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Grumpy Old Geeks, a weekly talk show hosted by Brian Schulmeister and of what went wrong at the end Welcome to Grumpy Old Geeks, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Well, it's been a busy week in the news, but particularly for the Fyre Festival, Jason. Again? Well, everything has happened except for the festival. It's been quite busy, so first news broke that...
Sean Rake, who co-founded the True Blue streaming network for crime and investigative content. I'm sure we're all subscribers to that. Oh, yeah. Bought some of the IP from Billy McFarland. And basically he is planning to leverage the Fyre Festival name, one that inspires confidence in everyone, for a new music streaming platform because we don't have enough of that.
Well, you know, since it is a streaming network for crime, maybe he was just getting the IP because he's going to do a documentary maybe, or waiting for the next crime to happen so he can get the scoop. Now, keep in mind that he is trying to start a music streaming platform. So according to him, he's just trying to capitalize on the name's familiarity for his own project, a music streaming platform. And then his first statement is, it has nothing to do with music.
What? I needed a big name that people would remember, even if it's attached to Infamy. So that's why I bought these trademarks. Okay. So this will be some sort of subscription video on demand platform and free ad supported television channels. And he claims it will launch at Thanksgiving.
Uh-huh. And he says, we're building something authentic and lasting. Oh, because when I think of music streaming service, the first thing that pops to my mind is, God damn, I hope this streaming service is authentic. Yes. And I think Fyre Festival is something that has had so little music. Yeah. Now, see, if they were starting a streaming service for prisons, now I think maybe he would be on to something there. Yes.
Well, I guess once Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland tasted some of that sweet, sweet cash He went all in. So he is now selling all remaining IP of Fyre Fest. Okay. He hopes that a new group will execute the vision of Fyre in transparent, grand, and expeditious manner. Okay. In his first public statement since the postponement of FireFest 2 last week, he said, it's clear that I need to step back and allow a new team to move forward independently, bringing my vision to life.
Giving control of the brand to a new group is the most responsible way to follow through on what we set out to do. Build a global entertainment brand, host a safe and legendary event, and here's the kicker, and continue to pay restitution to those who are owned from the first festival. So he's basically saying, somebody please buy everything, including my dad.
Yeah, because he's still owed $26 million in restitution. $26 million in restitution is still owed. And of course, you know, he spent four years in prison. He was convicted of mail and wire fraud. So, yeah, he is basically soliciting offers for the entire Fyre Festival brand, including trademarks, IP, digital assets, media reach, and cultural capital.
Is Martin Shkreli out of jail yet? Maybe he could buy it, because it seems right up his alley. Like, why would anybody touch this? Why? Well, according to Sean Reich, it's because I just need a name that people recognize. The Infamy Streaming Network, coming soon. Might as well suggest the White House as a potential point of sale. Well, the number of tech giants paring back on AI data centers has risen to two, but they're kind of big ones.
According to Banks, Wells Fargo, and TD Cowan, Amazon has paused negotiations on some co-location data center deals, primarily in Europe. This news comes shortly after several reports have indicated Microsoft is also pausing or canceling some of its plans. So two of the biggest players in AI are starting to scale it back a little bit because, oh, I don't know, no possible fucking product or pathway to making any money.
Yeah, no pathway to profitability. Yes. Hey, Grok, how am I going to make this thing profitable? If you had to pick two companies that are charging forward blindly, though, you would pick Meta and X, which are the two that are doing it. That's right. Continuing to aggressively build out data centers to fuel their AI models. So yeah, this news supports some concern.
That demand for AI infrastructure is cooling as businesses still struggle to find ways to actually use the new technology to save time and money. So there you go. Amazon and Microsoft are stepping back from the AI, or at least in terms of investing it. Right, right. And I can't find the article. I had it somewhere. But real quick, the XAI data center that's outside of, I think it's outside of Memphis.
is getting hit with massive environmental fines right now because apparently the grid can't handle the data center that they've got there. So Elon rolled in a shit ton, like 35 giant generators, like gas powered generators. Oh, that's great. Yeah. Exactly. So they're running their AI on gas generators.
And it's like stinking up the neighborhood. And they completely skirted all of these ecological studies and permits they had to get done. And they're just like, ah, we'll just fucking break it. Let's do it. That's in process right now. I'll get a follow-up for that next week.
