83: The Grump Awakens

The point of failure is not my education. Grumpy Old Geeks. A weekly talk show hosted by Brian and Jason. Discussing the finer points of what went wrong on the internet and who's for blame. Let's get started.

Good morning, Brian. How are you? Ah, standard. It's a day that ends in Y. Yeah, you're five by five on that. Okay.

I'm actually pretty grumpy right now because one of my best friends, roommate, photographer, previous guest on the show, Mike Vinicore, a.k.a. MXV, had another one of his photos stolen last night by some shitbag website that just, you know, takes photos, puts them up, and gives you a credit link, even though that's not a legally binding contract.

Yeah, I saw that as well. Well, it's funny because I posted an update on Facebook this morning because I'm in a spectacularly grumpy mood, and he kind of crapped on me for it, and I was like, hey, you just had your stuff stolen. Shouldn't you be grumpy? Seriously. Yeah. So, and he needs to have a little respect because we're getting ready to stand up for him here.

That's all we do on this podcast, MVX. All we do is stand up for you, so shut up. It's actually MXV. MXV, whatever. Whatever your Roman initials are. So, this douchebag from quote-unquote Brooklyn Vegan, which I need I say more.

I can't even start on that. Yeah, that's enough. That's all you need to know. So, we had a little Twitter campaign trying to publicly shame them because they deserve it because they literally stole the photo. Yeah. And he writes back to me – or actually, he wrote back to Mike, and I replied to him.

He's like, you're starting to sound like kind of a bully because Mike just wants to get paid. Yeah. You know? And you're sounding like a thief, so. Yeah, so my reply was, so if you got mugged and you wanted your wallet back from the guy that mugged you, would asking for your wallet back make you a bully?

You know, to be honest, we could actually just stop the podcast now because that encapsulates basically everything we're going to talk about. All right. We're done. Out. Okay. Yeah. Fuck you, Brooklyn Vegan. And yeah. Oh, God.

Just whatever. Okay. That's off my chest. What do you got? Well, let me tell you the – I'll give you the one bit of positive, uplifting news that I will say in this entire podcast. Okay. Star Wars 7 got a title.

The Force Awakens. The Force Awakens. That sounds like what you call your dick in the morning when you've got morning wood. There were a thousand good jokes about it. The absolute best one, my friend Tim Elliott, so I'll give him a shout out for this one. It was The Force Awakens, then immediately turns over and hits the snooze button.

That was by far the best one. So, yeah. The article on CNN that announces the title has so many good tweets in it that I was in tears by the time I was done reading them. Yeah. It's good stuff. But I am looking forward to the movie.

So, you know, it's always exciting to get a little something-something. Yeah. The rejected Star Wars title's hashtag is really good. Yeah. That is a lot of fun on Twitter, I have to admit. All right. So, enough with the good stuff. Let's get into the crappy stuff. Right before we started the program, I got an email from my domain registrar of choice letting me know that it's 35% off .BlackFriday and .Christmas domains, .FuckingIdiots.

Oh, my God. Hey, man. You got to make a buck where you can. I'm sorry. That's awesome. I love it. So, check us out at GrumpyOldGeeks.com, or .BlackFriday. Sorry. I even screwed up the joke. Yeah, way to shit on that one. It was your own joke.

Hey, well, what are you going to do? How's Ello treating you? What are you talking about? What's Ello? Yeah, that's what I thought. Even the tumbleweeds stopped updating. Yeah. No. Gone. Yeah. I checked in again just right before the show just in case I would be wrong, and all of a sudden there was this outbreak of wonderful discussion.

Last post was friend of the show, Sean Bonner, four days ago who's just been posting photos randomly every couple days. Yeah. Copypasta, we call that. I have – well, I haven't been on much social media, I have to say. I've been really busy with trying to earn a living. How's that going?

It's been spectacularly difficult. Yeah. I've had a wonderful week with that as well, which I will be getting into. How about Sue? On the Sue front, I posted one of my greatest pictures of a naked, hot, tattooed girl holding a Star Trek phaser wearing black latex gloves.

I am now up to three cents in revenue. If that can't make me money, fuck it. I don't know what can. I'm sorry. All right. I'm sorry. I've got naked women. I've got Star Trek. I've got vinyl. What's a fucker got to do to make some money?

That's it. That reminds me. Note to self, I have to delete my account on there. So I hope they allow you to do that and remove any traces, but probably not. All right. So those social networks aren't working out very well. Oh, well. Did somebody say that it was a bad idea maybe a couple weeks ago on this very podcast?

Oh, shut the fuck up. Oh, you see? Again, you're right about something and people just shit on you. Who are you, Brooklyn Vegan? Oh, God. You're sounding like a bully, Jason. Just give me your fucking wallet and shut up. I can give you my wallet.

There's no fucking money in it. Speaking of having no money, this dumbass. Oh, yeah. Okay, yes. $539 Uber bill. It is his fault. For an 18-mile ride. It is his fault. Okay. I'm sorry. This dude who, I mean, yeah, it's a $539 bill for 18 miles, which, you know, I don't know what the per mile works out at because I don't have a calculator in front of me, but I'm sorry.

It's your own damn fault because it tells you right there in the app what the percentage is of the pricing. Yes, it doesn't give you an estimate, but it says, okay, this is going to cost you your fucking mortgage to get home. Why don't you walk or go buy a bike, which he could have gotten a couple bikes for how much that trip cost.

I agree that it is his fault, but that is the most expensive ride in the history of the known universe. And it's absolutely ridiculous. And Uber knows exactly what it's doing. It's Halloween night. It's after two in the morning. They know their customer base is drunk. And $539 is unconscionable for no matter what.

The fact that even the driver was like, that's fucking stupid. Yeah. It was pretty good. Yeah. So I, you know, I, you're, you're, you're prefacing it with saying it's his fault, which I agree with, but I still think this goes firmly in my, in my category of Uber is a piece of shit, not the other way. And here's the deal though.

I mean, this was a first time Uber user who has to deal with surge pricing. So he doesn't really understand what it means. So here's a, here's a tip to Uber. Don't let a first time rider get in your car when surge pricing is active.

Only let a first time user get in your car when it's normal pricing because they don't understand or suspend surge pricing for that person. Yeah. First time riders should not have to deal with that because it doesn't really make sense. Even if you, if you, if you know it relatively well, surge pricing is still one of those things that just, uh, well, I think it's complete and utter bullshit and it needs to go away, but there you go.

No. Yeah. After getting fleeced in San Francisco on the surge pricing, as much as I, I still, you know, like having a nice car and the Uber X experiences I had in San Francisco were terrible because, you know, you just get schlubs in a, like a, you know, crappy, like 89 Corolla coming to pick you up.

I had the Prius with the, uh, with the lovely wooden bobble bead seat covers. That was awesome. Yeah. So Uber is, has rolled out another bit of their, I'm doing air quotes. It's a podcast. You can't know that service. Uh, they are helping people who want to become Uber drivers, get cars.

Sort of. Okay. So I think we're going to disagree on this one. So bring us in. Give it, give me your, uh, your take on why this is bad. Well, I don't necessarily think it's bad. I think it's a, it's a, it's actually quite a good idea. There's a couple issues with it. First off the, the rates that they're, these cars loans are at are astronomical and well above what you could get if you went out by yourself or found a third party broker.

Uh, secondly, they are making a dual claim here. Basically the Uber is saying, we talked about the Uber unicorn last week. Uber is basically telling people you can make this much money, even though we cannot find anyone that makes the mean amount.

What Uber says is the mean amount of money that you can make as a driver. No one can find anybody that makes that amount. So it's obviously not the mean it's, it's a fake number that nobody even actually makes. So they're saying you're going to make this much money. So why don't we get you a car? You'll be able to afford it because you're going to make this much money driving it.

Not true. Okay. Not true. Lie. No, I, I, I get that part. I totally get that. Okay. That's why I think it's bad. So on the flip side of it, I didn't see anywhere in the Washington Post article where they actually state the loan rate for the cars.

So I think I Googled that separately and it's, it's not good. Yeah. It's, it's actually quite high. Cause they, I mean, I thought what they were doing was getting a bulk deal on these cars that nobody just wanted to buy. Right. And so they were getting a discount on the car. So the people who are getting the cars are getting a car that nobody wants, but they're getting it at a discounted rate.

Right. So that was, I thought the, the, the side effect of the, the pricing on it. But now think about this. I have a whole diatribe in our show notes, which I'm not going to even look at now. Cause it'll take me an hour to read. Okay. Cause it involves Jerry Springer and shitbags. So I was really kind of hoping you were going to get into it, but okay.

Okay. Well, here we go. If you disassociate this program from the Uber connection, I think it's a good thing for people who would normally be sitting at home on welfare, watching Jerry Springer to be out and about earning some cash and at the end of it coming out with a car they own. If they're shitbags, you can repo the car, but it gives an opportunity to people to get ahead.

Lie. Also, also with more drivers, less surge pricing because this is a client demand equation shifts. I see this as an overall win. I'll stop there. Okay. Go back to, go back to your point where you, that you didn't like. Well, I just, I, I don't think that's true. I think it's, they're selling a load of shit.

I mean, if you, if you're people, if you're somebody that's sitting at home and you're on welfare, uh, you're going to get the car and then you're going to continue to sit at home and do nothing. And you're going to get the car repossessed. That's a gross stereotyping. That is a gross stereotyping of people on welfare because some people just can't get jobs.

