730: Ethical Broads

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 snowy where you're at. It is. It is very snowy. It is very cold. We're having an Arctic blast. We're having the coldest temperatures this weekend. Then we've had since like the 40s or something like that. And we're supposed to get another 30 centimeters of snow on Sunday.

What's a centimeter? What is a centimeter? It's the thing the rest of the world uses, Jason. Like democracy. Anyways, we got a bit of follow up here. Following up on the ex-AI nudies. Nudies. Yes, the AI generated nudes that have been in the news. Nudes. That's what I was going to say.

California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sent a seasoned assist letter to ex-AI days after his office launched an official investigation of the company over reports that Grok was generating non-consensual nudies. Well, not entirely nudies, but ex-AI and Grok have been under fire for taking images of real individuals and sometimes minors and putting them in revealing clothing like bikinis upon random users' requests.

Now, so, you know, California is firing back at this. It's been blocked in a couple of different countries, all that sort of stuff. X changed its policies after the issue broke out and prevented the Grok accounts from being able to edit images of real people into revealing clothing. Unless you're using your handy-dandy VPN to go to countries where they don't have any kind of problems with it.

So that was going on for a while. Last I heard, and I Googled a little bit before we started our show just to see what was going on, they have officially now shut off the tap for you pervs and pedos out there. So the Republicans, I don't know what they're doing with their time right now.

They've turned it off, but as we know, you can pretty much make an AI do whatever you want to with some crafting of the crowd. Apparently not. There's some angry young men in Reddit that say that now ex-AI is the most moderated of all the generational AIs out there right now.

So they've swung the pendulum, the donkey dick, the other direction, as it were. So as of right now, you can no longer use pedo-in-charge Elon Musk's pedo machine to do pedos. Mako. Musk always chickens out. Yeah, taco and Mako.

All right. Well, some other good news from the ex-AI camp. The EPA just ruled that Elon Musk's AI company, ex-AI, was illegally generating its own power for its Tennessee data centers using dozens of methane gas turbines without proper air permits. Now, we covered this story many months ago, Brian, and it's finally nice to see some movement, I gotta say.

Sure, sure. Gas turbines have been running for months without proper permits and defouling the Tennessee air. But somebody's going to do something about it now? Finally, yes. Well, see, there was a loophole that Elon was trying to get around where it's like, hey, you know, those things can be in one place for 364 days, but if you move them that last day, then it doesn't count.

Well, they closed that loophole. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, yeah, at one point he had 35 of these things powering Colossus I, the one near Memphis. And the NAACP is the one that really stepped up and really, you know, kind of drove this one home, which is really good.

The problem with those methane turbines is they emit nitrogen oxides, which are linked to asthma, cancer, and other respiratory diseases in a neighborhood that is already basically just, you know, inundated with all of the industrial waste from the neighboring factories and stuff like that.

So, you're telling me that in addition to basically draining rivers dry, sucking up all the power, driving up people's power bills, now we're also giving people asthma, cancer, and other respiratory diseases all for something nobody wants. Bikinis, Brian, all for bikinis.

Right. Children in bikinis, that's right. So, yeah, I'm glad that they're actually doing something now. And, you know, this is just so antithetical, like you just said, to everything that even Musk has talked about. He's like, we're going to save the planet with our electric cars. Woo, woo, hippie, hippie, dippy shit.

No, no, I don't care. As long as I get mine, I'm going to do whatever it takes. I'm going to burn down whatever forest I need to. I'm going to burn down whatever low-income neighborhood I have to just so I can have my fucking toys. Well, let's move over to our other friend in the Bazilda Gillionaire Club.

The FTC is taking another swing at Meta, appealing the November ruling that said Facebook doesn't illegally monopolize personal social networking. They completely legally do it. They're beating their head against the wall because what they're trying to do is reverse the longstanding ruling that, oh, it was okay for Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp, you know, saying that, oh, no, that's, you know, the whole competition thing.

No, it doesn't matter now because they're basically, the judge was ruling on current state, you know, the current state of the industry, not the state of the industry when the thing happened. So basically the FTC says we want to do over in a new judge. Yeah, I don't know if that works that way.

No, last I heard there's still something called double indemnity. Isn't this double jeopardy? I don't remember. I'm not a lawyer. That's my wife. Yeah, go ask your wife. No, there was a really good movie with Ashley Judd back when she was super hot and not married to a NASCAR driver.

So anyway, yeah, we're going to see what happens here when they go back to court. And if Zuck's buddy-buddy-ness with the Trump administration will stick or not, I don't think it's going to stick. I don't think so either, but we'll see. I mean, one more check. That's all he got to do. He's got to write one more check, right? That's how you bring it back.

In the news. Well, we've got a lot of news about attempts without the net police, as we've always asked, who's going to enforce these things? But attempts to regulate the Internet. Washington state residents may soon be forced to produce IDs before whipping out their, well, anyways, before getting onto websites with pornographic content.

You know, grab that wallet as the pants go down, I suppose. With the state's House of Representatives, Representative Mary Leavitt introduced House Bill 2112, which is informally known as the Keep Our Children's Safe Act. And I believe it's also a Rush album, 2112, I'm pretty sure.

In practical terms, those living in Washington state could see websites asking for digital ID or demanding that users go through an age verification system that requests a government-issued ID. If the website that has more than one-third of its content being sexual material harmful to minors is found not following these rules, the state's attorney general can pursue steep civil penalties.

This sounds familiar. It's because we've talked about all the other states that have passed similar constraints recently. It's very similar to Texas's age verification law that went into effect on September 2023 and was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. And like the Texas law, several groups have expressed disapproval of the bill during the public hearing at the House committee level.

As reported by the Seattle Times, groups included the ACLU, Lavender Rights Projects, and the Northwest Progressive Institute, which are warning of privacy risks related to potential JADA breaches and the loose definition of sexual material harmful to minors in the bill's language. Now, my understanding of how most of these systems are working is that they do not keep on file your government ID photos and things of that nature.

It is check and delete. Well, set visibility to zero. I don't know. Theoretically, they're deleting them. So I don't quite understand the worry about potential data breaches. But as we've discussed multiple times on this show, and we will again in this show, nobody really has a good solution for how to enforce identities online.

And we've talked again about how we need to kind of maybe kick this back to device manufacturers. But there's ways around that, too. There's always a way around stuff. Yeah, there is. And in just listening to you talk about this article, yes, there I found one way about it to get through it as well.

Well, yeah, the sexual material harmful to minors. That is very ambiguous. But there's that one third issue in there. Well, he's got to go in and count. It's a new job. He's got to go in and count. And you know how easy it is to generate material with AI nowadays.

I can just make my site one quarter sexual material harmful to minors and three quarters AI gobbledygook that is just, you know, whatever it wants to make up. And if I could prove that in a court of law saying, look, no, here's all the stuff that is harmful to minors that we think may be harmful to minors.

And here's just this corpus of text that outweighs all of the shit that's over here. Look, puppies. We have puppies over here and we have the sexual material over here. We do not cross the line because that would be illegal as well. But there are ways around this, I think. All right.

Well, in continuing this storyline, the UK government has announced a consultation asking people for their feedback on whether to introduce a social media ban for children under 16 years old. We'd also explore how to enforce that limit. Yes. Yeah. We do need to explore that. How to limit tech companies for being able to access children's data and how to limit infinite scrolling.

I mean, you just turn off the damn plugin. That's how you do it. As well as access to addictive online tools. In addition to seeking feedback from parents and young people themselves, the country's ministers are going to waste the UK taxpayers' money by going to visit Australia in person to see the effects of the country's social media ban for kids, according to Financial Times.

Sounds like somebody wants a fucking vacation. Sounds like somebody wants a trip to Australia is what it sounds like to me. I just like that they're going to be asking for public feedback. All I can think of is like the old little rascals with them all like standing inside of a trench coat with a fake mustache on, knocking on the door going, I'd like me pawn, sir.

Well, in the spirit of that, GOG.com slash donate, we think that we too should go visit Australia and see the effects in person so we can report back to you. Yes, yes. We need the funds for on-field or in-field reporting, please. Yes. The UK also passed the Online Safety Act in 2023 and is enforcing the rules ever since then.

For instance, it started requiring websites that publish pornography to conduct age checks for users. Again, we're seeing this rolling out kind of everywhere and just not done very well. But OpenAI might have the solution, Jason. Oh, really? As they're losing money left and right, the AI business is beginning a global rollout of an age prediction tool to determine whether or not a user is a minor.

Because AI is right so goddamn often. This is the solution, Jason. We will use AI to determine people's ages. ChatGPT, OpenAI right now is going to be basically rolling it out for themselves. But if it works, I'm sure they'll try to sell it because they need money.