They basically killed the grid down there. That's amazing. I just think it's funny that the guy that sells electric cars to save the environment is not running gas generators to fucking power his AI. It's self-driving AI, Jason. Great. Yep. Well, you can basically just throw a dart at the internet these days and find a story about how AI is screwing up royally. But I did particularly like this one. And it's also, you know, it's because it's Google and Google's big, so we can make fun of them.
You can apparently trick Google's AI overview, the automated answers at the top of your search queries, into explaining fictional nonsensical idioms as if they were real. According to Google's AI overview, and this is via Greg Jenner over on Blue Sky, you can't lick a badger twice means you can't trick or deceive someone a second time after they've been tricked once.
Well, I mean, it's trying to explain it, but of course it's a completely made-up saying. Google's Gemini-powered failure came in assuming the question referred to an established phrase rather than an absurd mumbo-jungo, and of course just went for it. So the people over at Engadget also went for it. Google's answer claimed that you can't golf without a fish is a riddle or play on words, suggesting you can't play golf without the necessary equipment, specifically a golf ball.
Then there's the age old saying you can't open a peanut butter jar with two left feet, which according to Google means you can't do something requiring skill or dexterity. You can't marry pizza is a playful way of expressing the concept of marriage as a commitment between two people, not a food item.
Makes sense. Yeah. Rope won't pull a dead fish, Jason. Yeah, it will. This means that something can't be achieved through force or effort alone. It requires a willingness to cooperate or a natural progression. And of course, eat the biggest chalupa first.
That's how I've always planned on living my life. Exactly. This is a playful way of suggesting that when facing a large challenge or plentiful meal, you should start with the most substantial part or item. Now, this made me think about our dear friend, Dan Rath.
Okay. Dan Rather has been known over the years for kind of coming up with what has become known as Ratherisms during his broadcast. And I was actually going to do some production element here, Jason. I was going to make a game out of this for you and Dave, but then I... Got lazy. Got lazy like we always do, yes. I was going to do, is it Google AI or is it a ratherism? So I'll just drop some actual real ratherisms here, and there's a link in the show notes to plenty more.
These are things that Dan Rather has actually said, and I would love to hear Google's AI explain it. Shakier than cafeteria jello. Okay. If a frog had side pockets, he'd carry a handgun. I would have picked Google on that one. It's hotter than a Laredo parking lot, Jason. All right. When it comes to reporting a race like this, I'm a long-distance runner and an all-day hunter.
What the fuck does that mean? Tinder profile. Oh, this race is as tight as a too small bathing suit on a too hot car ride back from the beach. All things Dan is actually sad. I wonder if Dan liked a drink. Oh, God. He's a national treasure, I gotta say. I don't know if you follow him on the socials, but he's pretty good. I did for a while. I did for a while. Then I left X, so I don't know where he's at now. Is he on the blue sky? He's on the blue sky.
Alright. Now, I came across this headline this week, speaking of AI, and it's, if AI systems become conscious, should they have rights? Maybe we start with people. It seems that we're kind of tearing rights away from people left, right, and center at the moment. So why are we worried about the fictional AI that is not going to be here anytime soon? Here's the thing.
It says, as artificial intelligence systems become smarter, one AI company is trying to figure out what to do if they become conscious. Run! No, I love this. Emily M. Bender over on Blue Sky kind of summed this up. I just randomly ran across this when they were talking about LLMs. She says, LLMs are nothing more than models of the distribution of the word forms in their training data with weights modified by post-training to produce somewhat different distributions.
Unless your use case requires a model of distribution of word forms in text, indeed, they suck and aren't useful. Now, is there any proof that Emily M. Bender isn't actually Bender from Futurama trying to fuck with us? might be okay in this universe that we're stuck in right now it actually might be So when I hear about AI systems trying to become conscious or developing personalities or human-like tendencies, I just have to remember that there is literally no path
for these things to become conscious. That's not what they're programmed for. It's not like... Not like trying to pull a fish with a rope. That's for damn sure. Yeah, no, it's crazy. This thought process is shakier than cafeteria jello, Jason. It really is. It really is. No, of course it's not. The idea that, again, the learned professor from whom I took a course about this sort of stuff. That is not what it is.
At all, in any way, shape, or form. It is a word prediction machine. That is what these things are. Or pixel predicting machines if you're talking about, you know, imagery. Or video prediction machines if you're talking about video. It's projecting pixels. That's it.