I, I don't, I'm not going to argue that point. I'm just saying that I don't think that this, I, I, this is where, this is where I get really weird because I am a true liberal and I'm super, super democratic and I'm super about helping everyone, but the world has beat me down and I don't believe it anymore.

Well, I'm saying that's, that's, that's the thing. It's like, no, it is a, it is a gross over stereotyping. I agree with you about that, but I also, I just don't see this as the way to go. I think there are way better ways to, to go about picking yourself up and getting yourself out there and doing something with your life than having Uber give you a card at an exorbitant rate, but I think companies giving people tools that they can't afford to enter the marketplace is actually a good thing.

Let's stop using the term giving because they are not giving you anything. Well, here's the deal. It's indentured servitude. Exactly. Thank you. But everything, everything we do is indentured servitude. You buy that iPhone because you need to make a living on it and then you have to pay it off for two years. That's your, I mean, the whole economics of it, everything we fucking buy nowadays that has a contract is indentured servitude.

That's well, this, this might be where, and that was my gross generalization. That's very true as well. But here's where maybe I differ from the rest of the world in that I don't do the indentured servitude thing. I don't buy something unless I can actually afford it and pay for it outright. I pay off my credit card bills at the end of every single month.

The only reason I use credit card bills is because I'm trying to get airline miles. If I could just pay straight up cash or write a check for it and not get a benefit, I would do that. I don't go into indentured servitude for anything and I never will. Well, that makes you, yeah, that makes you the unicorn in America.

Yeah, I know that. Or most of the world. But this is why, this is how people should treat their finances and we're just perpetuating this idiotic system that, that basically screws us and is a win for them. So damn it, stop it. Yeah, but like I said, if they fuck up and they don't, they can't pay it, then they take the car back.

But then for a while, they've had a car. But then they're in even worse situations because once you get a repo, your credit goes down, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Well, it's not like their credit's great already because they can't get a car, you know, so they got nothing to lose. They probably could get a car if they actually did some research and went out there and did it themselves instead of just going, ooh, Uber's going to give me one.

Okay. We're talking ourselves in circles. I know. Let's move on. Let's talk about how Neil Gaiman wrote a big blog about how he loves that people copy his stuff because he still makes money. Okay. I'm going to have to reach through the mic and slap you because he did not write a blog. He wrote a blog post. Whatever.

Damn it. And it wasn't even a blog post. It was a transcription of the introduction to a new book by Cory Doctorow called Information Doesn't Want to Be Free, which I see, it actually will be arriving here shortly, this book, which I could only get in hardcover from Amazon, which to me, I'll talk about this in a second.

But okay, the piece by Neil Gaiman is actually quite fascinating because it's called How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Duplicator Machines, and it talks about how the internet is a duplication machine and how people need to adjust their models on how they make money because it's not going to change.

No. We're stuck now. So you have to – it's adapt or die. Right. And he, fortunately for himself, saw this early and has tweaked his career to not just be a writer. Now, he's mostly a speaker, which sucks because I wish he would write more books.

Kind of my point about this. But here's the deal. It's how he makes a living. I mean he earns a ton of money doing what he does. So he uses the books as another stepping stone, which is how musicians use it as a stepping stone to get live gigs or whatnot. But everything has changed.

Let me make a really quick point about that. That only works if you became famous and built your brand pre the system. That's the only way that this works. Neil Gaiman would not be able to make a living speaking unless he had been a really famous author pre this system.

Anybody that's coming out now cannot do what Neil Gaiman did, what Trent Reznor did, what Amanda Palmer did, what Taylor Swift did. None of them could do that. See, I – here's the deal though. There are people coming up through the ranks all the time that are e-book publishers only.

The guy that wrote Wool and he was an e-book publisher only and then he did a good product and then it got up and then he's diversified since then. Those are the unicorns. They are. It's a self-selecting sample. Yes. Obviously, it's a self-selecting sample because you don't see the people that have failed which are, you know, immeasurable.

Yeah. Yeah. So the interest – It's a lottery system that we're all being sold on and I think that this article perpetuates that myth is a little bit to a certain extent and I want people – I want Neil Gaiman and I want Trent Reznor to come out and say, I'm fucking lucky.

You will not be able to do this. I'm in a position where I came up before in a system that did not held me down. I became super famous and I'm able to trade off of that and I will be able to for the rest of my life. You will not. Well, yeah, that's the thing. It's like every megastar, it's all about luck and timing and being in the right place with a good product.

Yes. I agree. You must have listened to my new podcast. I did listen to a little bit of it. Yeah, where I did basically say the whole VC thing is luck. OK. I'm good on you. Yeah. So there's an audio file that we're going to link from Cory Doctor, one of his speeches where he lays out his three laws of whatever it is.

Yeah. And a lot of this is really contradictory to shit that he's been talking about forever and I apologize for all of the foul language this episode. I'm just very hyped up and ready to go. Fuck it out. I had many espressos this morning. Hate espressos apparently.

And originally all of his books he's given away. Yeah. You can go download them straight from a site and sometimes he puts in advertisements for like small bookshops and stuff like this. This book you can't. No. You cannot do it. It does not want to be free.

Well, I love his new direction. I always had an issue with the whole free economy that we've been building on the internet. I've been bitching about it for, what are we, 83 episodes now. I'm glad to see someone swinging around to my side of the fence.

And I listened to this entire thing. I agree with absolutely everything he said. It's a shame that he was the other direction for so long, but he's seen the light. Unfortunately, much like Lanier. Lanier? Remember his book? Yeah, Jaron Lanier. Lanier. Wonderful ideas, but we've already let the dogs out.

Let the dogs out. Yeah. Pandora's box has been opened and we are not going to be able to shove this shit back in. Especially not at $4.99 a month. No. So I've got the book coming. I'll review it next week. I have the hard copy coming today.

I got it next day from Amazon, which is just so ridiculous because he bags on Amazon so much on everything else and you can't buy it through any other venue, which I thought was just, it's, it, I don't know how to react to all of the inconsistencies that are going on with this entire story.

So, yeah, it's, well, anybody that's almost like he gave up, he gave up and joined the system, but he didn't because the whole book is about railing against the system. So we'll see. Actually. Yeah, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. I'm, I'm, I'm just confused. I mean, I've got a love hate relationship with Corey.

I knew him way back in the day. I met him like 10 years ago, had some great conversations with him. I thought he was a stellar guy. The only problem was that he just gets on a tear and doesn't let it go. So you hear him repeating himself far too often. Well, I hope he sticks on this one and doesn't let this go because this needs to be screamed from the mountaintops.

Information does not want to be free. Content does not want to be free. Everything isn't free. If we keep going free, nobody is going to make a living. Nobody's going to be able to buy anything and everything is going to be fucking crap. It's all, we're, it's, we're rocketing towards a world that is nothing but BuzzFeed.

I think the best thing I took out of the talk was information doesn't want to be anthropomorphized. That was my favorite bit. I love the talk. He took information to the cabin and sat around with it. Had some cabernet. I mean, he's, he's very clever and I am a big fan.

I've always been a big fan of his writing. I've not really agreed with his ideas. I've, I've been the guy standing on the side going, don't give your stuff away. Stop giving your stuff away. You're feeding into the system. And he's come around to my way of thinking. So, Hey man, come on over.

The water's fine. It's just, we don't have any money. So yeah, his whole copyright and DRM things are, it's like, it's a, like you said, it's a Pandora's box. I, you know, I don't believe in DRM because it is, it is statistically proven not to prevent anything just gets in the way from people doing the things that they want to do.

But okay. Enough about Corey. You know, I love his books. I, I like him for the most part. I just think he gets a little old and tiresome, but I'll tell you next week how I feel about him after I read his book. Yeah, I've got to read that as well. I do have one more thing I want to throw in about this because another one of the people that wrote, uh, an intro for him, uh, and Neil Gaiman's wife, Amanda, my favorite person in the world, Amanda fucking Palmer, uh, also wrote an intro.

Um, she wrote one called, uh, why fans choose to pay artists they love because she is well known for basically taking things for free and asking her fans to pay for things and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Uh, she did not do this out of altruism because she also has a book out called The Art of Asking or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Let People Help, uh, which is, you know, her whole thing right now is just be you and people will pay you for it.

Uh, I would just like to quickly note, I'm not going to go on a huge rant about this, that the book is not available for free. Uh, you cannot make donations to get it. It is $27. So she is, uh, she is not asking, she is demanding $27 to read about how you ask for stuff. Okay.

Moving on. Moving on. Let's talk about a little bit of music real quick because this intro is going way too long. Yeah. Yes, it is. We're already at 20 minutes. Uh, Taylor Swift. Yeah. Um, she is, uh, basically, uh, we talked about how there had been no platinum albums.

She is already platinum. Now the conversation has shifted to this is probably going to be the last platinum album ever recorded, uh, and released. And I agree with that. Uh, until she makes her next one. No, I don't necessarily think there's going to be another one in her future, but. We'll see about that.

I, I think she realizes that, uh, the music industry is, is not a good way to make money. She's already positioning herself as, as kind of a lifestyle guru. I see some acting in her future. There may be one or one, maybe two other albums, but I think that, uh, we're not going to. Everything we've talked about is there's no money in doing this.

