver actually dove in this week with an episode on last week tonight about AI slop. I fell asleep halfway through it, but it was, I mean, it's John Oliver.

So it was, you know, pick and choose your facts as it were. It's kind of like, uh, shoot the arrow or shoot the, uh, the side of a barn with an arrow and then run up and draw the, the, uh, bullseye around the arrow. But it was, it was fun. It's John Oliver.

It's fun to watch sometimes. It just, I stopped watching the show because it's generally sadness porn. Yeah. I haven't watched him or Bill Maher in years. Well, not years, but at least a year. Fuck Bill Maher. Uh, well, Brian, for the first time ever, social media has officially overtaken television as Americans' top source for news.

Yay. Not, you know, could go with news websites. According to the Reuters Institute 2025 digital news report, 54% of Americans. Now get their news from platforms like YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, edging out TV and news apps.

Mm-hmm. The trend is driven by younger audiences and right-leaning users who favor creator-led content over traditional journalism. In other words, bullshit. Yeah, bullshit over truth. Bullshit that confirms my personal feelings. Yeah. Uh, even, I mean, mainstream media now is just so bad.

No matter what. I get most of my news from fucking Substack nowadays, Phil. What are you going to do? Or Blue, Substack and Blue Sky. Yeah. Digital subscriptions may have peaked with only 20% of Americans paying for online news and most unwilling to shell out for bundles. AI-generated news is growing, especially in Asia, but remains distrusted in Europe and the U.S.

Smartphones now dominate morning news habits with nearly 60% of young Americans reaching for their phones first thing. Okay. Uh, well, here's the thing. And in a sign of the times, podcasts are more popular than print newspapers in the U.S. With YouTube, now the country's top podcast platform.

You start off with a great bit, a great bit at the beginning of the sentence, and then you just fucking shit on it at the end. God damn it. Yeah. Well, you know, again, Facebook for me has basically just become a news source because I get a lot of stuff for the show from there because I follow a lot of tech, uh, tech, different, uh, tech publications on Facebook.

So. I thought Facebook wasn't allowed to have news anymore. I thought that was the whole point of Facebook is that they can't have news links anymore. In Canada, I'm not allowed to post them, but I can follow U.S. companies that can post them or other companies. So I can see things that are posted and I can link, I can open the links, but I myself cannot post a news link on my feed.

Well, that just shows that Facebook obviously doesn't consider grumpy old geeks news because you can post links to us whenever you want. Yeah, that one works. It's weird. Well, I think it's a, yeah, I don't know who the fuck knows how their systems work. They don't even know. Have you ever tried to go through their customer service to try to fix a problem?

They have no idea. Let's ask the oversight board, Brian. Yes. Let's ask them. Yeah. So, yeah. And basically, yeah, same thing. Like I go to, I, there's my websites that I go to in the morning. I think Apple news is still pretty useful, but I mean, again, you and I are probably like in the top 0.01% in terms of like news consumers.

And, you know, I have NPR in the background on all day. Like, well, I'm not going to go that far. No, no, I don't own a sweater. I'm not going to listen to NPR. Jesus. Fair and balanced. Sure.

Sure. Nobody's fair and balanced anymore, Brian. Just yoga instructors. But we do definitely pay. I pay for more. I pay more for news than I do for any of my streaming platforms. Like, you know, TV crap.

Although I did. I did, Brian. I, I, I, I, I caved this week. I gave fucking Amazon $3. For what? Ads. I couldn't take it anymore. You're going to pay that per month? I had to. Are you watching that much on Amazon? Yeah.

America's Test Kitchen. The Next Generation. Watch that. God, you can't. God forbid you have to sit through an ad for that. There are seven to eight minutes of ads per episode. We're on season two. Just the, the, the time I'm like, it's $3 and it's just too much.

And, and they're showing us ads for rock climbing gear. I'm like, do you, we're on the, we're not going to go climb a fucking rock. We're not mountaineers. We're watching a show about cooking. How's those targeting ad platforms working? I'm just like, what kind of deal did these people get?

We should advertise there if it's that cheap. Jesus. Right. Oh, at least it'd be targeted for people sitting on their damn couch watching TV. I am not going to go climb a fucking mountain. So yeah, I can't. So you don't want to go on the Will Rogers hike with us when we come into town?

Will Rogers State Park? Yeah. Is there anything left? Oh, shit. Didn't think about that. Yeah. You might want to, you might want to check the news, Brian, because I don't know if you've noticed, but the Palisades ain't quite what it used to be. Okay.

Yeah. I'm going to have to reschedule my Saturday. Yeah, I think you might, because even just getting up PCH now, it's 25 miles an hour in one lane. So even to get to the entrance. Oh, God. Am I going to have to go to fucking Runyon and be with all the fucking influencers? You're going to hang with Kevin Smith. Oh, God.

Enjoy. Well, let's feel insignificant for a little bit. Brian here. Let's just round out the news. I already do, Jason. I already do. Let's just add some fuel to that fire. The first images from the largest camera ever built reveal millions of galaxies. Cool. This is the camera at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

That's where my favorite wine comes from. Not in America. So in just 10 hours of testing, the observatory captured light from millions of galaxies and discovered over 2,000 new asteroids, including seven near-Earth ones. None dangerous, unfortunately.