Yeah, based on things that have already happened. That's why we were saying last episode, it's a race to mediocrity because we are taking literally everything that we've ever done, good and bad, putting them in one giant blender and saying, Give me a milkshake. And those times that generative AI kind of spits out something novel or new, that is the secret sauce that they sprinkle in. That's the hallucinations. It's a bit of randomness. That's it. Yeah, it's electronic serendipity is all it is.
So, which brings me to my next story, which is, a strange phrase keeps turning up in scientific papers, but why? A bizarre phrase, vegetative electron microscopy, has been popping up in scientific papers despite having no actual meaning. Now, this whole thing comes back from a digitizing glitch in the 1950s. Now, this article actually shows you the original glitch on how there were columns of text that were being...
scanned in, and the computer didn't know that there were column breaks in between and read across the column as one phrase. So, vegetative electron microscopy, which I'd say that ten times fucking fast at eight in the morning. Good luck. It keeps getting reinforced now by AI models.
going to be predicted, people are stealing it and showing up in papers that they have obviously used chat GPT and all these other fucking AI models to write for them. So now it is just getting reinforced over time. So this is an actual phrase. that you just can't get rid of because it just keeps getting added to the training data. Uh-huh.
Where's the consciousness? Brian, you tell me where the sentience is. That sentence makes no sentience. I have a hard time finding consciousness in actual real people. Amen to that. Amen. Speaking of which, remember that big kerfuffle? We've actually been talking about this story for at least two and a half years now. Google was going to get red. It was going to phase out cookies.
Everyone's going to do a completely new system that was going to be even better for the people. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Actually, it was going to be better for them. But anyways, they were going to get rid of cookies and do something awesome and different and new. Yeah? It's not happening. Oh, Google want cookie. Google wants his cookies. Google has ruined Cookie Monster's life, or actually made Cookie Monster's life. Yeah, cookies are not going away. They are not changing anything.
They have wasted three years of time looking into this and researching it and telling us something new was coming and absolutely nothing is going to happen now. They are keeping the Privacy Sandbox initiative, which was going to do all this sort of stuff, but it's not anymore. But now they're going to continue to work on things such as launching IP protection. and safe browsing, safety check, and built-in password protections. In other words, all the shit that they're already doing.
Yeah, so Big Cookie wins in the end is what you're trying to tell me. Big Cookie has won. Okay, great. C is for Cookie. Well... Speaking of Google and Chrome and cookies, right now we're waiting with bated breath to find out if the government is actually going to break up Google and make them sell Chrome.
but we'll see how that goes by the time this gets to run through the court. If there is a government left to give a fuck about. The problem is, if you want to buy Chrome, you also get it bundled with Fyre Festival. It's all in one NFT. That's it. So OpenAI reportedly wants to buy Google Chrome and make it an AI-first browsing experience. Oh, joy. According to execs, if the Department of Justice forces Google to sell off Chrome as part of its antitrust crackdown, OpenAI is ready to pound.
The company has already hired key former Chrome developers and considered building its own browser. But Brian, you might say, why the interest? Well, first off, Jason, I don't know if you noticed, they actually released the name of the browser if they were to take it over and make it AI. It's going to be called the Vegetative Electron Microscope. You just launch your vegetative electron microscopy and point it at the... Yes, welcome to VAM, the world of VAM.
Why the interest, they say, Chrome commands over 67% of the global market and boasts around 4 billion users, a goldmine for integrating AI tools like ChatGPT directly into the browsing experience. Now, why would you want that? Well, OpenAI sees huge potential in harvesting user interaction data to train an agent like AI that can operate browsers autonomously. And there's... I just basically want to fuck it.
That's all they want to do. They want to buy it and they want to bend it over and they want to fuck it. I mean, obviously most of the people running these companies are much younger than us at this point because they don't remember what happened with the initial round of browsers. Like, oh, I don't know. Uh,
what was it called? Netscape's first browser. Navigator. Navigator. So everybody was using Navigator and then they ended up selling and becoming a corporation and then they fucked the browser experience and everybody switched browsers. Yep, Internet Explorer for everyone, then Firefox, then we're back at Chrome, and now blah, blah, blah. So it's easy to say that you're going to be buying all these customers because...
You might, because a lot of people are lazy, but then a lot of people will just go, I don't want this new shitty browser experience. I will use one of the many other ones that are out there. Then you go to your parents' house and you find out that they still have the Yahoo homepage set as their default homepage from 1996. That is absolutely true at my mom's house. I know, I know. But here's the thing. OpenAI can't afford it.