So why are you going to do it? And I see that in conversations I have with musician friends, uh, with, with people in the industry, they're going, why am I working so hard at this? Uh, why am I producing all this stuff when I make absolutely no money whatsoever doing it? And they're all trying to figure out other things.

This is, this is what happens when we've opened up this Pandora's box. We can not, I'm not even saying Taylor Swift's music is good because I don't think it is, but a lot of people do. We're not going to have that anymore because you won't pay for it. Right. So the quality is going to go down because people are not going to spend the time to learn the craft to become masters at it.

Exactly. Exactly. So actually there, there will be, there will be a dedicated fan base and artisanal music club, as it were, that does get good at it. They do it for the love and pure enjoyment of it as a hobby. But all in all, the culture, I think is going to disintegrate down to the lowest common denominator of Taylor Swiftians.

Or how I refer to her, taste why. That is so adorbs. It's ridiculous. Cray cray. Yeah. The taste why. So let's talk about the actual reason that we were going to talk about Taylor Swift. Right before her album release, she pulled all of her music off of Spotify. This is not surprising.

People were very like, I can't believe that happened. Well, duh. Because let me, let's, let's run through the math here. Well, I was just going to say, just, just from, from my standpoint, I'm not going to ever buy her albums, but it's a, as far as a business move goes, it's brilliant. It's fucking brilliant. It's the only thing that you can do.

You build up the promotion to, to a, a, you know, taste, taste why proportion, that's just gigantic. And then you basically pull your music off the services that don't pay you anything. And the only way that all these fucking crazy ass fans can get her stuff is to pay for it.

Shocking. Now, so this caused a bit of an uproar and, and there's been a lot of conversation amongst, uh, amongst the musician circles that I run within. And, uh, I just wanted to read verbatim, uh, a post that I saw. This is by a low black who I do not know personally, but I friends of friends.

And he posted this on his Facebook and it's been doing the rounds. Here we go. Consider the fact that it takes roughly 1 million spins on Pandora for a songwriter to earn just $90. Avicii's release, wake me up that I co-wrote and sing. For example, was the most streamed song in Spotify history and the 13th most played song on Pandora since its release in 2013 with more than 168 million streams in the U S and yet

that yielded only $12,359 in Pandora domestic royalties, which were then split among the three songwriters and our publishers in return for co-writing a major hit song. I've earned less than $4,000 domestically from the largest digital music service. Why bother?

Seriously? For you music fans out there, this is a conversation that every musician is starting to have. Why am I doing this? What is the point? Yes, I love to write music. I cannot feed myself.

Especially if he lives in LA. Jesus, four grand won't get you very far. Four grand is barely rent in a lot of places in LA. Yeah, for one month. Yeah. So he's got to write at least 12 number one songs to get through the year. And it is, you know, the chance of getting a hit that big is so small.

And that used to be the kind of allure of doing this as a musician. The phrase was always, it only takes one. You get one hit song and you are set for life. And then you just keep writing music anyways, because now you know you can pay your bills. Well, if you win that fucking lottery and you get a hit song now, you get four grand.

Yeah. That's it. It's fucking over. So there's some more statistics that also came out about the Taylor Swift album. In the U.S., Taylor Swift's 1989 has the biggest first week sales since Eminem's The Eminem Show in 2002. Or 22% of all album sales last week.

Or more than the next 106 albums combined. So basically the music industry is Taylor Swift now. That's it. It's just her. See, that's what I'm saying. It is now become, it is so dissolved. It's the lowest common denominator, which is sadly Taylor Swift.

Yeah. So that's where we're at. And our intro is already 26 minutes and we have more stuff to talk about. Oh, Jesus. Okay. So let's just cut this real quick. Let's do it quick. And Apple has come out saying music sales are down 13% over the same time last year.

So they're going down. They're going to have to spin up beats, but that's going to be a failure and cause more problems in the industry. Basically, just if you like music, go to the back catalogs because that's all that's going to be anything worth listening to shortly. Yeah, I really don't see there.

There's no win right now. There's absolutely no light at the end of the tunnel. There's absolutely nothing. We thought it was bad with Napster. That's nothing. And it's time for the music industry to pivot. Well, the funny thing is that we've all sold this idea that, oh, well, if everybody just pays for the streaming services, everything's going to be fine.

No. No. It's actually worse. You might as well just steal it. You might as well. The same amount of money is going to go to the musicians if you just hop on BitTorrent and get their entire catalog versus stream it. Pretty true. Pretty true. So you have one last article that just backs everything up.

It's the five disturbing facts that show the system is rigged against America's middle class. This is a Salon article. It is, in fact, brutal. And I think the only way that things are going to change is revolucion. I think we're kind of coming down to that. This is a brutal article, and it is backed up by facts and figures.

There is no disputing any of these. Let me just read through one through five really quickly with no commentary. Number one, each year since the recession, America's richest 1% have made more than the cost of all U.S. social programs. Number two, almost none of the new 1% of wealth led to innovation and jobs. Number three, just 47 wealthy Americans own more than half of the U.S. population.

Number four, the upper middle class of America owns a smaller percentage of wealth than the corresponding groups in all major nations except for Russia and Indonesia. Number five, 10% of the world's total wealth was taken by the global 1% in the past three years. We are fucked. Way to start off a show.

Yep.

Comment of the week. Kenny paid for the hosting this month.

Woo! Thank you, Kenny. Thank you, Kenny. Yeah, we do appreciate the donations because, you know, it's the art of asking, and we don't get paid for this, and we don't get paid for anything in our lives, really. And the, you know, the desperately clawing onto the middle class that I've been doing is slipping treacherously.

So thank you very much, Kenny. We do appreciate it. We like doing the show, and we like that people actually seem to appreciate it. So here's his comments. Hey, Jason and Brian. It's Kenny from London, at S-K-H-X-S on Twitter, throwing you some more beer money and asking if you could do me a favor and give an unofficial shout-out to my good friend, Matt, at Stand Up Mass, the nerdiest man I know who just brought out an awesome book about the fourth dimension.

Check it out at, link will be in our show notes. I'm not going to read that. Much as I like to make sure you guys have enough beer money to keep me entertained as often as you do, I want him to write another awesome book, so I want this one to do really well. Cheers and keep up the regular grumpiness, Kenny. I think we're achieving that today.

So thank you, Kenny. Sadly, if you listen to our intro, that it doesn't look good for your friend Matt. No, no, but, you know. Cheers. We hope he does well, and I'm definitely going to buy the book just to say thank you, and I'll check it out. Yes, I'm going to buy it as well, and we'll probably review it in a future episode.

So, yeah, we are all about supporting people that do good work with the limited amount of funds that we have left. And I don't know who this man is, but I love his Twitter handle, StandUpMaths. Yes. It is good, so that's good. I like nerdy people. Me too. Our second comment comes from Charlie H.

Another great episode this week. Brian mentioned a couple of NPR podcasts that he enjoyed, and I wanted to throw out another that I enjoy. It is Ask Me Another. Very entertaining, as it features a lot of music in the questions. You can't go wrong with a good musician on the staff, and I bet he actually got paid.

Stay grumpy. Regards, Charlie. Thanks, Charlie. Actually, I'll bet you he probably doesn't. Well, the musician on the staff. Or at least not very much. Okay. Step off for a second. Okay, okay. What do they do on Adam Crowe? Sniff the microphone?

Sniff the mic. Okay. So, Ask Me Another is an awesome show. I actually pimped this show on episode 43 of Grumpy Old Geeks, The Gloves Are Off. And I really did enjoy the show, and I listened to it occasionally. The musician on the show is the one and only Jonathan Colton.

Nice. Who is about the only person, I think, in music that's not Taylor Swift that is making money. And he makes a lot of money by doing things that are not in the traditional sense. Now, I'm on the fence about him. I kind of like his music sometimes, but on this show, he's really good.

And the latest episode was called Puzzle Hood. Because they had Ethan Hawke on from whatever that 12-year epic long movie was. But he was really funny. But Jonathan Colton did a version of Crazy Train that was really entertaining.

Awesome. Well, I have not listened to this show yet. And Jason may have talked about it, but I ignore most of the things he tells me to listen to. So I will go listen to it now that somebody else told me to. What the fuck is the story of my life? Yes.

I'm in a bit of a loopy mood. Sorry, Jason. As a quiz guy, you're going to love this show because I was enthralled with it. I'd forgotten about it, and this got me to listen to it again. And it's really entertaining. And the way they do the puzzles and the rounds and the game and all that stuff, I was actually laughing my ass off.

So thank you, Charlie, and thank you, Kenny. Appreciate it. Thank you very much, guys. And please do go give us a five-star rating on iTunes because we love that number. And send us comments because we're not just doing this for shits and giggles. Actually, we kind of are.

Actually, I was going to say, that's all we're doing it for.

In the news. Amazon is now competing with Flickr and Dropbox, it turns out. Well, Amazon is diversifying to take over the world because they're on a hot streak right now. Yeah, that Kindle, or what is it, Fire Phone, that's a real hot streak for them.

One miss. So what they're trying to do is they're trying to replicate the iOS, Apple ecosystem to get you for lock-in. So they want to get you locked in. So they're giving you unlimited photo storage if you have Amazon Prime. Also, they have a new thing called Cloud Drive where you get five gigabytes free.