The telescope's massive 8.4-meter mirror and rapid-fire camera will scan the southern hemisphere's sky every few nights for the next decade, producing the most detailed time-lapse of the universe ever made. Scientists say Rubin will detect millions of objects nightly, helping to unravel cosmic mysteries like dark matter and dark energy, and a shit ton of goddamn communication satellites.

One image alone covers an area of the sky of size of 45 full moons and would take 400 HDTVs to display in full. That's not bad. Not bad. So set for its first official observations on July 4th, the Rubin Observatory is being hailed as a discovery machine that could redefine how we understand the universe.

Hey, Juan, we've been running this thing for five years, and all I see are fucking Starlink satellites. That's it. It's just a bunch of Starlinks. This January, Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship takes over the ocean.

The inaugural Brews Cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian Jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean. Massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and non-stop action. The lineup reveals coming soon.

Cabins are disappearing fast, and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com.

Media candy. I have terrible, terrible news, Brian. Yes. This is a three-pronged approach here. A, they're remaking Highlander. Bad. Bad. Bad. Don't do that. Don't do that. Just look what happened to The Crow. Highlander is a movie that should not be remade, just like The Crow.

There can be only one. Yeah. Second, Henry Cavill is going to play Conor McLeod. Henry Cavill is not Scottish. Although, to be fair, Conor McLeod was not Scottish in the first one. He was fairly French. Yes. Your point is?

Yeah. Yeah. Christopher Lambert did have a very horrible Scottish accent. Yeah. Sean Connery, on the other hand, who played a Spaniard, had a fun Scottish accent. Okay, so you're demanding accuracy in the remake that didn't exist.

I was drinking a lot when the first time it came out, Brian. Everybody sounded Scottish. Turns out I was actually watching Mike Myers. It's not Scottish. Just clap. Head. I'm the Highlander. Well, second up, they're going to cast Russell Crowe as Ramirez.

Oh, God. Yeah. I think after his Javert in Les Mis, he should not be allowed on screen anymore. Period. Never. The worst Javert ever. My dog could sing stars better than he could. Anyway, just no.

Stop it. Just no. Also, speaking of no, I watched part of The Amateur. Okay. With, what's his name? Rami Malek from, you know. Mr. Robot. Mr. Robot. That was it. But he was also in the Queen movie. He played Freddie Mercury.

He was. Much better in that movie than this movie. This movie is fucking dumb. We turned it off after about 20 minutes because it was so fucking dumb. And then we went to the, here's the thing. Then we went to The Accountant 2 with Ben Affleck.

Were you expecting that to be good? No. Which turned out, which made it awesome. So much better than The Amateur. We loved that movie. We loved The Accountant 2. It was terrible too, but terrible in a good way. Okay. That was fun.

It has the guy from The Punisher in it too. He was actually the best. He stole the show. He was fantastic in it. The Godfather of Harlem season four just wrapped. It definitely took a turn on the timeline this season. If you look up the historical accuracy on this, you will find out that no, not even close.

Not even close now. Yeah. Bumpy Johnson died in 68. And he's still alive and kicking in events that they portrayed that happened in 71. So yeah, they just gave up the ghost. Like, we're just going to run with it. Then I saw a show called In Vogue, the 90s on Hulu because we ran out of shit to watch.

First three episodes are fucking fantastic. It's like the rise of Vogue in the 90s and the supermodels, you know, Linda Evangelista, Claudia Schiffer, Naomi Campbell, all of that stuff and the rise of all that. When it gets to episode four, then it hits the Met Gala and just goes to shit.

So we scan the last four, skip the last four. But the first three, if you have any, I just had a girlfriend who was big into supermodels in the 90s. So I know everything about that era. So for me, it was a walk down memory lane. It was like you watching a Cure documentary, Brian. Oh, no, this would be the same for me too.

I mean, our college dorm rooms were plastered with the Linda Evangelista. Christy Turlington was always my favorite all over there. And then of course, you know, I don't know if you remember, but I did the guest website for quite some time. So a lot of those fashion spreads. Yeah, you did it and I did it.

And then that ended up becoming one of the first things that I did with my own company because we kind of stole them as a client for a while. So yeah, I remember a lot of this stuff. Yeah. I stole a lot of the materials they gave us too and took them home and put them on the wall. There were a lot of pirated Anna Nicole Smith photos running around my apartment back then.

Right. And to be clear, my girlfriend is the one that actually stole them. I think the Statue of Limitations has run out on that. I think so. Yeah, on some promo glossy 8x10s. But yeah, it was definitely really good. I think he would actually like it then for sure.

It was awesome. Well, as I mentioned on our Discord, and I can't remember if I mentioned it on the show last week or not, but it was movie night and my son had picked a Minecraft movie, which we watched over the weekend. Boy, he liked it. Okay.

He liked it. He liked it. I, you know, on movie night, we make a commitment to sit with him and watch the movie and I make popcorn and it's family bonding time and I fucking couldn't do it, Jason.

I could not sit through this movie. It was horrible. Jack Black is so fucking up his own Jack Black, Blackie, Black-assness now that I can't handle him. He's a, he's a parody. He plays a parody of a parody of a parody of a parody of a parody of a parody of himself at this point.