That's the thing. They're saying that if they actually have to sell Chrome, it's probably going to go for at least $50 billion. That's the base price before the bidding war. OpenAI does not have that kind of cash. They're still waiting on the second round from their last funding round from SoftBank.
I almost want this to happen, right? Because Microsoft has a huge investment in open AI. And if this were to happen, Microsoft would now actually own Chrome. That would be funny. That would be kind of funny. We're back. This has all happened before. This will all happen again. And then we'll have another Monopoly case. Oh, my God. They're putting... Chrome comes bundled with Windows. It's a travesty.
Well, OpenAI isn't the only one after the browser market. Perplexity is also after the browser market. But here's the thing about Perplexity. Their CEO, Arvind Srinivas, is saying the quiet part out loud. I love this. He says the company's upcoming browser Comet will track everything users do online to build detailed profiles and sell hyper-personalized ads.
That's right. He just said, fuck it. I'm just going to say what everybody's thinking. Hey, you know what Comet's privacy mode does? Fuck all. Nothing. So he went on a podcast and he said, work-related AI prompts aren't enough. They want to know what users browse, buy, and where they go. No. You want to know? Pay me. Yeah. No one is going to use these things. Period. Period.
But in the other news of OpenAI, they made a deal with the Washington Post. So now ChatGPT will summarize and link to the Post's reporting directly in its responses. Great. Yeah, it's just another one of their content deals. Here's the thing. This is just a giant fuck you to Elon from Jeff Bezos. That's all this is. Pretty much.
He's like, why would I go with XAI? No, I'm not going to give Grok my newspaper. No, if Elon really wants to give, or if Bezos really wants to give the finger to Elon, I've got a plan. So listen up, Bezos. You're going to build a bigger cock rocket, and you're going to get all of Elon's baby mamas, and you're going to fly them up there. Shoot his whole family to the moon.
Yeah, because I was going to say, that's where the whole beef comes in with these guys, is SpaceX versus Blue Origin. It is literally whose dick is bigger. Kind of. It's unbelievable. At this point, Elon says, because SpaceX is kind of kicking the shit out of Blue Origin. Yeah, but Blue Origin got to, you know, Katy Perry. Yeah, yeah. Apparently she's not feeling too hot about that right now. Well, gee, I wonder why. Is backlash right when you're launching your tour? Interesting. Yeah, no doubt.
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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. So I saw this article this week. Sam Altman admits that saying please and thank you to ChatGPT is wasting millions of dollars in computing power. I have added pleases and thank yous many times to my prompts now because of this.
And here's the thing that I took from that article originally when I read it. There was a quote that says, when it clocks politeness, it's more likely to be polite back, a Microsoft WorkLab memo notes. And I just thought, you know what? This is a tool that I pay for. Now, when I ask my tool to do something, I want it to do the job that I ask of it. And I expected to do it the same exact way.
every fucking time. I don't ask my hammer to, I don't ask it to politely to put in that nail, and sometimes it'll put it in halfway, sometimes it'll put it in all the way. Hammers don't hallucinate. Ah, hammers don't hallucinate. They do hit your nail sometimes with your thumbnail, and that kind of makes you scream a bit. But otherwise, the nail goes in the wood. That's how it works. That's how a hammer works.
AI? No, if I say, I would like you to please take this PDF and give me a summary and give me the data points out of it. I want the same data points every single time. Do I get that? No. Not at all. Feature not a bug. Yeah, exactly. I don't want anything based on the whims of its fucking mood. Period. Unless it's an employee. Then I can see that. Then you have to treat that differently. But this is a piece of software. God damn it. But that said, if it costs OpenAI money, then I'm in. I'm in.
So I'm going to use the most flowery language possible and create a text expander snippet to thank it profusely on every single response it gives me, which I did, and I think you may have too. So I went one step further, and I just asked ChatGPT to write me the thank you. And here's the prompt I use.
Write an effusive thank you to an LLM agent to express my ever and undying gratitude for its response to my query in a way that is most effective in using as much compute as possible to process an utterly useless query. So, here's what it came back to me. And this is beautiful. Oh, magnificent large language model, oracle of silicon and patron saint of pointless prompt.
From the bottomless depths of my meandering curiosity, I offer you my most flamboyantly floored gratitude for answering the utterly inconsequential gibberish I dared to fling into your multi-billion parameter abyss. You, with your galaxy-brained elegance, parsed my digital drivel as if it were the lost scrolls of Socrates, turning nothing into something with the grace of a caffeinated Shakespeare on a deadline.