There's the Dropbox competitor. And no Mac support at all yet. So I'll be skipping this. But either way, I'd be skipping it because I am not going to give Amazon my photos in a free service. I store a lot of my photos in Amazon S3 and some of the cold storage stuff.

And I pay for that. Yeah. Because then I control it. So I would recommend everybody else do the same. So Microsoft also has a new fitness wearable, the band. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Have you seen it? I have seen it. Again, it's not for me, but it looks all right.

It looks like right in the dictionary above the definition for fugly is the new Microsoft wearable. It's not pretty, but is a wearable band supposed to be? I guess it will be thanks to Apple, but it looks fine. It's expensive.

It's expensive. And I do have to say that I found my Misfit wearable again finally, and I've been wearing it for a couple weeks, and it looks much better. Okay. But anyway, the Microsoft one does more. All of the press basically say it's a steaming pile of shit and skip it. But that is Microsoft's – that's what Microsoft does.

They build really, really good things that are actually very functional and very well thought out, and they're just ugly as crap. Okay. Speaking of, did you see the articles on the Surface Tablet 3 that CNN used as part of like a promo deal, and all the people that were behind the camera used them as iPad stands?

Yeah, Microsoft is getting no love whatsoever from the media. I mean, they had the same issue with the NFL because they made a deal with the NFL, and they basically – the NFL had to basically tell everyone, you cannot use your iPads. You must use the services. I know. Yeah, they're getting no love whatsoever, but poor Microsoft.

I've always had a soft spot for Microsoft. I always will. I was a PC guy as a kid, so keep on going. And at the end of the day, Apple stock went down yesterday. Microsoft's went up, so apparently they're still winning. Well, tell me about market cap and get back to me anyway.

That's a good point. So Google's mission is changing from don't be evil, which always – it was kind of always like an anecdotal mission statement because one dude wrote it on a whiteboard. Yeah, and none of us ever actually believed it anyways. In the old days, I did.

I was, you know, young, doe-eyed, and thought that they were there to change the world, and I'm a fucking idiot. Well, you know, just join me on the jaded side. We're almost always right. For this one, I have to because, yeah, Google's mission is give me all your money.

That's it. Yeah. Yeah. That's pretty much it. Give me your data. I'll send you some ads, and we'll go from there. The weird thing is I am really pretty locked into Google's ecosystem. I use Chrome. I use their calendar system for keeping track of the work that I'm not getting paid for.

I use it for an awful lot of stuff, and I'm sad to see that they're just even overplaying lip service to the idea of not being evil anymore. Yeah. Times, they are a-changing. Indeed. That's a song, kids, if you didn't know it, that you can go buy.

Can you imagine? Let's go off on a quick tangent here. If Bob Dylan were around right now, he would be busking, and he would not have a record deal, and nobody would ever have heard of him. Oh, absolutely not. This is where we're at. Honestly, I think Bob Dylan's music is terrible.

Well, he's a horrible singer, but you cannot – he is probably the best songwriter the world has ever seen. Hands down. And you know who he learned most of that stuff from? Who? Liam Clancy, the guy that stole my photo and used it on his CD cover, who is now dead because I killed him with a lawsuit, literally.

Okay. Sorry about that, Liam. Anyway, I can take you to – That went somewhere I did not expect it to go. I've been to Bob Dylan's house. It's right up in Malibu, and it is kind of a shithole anyway. So now Facebook is offering tour users access to Facebook.

Okay. Seems counterintuitive because if you're going on to tour to be secret and privative, you're not going to go to Facebook. But okay. Well, on the surface it seems that way, but if you're a dissident and you need to like talk to people on Facebook because that's where other dissidents are hanging out because apparently they're dumb dissidents, that's the way you get to it.

So, yeah, it's an interesting concept. I'm glad they did it because apparently what was happening before was if you tried to access Facebook on tour, you were basically booted. Right, yeah. And now they've given you a .onion address where you can get to Facebook.

So I think it's a good step. Yeah, I'm for this. Why not? Do it. No, at the end of the day, you're still stuck on Facebook. Yeah. At the end of the day, you're still connecting through a private service to share your stuff that can be found by everyone. And in throwback news, we just found out that Facebook did another one of those little kind of tweaky secret experiments on its users.

Back in 2012, before the election, they tweaked their news feed so that we saw more hard news shared by friends as opposed to pictures of lunch. So here's the deal. This 2012 was the same year that they did the last experiment on. Yeah. Now, are the same people that were bitching about the other experiment bitching about this one?

Because this one had a good effect because it got 3% more people to the polls. So is there the same outrage for this one than the other one? I probably would think not because this one, they did something that got people to do something that was positive.

Well, we already know that there isn't the same amount of outrage because, I don't know about you, but my Facebook feed was filled with outrage the first time around. And this news story was completely buried and I had to kind of go out of my way to find it. Absolutely nobody posted anything about this one. Yeah. Oh, pick your – it must be pick your outrage day on the internet.

Yeah. And I'm totally okay with this. I like this idea. I mean everything that we talk about and everything that we hate could actually be fixed by voting for people that believe in the same things that we believe in. Nobody votes. I was totally happy seeing the whole Facebook thing for this election where it popped up with the find your local polling place, get out and vote, blah, blah, blah.

I think that these services almost have a need to do it. I want them to do it. I'm happy Facebook did it and I think they should keep it up. I have the complete contrarian opinion on that one. I'm not surprised. Because if they fuck with one aspect of your feed to make you do one thing, they can fuck with it to make you do another.

But they're doing it anyways. Well, so if you buy into it, know that you're being manipulated because it's ridiculous to say that, okay, if they use it for something I like, it's a good thing. If they use it for something I hate, it's a bad thing. And actually, you know what? How about you don't fucking do it at all and let people see what everybody else writes?

Look, I was trying to be positive for once. My real feeling on it is if – You failed at it. My real feeling on it is if you actually have to be reminded by Facebook to vote, don't fucking vote. There we go. That's a brand I love. Welcome back. That is how I really feel about it. If you need Facebook or Twitter to remind you to vote, you do not understand anything that you're voting on, so don't fucking do it.

I'm totally okay with 30% fucking polls. I'm happy with that because you idiots. Anyways, moving on. Moving on. Security. Ha. For the first time ever, I'm bringing in the security segment.

This is Jason's domain, but I found one that was too good not to talk about. It's the oopsies of the week. It's not exactly a hack, but it's still something that's bad. Apparently, there's a site – well, apparently. Like, I'm on it, so – no, I'm just kidding. There's a site called Positive Singles, which is a STD dating site.

They are getting a $16.5 million penalty because they leaked information to other dating sites. So if you signed up on Match.com and you also have herpes and you're on PositiveSingles.com, everybody on Match now knows that you have herpes. Well, it's not like that.

They have a – they basically have a consortium of affiliates. So what they would do is to give you your own dating site. They would say, here's a pre-done website and, oh, look, here's a database. Yeah. So if I wanted to have blackmenwithgiantdongs.com, then I have a pre-populated database, and that's pretty much what happened.

Yeah. So people – yes, yeah. Not good. So, yeah, there's a class action lawsuit, and you can get back, like, five bucks. Okay, so moving on – well, you can get five bucks if you're a black man with a giant dong, I guess. Well, conveniently.

The Department of Homeland Security employee data has been breached by a, quote-unquote, state-sponsored attack. Uh-huh. This is not good. No. Well, basically what happened is a – well, here's the thing.

It's a computer in China went after a couple different systems, but the one that got the most traction was a contractor to the DHS, and they pulled a bunch of data out. Now, this whole state-sponsored attack thing is kind of pissing me off a bit because just because the computer is China – it is in China.

The computer is not China. China would be a big fucking computer. A dude from Russia can take a flight to China, go to a cafe, or just get internet access and pull it out. There's no evidence of a, quote-unquote – that's why it's in quotes – state-sponsored attack. Well, it's even worse than that, and actually my main frustration with this article is that the title basically says it's a state-sponsored attack.

But the actual statement is, quote, has all the markings of a state-sponsored attack, end quote, which is not saying it's a state-sponsored attack. It's just saying we're looking into it. Absolutely. So, Sophos, stop with the click-baity headlines and just give us the news because that was bullshit.

That pissed me off. Yeah. And it's a new one. It just came out today. And, yeah, state-sponsored attack means it comes from an IP address inside of a known location where Chinese are, like, have hackers that are known to be causing breaches. There is nothing in the article about that.

But the point is that the Department of Homeland Security has been breached through a vendor. So, like, vendor security, if you're hiring a vendor, a third-party vendor, and you're giving them your user data, you need to make sure that those guys are solid. Yeah. Because they are, you know, your company, I mean, at this point it's, you know, a governmental agency, but if it's your company, you are on the hook for the data that you gave them that are now in the hands of other people.

So, you know, just practice safe security, I guess. Yeah. Okay. Now, this next one made me so happy. Okay. So, in the past, people would get a notice that, hey, I'm a hacker.

I'm going to DDoS your server. Give me some money and I won't do it. Right. Right? It's a total shakedown. It's blackmail. Like, it's bullshit. So, this guy, Martin Albert, who runs a Bitcoin site called Bitiloo, or Bitiloo, got one of these.