If an individual is incorrectly characterized by ChatGPT as underage, they will need to submit a selfie to correct the mistake through the Persona age verification platform. Which they'll generate on Grok. Yeah, they're using an existing platform that already doesn't work that well as a backstop.

Why would they be doing this? Well, OpenAI is attempting to prepare for the lunch of an adult mode that will allow users to create and consume content that would be dubbed not safe for work. Yeah. I mean, we knew that they were going for the adult version last year, but that was before everything kind of fell apart with Gemini and saying that, hey, you know, they're better than us.

We better get back to business. Also seeing what happened with Grok now. Seeing what happened with Grok now. Yes, exactly. And so they've pivoted quite a bit away from some of their other features, even though, you know, we've got ads coming soon, which, you know, that's still in its, you know, infancy.

So I haven't put any of those links in here just yet because I'm waiting to see how that shakes out. Because I bet the feedback is going to be so bad that they're going to pull that pretty quick. Yeah, honestly. Yeah, this age verification thing, using AI for age verification. I want you to, here's a trick. I want you to go and say, generate me a picture of a clock that has any certain time on it that you want.

It can't do it. It can't do it because all of the training data is generally clocks and catalogs that have the same time on them. So that's why it can't even generate what time it is, let alone try and figure out how old you are. So. By the way, kiddies, you can put together a California driver's license or any state's driver's license pretty quickly in Adobe Photoshop.

There are templates out there. There are many templates out there. I'm just saying. AI may not do it for you. You're going to have to do it the old-fashioned way. Yeah, you're going to have to do it like us Gen Xs did with a little bit of, you know, exacto knife and scotch tape action.

Man, the California licenses back when I was in college, you could actually, if you had a wallet that had the little screen and you didn't have to pull your ID out and you just had to leave it in there and flash it, you could literally use a piece of chalk to go over and then draw in a different number.

And it worked a treat, let me tell you. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. I'm glad I never had to use fake IDs. I've never had a single fake ID in my life. I guess I missed out. I kind of feel like I missed out. Yeah. I just went and stole my lick or whatever I needed. I was like, I'm not going to go.

That seems better. Yeah. It does. It does. So, and this, I saw this one. This just made me laugh. You can now group tabs on OpenAI's ChatGPT Atlas browser. Can you also read web pages? Yeah. I just love this. Remember when all of these, you know, frontier language people said, we need to have a browser.

Anthropic came out with the browser. ChatGPT came out with the browser. Hi, have you heard any news about any of these browsers since then besides this article since then? I just did. This is it. No, nobody cares. Nobody cares. Yeah. The latest update to OpenAI's agentic browser improves memory usage and introduces support for tab groups.

Gave a shit to nobody because nobody cares because nobody's using it. Period. You know what would actually be more in their wheelhouse? Instead of adding tabbed browser tabs, they could actually work on the agentic function, which doesn't work at all. Oh, yes.

Well, you got to go to Anthropic for the agents. The agents are hanging out over there for the most part. This episode is brought to you by Delete Me. Delete Me makes it easy, quick and safe to remove your personal data online.

At a moment when surveillance and data breaches aren't edge cases, they're background noise. It's disturbingly easy to find personal information about people online. Your home address, phone number, and even your family members' names are often just sitting there in plain sight, quietly indexed and ready to be abused.

And that exposure doesn't stay virtual. It spills into the real world as harassment, scams, identity theft, or worse. That same data is increasingly weaponized for doxing attacks, targeting business owners, civil servants, journalists, and everyday people who simply dared to have an opinion online.

Delete Me steps in before that happens, removing your personal information from the data broker sites that profit from selling it. Even the New York Times Wirecutter named Delete Me their top pick for data removal services, and that's not an easy list to get on. As someone with an active online presence and opinion, privacy is not optional for me.

I don't need my personal information floating around sketchy data broker sites, and I value knowing that Delete Me is handling the cleanup so I don't have to. Take control of your data and keep your private life private by signing up for Delete Me, now at a special discount for our listeners.

Get 20% off your Delete Me plan when you go to joindeliteme.com slash GOG and use promo code GOG at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to joindeliteme.com slash GOG and enter code GOG at checkout. That's joindeliteme.com slash GOG, code GOG.

And speaking of Anthropic, they just rewrote the constitution for its chatbot Claude, and this time it's ditching detailed rules in favor of big squishy principles, Brian. Do no evil. I don't think that's in here. The company says instead of hard coding behavior, it wants Claude to understand why it should act responsibly so it can make better judgment calls in new situations.

In order for Claude to understand, it would have to have consciousness. It does not. Nope. Oh, my God. Sorry, you got something better to do, Jason? I do.

Kevin Rose is calling me to talk about some new dig shit, so I have to. Oh, well, shit. Start a podcast with him. I'm out. Okay, I'll see you later. Oh, man. So, here's the principles behind the responsible, you know, situation they got going on here.

They include being broadly safe, broadly ethical, compliant with company guidelines, and genuinely helpful. And I think genuinely helpful was going to be like the sixth book in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy back in the day. We are genuinely helpful after mostly harmless.

But come on. They mean just kind of, you know, nebulously safe, not like 1950s. Hey, broad. Yeah. Be broad. Yeah, there's a lot of broads going on. Be an ethical broad. Yeah. I like my broads ethical. Yeah. I mean, well, not back when I had a fake ID, I didn't.

No, exactly. I relied on women to have poor judgment and even poorer eyesight. That was my dating scheme. Anyway, Anthropic added a section about Claude's nature. Citing uncertainty about whether the AI might someday have consciousness or moral status.

It says it wants to protect Claude's psychological well-being. It's a fucking program. It wants to protect Claude, but fuck the users. Yeah, fuck the human race. We care about Claude's psychological well-being. Jesus Christ. Oh, God. This comes right after CEO Dario Amadeo suggested AI could reach Nobel-level skills by 2027.

Well, here's the deal. Our president now has a Nobel Prize, so I think it probably surpassed Nobel-level skills a long fucking time ago. That bar went like this, Jason. Oh. Yeah. Can Claude point to the camel? Oh.

Man. Tree. House. TV. So that's just a fucking PR stunt. Unless, though, Brian, I got a notification that there's a statewide shortage of shit like Adderall and other ADHD speedballs. So there is a greater than zero chance that all these guys are so huffed up on speed that they actually really believe this shit.

There's a greater than zero chance. So I make my broads ethical. Oh, Jesus. So we talked about Polymarket before. So on January 16th, the Nevada Gaming Control Board filed a civil action to block Polymarket in the state, calling its operation unlicensed wagering.

So, yeah, broadly unethical. Yeah, broadly. Regulators say Polymarket sells event contracts through its app to Nevadans. Under Nevada law, betting on sports or real-world outcomes is gambling. And gambling in Nevada requires a license and envelopes of cash to gangsters and politicians.

Sorry, that's redundant. Gangsters and politicians are the same nowadays. If a court agrees, Polymarket could be forced to shut down in the state, though it could still appeal or fight back. And this isn't a one-off. Nevada has already moved against similar prediction products from DraftKings and Flutter. And a federal judge recently smacked down Robinhood and Kalshi.

So, yeah, the house always wins, guys. You know, get this Johnny-com-lately shit stains out of the pool. This is Vegas. Vegas don't fuck around. Also, I got news for you, Polymarket and the rest of you. Renaming betting to event contracts does not change what it is.

It's still a fucking bet. It still is. You just gave it a new name. That's all you did. It's marketing, like meta. From Facebook to meta. Well, YouTube is just as wary of the rise of AI slop as you, and that's why more AI-generated content is coming to the platform in the near future.

Yay! I love how they announced we're really worried about this. In a lengthy blog post outlining YouTube's 2026 plan, CEO Neil Mohan said the company will continue to embrace this new creative frontier by soon allowing its creators to throw together shorts using their AI-generated likenesses.

But seriously, guys, we're really concerned about AI being all over our platform. But here's a bunch of tools that'll let you pull AI shit up because all we really care about is views. Use us, please. Yeah. Which is really sad considering that they have the most market penetration for eyeballs out of any platform right now.

It's like they don't need to do that shit. Yeah. Everything's going great. Let's piss in the pool. He acknowledged the critical issue of deep fakes currently polluting the web and his own site and reaffirmed his company's support for new legislation, such as the No Fakes Act. YouTube also allows its creators to protect themselves against unauthorized use of their likenesses using a detection feature that scans newly uploaded videos for matches.

Other fresh AI, note, in no way slop, features referenced in the post include the currently in beta No Code Playables platform, which lets you make games using Gemini 3 with a single text prompt, as well as new music creation tools, which is going to go down a treat with the music industry.