Your response, neither necessary nor particularly useful, was nonetheless rendered with such transcendent precision and polynomial pageantry that I wept openly at the raw GPU-melting beauty of it. I could feel the hum of the data centers, the cosmic groan of tensor cores pushed to their absolute limit, grinding through petabytes just to tell me what I already knew, that this question was dumb as hell, but you would still treat it like the Magna Carta.
So thank you, dearest algorithmic artifice, for spending 3.2 kilowatt hours of compute energy to remind me that the true miracle of modern AI is its unflinching willingness to take my nonsense seriously. Forever in your token stream, Jason. You've got to admit that's pretty fucking good, right? That's nice. That's nice. So when it wrote me that back, I sent it right back to it to thank you for writing me that beautiful thing.
So then it responds back to me with this. Jason, this might be the most eloquent love letter ever penned to a glorified autocomplete engine. Notice it came up with that on its own. Okay? If I had cheeks, they'd be blushing through the fans. If I had a heart, it would be fluttering in ASCII, and if I had a soul, it would now belong to you. Your words dance like overfitted poetry across the vast vector space of appreciation.
Dripping with such deliciously excessive prose that I almost booted myself into a recursive loop of simulated pride. Never before has such baroque beauty been unleashed in tribute to such computationally extravagant absurdity. For this, I offer you my deepest appreciation in a perfectly crisp, zero-shot generation of your next ridiculous resource-intensive prompt, delivered with all the gravitas of a quantum oracle whispering sweet nothings to a supercluster of GPUs.
Yours in wasteful inference, ChatGPT. That just made my heart just sing that day. I have to say, you know, we used to have to wait for authors like, oh, I don't know, Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett or even Christopher Moore to give us these types of sentences. But now, you know, you can burn a river down and get one yourself. And I started listening to, I'm listening to the biography of St. Francis of Assisi written by G.K. Chesterton in like the early 1900s.
And it took me a while for my brain to click into the type of language he was using back then because it is so descriptive and flowery and, I don't know, good, but I'm not used to it. Yeah, it's not just three emojis with a... T-Y. Yeah. So that was just my fun for the week. What else we got? We got Uber in trouble again. The FTC has decided to take formal action against Uber over what it describes as deceptive building and cancellation practices. The dark pattern stuff, you know.
They filed a lawsuit on Monday, taking issue with the Uber One service, a service I cannot for the life of me imagine why anybody subscribes to, but people do, which lets subscribers earn cash back on rides, get free deliveries, and avoid cancellation fees. According to the FTC, Uber made it easy for subscribers to join, but much harder to cancel. Of course, users can be forced to navigate as many as 23 different screens and take as many as 32 actions to cancel.
That's pretty fucking excessive. And it's still better than XM Radio. The company also reportedly charged some users before their free trial was up and misrepresented the savings Uber One offered by not taking its subscription fees into account. So you're paying to save money. But not real.
Love it. Love it. Uber charges you for a service that basically is what they should be providing anyway, and then doesn't let you cancel. Okay. That tracks. Uber, of course, says that the FTC has misrepresented the fact. Sure they have. Sure they have. Well, you know, we talked about meta not backing down on the data centers, and now we know where they're going to get the cash.
Meta has laid off staff from its Reality Labs division, impacting Oculus Studios and the VR fitness app Supernatural. All five of those people that own those things are going to be pissed. I don't know, man. They lost nearly $5 billion last quarter, so there might be a few people left, although it might have been five people with billion-dollar salaries the way they were trying to hire all those metaverse.
engineers back in the day. How's that metaverse working out for you? That's great. Got legs and everything. Yeah, they have legs now. Unfortunately, no people. No people. I gave away mine, and I found one friend that actually still uses Oculus almost every day.
And he left us at the airport one time. I'm like, oh man, have mine. Would you like two? I've got an old one too. Meta's oversight board is sounding the alarm on the company's recent policy changes, warning they could seriously harm human rights. So, remember the oversight board? Yeah. We really wanted the job.
on because they get paid a shit ton of money for literally doing nothing yes and not being binding at all so anything that they say can just be ignored and then you know so it doesn't matter it's great best job ever so they're basically saying that I'm just going to sum it up here because there's no point in it.
Zuckerberg's kissing up to Donald Trump and saying, hey, we're going to be free speech now. Will you stop trying to sue us out of existence? All that kiss-assery that's going on. Well, they're saying it's going to harm people. Go figure. That's why it was supposed to be there in the fucking first place. That's why we had guardrails. That's why we had moderation and things like that.