And the guy's like, yeah, give me a Bitcoin and I won't DDoS your server. And he's like, uh, fuck you. I'm going to put, I'm going to give you, I'm going to give 100 Bitcoin to the person who finds this asshole, just like that Mel Gibson movie. Right. Yeah. And I loved it.

I loved it. And the hackers is, uh, DD, yeah, DD4BC. That's his, his numbed plume. So, I just love this. I totally loved it. I'm like, yeah, fight back. No, I, yeah, that's great. Everybody should do that.

Awesome. Um, next up, uh, your fingerprint scanner on your phone. They can make you open your phone with it. The, if you put a password on it, they can't do the password. But the fingerprint, yes, they can. Okay. So that's not secure. Uh, no. The interesting thing is Authentech, the people that sell Apple, the fingerprint recognition technology, is also owned by the same company, uh, Harris Corporation, who manufactures the Stingray, which we have talked about many times on this show.

That, uh, local law enforcement illegally purchases and uses against you. So, uh, maybe skip the Touch ID and go with, uh, uh, complex passphrase. Look, I would never keep my, my illegal secrets on my iPhone. Uh, that you know of.

We'll get to that in a second. Uh, this one's real quick. This is an Ars Technica article where researchers bridge air gap by turning monitors into FM radio. This is awesome. It's so cool. It's so cool. I mean, it destroys any sense of privacy that I've ever had in my entire life, but it is awesome.

We've talked about the air gap stuff before, but this one is just like, yeah, you can turn your computer's video card into an FM transmitter. Anybody with a, uh, receiver can stand outside and get the data. I mean, it, it, it, you know, assumes a pre-reached computer.

Just read the article. It's a bunch of tech stuff, but the fact that they can do it is so cool. Didn't they do this in sneakers? Remember that movie, Sneakers? Didn't they? I've, I've, I've reviewed sneakers on, does it have legs? Didn't they do this exact thing where they basically, they, they, they recreated what was happening on a monitor from way far away?

Or is that just, is my brain making that up? Okay. Your brain is making that up. They had what, what, what we call colloquially as a, uh, pair of binoculars. Uh, there you go. Okay. It must've been some other movie. Cause I do remember it from a movie, but it's amazing. I can't believe that you can do this. Unbelievable. So Mac users, unsaved files and screenshots are automatically stored on iCloud is next up.

This is actually a slate article. So I thought you would have posted it, but, uh, no, um, I did see it and I was going to put it in the notes. Uh, so whenever you're using a Mac app and you have iCloud attached to your computer, you know, with your iCloud login, there's, there's that cool, like, functionality where you can quit the app and you come back and all your documents are exactly as you left them.

Yeah. Well, they're using iCloud to store those in between documents. And there's no reason for them to do that. None whatsoever. There's no reason for that to go to the cloud instead of just be stored locally. Exactly. So, uh, a researcher figured this out and he's like, uh, these are files that not should be, should not be off my computer and they're there.

So what the hell, Apple? Uh, so just be careful about what you're using in iCloud enabled devices. If you're doing documents that need to be, you know, secure. Right. Yeah. That terrifies me. And in related news, don't buy a new TV. I didn't plan on it, but tell me what's wrong.

I am in the market for a new TV right now because, uh, I just got a new place, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm getting a new TV, assuming I have any money to buy one. Uh, and then I found this article on salon. I'm terrified of my new TV, why I'm scared to turn this thing on and you'd be too. And basically the, it just runs through all the new features that come with your smart TVs that involve, uh, basically always being on, uh, listening for your voice commands, recording

things, storing it off in the cloud, uh, all the different data that's being sent back and forth to the manufacturer of the TV and the deals that they have with people like direct TV and cable companies. Uh, this is scary ass shit and it's your TV. See, I didn't need to read this article because I knew as soon as they put a, a, they put a camera in the TV and they have apps on the TV and the microphone and they do the voice recognition.

Yeah. It's the same reason why I don't think anybody should ever buy a Microsoft connect or an Xbox one because it's always listening and always watching and always recording and always being stored offsite somewhere you do not know about. And the fact that the TV manufacturer says, Oh, we're just going to share this to third party, you know, third parties who could be anybody in a safe.

Yeah. And there's no, there's no opt in or out by the way. It's either you turn off all the features or they're on end of story. So it, the main reason I would never buy a smart TV is have you used one of these things? No, no. I still, I have a stupid TV still.

The user interface for any features on a smart TV are so terrible that they're almost unusable. My mom has one of these things and it doesn't have the camera, but it has like, you know, built in apps for Netflix and stuff like that. And every time you turn the TV on, you have to update the apps.

It takes forever. It's a mess. Yeah. So just from a usability standpoint, you should never buy a smart TV just because they suck. Yeah. Not to mention that they're watching you walk around and spank it to golden girls or whatever. Yeah. Agreed. So, uh, found a new article on smart light bulbs that fool burglars by pretending you're at home.

This is the dumbest thing I've seen today. I, and I've seen some pretty stupid things already today. I think this is the one thing that we can agree a thousand percent on. First off, these light bulbs are what? Almost 200 bucks each. 300.

300 for a light bulb. For a light bulb that has a speaker and it also learns your patterns. So it's like, oh, I'm usually home here and I'll turn the lights on, blah, blah, blah. Here's the deal. If you go on Facebook and you post off to Hawaii with the family, no fucking light bulb is going to keep your, your smart TV on the mantelpiece for when you get back.

Okay. Yeah. And how often do burglars case a house for weeks to kind of learn patterns? Like, oh, five o'clock. He usually goes out and gets some milk or takes a walk. Give me a break. This is, this is, they've invented a problem and given you a very expensive solution.

Exactly. And it's kick-started. And it's kick-started. They haven't met their goal yet. And I encourage the entire grumpy old Geekosphere to not give these people any money because it is a stupid idea. Agreed. So, uh, yeah, that's what I got this week.

All right. Good times. Good times. I'm so cheerful. At the library. I downloaded and started to read the peripheral by William Gibson. Um, I did not get to it because then I immediately ran off and got the Martian and read all of that.

So we'll talk about that in a second, but, uh, you've got some follow-up on Gibson. I really enjoyed this book. I mean, I, I, last time when we talked, I had been like, you know, like halfway through it or something. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and it's one of those books. It's, it's kind of like the, uh, the big end trilogy where it gets better on the second reading.

You know, you really start to kind of, everything kind of congeals because he is a little dense and he's talking about things that just never existed, uh, before. And on the second reading, I got so much more out of it, but I really enjoyed this book. I love the new universe that he's building with it.

I don't know if it's going to be a multi-parter, but you know, I, I really had a good time with it. So I'm definitely going to have to go back and read it then, uh, cause I'm having the same problem I have typically with Gibson books, which is the first few chapters, I'm just lost. I have no idea what's happening. I'm not making a connection with a character because his, his character developed development typically takes a long time.

So I don't know who's who he's using. He always invents completely new terminologies and I'm trying to figure out what the terms mean. I'm not there yet, but this is what I have with every Gibson book. So it always ends up congealing after a few chapters. So I'll just have to get back to it.

Yes. He has very circuitous, uh, character development, you could say. And I just, I loved it and I've read it twice now just because I was, I was just, just like you confused at the beginning. And it took me a while to figure out what the hell was going on. And then once I figured it out, I got into it, you know, and I really enjoyed the second half of the book.

But then I'm like, I kind of missed the whole first half of the book because I was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. So when I went back and read it again, I was just like, Oh, now it all clicks. And it was a great book. That's exactly where I was at with it too. So I'll have to get back to it. Um, I've had this link in the show notes for three episodes now and I have the book, but I have not gotten to it yet, but I just want to mention it to get it done with until we both read it.

Uh, there's a book called this will make you smarter by John Brockman, uh, which looks incredibly interesting to me and I absolutely have to read it. And we have a note in the show notes that, uh, a link in the show notes that talks a lot about it. Um, I think everybody should be reading this and at some point I will too.

Yeah. I actually sent you this link. This goes to brain pickings, which is Maria Popova's amazing site. If you don't check that site every day, you're an idiot. Um, I've read this book. I read it. I read it when I was in Pennsylvania doing manual labor last summer. If you remember me bitching about that, this was, this is what kept me sane this book because it's like two to three page essays by some of the smartest people in the world.

And it is great bathroom material because it, they basically are in poop size chunks. Um, and, and then you feel lighter and smarter when you come out of the bathroom. It is an amazing book. I highly recommend it. All right. So I will get on that after I finished the Gibson and then we'll talk about it.

Again, let's talk about the Martian because we both read it in record time. The Martian, a novel by Andy Weir. First time author. Yeah. Yeah. I fucking love this book. This is hard sci-fi at its best.

I really did enjoy it. Um, you have to be into tech. You have to be into science. Uh, if you are, this is a dream come true. Or if you just have OCD and like to, you know, know where everything is and has to be in its place. Really good about that. So it's, it's, it's the long and the short of it is it's a guy who's stranded on Mars.

Yeah. I don't want to give too much away, but it's a guy who's, is stranded on Mars and has to figure out, uh, uh, stranded on Mars. What do I do? And, and the first chapter is, I mean, it opens with the best lines in the world. It's like, well, I'm fucked.

You know, yeah, it's, it's very, very good. It's a great book. Uh, highly recommended. I mean, obviously the character work isn't the best because it really does focus on the hard science, but, uh, it's plausible. It's realistic. Um, it's fascinating.