Oh, too bad. Horrible. It's horrible. This movie was horrible. Oh, man. Anyways, Cade loved it though. Yeah. Okay. I tell you, Jack Black peaked at the pick of Destiny for me. Yeah. Anything post-tenacious D, I mean, High Fidelity was awesome, but late Jack Black.

School of Rock was good. Late Jack Black is horrible. Yeah. Too bad. Too bad. I did, I did like a pandemic Jack Black though, when he would get on the mic and just do that thing he did from Rocky Horror was amazing. I mean, the guy can sing, give him that. Yeah, of course. He should stick to it.

Too bad. He wants those big paychecks though. So. Yeah. Yeah. I saw an article in Salon this week. Anthony Bourdain didn't say that, but we wish he did. And this is about that, get the cream sauce, have a pint at four. It's the internet's favorite Bourdain quote, which is actually not real and not from him.

This article delves into where it first appeared. It was a fan of Bourdain that wrote it with a caption on Etsy and then started to sell stuff with it. Anyways, it's a really great article. I hadn't thought about Bourdain in a little while, so they really kind of get into it. And man, I miss that guy.

And then I started to realize that Anthony Bourdain stuff was popping up everywhere and I couldn't quite figure out why until I saw another article on Salon, how to celebrate Bourdain day. A thing Tony probably would have hated, which is true.

And it's because it's Anthony Bourdain's birthday was on June 25th. It would have been a 69th birthday and it was started by his close friends, Eric Repair and Jose Andre the year after his death in 2018. It's an unofficial holiday to honor the chef the way he lived with curiosity, appetite and an honest eye for the world around him.

Okay. So happy Bourdain day, Jason. I figured alcohol and vitriol would be the way to celebrate. Well, that's how I personally celebrate it. Yeah. I do want to point out a website that I just absolutely love. It's called Quote Investigator.

If you want to go down the rabbit hole on a bunch of shit people never said, which I love to do, as you know. Yes. I can't fucking stand after this shit. It just tickles that itch. Doing the same thing over and over again is not the definition of insanity. It's the definition of practice.

And Einstein didn't say it ever. It came in a fucking novel in the 80s. Stop saying it. Yes, but since the entire internet is being rewritten by AI slop and the AI reads that stuff, it shall be true. You know what's great?

Oh, you know what AI has sucked up? All of those memes that are meant to piss people off that take like the Star Trek quote with the picture of the Star Wars guy. Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings and mix them all together. Yeah. AI is going to be so confused from that.

Oh, but I did look up, since you got me on Bourdain, I went and I looked up, I've got a first edition signed cookbook, the Appetites cookbook. Oh, yeah? That's cool. Those things are selling from anywhere from $300 to $650 on eBay. Like, hmm.

But then there are the ones that are the exact same book that people post that don't do any research and they sell for 20 bucks. Yes. But they do sell, they do sell. You have one, don't you? Not a signed one, but I do have one, yes. Oh, okay. Mine is stained, as Anthony Bourdain would have liked it, because I have actually cooked with it.

Oh, I haven't. Mine's been sitting. Mine has been moved 17 times. Mine has a lot of road miles on it, like Bourdain did. Right. I took it with me around the country, but yeah, it has never been cooked with, sadly. All right. In news that you won't care about, because I know you and I disagree on this, The Stand by Stephen King is one of my favorite novels of all time, and I enjoyed the first miniseries quite a lot.

Kind of, sort of enjoyed the second one, but not that much. Well, we're getting the third, but not a miniseries, which I don't quite understand, because The Stand, Stephen King's doorstop-sized 1978 post-apocalyptic novel, is getting a new adaptation from director Dog Lyman.

Instead of another series following in the footsteps of the 94 and 2020 versions, this will instead be a feature film. Yes, the book, which is 1,152 pages, is going to become a two-hour movie. Yeah, good luck with that.

As they state in the article, it will instantly become one of the hottest writing assignments in town, aka it is getting pumped directly into a large language model, saying, please condense this into a two-hour movie, and it will leave out all the good bits.

So that's going to suck. Yeah, that's pretty much going to suck. The one thing that got me thinking, The Dead Zone. Yes. Remember the, I mean, the TV series with Anthony Michael Hall is what I'm talking about. I never watched that. I did see the movie, but I never saw the miniseries.

I've never seen the movie, but I thoroughly loved the miniseries. I kind of want to go back and get that now. That was pretty good, I got to say. And the other Stephen King thing that I really like is The Langoliers. Oh yeah, I like that one too.

That two-night miniseries that they have. It took me forever to find in Sweden, but I finally got a copy of it. I'm going to slide you under the table. But it's in 4.3, sadly. All right. It kind of looks like you're watching Deep Space Nine.

Oh God, I can't do it. I tried. I really want to watch Deep Space Nine again too, and I can't do it. Yeah. Oh well. The 90s nostalgia is in full bloom, if you can tell around my house too, because the Oasis concert is coming up and my wife is very excited. But I saw a great article over on the UK Times website.

The boys got sex, I got poetry. What Britpop was like for women. So it says, Oasis are back along with a wave of 90s nostalgia, but was Britpop so much fun for women in bands as it was for the guys? We asked the lead singers of Lush, Sleeper, and Echo Belly. Lush and Sleeper, two of my favorite bands from that era.