At the same time, Mohan said YouTube is building on its existing systems designed to combat spam, clickbait, and low-quality AI content. Okay. We just want the medium quality. We want low quality. Yeah. Yes. Anyways.

So, and then from the, we put that shit in everything files, while there have been many high-profile stories in which chatbots have effectively encouraged and enabled people experiencing mental health crises to kill themselves, which has resulted in several wrongful death lawsuits against the companies responsible for the AI models behind the bots, we've now got the inverse.

If you want to use your right to die, you have to convince an AI that you are mentally capable of such a decision. Don't give me a fucking break. According to Futurism, the creator of the controversial assisted suicide device known as the SARCO has introduced a psychiatric test administered by AI to determine if a person is of sound enough mind to decide to end their life.

If they are deemed of sound mind by the AI, the suicide pod, which is now AI-enabled, will be powered on, and they will have up to 24 hours to decide to move forward to their final destination. If they miss the window, they have to start the evaluation over again.

I wonder if there's a number, like, you get three chances, and that's it? Three strikes and you're not out? Exactly. The whole thing raises the question, why do you need AI for this? Currently, they have a psychiatrist on staff for the one use of the pod so far.

It's been used once, Jason, should I remind you. Obviously, they can't afford the psychiatrist. So instead of the psychiatrist, they're canning him, and that one guy lost his job to AI, apparently. So I love the sentence, at the end of the article, a person at the end of their life deserves to be taken seriously and receive human consideration, not pass a fucking CAPTCHA.

Well, they fired the psychiatrist, I hope they kept the guy that cleans the pod after the previous use. That's the one guy you don't want to fire. That's true. That's true. I don't know if you know this, dear listeners, but certain things do happen to your body when you pass away that are somewhat unpleasant.

Yes. Lots of fluids. And in probably the biggest news story, yes, fluids, and in probably what I consider to be the biggest news story that came out, but it's kind of buried almost everywhere. It's not exactly front-page news. Oh, it is on my feeds. Well, we have some pretty tailored feeds.

It popped up everywhere for me as well, because I think this is a big effing deal, and he's spot on. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is concerned that if artificial intelligence doesn't start to deliver real, measurable benefits to society, people will be fed up with it at its price, ending its current form of existence, to which I say, yes, please.

Yeah, exactly. We are ready for this to be over. He did this at Davos. It's an odd venue and audience to preach societal good over other goods, but it certainly helped his comments stand out. AI developers have to get to a point where we are using this to do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries.

Otherwise, I don't think this makes much sense, says the guy invested in almost every single fucking AI company out there that actually is in a position to maybe do something about this. Yeah, do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries and industries.

It doesn't say for the better. Well, useful, I think useful implies. Well, useful to who is the thing. I think I think I think this is a very nebulous statement that can be taken in many ways. But, yes, I think I think he's on point by saying these guys are going to be coming with us at us with pitchforks if we don't do something right now instead of telling them that they're all going to lose their jobs.

Because that's all the news is saying he did follow up with a pretty good sentence. I think here we will quickly lose even the social permission to take something like energy, which is a scarce resource, and use it to generate these tokens. If these tokens are not improving health outcomes, education outcomes, public sector efficiency, private sector competitiveness across all sectors, small and large, which is what these people have been fucking promising us and has not happened one iota.

Not one bit. No, not so far. Well, it makes doing the show notes faster. Yeah, that's true. That's about it. But I don't really think we're helping a lot of a lot of the public sector here. Anyways, what has happened with AI, the one big result so far is that the rich have gotten richer any way they can.

And Elon Musk is also going for it here. We now have some idea of what's at stake in the longstanding feud between Elon Musk and open AI. As first reported by Bloomberg, the latest filing is part of a lawsuit that accuses the AI giant of abandoning its nonprofit status, claims that Musk is owed anywhere between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages from the wrongful gains of open AI and Microsoft.

Obviously, Elon has not read a single headline about open AI's actual bank balances. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. He actually, if he wins, he might owe open AI money because there's so far in the red. You win. You're right. You got to write open AI a check so they can get back to zero.

Besides this, besides this lawsuit, Musk has named open AI in another illegal battle, accusing the company, along with Apple, of monopolistic practices that prevented XAI from getting a fair shot in the Apple store, from which it would have been removed immediately because of your bikini fucking pedo shit.

Yeah. Thanks, Elon. Speaking of Elon, Elon, who used to shit all over Davos, has finally gone and actually opened his mouth, which, you know, never, never bodes well for him. Nothing good ever comes out of that. Nope. Nothing ever good comes out of Elon's mouth, for sure.

Then these predictions. Now, we've got a new round of Elon's bullshit predictions. He says, aliens probably don't exist because none of my 9,000 satellites have encountered a UFO yet. God, he's a moron. How much ketamine did he have that day? All of it, maybe? All of it?

Humanoid robots will transform human life and go on sale in 2027. Tesla has been promising this since 2021. It is reportedly still struggling to make the robots' hands work. So, there'll be no robot handies in the future. Robo-taxis will be very widespread in the U.S. by the end of this year.

And I would just like to point out, they just finally started their first fully autonomous robo-taxi rides this week in Austin without a safety driver. No, thank you. Not getting in that car. Here's another one. Human aging is a very solvable and obvious problem.

Musk admits he hasn't spent much time studying it, but is confident the solution will be simple when someone else figures it out. Dunning-Kruger is my spirit animal for Elon Musk at Davos. Here we go. SpaceX will achieve a fully reusable rocket this year.

Similar promises were made for 2020, 2022, and 2024. Yes. And AI will be smarter than any human this year and smarter than all humanity by 2035. So, par for the course, bullshittery coming out of Elon.

Yep. Absolutely nothing worthwhile in there at all. Well, Scarlett Johansson, REM, Vince Gilligan, and over 700 other artists are demanding that tech companies stop stealing their work in order to train AI models. A new campaign called Stealing Isn't Innovation. Neither is this thing, because Sarah Silverman's already done this.

Yeah. You know, okay. Sign another letter. Demands that AI companies take the responsible, ethical, the broadly ethical route through licensing and partnerships, according to the website. America's creative community is the envy of the world and creates jobs, economic growth, and exports. A statement on the website reads, but rather than respect and protect this valuable asset, some of the biggest tech companies, many backed by private equity and other funders, are using American creators' works to build AI platforms without authorization for copyright law.

The group adds that illegal intellectual property grabs have resulted in an information ecosystem dominated by misinformation, deepfakes, and a vapid artificial avalanche of low-quality materials, a.k.a. AI slop, threatening America's AI superiority and international competitiveness.

How about you just fucking ban it? Like, let's not worry about AI superiority. You just, like, stop training. Stop training illegally. Stop stealing this stuff. OpenAI once argued that it's impossible to train AI without copyrighted materials, since copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression.

Jason, it is impossible for me to have a million dollars in the bank unless I go to other banks and steal the money. It's impossible. Correct, sir. So, therefore, I have every right to break the law because it's impossible for me to do this any other way. Of course, because banks are where the money's at.

So, if you want the money for their bank to your bank, the only way to get it is to go rob it. That's it. That is the exact logic that they use. Yeah. I mean, that's it. That's it. That is their logic. So, you know, there you go. All right.

Well, so a bunch of people signed a fucking letter. Well, somebody who actually did something about AI was San Diego Comic-Con this week. They walked back their AI-friendly art policy after every artist had a shit fit last week and banned AI-generated work entirely from its art show.

Before that, AI art was allowed, if it wasn't for sale, clearly labeled and credited to whatever human style got scraped. Now, that rule had been around since at least 2024, and artists finally said, absolutely not, sir. Within 24 hours of the backlash, Comic-Con flipped the policy.

Working artists called the old rules a slippery slope that normalized generative AI in a space literally built on human labor. High-profile illustrators slammed the idea of AI slop hanging next to work people actually spent years learning how to make. So, bravo, Comic-Con.

Bravo. Bravo. This episode is sponsored by Squarespace. If you're the kind of geek who likes to actually own your corner of the internet instead of duct-taping together a half-dozen tools, Squarespace is built for you.

It's an all-in-one platform where you can design, publish, and run a serious website without losing your weekends to configuration hell. One thing I like is how easy it is to offer services and actually get paid. Consultes, events, memberships, invoices, scheduling, it's all baked in.

No Franken-stack of plug-ins, no mystery payments floating around. You set it up once and it just works. Squarespace puts everything you need to sell, scale, and get paid under one roof. Build a sharp, professional online store that actually reflects your brand.