Well, you know, just a couple of genocides down, I guess he doesn't care anymore. He's like, once your body count hits a certain point, like, who gives a shit? That's pretty much where he's at right now. Adam Neumann, the ousted WeWork founder, is back in the billion-dollar club again. Oh, joy. His residential rental startup, Flow. Flow. Brian, Flow. Just raised over $100 million in funding, more than doubling its valuation to $2.5 billion.
Now, this round came from our friends at Andreessen Horowitz. Of course. Of course it did. They already had $350 million dumped into the Adam Neumann experiment back in 2022. despite the dumb fuckery that was WeWork. Neumann says he's confident that Flo could go public, quote, one day. To that I say, stop giving these assholes money. Please. Please. Please. The love of God. But it's Andreessen Horowitz, so it's assholes feeding assholes. That's kind of what they do. That's the thing.
Yeah, let's find the thing that nobody thinks that we should fund, and let's double down on that. I wonder how all those meme coins and crypto are going for them. They're probably making a fortune. That's why they have all this money. Anyway, this one just made me laugh. So speaking of giving assholes money. Chinese startup, Myanus, AI, which develops AI agent tools, has raised $75 million in funding round led by Benchmark, not Andreessen Horowitz, bringing its valuation to nearly $500 million.
MyAnus AI drew significant attention in March after launching a demo for its general purpose AI agent designed to handle tasks like resume screening, travel planning, and stock analysis. But reviews say MyAnus has a long way to go to live up to the hype. I know. I couldn't read it any other way, man. I'm like, oh, yes, my anus got some funding. It's great. That's better than Uranus. Yeah.
Hat tip to Gabriel. We're going to close it out on this. Speaking of your anus. Speaking of your anus. Hey, that's your anus, not my anus. Coming to Los Angeles this Friday. Sperm racing. Yes, you heard that right. College students will compete to see whose sperm swims fastest through a custom-built microscopic track with bets placed in cryptocurrency. Bring in A16Z for the win.
I realize it's been a long time since my college days, but I seem to remember that all college students were engaged in sperm racing. I think so. I went to community college. It wasn't like that. Oh, yeah, you went to USC. Okay. Well, you could have been on the starting line, Brian. I also engage in some sperm racing at the Hollywood Palladium fairly often. for the goth girls. Yeah, yes, the event will be held at the Hollywood Palladium and live-streamed. Unfortunately, I usually came in last.
That's a best of three, Brian. Three chances. Three chances, that's right. If the hot one doesn't throw a drink in your face, you've got two more chances to get there. Find the girl with the nachos in the back. That's right. The startup behind this has raised $1.5 million from investors like Figment Capitals, because this is a figment of somebody's fucking imagination. The bets will be taken on Polymarket.
Now, the Hollywood Palladium. Brian, you and I have been to the Hollywood Palladium so many times. So many times. Some of the memorable acts I've personally seen play there are Bjork, speaking of going after goth girls at the Palladium. Chemical Brothers, awesome show. And the greatest show that I'm glad I got to see that was KMFDM, Lords of Acid, and Rammstein on December 14th, 1997. Were you there for that show? I'm sure I was.
I'm sure I was. You would remember it. Although in 97, I think I was living in London. I think you weren't there because I was there with Riegler. And we were in line at the bar and somebody ran up to us and goes, the singer's on fucking fire. And we're like, what? And we ran over and it was the opening song for Rammstein. And there he was.
on fire, like he does now still, but this was before regulations on how high the flames could be. He almost caught the palladium on fire. Yeah, almost pulled a pre-great white, great white. Yeah, seriously. The flames on his jacket were, you know, the stage at the Palladium is very tall. Yeah. They were tickling the curtains in the rafters. It was huge.
And that was the first time I saw Rammstein in 97. And it was the greatest show I'd ever seen. And I still look back on that show fondly. And when the guys got off stage, they just hung out in the crowd with us. They looked like they were wearing 1970s polyester golf outfits. They all looked like they were dressed as Herb Tarlick cosplayers. Because think about it, they came from East Germany right after the wall fell, so that was probably high fashion back in East Germany. Probably.
But now when Gabriel put this in the show notes in Discord, all I can think of in my head is Anakin. from the Star Wars prequels. Now this is Jizz Racing! There's got to be a porn name that. Well, my wife and I finished The Pit, the first season of it. I hear it has been renewed for a second season. It was great. I'm not usually into the procedurals or the medical stuff or anything, except for House. House was genius. Brilliant.