Never really got too into Echo Belly, but as they popped up in my AI curated playlist sometimes, I've started to enjoy it a lot more than I did back then. So it's a really good article about how it was like being a woman fronting a band back then as opposed to the guys, because it was a very sexist culture back then.

Yeah. Yeah. So, and then speaking of bands of an earlier era, there's a podcast called The Story Behind the Song, which I don't listen to too often because I actually can't stand the host. He makes everything about himself and it's so frustrating.

Your job is to interview the star. They're the star. It's not about you, buddy. Kara Swisher. Oh, I'm sorry. Wrong show. Wrong show. Wrong show. But they talked to the Bengals' Suzanne Hoffs about the song Eternal Flame, which is a great track and I love the Bengals and I particularly love Suzanne Hoffs.

So I really enjoyed listening to it. But of course he did make it about himself so many times. I was at that show of yours. Oh, I was, I lived in Laurel Canyon for a while. Who the fuck cares? Shut the fuck up. Oh God. Well, speaking of making it about yourself, I went on, I went on Kevin Rose's new podcast less than one this week.

Shut the fuck up. Yeah, pretty much. Nobody cares. Nobody does. No, I listened to it, Jason. I thought it was a, it was a really good episode. I think it was great that you actually talked about it a lot. So kudos to you. Oh, thank you. I can't believe you listened to it. No, I actually really did.

And then as I was, I did make it a little bit about me, Jason. Okay. Because as I was listening to you and Kevin talk about it, I was like, you know, I've, I've always enjoyed drinking. I, I've been a heavy drinker at points and times in my life. I've definitely scaled that back a lot recently, but I've always had a little bit of a niggling feeling in the back of my mind.

Am I an alcoholic? And you guys answered that question for me. No, I am fucking not. You're not. You're definitely not. I am absolutely not an alcoholic. No, no, you're not. No, you're not. But yeah, this is an hour and a half of me and Kevin talking about something.

And I don't even, I, I drank for 30 years, like pretty consistently. So this is an hour and a half, like snippet. Yeah. Huge swaths. No, I mean, there, there was definitely like segments of your life that you did not touch on and which I knew you quite well. Yeah. Yeah.

The early days in tech in Hollywood, I didn't even touch on. I didn't talk about my James Cameron story or any of that stuff. So, uh, we're going to be doing this kind of fairly often. So I think there's going to be like a once a month at once, every two month thing where Kevin and I get together and talk about, cause he's, he's on the path.

So, you know, it's a, it's a really good show. The first episode is with Jason Freed from 37 signals. And, uh, it was, it was really good too. So it's, it's an audio only podcast. Thank you, Jesus. And, uh, we recorded it over at my, in my garage, my new garage studio, since I don't have a proper studio anymore.

But no, it was very well done, Jason. Thank you. Thank you. Link is in the show notes. Go check it out.

This January bare knuckle fighting championship takes over the ocean. The inaugural bruise cruise sails from Miami to the Bahamas aboard the Norwegian jewel. Three straight days with pool deck bare knuckle fights in the Caribbean, massive parties, beach events, DJs, cigars, tequila tastings, and nonstop action.

The lineup reveals coming soon. Cabins are disappearing fast and the prices won't stay this low. Reserve your spot with just $200 down at BKFSEA.com. Apps and doodads. Brian, do you use Safari on your iPhone or do you use Brave or a different browser?

I actually use Chrome on my iPhone. Okay. Yeah, you probably won't run into this problem then. I use Brave and I also have all of the Google apps on my phone. Now, these tricky motherfuckers at Google, every time I use Brave to search Google, it tries to open the Google app.

Oh, that's annoying. Oh, God. And sometimes if I leave Brave and I come back, it will automatically, without even asking me, switch over whatever the current query is in the open tab to the Google app. So annoying. I mean, that is some seriously dark pattern shit right there.

That is. So if you do use Brave and you see this popping up and you are annoyed as I was, I put a link in the show notes on how to fix it. So there's some settings in Brave that you can go and say, no, no, no, no, no, not on my watch, buddy. And then it never happens again. Well, big changes are coming to Windows, Jason.

The notorious blue screen of death is finally headed to a junkyard upstate. The error message has been a key part of the Windows experience for almost 40 years. And boy, do I remember it well. And there's computers. Oh, God. Death. Window computers are still going to crash. So there needs to be some sort of error screen.

They are transitioning to, wait for it, a black screen of death. Dun, dun, dun. It will be black, as the name suggests. None more black. And there will be no cutesy frowny face or PR code. It'll just be a black screen with a short message that tells users they need to restart.

Okay. That seems unhelpful. The new BSOD recalls the black screen shown during a Windows update, but it will list the stop code and system driver that contributed to the crash. Okay. Thank God for that. So it's not just telling us that we need to restart. That actually is going to be useful.

Not that I use Windows anymore. This will debut alongside the quick machine recovery feature. This tool is designed to restore machines that won't boot. These changes are being made in the wake of last year's CrowdStrike incident that crashed over 8 million Windows devices. And of course, the internet is already a flurry with Spinal Tap memes.