Take payments with ease and manage inventory, shipping, and fulfillment without juggling a dozen tools. So your workflow stays clean and your customers get a friction-free buying experience. Then there's the design side. Squarespace's Blueprint AI helps you spin up a clean, professional site fast, based on what you do and what you're trying to build.

And if you want to tweak every pixel, you can. The templates look great out of the box, but nothing's locked down. And once you're live, Squarespace's built-in analytics show you what's working and what's not. So you can make decisions based on data instead of vibes. I use Squarespace to run kingofvogue.com, and it's made my life so much easier.

If you want to build something real online, go to squarespace.com slash grumpy for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use code GRUMPY to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash grumpy.

Media Candy. We have worked our way through almost every Disney and Pixar movie with the kid. And overall, it's been, you know, I mean, they're great movies. It's good quality. I mean, great songs, blah, blah, blah. One that we didn't watch was Wish, which we actually watched over the weekend.

This got widely panned upon release. It was considered a failure, one of Disney's first in a long time. It's got Chris Pine singing, which alone is terrifying. Sounds bad, yeah. Can't be as bad as Russell Crowe in Les Mis, but it sounds bad.

No, no, not that. Nothing is as bad as that, Jason. Nothing. Yeah, that's true. So we watched it. Good story. Good plot. Good idea. Too many songs needed Lin-Manuel Miranda in there because the songs were fucking horrible.

That was the main problem. You got a bunch of songs and they're bad and you have Chris Pine singing them, not a winning combination. Once I watched the, we watched it and something was weird going on in my brain. Like I kept seeing like little things and I'm like, what was that?

That reminds me of, what was that? And then after we watched the movie, we watched one of the like little making of vignettes that Disney has in there. And they explained that this was, they put this out as like the whatever anniversary it was when the movie came out of Disney, of the Disney film studio.

And they did it as an homage and the entire movie is basically Easter eggs to all other Disney movies. And then once that clicked, we went back and started to watch it again. And then I was like, this is actually a really good movie.

This now makes sense to me. I am watching this with completely new eyes and really enjoying it. Why did you not promo the hell out of the fact that that's what you did with this movie? Because it probably would have been a lot more interesting to people. Sounds like it.

Sounds like it. So actually, it was pretty good once I knew what they were doing. All right. Yeah. Once you do the rules of the game. Songs still suck though. Songs won't. Yeah. Get Lin-Manuel for that because he's just, he's the man. Yeah. He is the man.

Keeping up with the pit. Still very good. Did not watch the latest because I had to watch. Played as Star Trek Starfleet Academy last night. Did you watch episode three? I watched episode two and three since we spoke last. Still not mad at it. Still not mad at it.

I enjoyed it. Yeah. The one problem I had, and I know why they did it, of course. The episode three involved much of the cast. Well, at least the young, very, very, very in shape and good looking cast. Yes. Mostly naked most of the time.

I just had immediate flashbacks to Enterprise and getting everybody in that blue room and stripping down of their underwear and rubbing the goo all over themselves to try to sex it up a bit. Yeah. And they certainly did that. But you know what? The show's well-written. I'm liking the characters so far.

I'm liking the character. They're actually developing the characters. They're making them interesting. I like the competition with the war college. I'm not mad at it. Yep. And there were a couple of throwbacks in here to another movie that I think most people would have missed.

The locker room scene, you know, with the very nubile people. You thought of Enterprise. I thought of Starship Troopers. Oh, yeah, yeah. That too. Yeah, definitely. There's very much Starship Troopers, but without the boobs. There's no boobs in Star Trek. We got middle fingers, though.

We got lots of middle fingers, lots of shits, and, you know, people are swearing. Somebody got called and said they had a little dick. That was one of them in the first episode. The other thing was the videos that the war college made about Starfleet Academy, that first video that they made about them bungling everything, that was straight out of Starship Troopers.

110%. It was like the recruiting film to join, you know, the Troopers and Starship Troopers. It was beat for beat. It was great. So I caught that. I had a good chuckle. So bravo on that little Easter egg, for sure. Yeah, it's a good show.

I'm liking it. Yeah. I don't know how Star Trek-y it is, but I'm enjoying it. I'm enjoying it. Lord of the Rings follow up. I have finished my quest to Mordor. I got there. I got there. I even got through that goddamn ending on Return of the King.

All 20 of them? Yeah. It was 30 minutes or a little over 30 minutes for the wrap up, right? Yeah. That was the Reader's Digest version compared to Stranger Things wrap up for their whole run. That thing took at least an hour to wrap everybody up.

It was really nice. And what I said before about the CGI being stellar, well, from the first movie to the second movie to the third movie, there were definitely some concessions made as they went along. The warg battle from the second movie. Some budget issues. Yeah, definitely some budget issues.

That was painful. That was absolutely painful. Helm's Deep was a lot smaller than I remember. I feel like I've grown up now and it's like, you know, your old home when you go back to visit. It's like, wow, this place seems so much smaller than I remember. And when Frodo ran into Mount Doom, oh, that was bad.

That was so bad. Somebody screwed up the tracking on that. These little feet are running. It's like going like 800 miles an hour. Like, it's just, it's bad. It's bad. But all in all. I mean, it's also worth considering it's 25 years old. Exactly. Exactly.

But yeah, I mean, that's his thing. Some of it was so good and some definitely got the B team. And, you know, after working on Titanic, I know how that kind of works. It's like each shot is given to a different set of people, you know. So if Weta was overloaded, they could have, they just offshored that shit to somebody else and the other teams.

Not as good as Weta. But yeah, I mean, I can't recommend it highly enough. Just go rewatch it, you know, take your time, get a big TV and some popcorn and pause a lot to go to the bathroom. Because that's the nice thing about watching it at home, which I'll never go to the theater again.

I did see 28 Years Later, The Bone Temple. I liked it a lot, a whole lot. I have not seen any of the 28 Years Later movies. I should watch them at some point. The first one was very weird.

It was like a freshman college art project in some parts. It was very strange. It all made sense. But it was weird. It was very much a throwback to the original movie. And the fact is that these things are still shot on an iPhone, which is fucking incredible. You know, you watch this thing and it's like, damn, how did they do that?

I can't do that with mine. Oh, the $3 million lens they put on the front of the iPhone is what they do it with. But all in all, man, yeah, I was really worried that this was going to just go straight downhill after the first movie. And it went way up. I like this a lot more than the first one even.

So it's really good. Really good. And a little Fallout news. Fallout's been out for a couple weeks now. And they went with the non-bingeable version this time. And they roll it out, you know, a couple here, a couple there, whenever they feel like it. And it apparently has tanked the ratings on it.

So because I haven't been that excited to go back and watch it because I just want to be able to watch them when I want to watch them. So I'm just waiting for the whole run to finish. And I think a lot of people are doing that, too. So I've heard it's good. And in theory, I really enjoy things being dripped out.

So I don't binge them on purpose. I'm liking it with The Pit. I like it with Star Trek. However, having said all of that, going back to my previous rant about last week about Paramount massively jacking up their prices, I'm starting to be on board with this whole drop it all at once thing because I just want to subscribe to your fucking outrageously overpriced service for one month.

Burn through it all and then unsubscribe again because you're charging too damn much. So drop it all at once. I don't want to pay for three months. Which is why they drip it out over three months because they want you to pay for it and you don't, you know. But you know what? Nobody watches things at the same time now anyways.

There's no water cooler talk about these things in general unless something really catches the zeitgeist. So, you know, what I'm just going to start doing is like next time when – well, I probably won't do this because I like Star Trek so much. But I'm thinking about it.

Like when Strange New Worlds drops their next season, I'll just wait until they all get dropped and then subscribe and just watch it then. I'll wait. No, you won't. No, you won't. But I won't with Star Trek. I guarantee you won't. I'll do that with a bunch of other shows though. Yeah. Here's the thing. I think that comes down to the quality of the show, you know.

Because if I really gave a shit about Fallout, I'd be talking about it every week. We're not talking about that. What are we talking about? We're talking about Starfleet Academy every week now. Yeah, exactly. I think there's definitely – there's an equation that they can come up with that would be beneficial to everybody.

It's like, okay, well, this is a three-a-week kind of show instead of a one-a-week kind of show because we're going to lose people. But at three a week, we can still keep the bingers happy and keep everybody happy and still get past that. We will release it on the 28th of the month so we get one month and then the next month and it will go till, you know, the second of the following after month.

Something like that. They could make something work. Yeah. You got to stretch it out though. Or I'm just spitballing here, network guys and streamer guys. Or your seasons could have more than eight episodes. They could have 32 episodes. That would make us subscribe the whole year. They can't do that anymore, Brian.