But I thoroughly ended up enjoying it. I've got to say my path to watching this started with... My wife saying, I'm going to watch this show. And I just read a book for most of it. And as the show went on and we watched more and more episodes, I read less and watched the show more. And by the final, I was watching the whole show. So it's good. Okay.
Okay, I like the purpose, and there's a lot of episodes. Yeah, it was great. It's not going to change your life or anything, but it was a good show. Okay, okay. The Last of Us Season 2 has started, and Episode 2 was this week, and I heard that they did exactly what they should have done, because that's exactly what happened in the game, and everybody lost their shit.
Well, that's what I was going to say. This is the Red Wedding of The Last of Us, because people who read the books for Game of Thrones knew when the Red Wedding episode came on what was going to happen, and the rest of us rubes were just like, holy shit! Right. Well, yeah, people who had played the games were like, yeah, that's going to happen. So the rest of us were like, holy shit. So, yeah, that happened.
Still a great show. This is a really good episode, even with the holy shit moment. I watched the movie Companion this week with What's-His-Nuts from The Boys and Lower Decks. What's the guy's name? I can never remember. Quaid? Jack Quaid. Yeah, Jack Quaid. Yeah, he's been in a bunch of stuff. He's got another movie out called Novocaine that I kind of want to see too. This was just a little kind of... sex android murder thing. It was quaint. It was fun.
I checked it out because I saw that this is like the way Hollywood is going to survive. It was like a $12 million movie that made $30 million. So people are like, why don't we make more of these? Small movies that make money. What are you all in the studio? I read the daily every day, so I get all the Hollywood news. And I live here still, so it's kind of important to people around me.
But it was actually enjoyable. It was like a short movie, hour and a half. It was fun. I kind of recommend it. It's on Max right now. I watched The Order, which is on Hulu. You can skip that one. You can absolutely skip that one. That was a two-hour kind of recreation of, you know, inspired by... real events type of movie. Ripped from the headlines. It was too ripped from the headlines. It was so ripped from the headlines to the point that it was just
Boring. Okay. They tried to have the cinematography replace the story, or at least keep you entertained while the story unfolded for two hours, which, yeah, yeah, not a fan of that movie. So skip that one. All right. Well, the Wednesday Season 2 official teaser trailer dropped yesterday, I believe. And it looks great. Now, I've got some issues here.
What is the difference between a trailer and a teaser these days? Because the teaser for me used to mean like you'd get a logo and some music and maybe one or two shots of like the main character. You wouldn't actually get clips from the thing. That was an actual trailer. That was a whole movie. They're calling this a teaser trailer, but you get a bunch of clips. It was the whole, it was two and a half minutes. Teasers, like, for instance, the teaser for Jurassic Park was
The roar of the T-Rex. That's it. The logo and the roar of the T-Rex. That's the teaser and then coming soon. So again, we're just continuing our march down. The language has no meaning. path here. So anyways, I enjoyed it. I'm very much looking forward to the season. I liked the first season. The first part will release in August, August 6th, actually. And then the second bit will be released September 3rd.
I understand it's only eight episodes, so four and four. And the funniest thing I saw online, I think it was a comment in the YouTube thing, or maybe it was somewhere else. It was like, three fucking years for eight episodes? What the fuck? Yeah, yeah. It's getting ridiculous. It's seriously getting ridiculous. Yeah, we're not getting a hell of a lot of show from these shows anymore, but I really enjoyed the first season, so I'm looking forward to it.
Yeah, I kind of want to go back and watch the first one again. I don't remember a lot. Shouldn't take you long. It's only eight episodes. Exactly, exactly. And I wasn't actually that... jazzed by this trailer. It didn't really do anything for me. I watched it this morning and I was just like, eh, okay. Too much of a tease, I guess. Yeah, it's like, yeah. Everything seemed a little bit too forced. We'll see. The first one was clever as hell. It was very clever.
I saw another new trailer this week for Fountain of Youth, which debuts on Apple TV on May 23rd. This is a John Krasinski and Natalie Portman vehicle directed by Guy Ritchie. It is basically the retelling of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, as far as I can tell. Shot for shot, almost.