I think he's right. There's something about this that's so black. It's like, how much more black could this be? And the answer is none. None more black. I think you're rationalizing this whole thing into something that you did on purpose. And Phillips Hue is in the news.

Their prices are going up in the U.S. next month, and you can officially know who to blame. Hint, it rhymes with rump. Okay. Parent company Signify told Hueblog that its price increases are a direct result of tariffs. See how easy that was, Amazon? Yeah, there you go.

Yep, there you go. Easy peasy. Yeah, they have no problems mincing words about this. The trade war is the culprit. Signify will increase prices on our Phillips Hue portfolio in the U.S. effective July 1st as a direct result of tariffs. We are committed to providing consumers with high quality products and features that make smart lighting extraordinary.

We reserve the right to modify prices based on new or additional tariffs becoming effective in the future. So it's more expensive. You're paying for it. There you go. The name Hueblog got me thinking. I'm like, you know, if I was in their marketing department, the first thing I would do would be to hire Hue Laurie, Hue Jackman, and Hue, Hue Grant, and have the three of them as the Hues.

They could wear three different colored suits. No, they could wear those Red Hot Chili Peppers light bulb outfits that they wore for Glastonbury or whatever the hell they wore it for. Oh, God. See, I'm a marketing genius. You are. You are. iPhone users have said Apple is not a marketing genius this week because I don't know if you got one, Brian, but I got an alert from my wallet app that tells me the new F1 movie is out and that I can get cheap tickets.

I did. This is almost as annoying as the U2 album showing up in my library without me asking for it. Exactly. The first thing I thought, I'm like, they're doing it again. Did they not learn? Did they not learn? Obviously, that person retired and a new person came up. Quote, unquote, retired. Yeah.

Yeah, I got it as well. It was very annoying. Yep. So people are pissed off about that. But what are you going to do? It's your wallet app. I don't want an ad in my wallet. I want money in my wallet, but Apple keeps taking it. The only ads I should be getting in my wallet are for Trojan. Dun, dun, dun.

Beyond that age at this point. Anyways, the HDMI forum, which develops and manages HDMI specifications, has officially launched the final and full specs for HDMI version 2.2. This was designed to make it significantly easier to send videos with higher refresh rates and resolutions to modern TVs, such as those with 4K and 8K displays.

So these will be rolling out soon, which is pretty cool. Yeah, more cables to buy. More expensive cables that we can upgrade with. Yes. The dark side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave.

Podcast superhost Dave Bittner decodes things all things cyber on the cyberwire every day. I can talk good today. Exposes deception with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans. Dives deep into privacy with Ben Yellen on caveat. Breaks down industrial cybersecurity on Control Loop and even brings the laughs on only malware in the building.

Hello, Dave. Hello. I'm thinking all the things. You're thinking all the things, sir. Jason's coming to us from Alabama today. Alabama today. Alabama. Alabama. Yeah. Yep. Thinking it all. Well, gentlemen, I am pleased to say that last night I completed my Andor viewing.

All right. And? Yes. Oh, it was amazing. Yeah. So good. Best Star Wars series so far. Hands down. So, all right. Let me ask you this. We have spoken before about my view that while Star Wars, the original Star Wars is my favorite movie.

Mm-hmm. I concede, I guess, that Empire Strikes Back is the best of the Star Wars movies. Yes. So the highest quality. Yes. So here's my question. Is the Andor season or Andor series taken as a whole better than Empire Strikes Back?

If Andor existed in a universe in which there was no Star Wars A New Hope and no Empire Strikes Back, Andor would not be as good as it is. That is true. It absolutely relies on what came before. That is my qualified answer in which I am hiding behind.

I see. So you've got the Old Testament and the New Testament. There would be no New Testament. Right. If there weren't an angry, wrathful God to start with. Yes. All right. That's a view. The thing is, it's like one has lightsabers and one doesn't.

Right. But I think this... That's kind of a defining characteristic for me is that it must have lightsabers at some point. There's a Death Star. I'm going with Brian with the fact that it wouldn't exist without the others. So I might be on Team Brian here. Yeah. It's a very good side plot. Yeah.

Yeah. The best of the side plots. Right. So what's your answer, Dave? Well, I... He's a Mon Mothma fan. She's dancing and she's drunk and, you know, next... First he wants to go antiquing with some crazy actress and now he's doing this.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Give me my space MILFs, I guess. Space mama. Yeah. I don't know. I mean, it is an unfair question to ask because whether there's 30 or 40 years in between the two of them.

I can tell you it is much better than the Book of Boba Fett. Yes. Yes. Yeah. That's true. But it seems to me like there's even something different about this than any of the other series. Yes. It's very serious.

It's very political. It is not... There is no part of this that is in any way, shape, or form for children. Right. As opposed... Every other show has at least been touched upon with, like, this is for the kids. Here's the lightsaber. Here's the good guy. Here's the bad guy. There's no moral gray areas.

This is all moral gray. Right. Yeah. So maybe it's just that I'm seeing... This appeals to me at the age I am now. Yes. In the same way that Empire Strikes Back appealed to 10-year-old me. So, yeah, it's impossible to look back through the lens of nostalgia.