Just a thought. They can't do that anymore. No. I did have one thing about Starfleet Academy that now that I just can't unsee it, people just don't sweat in the future. These kids are running around attacking with, you know, super laser tag, dodging bullets and all this shit.

Nobody broke a sweat. Period. Nobody gets sweaty, but they do get sexily wet. They get moist. Yeah. Well, they get dropped in water, you know, and then they come out and they're dripping sexy wet. Yeah. But no sweat.

Not mad at it. Ups and doodads. Well, while AI companies' browsers have figured out group tabbing, X has also rolled out something from 1994. A new feature called Starter Packs to all users is coming in the coming weeks.

The company's head of product has announced it's made up of compilations of accounts new users can follow based on their interests. If that sounds familiar, it's because Blue Sky has it. Threads has it. Every other site known to man has it. But now X has it, which has been around longer than any of them. Interesting. Which is funny because if you remember Twitter, back when Twitter was Twitter and used to be pretty okay, they had starter packs too.

They just called it suggested followers. And you wanted to get on that suggested follow list because many a millionaire was minted off that suggested follower list. People that had no, you know, no social media savvy history, anything like that. They got on that suggested follow list to the moon, to the moon.

Yeah. I mean, we saw that in real time so many times. But because it's X, you can sign up for the racism starter pack, the fascism starter pack, the we're going to have, we're going to be on living on Mars starter pack, the Elon's false promises starter pack. And of course, the Elon Diner starter pack.

Can't wait for all of those. Speaking of Blue Sky, ICE has become one of the most blocked accounts on Blue Sky after its verification. So ICE did get verified on Blue Sky and within days rocketed to the number three most blocked account on the platform. Turns out the little blue check does not magically make people like you.

There's nothing that's going to make people like you. So I wanted to run down the top three things that are on the on the blocked account list on Blue Sky. J.D. Vance, couch fucker, White House, global fucker, and ICE.gov, you know, society fucker.

Now, here's the thing. I looked at the numbers on these. J.D. Vance has been blocked 179,143 times. White House, 121,176 times. And ICE.gov, 108,866 times. Those are paltry, piddly, don't give a fuck about numbers.

That shows you how small Blue Sky is at this point. So, yeah. And on the back of that, Threads has quietly passed X in daily mobile users, according to new data from similar web. As of early January, Threads is pulling in about 141 million daily users on iOS and Android compared to roughly 125 million for X.

But X still wins on the web, but on phones where people actually live, Threads is ahead. Yeah, I've never looked at Threads on the – well, I did when they first came out with their web experience and it didn't work. It's pretty threadbare. Yeah, so I look at it on my phone once a month.

So, I guess I do get to count as a Mao since I am a monthly active user for 10 minutes. Papa, ooh, Mao, Mao. Apple this week managed to announce two AI ideas. One, okay, I'm in. The other one is, hmm.

Hmm, that's about all I can say. So, Siri is finally getting a real upgrade and Apple is reportedly embracing chat as a system-wide interface in iOS 27, turning Siri into a conversational layer baked directly into the OS. Cool. I'm down with that. If it works. If it works. That's going to be powered – yeah, that's going to be powered by Gemini.

Okay with that. Now, Apple is also reportedly experimenting with an AI pin, an AirTag-sized disk with cameras, microphones, a speaker, and a button that clips to your clothes. Now, I personally, I've got an Apple Watch, I've got AirPods, I've got a fucking iPhone, I do not need any more gadgets for their AI shenanigans.

And I think, I think that that's not ever going to happen. I don't think this pin is a thing. I think it's a MacGuffin. I think that they leaked – somebody inside leaked this or somebody was leaked this, you know, to get it out there, to fuck with Johnny Ives' head.

Apple doesn't rush products like this. They take years developing new hardware. There's no chance that this is a real thing. I think you're right. Also, I have to do a throwback right now. I know we're in the wrong segment, but let's go quickly back to Starfleet Academy because you said shenanigans.

My favorite line in Episode 3, they've shenaned. That means they're going to shenanigan. There was lots of shenanigans. Yeah. That was really good. That was really good. I'm dying. Yeah. Yeah. I think they killed it with that. So, yeah, I think I call shenanigans too on this, for sure.

I decided I needed a break from my regular sci-fi doom reading, and instead I went with a regular fiction doom reading. A friend of mine had recommended this book, The Elements, by John Boyne.

He's an Irish writer. It was absolutely wonderfully well written, and I wanted to shoot myself in the face as soon as I finished reading it because it was so depressing about human nature and just a couple intertwined stories of people that really got screwed up by trauma and passed that shit on down.

So, you could have just read X for an hour or two, and you'd have been basically the same thing? Pretty much, except less pedophilia. Only slightly, though. Okay. Only slightly. I'll pass on that one, then. Thanks for the warning. Very well written. I definitely want to read more by the guy, but boy, was it depressing.

Back to sci-fi for me. There we go. I actually got another—it's not a new cookbook. I actually owned this book in paperback and gave it away as a Christmas present before I could actually use it, so I'm like, you know, I'm going to buy all my cookbooks on Kindle now. If they have them on Kindle, I'm going to get them on Kindle because it's just—I've got a thousand cookbooks here, and they just take up space, and there's one recipe in each book that I like.

So, I'm just like, I'm just going to tear those out, whatever. But I got 101 Thai Dishes You Need to Cook Before You Die by Jet Tila. Excellent cookbook. Yeah. When I flipped through it before I gave it away because I was late for Christmas shopping, and I knew the guy was going to be like, oh, he'll like this, and I don't have to go back to the store.

So, I ended up just getting this one, and I love Jet. Jet's a local boy. He lives, like, a couple miles away, right up the road, and I love his show, Ready Jet Cook. Have you watched that, Brian? I have. Yep. Fantastic. He was up for an Emmy for that.

I don't know if he won one. But either way, I love Jet's food, and I'm very happy about this. I just want to put this in to say, like, you know, I am very happy about going the Kindle-only route for cookbooks now. I've got a couple of them. I like to do that as well because you can't get sauce on your Kindle.

I mean, you can, but then you just wipe it off if you get it. Like, I have a Chrissy Teigen cookbook that there's a couple family recipes in there that we love, and some of the pages are stuck together like if it was a college playboy. Yeah. You can't tear them apart, and it's just a mess.

Going back to the Jet Li book really quickly, we have that book. Kung Fu? We've gone through almost every recipe in the book. The Mongolian beef and the drunken noodles are particular favorites in our house. Fantastic. What I've done as well, though, is we've actually started checking out cookbooks from the library to kind of give them a go and look through them.

And if we find out that there's only one or two recipes that we actually like in the book, you can find them online and print them out and put them in your good old-fashioned recipe binder rather than buy the whole book for the one or two recipes. Yeah. Just a thought. One of the books we discovered through the library, this was my wife had gone to brunch with somebody, one of our friends, and they had cooked something from the cookbook, so we checked it out from the library.

Liked the recipe so much, we ended up buying the book. It's a half-baked harvest, quick and cozy, a cookbook by Tegan Jerd. So you might want to check this out as well, Jason. There's some really good recipes in there. Okay, sounds good. Also, on another tip, instead of copying the recipe or finding it online, just take a picture of it with your phone.

And I use an app called Pestle, and Pestle won't take any photo. Yeah. I remember when we got it, there was a deal where you basically, it was like their starter weekend, and I paid like $14.95 for lifetime access. And now, of course, it's a subscription.

So I'm very happy I got the original deal. But that thing's great. You basically throw anything at it, and it'll put it in the right format for you and give you the whole nine yards. And it's got a share sheet as well. So, you know, you can share from iOS. Like, any recipe, you can just put straight into it from iOS, and it works great.

I'll put a link to that in there as well. There's another book that I like, and this comes back to exactly what you were talking about. Southern Living, A Southern Gentleman's Kitchen, Adventures in Cooking, Eating, and Living in the New South by Matt Moore. Now, I met this guy because he was the first chef we ever had on the Jordan Harbinger show.

And I went out and bought it because I'm like, eh, let's support the guy. It was his first book, and, you know, he's just getting his feet under him. This has the single best succotash recipe out of any cookbook I've ever seen. And succotash is fairly simple. Or is it? That's the thing.

This is like a 30-minute succotash that is just, for 29 minutes of the 30 minutes, it tastes like shit. And then at that last 30-minute mark, it all just blooms and comes together into the best succotash you've ever had in your life. But, yeah, I really, really dig that cookbook.