And, uh, I really, really enjoyed it. And it's been optioned for a movie, which, uh, I'm both excited and terrified by. Here's the thing. The way that I found out about this book was from the Adam Savage podcast. He did a spoiler cast on it. Yeah. Which is, if you enjoy the book, go listen to the spoiler cast.

Cause it's quite. Yeah. Yeah. Well, read the book and then listen to it. Cause I listened to, I listened to this. Yeah. Well, I listened to half of it. So I kind of got up to it and I'm like, this book sounds amazing. I got to go get it. And I turned off the podcast. And then after I was done, I went back and re-listened to it and they had a really good dissection of the book and nothing really new that came to me after I was reading it.

But it just felt like a bunch of people that I can really commiserate with talking about the same things that I loved about the book. You know? Yeah. It's good stuff. Great book. Can't wait to see the movie. Maybe. I have a feeling the movie might suffer from the cast away Wilson problem. I don't think so because he does get, no, no, no, can't, can't talk about that.

No spoilers. No spoilers. So, but it is Ridley Scott who does know how to do space movies and it's Matt Damon who is not my first pick. Actually in the spoiler cast, they say Carl Urban would be a good pick. And I think that would be better. I think that would be so much better.

I love Carl Urban. I think he is so good. And by the way, if you haven't seen the new Dread movie where he plays, yeah, Dread, it's so good. I highly recommend, I think it was a 3D movie or something, but the newest Dread movie with Carl Urban is awesome.

Go check it out. And it's none of this, like Sylvester Stallone, I am the law kind of bullshit. That movie was horrible. I'm still tainted by it, but all right. I might check out the new one. Okay. All right. So did you read Cory Doctorow's book? I'm waiting for it to arrive.

Oh, you're waiting for it to arrive. Sorry. We did discuss that earlier. Yeah. Okay. You got a Bauhaus book. Tell me about this. I do. I got the David Haskins, who is the bass player for Bauhaus and then was the bass player for Love and Rockets and has also done some other things. He wrote his memoir.

It's called Who Killed Mr. Moonlight? Bauhaus, Black Magic, and Benediction. Full disclosure, Love and Rockets is the first band that I ever worked for. I was moonlighting from my first real gig at Hollywood Online doing websites and AOL packages for movies and did the Love and Rockets website for one of their releases.

I convinced David to do a blog and he would basically fax me handwritten sheets from the Holiday Inn or wherever the hell they were staying while they were on tour to my work and then I would type them up and put them up on their website. Wow. That's actually a really good story.

I never knew that. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I was doing. I would walk into work at Hollywood Online and there would be all these faxes waiting for me, handwritten from David Jay, which I still have sitting around somewhere. Okay. Okay. You know what? This is actually a little bit of history then because this had to be – we met in 1996, so this had to be what?

Like late 1995, early 96? Yeah. I think it was 95. So yeah, when I was doing that. I think you may actually have the first music blog. I think we – yeah. Nobody else was really doing it because the blogging scene was just kind of exploding, but music sites at that point were run by the labels and basically – No, no, no.

1995. Well, the term blog didn't come out until the late 90s. I think it was 99. Okay. And so there was no blog. And I thought that I was pretty early with Spew, like doing daily updates, but I think you may have beat me. Yeah. We just called it the tour diary. I was just like, we should do this. Why not?

So – and he was game for it. So this is getting away from the point of the book. Sorry. I just – I was fascinated. I thought that was a good story. Yeah, so that was a lot of fun. Actually, even though he was sending in the stuff, I had the least contact with him. I actually – Daniel Ashe, who's the singer for Love and Rockets and guitarist for Bauhaus, I talked to quite a bit, and Kevin Haskins, his brother, who's also the drummer, I actually

got to know relatively well later on because he got really into the electro EDM scene and raving, and one of my friends was a rave promoter, and he used to come out to all the raves that we were throwing back in the day. But it's an – if you are a fan of Bauhaus, I don't know if you want to go read this because it is very behind the scenes.

It is very music industry. It is very depressing to a certain extent because you find out basically what makes for a good band is tension, and obviously it's written from David J.'s perspective, so Peter Murphy does not come off very well.

So if you're a big Peter Murphy fan, you're going to find out that he's an egotistical asshole. Daniel Ashe is wildly creative but incredibly unpredictable and very good at shooting himself in the foot and destroying careers, and David J. is a fucking weirdo. So it's a great read.

I mean, if you want to keep the mystique of a band, you probably don't want to read it, but if you've already given up on the music industry like me, awesome. Absolutely stunning. Totally engaging except for when he goes into the crazy magic stuff that he believes in. Okay. Looney Tunes.

Little Looney. Honestly, I can name one Bauhaus song, which I think everybody can name, which is Bela Lugosi's Dead, and I cannot give you the title for a single other Bauhaus song. Oh, really? Well, I mean, I would highly recommend going and getting one of their best ofs, or even better, like one of the live albums, because it's stunning stuff.

Really high-wire, tension-filled music. Really? Yeah. I go back to them repeatedly. They're one of those bands that I would never list in my top ten, but I just listen to them constantly. Just great, great stuff. Super intriguing, super interesting.

They are not a goth band. That's how they're painted. It's just like, Bela Lugosi's Dead. No, this is great, great stuff. Go listen. I will put a link in the show notes for an album I recommend. Oh, awesome. Okay, cool. I didn't expect that. Thanks. No problem.

A friend of the show, Mike Walter, sent me a link to something new by Amazon. And they're continuing effort to spread themselves over the entire spectrum of human existence. It's something called the Amazon Echo, which looks like a microphone that sits in your room.

And it's their physical attempt at basically doing a Siri, if I understand this correctly. Yes. Well, it's a cross between Siri, Spotify. No, no, I'm sorry. Siri. Yeah, well, actually, yeah. Siri, Spotify, Pandora, and Sonos.

Okay. Yeah, it's always on. It's listening. It will answer your questions. It will record everything that you're doing and throw it up on a cloud somewhere. It will probably take pictures of you naked. There's no camera. Oh, there's no camera. Okay, they won't take pictures of you naked. Actually, I'm a little surprised that they didn't go all the way and have a screen.

I mean, why not just play YouTube videos as well for all of that and have a camera as well? Here's the deal. Here's the deal. The whole point is it's a hands-off extra brain in your house. It's almost like a digital servant. So you ask it. It's like, eh, I'm dumb.

Can you answer me a dumb question? Okay, here's the answer. And I loved it because I watched the video. You have to go watch the video because this is the stupidest fucking family I've ever seen. There is no way that these people can get a job good enough to buy that house, dress as well as they do, and have children that are also just as dumb.

So the wife is baking in the kitchen, and she's like – they named it something. They gave it a cute name. And she's like, oh, how many teaspoons are in a tablespoon? And I'm screaming at three. Three, you idiot. Did you not take home economics in high school?

And the father comes in, and the daughter's like, Daddy, how do you spell cantaloupe? And he's like, C-A-N – oh, hey, how do you spell cantaloupe? And I'm just like, you can't fucking spell cantaloupe? How stupid are you? So my whole thing is you have to have an IQ of 75 or less to purchase this product.

This has to be the lowest bar product in the history of the world. Well, there's your review. Yeah. Well, security concerns aside, which this is a nightmare waiting to happen because all this does is connect and do weird things, and you have no idea where all your stuff is being saved.

It's pretty stupid. It exists in a thousand other forms already. A friend of the show, Mike Walter, who sent this to me, purely wants to get it because you can name it. So he wants to be able to walk around his house and go, hey, bitch. The funny thing is I actually think it's a decent product.

Do you really? I do. Would you get this? I actually will. It's invitation only. You can sign up right now, and it's $100 off if you're a Prime member. Go for it. That's the only reason I'm buying it because I want to review it, and I do have an IQ of 75 or below, so I am a Prime member for it.

But the fact that it ties into your music system and you can play Spotify or whatever, it'll do Bluetooth from your phone to the system, so it's basically a speaker as well. And for $99, it seems like it's a decent speaker system. And the other stuff, it's just like, hey, oh, the alarm clock aspect was kind of nice.

But for the most part, it's just like we've got all this shit with Siri or whatever the Ask Me Google thing is. It's a cheap play to get in, and I think if I buy it when it's early, I will have an artifact of the past because this is going to be a dead product in a year.

Yeah, I think it will be, too. Media Candy. Now, I generally don't like to talk about comic books because that is death for a podcast when you talk about comic books. And we're geeky enough.

So I won't. I won't. I will just say in the back, in my previous history, I used to love the comic book Hellblazer. Then they made a movie out of it with Keanu Reeves called Constantine, and now they have a TV series out called Constantine. Okay. All I got to say is, as far as the new crop of TV this year, this season, or whatever the fuck they call it nowadays, the cycle, if you're a supermodel, Constantine rocks.

I love it. It is so good. Okay. Okay, that's it. That's all you got. Well, I've never – I'm not a comic book fan. I think I got G.I. Joe's when I was a kid, and that was about it. I'm vaguely aware of the concept of Constantine, which I like.

And if you think it's good, then I guess I should probably watch it. Okay. Let me give two seconds of background then. I was expecting a little more from my co-host on that one. Well, hey, not a comic book guy. No, but did you see the Keanu Reeves movie? I did, and I thought it was decent. Not great, but decent.