But... Did you watch Rogue One after? No. It didn't have time, but we're planning on watching Rogue One on Sunday, I believe. So, coming up. There you go. We did two episodes back-to-back last night to wrap it up, so we were... Yeah, that's a lot.

We were... We needed a breather. Yeah. But, boy, was it good. Oh, so much fun when... What's-his-name? K2SO shows up? The Imperial droid? Yeah. Yeah.

Such good comic relief. I was talking with my son about how he basically takes the C-3PO role... Yes. ...of being the complaining droid. But, no, my son said, but he's so much better than C-3PO. And I said, really? How so?

He said, well, he's a badass, you know? Yeah, he kicks ass. Yeah, yeah. And he's not as whiny. I was like, oh, he is pretty much... He's pretty whiny. He's pretty whiny. It's just you don't want to tell him. Yeah. I guess he's a little less deferential. There's going to be no shut-up goldenrods.

Right. Right. Shut him up or shut him down. Yeah. So, very well done. And I'm looking forward to heading into another viewing of Rogue One with this now as perspective. And I'm just really happy that we have this kind of quality Star Wars being produced right now.

I agree. So, it's time well spent. Yeah. I agree. It was very good. You should at least watch the last five minutes. Watch the walking through the camp montage right before you go into Rogue One. Okay. Just do that for me. Okay. Just to set the mood and the tone.

Yeah. That's a great idea. That's a great idea. And boy, did they give Cassian a hero's walk at the end there. Sure did. It was the slow-mo strut through camp. Oh, boy. It was pretty good. Yeah. Very good. In related Star Wars news, the official Star Wars website, to sit along its own interactive timeline of the eras of Star Wars past and future, released an updated, semi-interactive map of the Star Wars galaxy.

Have you looked at this? It is awesome. Yeah. Because I need more things to waste time on. They're very good at wasting our time. It needs to be more interactive. They should have spent more time on this because it is pretty badass.

Mm-hmm. I want to be able to click on movie or series and have it trace all the different places they go to. There are many things I want to see from this map. Yeah. Sound effects, you know. Yeah. All of it. All of it. Starts playing the movies. You know. Sure. Clips. Yeah.

But very cool. I thought it's a really neat addition to their site. Right. And that they invested in this. Yeah. Mm-hmm. You know? Yeah. Absolutely. You can do that when you got mouse money. Yeah. I guess so. You know, I learned something. I was doing a – oh, God.

I went down a rat hole of R2-D2 builders. And one thing – and one of the rat holes I went down was an exhaustive history of the original half dozen or so R2-D2s that were built for A New Hope.

And how people have checked which one is which and screen accuracy and how they differ from each other and this, that, and the other thing. And one of the things I learned – well, a couple of things. First of all, there is no canon version of R2-D2.

Like, because he changes from shot to shot in A New Hope, there's no real settled opinion of which one is the actual R2-D2, which I guess makes it a little – well, both makes it easier and harder for the builders. But the other thing I learned was that when Disney bought Star Wars, George Lucas got to keep all the stuff.

So they had to build all new R2-D2s for the new movies. Right. Because they didn't get to use the old ones. Right. So isn't that interesting? That's a good part of the deal for George, I guess. Definitely. If he ever hits hard times, he can sell that stuff.

Right. You know, once he plows through the five billion. Yeah. Yeah. If he goes down the Coppola path. Yeah. Well, the new museum is opening up soon here in L.A. Oh, yeah? So maybe some of it will be there. Have you guys seen the – have you seen the thing?

Yeah. The museum? It's amazing. Oh, it's stunning. I can't wait. I cannot wait for that thing to open. It is just – it's not until next year still, but just the campus is beautiful. It looks like a spaceship. It is so cool. Is it a Star Wars museum? No, it's basically a fiction museum, like a storytelling museum, I believe.

Okay. Yeah, it's called the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art. I'll put a link in the show notes. Okay. And you can take a look at the building. It is just unbelievably beautiful. Wow. We'll all have a good time wandering around in the Howard the Duck wing. That's getting its own thing, man, down the street.

It'll be a men's room. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. We got some feedback, actually. I got some feedback. I think he copied you on this, Jason, over on the Fediverse.

This is from Grim Ghost, who said, So just listen to last week's GOG and Dave with your most recent download. Just check Amazon or AliExpress for the recent Ambernick devices. They come in a variety of form factors, sure to fill you with nostalgia.

They will make good use of your downloads. So remember we were talking about MAME emulators and all that kind of stuff. Yes. Well, I placed an order. So this is basically, there's two form factors. There's one that looks like a Nintendo Switch, and there's one that looks like a Game Boy.

I've ordered the Switch version, and it looks like this is just a device that is fairly high quality, and its purpose in life is to run emulated old games. There you go. And what more do I need? Yeah.

There you go. Actually, after we had talked about that the other week, I ended up taking my kid. I think he had passed this next swim level or something like that, and we promised him a new game for his Switch. So we went down to the local game shop, which has all the Funko things, and then all the games and used games and all that sort of stuff.

And I looked over, they had a glass container where you check out, and lo and behold, there were cartridges from Atari, Super NES, all that stuff that you guys are talking about. And I was like, surely this isn't a big thing. Oh, it's a thing. Yeah, I told you. There are all these old cartridges everywhere, man.