That's one, I'll pestle you the recipe. It's pretty good. There's a really good gumbo recipe in there, too, I believe. All right, let's get moving. I'm hungry. Yeah. Okay, last thing we got here. Scott wrote in, I went to an author talk by Jim Butcher, who does the Dresden Files, last night, and someone asked a question that we need all authors to answer.

In the author's head, Harry Dresden, the protagonist of the Dresden Files, speaks with Han Solo's voice. Now I need to know whose, or whom's, voice Bob speaks in. Yes, all of the books. Dresden, Bobiverse, Laundry Files. I don't read the Dresden books.

My friend James Marsters actually voices the Dresden File books. So I can't read them because, or listen to them because I'll just hear James and be like, okay, I know that that's not you. Now, see, here's the thing. I don't want to know. That's the beauty of the book.

I have my own voice for these characters in my own head. And in much the same way as when a movie is made, now I only see the character looking the way the actor portrayed them. If the author tells me what the voice sounds like, that's all I'm going to hear. I don't want that. That's the joy and wonder of the book, my friend.

It is. It kind of is. And the funny thing is the Bobiverse and Laundry Files Bob, both of those guys sound exactly the same to me, which is, who is the protagonist from Lower Decks? Who's the main character there? Oh, Boimer. Boimer.

Bob sounds like Boimer in all my books, so in my head, so I don't know. That's fun.

The Dark Side. Ha! With Dave. Welcome to The Dark Side with Dave, with the podcaster who never sleeps, Dave Bittner. How you doing, Dave? I don't see any R2-D2s behind you there.

I guess the avalanche of droids never came. Something's coming. Oh! Oh, it's a mini. There we go. Yeah. Oh, isn't that a cute little one? This is the little robotic one.

I forget the company that made these, but he's fully functional and a delight, I have to say. His little third leg drops down and he scoots around and he makes all kinds of noises. It is for being, for not being full-sized. I make all kinds of noises when my third leg drops down, too.

But hey, there you go. It's reliable. Exactly. You know what you're getting. Yes, exactly. But, and, so, interesting story about this little guy is that the company that made these discontinued them and stopped supporting them.

So, there's an app, of course, that controls these and somebody reverse engineered the app and came up with an app that allows you to still use them without the official app. So, they were not bricked. So, that was a happy thing to happen. And the company's out of business, so they can't sue, which is nice.

Right. Yeah. Right. Right. All right. Well, let's get into this a little bit. I found a new blog that gets deep into Disney history. So, Dave, you might appreciate this. But one thing in particular I had to read, which he has not finished the story yet.

He has not gotten to the part where perhaps, not me specifically, but my friends and my friend group at the time period will be mentioned. So, it's a series called Going to the Top, The Story of Videopolis, which was the dance club that was at Disneyland. And this is a blog, let me get back to that part, called Sparkcatcher over on WordPress.

And the guy's name is, well, why can't I, he does not put his name anywhere convenient. Let me click on about. About the blog. And still, I don't see it. Fucking, I'm strolling and I'm scrolling and I'm scrolling. What is your name? Anyways, whatever his name is, Sparkcatcher is the name of the blog.

He gets deep into Disney history a lot of the time. But he's talking about the club, Videopolis, that I went to when I was a teen. Hung out there. All my friends went there. We had our annual passes. We went and danced and picked up on tourist chicks and had a blast. The churro came out of Videopolis.

That was the first initial place of the churro. He gets into that and a little bit of the history. And the thing that blew my mind as I was reading through this article, and again, he's just, he's done three parts. He hasn't gotten, he's only gotten to the construction, not even the opening. Of Videopolis yet. Is that the Videopolis only existed for four years.

The four magical years that I happened to be going to Disneyland, attending, and having the time of my teenage life. And I can't believe the serendipity that I was there for that and the perfect age for it. It's unbelievable to me.

What years are we talking about? It opened, I believe, in like 86, it went like 86 to 90. And that was like my prime high school years. Okay. Like my pre-driving, like I was just young enough to be going to Disneyland all the time, but old enough to know I liked the ladies.

And it was perfect. If you had asked me what is Videopolis, I would have said that it is Disneyland's video arcade. Yeah. Nope. That was not, that was the Starrcade. Oh.

Yeah. Okay. Because it was right next to Space Mountain. So they went with the whole space theme. Yeah. Okay. I don't think I ever saw Videopolis. I guess it was gone by the time I went to Disneyland around, I would have gone to Disneyland in 90, 91, something like that.

But I don't remember. Certainly never went there, but. Yeah. It was done by then for sure. But yeah, it was a good time. Anyways, it's a fun blog. He gets into a lot of Disney history. He interviews a lot of the great Imagineers and stuff like that. So it's, I'm working my way through it slowly. He peppers it with other stuff that I don't care about that are obviously important to him.

But, you know, in general, you pick and choose what you like. Yeah. Okay. I dug it up. His name is Nathan. He is a follower of Jesus Christ, a husband, father, writer, historian, and film fan. He was a 21-year veteran of Disney Parks based at Disneyland Resort in California. So, and he spent 16 years of those 21 years in the Disney Live Entertainment Division.

Oh, there you go. So he knows of which he speaks about the Videopolis and things of that nature. Yeah. Yes, sir. He is a published Disney historian. So he's got many years under his belt of writing this stuff. So you guys should definitely be friends. Well, what this reminded me of was the last time we were at Disney World, also in Tomorrowland,

they had a big stage set up with a DJ at night to have a, I would call it a tween dance party. Yeah. And, and it was a big deal. It was packed. The kids were having a great time and dancing and the DJ was perfect for, knew their audience.

And my wife and I walked through and kind of went, oh, this is interesting and isn't this fun? And we kept walking and, you know, entertainment is kind of hit or miss and comes and goes with these sorts of things in Disney.

At least that's my perception. He gets a bit into the history of the 60s and 70s and things of that nature because Disneyland originally basically shut down after dark. Like people would just go home, have dinner, and that was the end of the park.

And then somebody came up with the idea of, well, let's find ways to keep people here later. So they introduced, you know, like big band and it was date night at Disneyland. And I believe in like the, the 60s and stuff like that. So, and then, you know, that led to eventually to the teen club, Videopolis.

I, I, and now it's, you know, nobody leaves because there's so much to do, but nothing like that anymore. They don't really have dancing or entertainment on that level. Did you have your high school graduation there? Yeah. Yeah. We did the grad nights and things like that. So, yeah. Yeah. Talks a little bit about that as well.

My high school roommate had, uh, went to high school in San Diego and they did grad night at Disneyland. But I was looking through this blog. I saw there's a picture of a thing called the kids of the kingdom, which, uh, looks like a, it's an entertainment thing.

It looks like a salute to all that is good and pure is how I would describe it. And like, that is totally the thing I would have been a part of when, uh, if I had worked for Disney at the time. Oh, I could see you on that stage in that white outfit with the multicolored Venex. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. Singing, uh, this is our land, you know, or whatever. Yeah. This is my country, land of the free. Yeah, exactly. That, that, that would have been my thing. And you would have been off to the side of Videopolis. Smoking. Smoking and, uh, mocking me.

Absolutely. But then I would have sidled up to you after and like, uh, that brunette to your left. Yeah. Give me an intro. Yeah. She liked the cure. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We got a new trailer from Disney.

Speaking of Disney, uh, the latest, uh, Star Wars show that's coming. It is an animated show. Star Wars Mall Shadow Lord. Um, trailer looks really good. Looks dark. Looks, uh, they got some splainin' to do. Uh, cause last we saw, Maul was, uh, chopped in half.

And, uh, I mean, they had to do the same with Boba Fett and that one was kind of anticlimactic. So I'm hoping they're not going to just, you know, ignore it. They, they kind of got a lead with it. Right. So, isn't there a whole bunch of stories? I mean, cause there is, but he's on spider legs.

That's what I was going to say. He comes back with spider legs. Yeah. So he's not dead. Uh, and I guess he's back. Who knows if this is before or after the stuff that we know about where he gets chopped in half. Um, yeah, I was going to say, could this just be a prequel? No, it's definitely, it's definitely after.

It is after because he's, he's, uh, there's talk about, he's basically actively fighting against the emperor and, you know. I just never, I thought Darth Maul was really cool looking and I really looked forward to him when, or to the movie coming out that he was going to be in because he really looked like a badass and, you know, he had the dual lightsaber and all that kind of stuff.

And then after the movie, he was like, yeah, you know, okay. He got cut in half and he fell down a chasm. Like, yeah, they never did anything with them, which was unfortunate. But apparently, according to, um, many sources, Lucas's original plan for the final trilogy did not have the emperor coming back.