Well, the expectations going in were so low that it turned out to be an amazing movie compared to what we were all expecting. Oh, I call that the Matrix effect. Well, the Matrix one was still a solid fucking movie, don't you? No, the Matrix was great, but nobody thought it was going to be anything.

That's why I call it the Matrix effect. Everybody went in and went like, what the hell is this going to be? And then it was like, holy shit. Yeah. So Constantine is a British magician slash sorcerer type of guy. So when the Keanu Reeves movie came out, they turned him into an American from Los Angeles, and he should be a British guy from London.

The TV series fixes that. And they also, they were smart enough to know that even though their pilot was really good, they found the weak links in the pilot and just scrubbed them. There was one character in the pilot that was just like, eh, we don't need her. Fuck it.

Let's go on our merry way and make it a better show. And they did it. So, so far, two episodes in is a great show. I love it. Check it out. Watch it because, and don't do that bullshit where you're like, I'm going to wait to see if it gets picked up for another season. I'm looking at you, Mr. Fogarty.

Oh, that's me too. Yeah, you too. Just go watch the fucking show. At least put it on your TiVo and play it in the background so they get a hit. All right. I will do so. I will do so because I'm a sucker for all that sort of stuff. So I would definitely do that. Sweet. I think you'll like it. All right.

So I took a flight and that is the only time I ever watched movies. I just, I don't know why I've totally stopped watching movies, but when I'm on a plane, I order my Jackson Cokes and I just line them up and watch them. So here we go. I've got five, I watched five movies flying back and forth to Toronto and I'm going to review them all right now.

Real quick, before we start, before we start, how did you get these movies? Were they on the on-flight system or did you talk to people in Sweden or paper them? All on-flight system. Okay, because I was worried, I was wondering. Okay, go ahead. All right. Let's begin. Let's start with another comic book that I never read, Guardians of the Galaxy, which everybody was going crazy for this summer, right?

Everybody said they totally loved it. It was the best sci-fi movie that's come out in a long time. It was the best action hero movie that's come out in a long time. It was really, really funny, et cetera. It was all right. It was way too long. I mean, even when I'm up on a plane, I like long movies because you've got to do something.

This could have been 45 minutes shorter and I probably would have enjoyed it. Absolutely not because you saw it in the wrong venue. If you saw it in the theater, it was the exact perfect length because in the theater experience, I saw it twice in the theater. I actually went back to see a second viewing and I never go to the theater because I hate people and I hate popcorn because it smells like feet.

And I sat through this movie twice and it was exactly the perfect length. So you just saw it in the wrong venue. I think if you saw it in the theater, you would be on our side. I think it's more that I just didn't know anything about backstory to fill in anything, which is how I feel about a lot of adaptations of comic books and superheroes.

I didn't either. I had no expectation going in. I knew nothing. Okay. Well, nothing whatsoever. I thought it was okay just too long. Now, I also watched Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Horrible. Ah, damn. I got that on the – I got that queued up. Well, I didn't like any of them.

I saw that. Oh, wait. So you didn't like the last one? Yeah. Oh, okay. That's fine then. Okay. So your opinion doesn't matter on the Planet of the Apes movies then? No, my opinion is completely invalid apparently. Well, for this movie, if you didn't like the last one, which I loved, so I'll watch this one and – Okay.

That's fine. I thought it was boring as hell and just stupid. X-Men Days of Future Past. I'm a huge fan of the X-Men series, but I was a little disappointed because I always get bummed out by time travel tropes. I always find it to be the weakest bit of stories, story writing.

I hated the Star Trek one where they had to go back in time. I hate time travel stories. Hey, I worked on that movie. God damn it. You didn't write the fucking screenplay. No, but I worked on it, damn it. Yeah. All right. I found it to be pretty predictable. This is definitely my least favorite of all the X-Men, and they spent way – Oh, come on.

Come on. You cannot say that the Brett Ratner movie was better than – or was – yeah, you can't say it's better than this one. I don't even watch Brett Ratner movies, so I didn't watch that one. He did the third version of the X-Men movies. Yeah, I did. He did the one with – I didn't watch. Fucking Brett Ratner. Yeah, I hate him. So I found this to be predictable.

It was nice to see all the characters. They spent way too much camera time on J-Law's blue bodysuit. Absolutely not. Well, you can go to the internet and see it without the blue, okay? It's all over the internet. It was okay. I want there to be better X-Men movies in the future.

This one was not very great for me. I watched Chef to get out of the sci-fi thing a little bit. It's a great little movie, but I kind of feel bad because it's just sad that we've gotten to the point where we hail a movie as being amazing just because it's not insulting to your intelligence and has decent dialogue.

That's what this movie is. It's a cute little thing, great dialogue. The only time it insults your intelligence is when you realize that Favreau, who is about 300 pounds in this movie, casts Sofia Vergara as his ex and Scarlett Johansson as his current girlfriend. Okay.

And finally, the movie that I like the best, which I am shocked by, is Live, Die, Repeat, colon, Edge of Tomorrow, the Tom Cruise movie that couldn't pick a title and had a really shitty marketing campaign and couldn't do anything right in terms of how it was marketed. It's great.

Yeah, there was actually a third title for it, which I can't remember right now. Was there a third one as well? Yeah, they changed it three times, but I have to agree with you. This movie fucking rules. It was really, really good. It was a great sci-fi movie. And again, it's a time travel thing, sort of.

I'm not going to give too much of it away, but it was... No, it's Groundhog Day. Yeah, it's Groundhog Day. It's a fucking Groundhog Day. It was absolutely fantastic. I was riveted. I really enjoyed the whole thing. I loved how they made the aliens look. I loved the entire concept. It was great. No, I was completely taken by surprise by this.

I expected it to be just shit. And especially because I listened to the spoiler cast on the Adam Savage show and just them bitching about that it wasn't as good as the book. And I'm just like, I didn't read the book. So I watched the movie and the movie was fucking good.

So I have no complaints about this movie whatsoever. I thought Tom Cruise was fantastic in it. And I thought the movie itself hung on its own merits. I thought it was great. Yeah. Fantastic movie. So that'll be it for me for movies until I take another flight. Okay. So out of the five you just listed, you're wrong on three.

Not bad. Thanks. Moron of the week. Our moron of the week is a company called Breaker Nation, spelled in the way that Web 2.0 companies do it. B-R-E-A-K-R-Nation.com.

If you are our age, you are probably not aware of this whole thing that happened. Alex from Target was a trending tweened Twitter topic. Tween Twitter topic. It was this tweender. Yeah. It was this tweender. Somebody snapped a picture of this very photogenic young man who works at Target bagging stuff.

And it just went insane on Twitter with girls following him, his girlfriend getting pissed off and tweeting about it, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So it went viral to no point whatsoever except for the fact that it's all, you know, got Target everywhere. And then a company, Breaker Nation, decided to claim that they did it.

And it was their concept. And look how good they are at social media. Except for the fact that this is the internet. And if they understand the internet at all, people find out that you didn't do it. And they didn't. No, they basically glommed onto this. They glommed onto a hashtag that was from somebody they knew but wasn't actually there.

It's a convoluted story. I did some research on the CEO of the company. He is a total douchebag. And not in a good way because there are good douchebags. And this guy is just he's a shit show. He's made this whole fucking thing up.

And do not trust this company. Just stay the fuck away from him because it's it is scumbaggery 2.0. You know, they can afford an E. Yeah, this is a you. You guys are fucking idiots. And this is the problem with what we do for a living.

Not only has it been devalued. There's all these idiots out there that are basically screwing it up for all of us and making us look all like idiots. Bad, bad, bad, bad. Screw you guys. And Target came out and said, we have no fucking idea who these guys are. We they didn't talk to us in the people who they claim were part of the, you know, the whole thing, as it was, the thing a verse or whatever.

They're like, oh, we don't know who these guys are either. Basically, everybody said this company over here that's taking credit for this, you know, really vapid, stupid thing that happened. We don't know. Yeah. So it's like these guys made the whole fucking thing. No, this this actually does seem to be a true, real viral sensation.

The people that come off looking good out of this, surprisingly, Target, which is basically just saying, well, we don't know what's going on. But, hey, it's cool. And the kid, Alex, from Target, who I actually saw on the Today Show. They interviewed him and cute little kid, charming.

He's like, I don't I don't know. Well, that's good. At least he's not a dick. Yeah, he's not a dick at all. So I feel bad for his girlfriend, though. She is getting she has got a very early introduction to the shittiness of the Internet and trolling. Poor girl. The Web's not dead.

The complete and utter Internet win of the lifetime for me came out this week. I will give some context to this because I was talking to my my esteemed co-host, Jason, a little bit off the air just a few seconds ago, and I realized that I'm such an Anglophile that this is all second nature to me and he has no idea what is going on.

So if you're in England, you'll get this one. This one's for you, Kenny. And if not, here's a bit of background. There is a band called Blur, very popular in England. They had a song called Park Life on an album that blew up. They became one of the biggest bands in Britain at the time. It's very Anglo-centric.

It only makes sense if you live in England. You can't even explain it to an American. It's a great song. It involves a spoken word part, and it's very funny. And somebody went in and took the original video for the song Park Life and took out the spoken word bits and replaced them with rants from Russell Brandt.