It was crazy. Well, my son said to me just, I think, day before yesterday, he said I was home, and I was going to – I decided I wanted to play Mario Kart. And I realized that my brother had borrowed my Mario Kart cartridge, and I couldn't play it.

And I said, Mario Kart cartridge? You have a Mario Kart cartridge on your Switch? He said, yeah, there's like two games I have on my Switch that are actually cartridges. But now, you know, pretty much everything he does now is downloads. Right. Yeah. Yeah, there are completists out there who, you know, people want to have the entire Atari 2600 collection.

Gotta say, I was tempted, but I got over it really quickly. They were selling a 2600, too, and I was like, oh, if they had the Odyssey 2000, I would pick that up. I just – you know, my experience and advice is that you can quell much of that thirst through emulators, you know, just enough to keep you from spending a lot of money.

Because for me, anyway, a lot of the nostalgia is about quantity, not quality. So I'm like, oh, I want to play this. Oh, I want to play that. Oh, I want to play this. But I don't want to play any of them for very long because most of them actually suck. Yeah. And you know what the emulators don't require?

Wife approval. That's true. Or boss approval. Oh, man, I'm looking at these pictures you posted, Jason. This museum is gorgeous. Isn't that going to be cool? Yeah.

Yeah. It's going to be very neat. Very neat. Wow. Speaking of very neat, I saw something that I just wish I had when I was a kid. It's called the Dragon Grip, martial arts sound effect toy. It's basically a handheld stick that you can press buttons on to make noises like you're kung fu fighting.

Yeah. Right. It's a stupid, simple idea, but man, I wish I had this when I was a kid. You know, I pulled this up to look at it, and my kid was actually at home at the time. And as I was watching this, my first thought was, this is so ridiculous. And then my kid flew past me going, And I was like, huh, I guess I should put this in the cart.

I was going to say, Christmas is coming. Yep. You know what? Actually, this reminds me, this is probably 10 years ago. I was doing some motion graphics work, and one of my colleagues, I asked one of my colleagues to come in and take a look at what I was doing. And I was walking through some stuff, and about halfway through the little demo I was giving him, he goes, you know, it's really comforting for me to know that I'm not the only one who makes sound effects

when I'm manipulating the mouse. I was like, I said, what do you mean? And you go, because I was like, zoop, boop, up, zoop, zoop, zoop, zoop, boop, boop, boop, boop. So we'll move this over here, zoop, and we'll click here, boop, you know.

And I didn't even know I was doing it, but I totally was doing it. And I don't know if I was doing it just because he was in the room or whatever, but I'm okay with it, you know, whatever. Whatever gets you through the day. It's so funny. I made a video one time of me playing, throwing the ball for the dogs, and I too didn't realize I made sound effects.

So I'm throwing the ball, I'm going, boop. Yeah. Right, exactly. And I didn't, even when I made the, when I posted the video, I didn't even pay attention to it. And somebody's like, your sound effects are so cute. I'm like, what? And I went back and I listened. I'm like, oh, I feel like a dork. The only thing better than sound effects, and it made me think of the family guy when he had his own personal soundtrack for the day for that episode.

Most hilarious thing. I want my own soundtrack. Yeah. I used to do that with my, my dad had an accordion in the basement, and I never did it, but I had this giant peacoat, like a military peacoat, but the pockets could go in, like it had holes that you could go all the way through. So I'd button up the coat, put the accordion on underneath, and I would play the accordion as I walked around.

I mean, I did have my version of that. My local pub in my 20s and early 30s at that point in time had the touchtone system. Did you remember that, Jason? It was a system where it was a jukebox for the pub, and you could play money, but then they moved to an app.

So I would start to play my entry song as I was walking down the block. Yes, I do remember that. I remember that, yeah. We'd be sitting there waiting, and your song would come on. We're like, oh, he's coming. He comes flying. Oh, man. Yep. That's brilliant. I totally remember that.

That was great. Everybody should, somebody should have just that as being the product, right? That all it does is makes entry music, and like all the lights dim, and there's a spotlight when you walk in the door. People would pay for that. I paid, I paid a lot of money to, because I would, you know, other people would have already paid, but you could pay to usurp their choices, so my song would come on immediately.

Dude, I was talking to my friend John Sylvain the other day, and he's got a home kit that he was having problems with, but he's got it set up, so when he walks in the door to his apartment, it plays one of his favorite songs. That's awesome. Because he was telling me he went to the Barenaked Ladies concert the other night, and when he came home and opened his door, he was playing Barenaked Ladies for him.

Questionable taste in music, but yeah. I'm not going to yuck on another man's yum, but I just thought it was cool. I'm like, okay, if home kit worked like it was advertised, and you could do that all the time, that would be kind of neat. It would also tip off if your wife's having an affair, so she could get the guy out of the house sooner, but...

Here comes my husband. How can you tell? The Indiana Jones theme is playing. How come every time my wife walks in the house, it starts playing the theme from Shaft? That's right. Oh, my. Every time... Every time the groundskeeper comes by.

The pool boy. Sexy music starts playing. Right. Honey? I didn't know she liked Barry White so much. Yeah, whatever. Whatever gets you through the day, right? I put a link in here for an interesting little video I found that I think helps amplify all of our...