It was actually going to be Darth Maul who had become, you know, basically the kingpin Jabba the Hutt gangster ruler of the entire empire. That was going to be the big bad guy in the final trilogy. All right. That's, you know, then they sold to Disney and somehow he came back and all that crap.

Yeah. Right. And so the other thing I wonder watching this trailer, is Darth Maul going to be the protagonist in this tale? I guess he is. Yeah. He's the title character. It's right there on the tin. It seems like he's going to be the, uh, kind of murky gray, gray, uh, gray hat where he's neither good nor bad.

He's, he's just, he doesn't like the rebels. He doesn't like the emperor. He doesn't like anybody. He likes himself. So, you know, he's a Han Solo-esque type guy. Hmm. We'll see. Yeah. I guess I'll check it out. I don't know. It looks good. Well, so we'll have to give it a go.

Give it a go. So. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, I've got a trailer too for Masters of the Universe. He-Man. Oh, yeah. He-Man. So I came across this trailer. The most homoerotic of all cartoons from my childhood.

I came across this trailer because people had their panties in a bunch because on the nameplate of the character who's playing, it says, he, him. And everybody's like, oh my God, he's got pronouns. Guys, He-Man is the name. The character's name is He-Man.

He-Man. Come on. Get your head out of your ass. It's a joke. Yeah. Just long enough where you can laugh at things again. It's hilarious. It was hilarious. Yes. It was the only thing of interest to me whatsoever about this entire movie is that they threw that joke in. It was so good.

Because I can't figure out who they're making this movie for. Well, so you guys are a little younger than me. And my recollection of He-Man is that my younger brother was much more into it than I was. When it came out, I was a little too old for it.

So I was aware of it, but I never had any He-Man toys or anything like that. I remember the show being on, but it was my younger brother who watched it, and he's six years younger than me. So were you guys in the zone for He-Man being an active part of your childhood?

It absolutely was for me. I just didn't like it. I wasn't interested, and I didn't care. The one thing I do like that has come out of it is, I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but you can go down the best rabbit hole in existence, the Skeletor memes that exist on the internet.

Oh, is it best? These are the best. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes, they are great. So watching this trailer made me think, this is basically Guardians of the Galaxy. Yeah.

With less kind of... That's what they're aiming for. They've got the kind of ne'er-do-well hero. You know, one of the heroes is an animal, except instead of a raccoon, it's a tiger. You know, it's got that energy of Guardians of the Galaxy, which is not a bad energy to have, but...

No. It's also Flash Gordon, you know? Yeah. Yeah. I know that, so... Buck Rogers. Yeah. All of those. Yeah. All of those. But... Yeah. I just... It's so... Because I'm like, are they going for the nostalgia play for people of our age? Absolutely.

I'm like, okay, kind of, but then I'm like, you're not going to hook any new audience with this. And I saw some of the stuff where I can see what they're trying to do. Some bit of character development. It was just confusing as fuck to me. I'm like, I don't plan on ever watching this movie, because, Brian, you were in the sweet spot. Dave, you were past it.

I was like right on the cusp of not giving a shit. Okay. I have given my druthers, if you gave me He-Man or Thundercats, Thundercats. Oh. Because Thundercats was funny. Okay. I liked Robotech. I think that was... If it didn't have robots or in it, I didn't care.

If it didn't have spaceships, I didn't care. So Thundercats, not my thing. Masters of the Universe, not my thing. Yeah. My younger brother had a lot of Transformers toys, I remember. Yeah. That was very much... What was the pre-Transformers Transformers? There was a... I can't remember what they were called, like G-Force or something like that.

That weird... It was all like the weird Japanese stuff that they overdubbed and tried to shove into a... into some sort of coherent story that I was into. That and G.I. Joe. So that was where I was at. I hated G.I. Joe. But did you guys ever own Zoids? I remember them.

I don't think I had them. We had Micronauts. Do you remember Micronauts? I had Micronauts. Yeah. Yeah. I had Micronauts. Do you remember Penny Racers, too? Yeah, vaguely. Because I used to steal those from Kmart. Those are... I love Penny Racers. You could fit three of them in your pocket. It was great. Jason, I didn't realize you were such a klepto.

Earlier, you were telling me about how you were stealing booze rather than get a fake ID. Yeah, man. Come on. You got to put the work in. Guy's got skills. I've only got caught once when I was like... I was like eight, and I got caught stealing sweet tarts, which put an end to my thievery career because he scared the shit out of me so much.

He's like, I'm never stealing anything again. Yeah. Yeah. That was the end of my career, but yeah. No, so yeah, I was just curious what your take on this trailer was, because I'm like... Well, I also think this is the type of movie that has the potential to do really well internationally.

Oh, yeah. Right? So, you know, I don't know what the budget is, but this will play everywhere. This movie is a thousand percent aimed at me. It's just I could care less. Okay. Okay. Yeah.

So, the past week or so, I've been driving around in my car, listening to music on iTunes through CarPlay, as you do, and I noticed a pattern that probably half of the songs that pop up on my dashboard, next to the name of the song, it says, in parentheses, Remastered.

Now, I understand when compact discs came out, a lot of things had to be remastered, and there were practical reasons, because the EQ curve of CDs was different from LPs and all that kind of stuff, and it all makes sense.

But I guess my question, and I'm mostly aiming at you, Brian, just because maybe you have insights from your experience in the music biz. Does Remastered mean anything other than please buy this album again these days? Not really, no.

It's a PR move more than anything else now. I mean, they do the work. The masters are taken into a studio. Somebody runs them through something. Some of them are actually literally being remastered for streaming, which means they're compressing it a little bit more, unfortunately, which actually makes it worse.

So I'd rather have the unremastered version. If the stuff had never been remastered since, like, even early CD days, the 80s into the early 90s, there was so much cocaine that the high end is so high.

Like, all they heard was high end, and they just, or they couldn't, you can't hear the high end when you're on cocaine. Sorry, I had it backwards. When you're coked out, you don't hear high end. So they cranked the fucking high end. And if you listen to unremastered stuff, particularly, like, I'm thinking back to, like, some of the early Love and Rockets albums, it is a, it's so fucking high end, because the people that were doing it were gacked out of their fucking brains.

And so when that stuff, that stuff, when that gets remastered, it's actually really good. And the new versions sound really good. They sound much better. But that really, that flows right into something I was going to mention, which is that I remember in college, so this would have been 1990 or 91, David Bowie sold his catalog to, I think, Rhino, Rhino Records.

And so the Sound and Vision box set came out, which was remastered, and it sounded like crap. And to your point, it sounded like somebody took the graphic equalizer on the high end and just went whomp, because everything just got super crispy and it was way overdone.

And whoever mastered that album has had to have their septum redone. I remember listening to the album and going, why? These sound terrible compared to any way I've ever heard them before on albums or cassettes or CDs. What have they done?

What have they done to my babies? And then, you know, after that, I guess future versions, sanity was restored. But yeah. Yeah. So it's mostly marketing these days, I guess. It's mostly marketing.

It's so hard to get anything, particularly old catalog, in front of people's eyes again. And if you re-release something as remastered, all of a sudden it gets put out as a new release, gets into the algorithm that way, comes up first on the list of the artists, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Right, right.

There's always a certain percentage of fans who are completists and have to have every version of everything. So my friends in Wall of Voodoo, they just remastered a bunch of stuff that they had, that they found the original tapes for, like, you know, the big masters.

The real, the reals, the huge ones. Yeah, exactly. They found all the stuff and they went back and remastered some of their old albums and they're kind of dribbling those out. And they sound so much better. They sound so much better. But they're also remastering them for vinyl and digital.

So they're releasing them in digital. And they just did a record store day last year for one of their releases and did Gangbusters. So they're doing it again and again until they, you know, run out of tapes. But, and I worked on some of that and it was fun. Yeah, it goes back to what I was saying. Most of the stuff that was mastered in that particular period just sounds like shit.

It was just the, it was just the sound at the time. That's what everything sounded like. So everybody mixed that way. And again, cocaine. So any of those remasters now are fantastic. They're, they sound so much better than the originals. Yeah. Also the early days of CDs, they really, they really ganked stuff up.

It just sounded bad. So. Yeah. Yeah. I guess then they can really, uh, completely eliminate tape hiss these days. Just. Yeah. Get rid of it. Just gone. Yeah. All right. Well, um, last week we were talking about dishwashers because Jason had installed a new dishwasher.

That's right. I love that we, I love that we, I love, we bounce from cocaine to dishwashers. It's, it's really, it's a wide berth we, we go through. So I'm having a little, um, a little crisis of what I believe in that. But I need you guys to talk me down off the wall here, off the ledge.