Russell Brandt being an English comedian who is recently, well, first off, he was married to Katy Perry, which is why most Americans know him. He's tried to have a few TV shows over here that have not gotten very well. I find him to be funny but infuriating, and he is rebranding himself.

He has a political firebrand who is outside of the system and railing at it. So they combined some of his rants with the Blur video, and it is fucking hilarious. I've watched it at least 50 times, and I laugh hysterically every single time. So Russell Brandt is now Firebrandt.

Yeah, well, jeez, I'm really doing that. I did the Moonlight thing, and now I've got Brandt and Firebrandt. Yeah, so there you go. You asked me what side I was on with Russell Brandt. I'm torn. I find him occasionally funny, occasionally infuriating.

I find him repositioning himself this way and going on talk shows and talking, you know, spewing out gigantically long words about economics to be frustrating. But I also think that we need someone like him. I agree with most of the things that he's saying, and I think it's just – it's what we do.

It's part of human nature for us to immediately dislike someone that is basically rich and famous going around and talking about inequalities. But he has the platform to do it, so I appreciate that he is doing it. See, I like Russell Brandt a lot. I've been following him since before he did all of his political work.

I find him to be extremely intelligent. Oh, he is. He's very intelligent. He's very smart. Yes. And I think a lot of his intelligence goes towards building his brand of Russell. A brand of Russell of fire, yes. And I think I'm one of the probably handful of people in the continental United States that actually thought that he did a good job in the Arthur remake, even though I thought they shouldn't have made it.

And I was very upset that they remade it because Dudley Moore is a national treasure. Also English. Yes, exactly. And I thought that Russell Brandt actually did the legacy well, and I thought he was funny with it. I thought he was poignant, and I think he's a very smart guy.

So my only problem with this is that I just don't have context. I actually like Blur a lot. I like their music, and I like Russell Brand. I just didn't get the context with which this came out in. So I think Kenny will get it, and you will, but I won't.

Yeah, if you're a huge Anglophile, you will very much get this and enjoy it, and it's very funny. So I'm sorry that you don't get it because literally I got my ab workouts watching this video this week. Yeah, I would love to get it. Okay, let's just move it on. The second video, which would have won the internet until I found the Russell Brandt one, is awesome.

Classical orchestra eating the world's hottest chili peppers, and they pop it halfway through the piece, and then they continue to play. And then there are lovely shots of people just in agony and pain as they play a gorgeous piece of music. It is fucking hilarious. It is fantastic. I watched this, and I'm like, where's the punchline?

But then the punchline was that they actually finished playing the piece, and they suffered through it, even though they were in complete agony, and they made beautiful music. Yes, and then you just see them put their instruments down and react. And run. Some of them run. Others just, like, are keeling over. One guy just lays down.

I love the shots of when they're playing, and you just see the sweat dripping off guys' foreheads. Exactly. The drummer who basically holds his stomach and looks like he's about to crap his pants while playing. So good. So, so good. What the internet was made for.

Also, what the internet was made for is I found a video of the 1987 Crystal Light National Aerobics Championship last night. Now, we mentioned to my roommate, MXV, earlier in the show, and before he went to bed last night, he just hummed a few bars of Xanadu, which drove me fucking crazy because it's an earworm, and I had to go to bed listening to Xanadu, the soundtrack.

Right. And so I'm listening to the soundtrack, and I'm flipping through Facebook, and I find this video, and the video, like, times up perfectly with Xanadu, and I'm just like, oh, okay, I'm back in the 80s. This is awesome. And I post it, and then my buddy Tommy, who's one of the Resistance Pro wrestlers, posts another video.

It's called Jay-Zer Size. Jay-Zer Size. Jay-Zer Size, where they take the video, and they time it up with a remix from Jay-Z. Jay-Z's Dirt Off Your Shoulders, which is the Professor Click remix, and I have watched this probably 15 times today because it is fucking mesmerizing.

I mean, the original was mesmerizing, but this one is just awesome. I mean, you have to watch it. It'll be in the show notes. It'll be in the show notes. You're just going to sit there and go, oh, how did they make such hot women look unattractive back in the 80s?

It was a special skill at the time. It was, man. These are the hottest girls in the fucking world, and they're doing their dance, and the outfits that they're actually wearing make them look like asexual. It is the bizarrest thing, but the video and the music, awesome.

That's my pick for the week. Excellent. Closing shout-outs. As I mentioned, I went to Canada, so I want to give a quick shout-out to friends of the show that I met up with there and had a lovely brunch with. A friend of the show, Ted. Please check out readchocolates.com.

They have fantastic chocolates, and they deliver anywhere in the world. Good guy, and he always likes to quiz me about it. He's catching up on the shows, and he just heard your response to his question about the Beatles, so he was very intrigued in that. Also, shout-out to Mark Myers, who I talked about a couple episodes ago.

He did the documentary delivery available on iTunes, and he is a new Grumpy Old Geeks listener as well. So great to see you guys. Had a fantastic time. Can't wait to be back in Toronto and see more movies so Jason can tell me I'm wrong about my opinion on them. Well, Ted needs to send me some damn chocolate, I think.

So as a follow-up to my previous attempts at a solo show, there's one that actually stuck. I've been doing it for six days. That's why I didn't even talk about it, because it's important to get past the hump days. Right. And it's called Vapid.

Okay. Which I bought the domain Vapid.com in 1997, and I never used it. And by the time this airs, it still probably won't be used. But we'll see. Anyway, it's just a daily audio blog of me just rambling about stuff.

And as previous show guests, Dr. Teeter, said, you don't need to listen to episodes one through four because they were terrible. It starts getting okay in episode five. Well, I'm glad you finally got back on that horse, as it were. I am bummed out you're not using my name, Jason.com.

That was actually half of the problem, because I didn't pick the name, so I didn't feel I owned the show. Ah, gotcha. Okay. Well, I screw it up for everyone. Yeah, it happens. So, other shout-out goes out to my friend, Gigi Edgley, who played Chiana on Farscape. Great girl.

She's got – now, this is the part that's really kind of humorous and let the – just give me all your hate. She's got a new Kickstarter. Shocking. Number one, and it's called Hashtag. Oh, my God.

She's making a movie, a short film called Hashtag, and it's – whatever. I love Gigi. Let her do her thing. Go check it out. It'll be listed in the show notes. There are no judgments in the shout-out section. Okay. I mean, I love Gigi.

She's a sweetheart. I've been doing her website for 10 years now, but she's awesome. And my last shout-out is to Among Us. Mm-hmm. You. Yeah, me. Brian, you, and Robbie. Yep. Right? Yep. Why can I not buy the album that I want to buy on iTunes?

Because we use it in the music for the show, and I went to iTunes to go find the link, and I cannot pay for it. What do you mean? The music for the show that we use, you cannot buy on iTunes. That's – well, I'm using alternate mixes that don't have the vocals in it.

The closing track is definitely up there. Couldn't find it. No, no, no. Both of them. We use number one, Bad Kitty, track number one. That is our intro. And Serious Chemistry, track number five, Without the Vocals, is our outro.

So you're wrong. Oh, well, see, the problem is I have the version without the vocals. Yes. I have the original version that you sent me how many years ago. Oh, well, that's – you know, we were working – we worked on those tracks a thousand times over, so there are multiple different versions.

But you packaged it as a complete album, and that's what I have. Well, that's – we were shopping at Around the Labels. Oh, is there any way that we can get these to the listeners? Well, I mean, if anybody is actually really interested, we could just put some up on GrumpyOldGeeks.com.

I mean, I'd have to put some time into it and find the drive that's got everything and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But sure, why not? Well, I've got them. So how about we say this? For a $10 donation to Grumpy Old Geeks, we will give you the entire first Among Us album. We will go ahead and say that, but I need to hear what you have first.

Let me double-check and get a copy from Jason and give it a listen and make sure there's nothing horribly bad in there that I wouldn't want out. But yes, how about if you give us a $10 donation, we will send you at least five, possibly ten Among Us tracks that are not available elsewhere.

Awesome. Okay, cool. Sorry to put you on the spot like that, but it's fucking good music. I listen to it every week. I was doing the show notes this week, and I was listening to it, and I'm like, I want to put this in the show notes because I really enjoy it. And I couldn't buy it, and I'm just like, dude, what the fuck?

Thank you very much. As you know, we're about to pull all our music from Spotify to get a big sale. Awesome. Wait, I'm going to suck on you, Brashute. Brashute. Brashute. Brashute. And Brate.

Music for the podcast is by Among Us. You can find us on iTunes, or if you give us a $10 donation, we'll send you some tracks that you haven't heard before. We are hosted by Libsyn. Use the coupon code GOG while signing up and receive up to two months free. If you'd like to help support the show and keep the lights on, you can donate at our website at grumpyoldgeeks.com.

You can also leave us a voicemail comment or question by using the SpeakPipe widget in the sidebar. On social media, you can find us at facebook.com slash grumpyoldgeeks or twitter.com slash GOGpodcast. We've given up on Ello. You can also get our iPhone app at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash iPhone. And as always, we appreciate your iTunes ratings and reviews.

Show notes for this episode can be found at grumpyoldgeeks.com slash 83. Yarr, there be fungus among us. Okay, last one to kill a bad guy buys the beer. We're driving to Florida.

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