The three of our disdain for blue microphones. For blue Yetis, I guess. I'm on one now. What are you talking about? For blue Yetis. All right. Me and Jason's disdain for... And it's mostly having to walk guests through using...

Getting the most out of their blue Yetis, right? By throwing it in the trash, yes. Yep. Right. Exactly. Usually that starts with getting them to talk into the right part of the microphone because they talk into the top of it. But there's a nice little video about the history of blue microphones and how they came to

be who they are today and their downfall and part of why the current line stinks and that they really don't exist anymore. And one thing I learned was that the L in blue stands for Latvian.

They're a Latvian company. Did not know that. Yeah. Yeah. They have an interesting history of making microphones that you can hear a dog fart three houses away with. Not hear the person talking into it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Because it's pointed in the wrong directions. And it's a condenser microphone, not a dynamic microphone.

So no podcaster should ever use it unless they're trained in the audio arts. But everybody buys them. Now, the funny thing is the blue snowball you could buy at CVS for a good long time. And I'm like, do you want to start a podcast with a piece of high-tech technical equipment that you bought next to your NyQuil? Right.

No. No. So. Well, the price is right. And I guess it looks good. Meanwhile, I have my show notes written down on my CVS receipt because it's so fucking lucky. Yeah. Who needs to buy a notepad? So the final thing I put in here was something I stumbled across.

And boy, if I had a garage. Who are these people with this time and money? I don't know, but I'm glad they're out there. Me too. This is a YouTube video of, I'm going to say, a couple who built in their garage a miniature version of Star Tours from Disneyland.

And it looks like a miniature version of the Star Tours vehicle. It only holds three people. It is manually operated by two people in the back of the ride manipulating a couple of two by fours.

It does look like you went to Latvian Disneyland. Yeah, exactly, exactly, right. And, you know, it doesn't have all the axis of rotation that the original does. But you know what? Doesn't matter. It's like Grandpa's just shaking it in the back.

Yeah. I mean, the kids are loving it. They're absolutely loving it. And the guy and the gal who owned the place are dressed up like Han Solo and Princess Leia and Darth Vader comes out. I suspect this must have been taking place around Halloween.

You know, it just seems like a perfect part of a Halloween tour kind of thing. It's somewhere in the video. Somebody says that they're waiting for an hour for their turn to ride it. But yeah, that's pretty good, man. I'm impressed. It really is.

I mean, just and they're doing it for the neighborhood kids, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Screw the kids. Yeah, exactly. Well, the problem, the only problem with this. I'm going to come to the nighttime ride with a margarita. Yeah. The only problem with this is because it's manually operated.

Yeah. If you want to ride it, you got to get somebody else to do all the moves. Yeah. And they're never going to be up to your standard for doing all the moves. But because you have to have the ride memorized. Jason, I said two rights. Good God.

I like speed to end or. I should have got Dave to do this. He understands. That's right. That's right. Her professional quality and dedication. Dave would be too busy trying to hook up a solar panel to figure out how the actuators can work. That's true.

To make the whole thing off the grid. Yeah. We've got no power. We better get Scotty. Oh, wait. Universe creep. Yeah. I just, I don't know. It's just a little project that makes me happy. So. It's very cool. We need as much happiness as we can in today's world.

So. All right. That's what I have this week. Thank you, gents. Thanks, Dave. Next week we're off for 4th of July. Oh, yes, indeed. All right. We'll see you in a couple weeks. Yeah. All right. Take care. Bye. Over at Patreon, we've got two new patrons, Gene and Rick, and Jeff upped their pledge.

Woo-hoo. Thank you. And from the archives, Michael, Dana, Ryan, JC, Don, Christian, Jason, Ralph, Joshua, and Barrett. We thank you all so very, very much. All right. Thank you all. Over at PayPal, we've got Charlie, Jen's, Joseph, Gordon with a $25 donation.

And Susan said, hold my beer. Here's 50 bucks. Woo-hoo. Over at the tip jar, we've got Ross and Jennifer, and James picked up some merch. Yahoo! Woo-hoo. Just a quick reminder to let everybody know, if you want to support the show, you can go to patreon.com slash GOG.

And for as little as $3 a month, you can help keep the show on the air. You can give us more if you want. We take it. And if you like, if you really like, you can pay for the whole year up front and get a discount. We don't know why they give you a discount, but they do. But anyway, we like your money because it keeps us on the air.

So please, patreon.com slash GOG. Oh, oh, that's right. And you do get the show early, ad free, and in high definition. They give the discount, Jason, because they figured out they're getting dinged for credit card charges and they don't pay, they pay less. So they're saving you that much. That's why.

There we go. See, Brian, always, always pulling back the curtain of commerce. That's you. That's what they call me, the curtain of commerce. Yep. Quick condolences to my cousin Dwight this week. He lost his father and I lost an uncle this week. Uncle Denny died.

He was a hell of a guy and he will be missed. Condolences to you and your family, Jason. Thank you very much, Brian. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmes. I'm Jason Filippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 703.

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Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.GOG.show. 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 Meek Pleaver Cullen.

BKFC 94. Till vs. Romero. Watch it live only on DAZN. Sign up now at DAZN.com.