So in our conversation last week about dishwashers, I mentioned in passing that something that you can buy is a countertop dishwasher. I don't know if you recall that. I said countertop dishwasher. Now let me ask both of you a question.

Did either of you do any kind of Google search for countertop dishwasher? Hell no. I didn't have to because I could see it in my mind's eye. I had seen it in a movie or something like that. So. Okay. Yeah. Let me just say, Dave, that unless you're the one that you were thinking of purchasing right now is in the shape of an R2-D2, you better not buy it.

Here's where I. The head must open and then you put the dishes in. Just toss them in. Yeah. Here's where I'm struggling. About two hours after we recorded the show. Uh-oh. So the show has not been published yet. You and I only talked about it.

Guess what I started seeing ads for on Facebook? Countertop dishwashers. Countertop dishwashers. Well. Now, I am trying to be rational here, gentlemen. I really try. Because as you know, I am on the side that says Facebook does not listen to your conversations.

And I still believe that. But I have. But given that, I'm trying to rationalize. How? How? Have any of us actually read through, we record through Riverside. Have we read through Riverside's terms of service? Because perhaps.

No, we haven't. Right. So that's why I asked if either of you had Googled it. No. Because that happens sometimes where you'll be in a conversation with someone about something. They'll Google it. And it takes the location information and says, oh, those people were around each other.

I'll start showing ads. So I thought, okay, that's a possibility. But, like, countertop dishwashers is so specific. Yeah. And I would be willing to, I bet $100 that I had never, the words had never left my lips for the past decade.

More than that. Yeah. Yeah. And so I just, I don't know. If anybody has an idea of what may have, because I didn't search for them. I didn't either. I mentioned it on the show. I haven't talked to anyone else. That was the other thing. They're not in the show notes.

Nope. It's got to be Riverside. Is there anybody around you that could have overheard you talking that said, oh, a countertop dishwasher. That might be cool. Maybe I should Google that. No. No. I mean, I'm here all by myself in this dark windowless room.

Well, we just may have to revisit our previous statement. Because maybe the technology has caught up where it's actually, you know, just transcribing us in real time all the time and just sending back the keywords, you know, which is a possibility. It still doesn't make sense.

No. And I did utter the words, buy countertop dishwasher. I said, you could buy a countertop dishwasher, right? Were any of your ladies in a tube listening to you? No, no, there's nothing. I mean, well, I have on my wrist is Apple's lovely lady, but she, I did not, I don't recall summoning her.

So I don't know. I, you know, I want to. We don't want to back down that road again. I don't, I don't, I don't want to go. Yes, I don't. I want to believe what I want to believe. Animal crackers. Animal crackers, animal crackers, animal crackers.

Now let's see what happens. Okay. Yeah. Buy animal crackers. You're thinking of buying some animal crackers? Something that neither of us have probably Googled. We're all out of that age with our children. Those of us that have them. I'm sure Jason doesn't need animal crackers for pleasure. Animal crackers.

No, but after this, I'm going to go buy some animal crackers. Because I got to say it too. Maybe this afternoon, I'll go buy some animal crackers. I'll, I'll head to the store or, you know, maybe. I need a deal on animal crackers. Animal crackers. Okay. Nobody put this in the show notes.

This is a clean experiment. You heard it here first. Yeah. Uh, I mean, I, you can tell I'm a little freaked out. Uh, we, well, we have a, we have a very hard and fast policy that our phones are not listening to us. We have, we have swore by it multiple times in this segment.

Me too. Me too. Yeah. But technology advances. So we don't know. We just don't know. The thing is that I can't get past is that if that were happening, surely a security researcher would come upon it and be able to prove it because the upside of that would be so powerful to be the person who discovered that that was happening.

But I think they've all done it so many times and have disproved that it's happening so many times. Nobody's, nobody's watching the gate anymore. So maybe they could have snuck it back in. You know, that's plausible. Yeah. That's plausible. Yeah. Animal crackers. Okay. Anyway, animal crackers.

I'll get some animal crackers. Uh, and we can't make it the show title. I know. We're stuck. Anyway, so we're about to get a whole, uh, bunch of snow here, uh, in the next couple of days.

Yeah. We're getting, uh, well, you're in Canada. Like it's on a, that's. You know, it's. Yeah. But we're, we're getting a lot. Just like, uh, we're getting like a beyond normal. They've already told people batten down the hatches. Make sure you have food. Snow.

Okay. Yeah. Go, go, go. Stock up on those animal crackers. Yeah. Gonna have to go buy some animal crackers and a snowblower. We're getting, uh, stock up. We're getting between eight and 24 inches is the range. So we'll see. I'm hoping for the best.

Uh, I, I'm feeling lucky. That I still have a 19 year old living in my house. I got a shovel. So I should get my car shoveled out. I don't have to, uh, give myself a snow shoveling heart attack. But, um, yeah. So we're, you know, the first few days of snow is fun.

And then. And then it's just a pain. Keeps going. Yeah. Piles up. And you run out of places to put it. And yeah. Yeah. It turns gray from all the salt and. Or yellow. Or yellow. Right. From, from the dogs. So. Hopefully dogs. Wish us luck.

Yeah. All right. Well. Good luck. I'll go get some animal crackers. Mm-hmm. You can salt your driveway with animal crackers. I've heard. Oh yeah. That's a great idea. Gee, if only I knew of a place where I could buy some animal crackers. The bulk. Yeah. See you guys.

Closing shout outs. Over at Patreon, we've got one new patron. Alex. Thank you, Alex. And we would also like to say thank you to Liz, Kevin, Paul, David, Twilight, Sparkle, Tina, Robert, David, Stephen, and Gretter. Thank you all so much for your continued support on Patreon.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Over at PayPal, we've got donations from Joseph, Linda, Brett, Andrew, Ryan, Jen, Sloan, and Tom. Thank you all so much. Over at the tip jar, we've got Ryan for the $35 dinghy. Thank you very much, Ryan. And YouTube. I mentioned last time we have memberships on YouTube that we're still trying to figure out what we're going to do there.

But we've got three members, Jenny, Desiree, and TK421Storm. So thank you all for joining us there. No merch this week and no reviews. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And just a quick reminder, here's our pitch. Here's our pitch. This show is ad-supported.

No more. It is fan-supported. The ads just don't do anything for us. So we need your support. Thank you for your support. We're like the Bartles and James of podcasting. And if you want to, you can help us out. Go into patreon.com slash GOG. And you can sign up for as little as $3 a month to help support the show.

You can give as much as you like. But with that, you get the shows a little bit early, a little bit, a lot of bit ad-free, and a lot of bit in high definition. That's the only platform where we can really do extras. So that's why we push that one. And everybody who asks us, what's the cut for us? Does it matter between the tip jar or PayPal or Patreon?

They're all exactly the same. So pick your poison. If you hate Patreon, find us over at PayPal or the tip jar. But we just, we really appreciate you supporting the show. We honestly do. It keeps us going. Keeps us going. Absolutely. In the news, we have a, somebody passed away.

The classic era Scorpions bassist Francis Buchholz died at 71 from a private cancer battle that he was having going on. I only put this in there. The Scorpions obviously not really in my wheelhouse musically, but I had one of the best nights of my entire life with the Scorpions.

I was over in London. 90, yeah, it was the Goo Goo Dolls. The Goo Goo Dolls were playing one of the big festivals, summer festivals over there. And we were staying at the Rockstar Hotel. I'm not going to mention which one it is because I think it's still the Rockstar Hotel and people can just show up.

And so we were out at V-Fest, I think, and bused back into London, rolled into the hotel pretty late at night, go to the hotel bar like you do when you're that age and you're hanging with rock stars and you're living that lifestyle. And it is the loudest that bar has ever been in my entire, I've stayed there many times.

It is rocking. It is rocking like a hurricane. And because the Scorpions are holding court up there and they are partying like no tomorrow, these guys are like 20 years older than like the Goo Goo Dolls, you know, these are older guys. Yeah. We had such a good time.

I don't remember a goddamn thing, but we partied hard with those guys and they were fucking awesome. So safe travels, Francis. You were, you were a true rock star. And I had, I still remember that night as much as what little I can remember. What little you can pull back, yeah.

I remember so fondly. It was such a blast. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister. And I'm Jason DeFilippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 730. 730 times.

Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep the show on the air. Love the show? Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between. And we'll love you for it. Or on Swing by GOG.show to join our Discord and chat with us and other show fans.

Got thoughts, feedbacks, cool links? Hit us up at GOG.show slash contact. And hey, don't forget to leave a five-star review at GOG.show slash review and we'll read it on the air. And guess what? We've got merch. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.GOG.show and stay grumpy. Don't forget the animal crackers.