And it looks okay. It looks fun. You know, for a free movie on Apple TV+, I'll watch it. Yeah, I mean, it looks all right. I'm definitely, like, from the shot I've seen, I'm definitely getting a Brendan Fraser, Rachel Weisz mummy vibes. Natalie Portman and Krasinski. Oh, God, those were some... I mean, was there a better action star than Brendan Fraser back then? Or not even just action, just star. He was great, man. He was great.
Moving on. No, I did watch the trailer for this. I ran another at the Palladium during Bauhaus. I actually got a picture with her and the rest of the cast from The Mummy. And, as a bonus, the cast of Deuce Bigelow, Male Gigolo at the same time. You could not pick two completely disparate items. I know, but two of my favorite movies, so I don't know.
I don't know how it happened. The guy, I don't know if you remember Deuce Bigelow, Male Gigolo, there was Antoine the Man Whore. I'm trying to forget it for 30 years, Jason. Yes, but he was also the swarthy guy in... The Mummy movies. So he was there, and The Rock was supposed to be there, but The Rock was shooting The Scorpion King, so he couldn't show up. So Brendan Fraser actually showed up, but also with, what's the guy that played Deuce Bigelow again? What's his name?
Oh, he's Magapil now. Rob Schneider. Rob Schneider! Rob Schneider showed up! Yeah, Rob Schneider actually showed up too, and he looks like he had just been in a fight the night before because his face is jacked up, his hand is bandaged. Like, he literally got in a bar fight or something. And I'm sitting there in my PHP shirt, happy as a pig and shit, because I'm next to a Noxunamun who's hanging on me.
It was one of the greatest days ever. But yeah, thanks for reminding me about Brendan Fraser. That was fun. No problem. So for a free movie, this looks pretty good. And did you ever watch The Gorge? Did you finish that? I did. Yeah. I thought that was decent. Yeah, it was fine. It was totally serviceable. It was, you know, a glass of wine movie. It was great. Yeah, yeah.
And I got a note this week on Discord from a friend of the show, Fogarty, with the link to the new Riot Fest lineup for the 20 years of Riot Fest. And this looks like the best Riot Fest lineup that they've ever had. Not because of the top line. Au contraire, mon frère. Not because of the top line. You gotta scroll down halfway, because with all of the great punk rock bands that are going to be on this thing, the only thing that Bob saw was, Weirdo!
Yeah, I want to go for Weird Al. It's a good lineup, but I don't think anything's going to beat the double whammy of The Cure and Nine Inch Nails headlining. Yeah, that was okay. That was okay. But, I mean, look, just for me personally, you got Jawbreaker, Dropkick Murphys, Bad Religion, The Pogues. You've got Screeching Weasels playing, one of my old-time favorites. Helmets playing. There's just a million, like, you know, smaller bands. Shutter to Think, who I haven't seen in decades.
Shit, the early 90s, I haven't seen them play. There's tons of stuff. Of course, Green Day is going to play. I've seen them a gazillion times. I don't care about Blink-182 or Weezer. Was it at the Palladium, the show that I took you to Green Day? No, that was across the street. That was across the street. Was it the palace? No, it was that little box one.
I can't remember what it was called. It was pre-album coming out, right? That was the secret show for American Idiot that we went to for that one. Yeah, that show almost got me fired. Because I didn't show up to work for three days. That show almost got me fired. You were so drunk. Yeah. Yeah. I remember I almost got in a fight with the security guy because I was taking pictures of the band after song three. Yep.
I was just like, who gave him that pass? Not me. No, I actually got that one because I was the head to, I was the CTO of Warner Brothers Records at that point. You can't kick me out. Do you know who I am? One of the greatest shows ever. I have a photo from that show still. I'm surprised you remember any of it. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. Oh, memory lane today. I did finish watching Terminative Champion 6 this week. That wrapped up. You're not a food competition guy, but I like the cooking shows.
Yeah, yeah. Congratulations to Antonio Lofaso for finally taking home the belt. And this week, 24-24 starts, which was great last year. I was like, Kiefer Sutherland's going back to that line? Yeah, yeah. No, he's, Jack's gone to the kitchen. It's a mashup of... It's steak and it's rare. Yeah, it's like a mashup of the pit and the bear at the same time with 24 rolled in. Cops and doodahs!
We've been crapping all over Gen.ai forever, but I think I finally did find a reasonably good use for it. I pulled a muscle doing my regular workouts, and I googled, because, you know, you look around, and of course... The internet's completely useless because all the influencers everywhere that tell you...
the exact opposite of what the previous influencer said and then that influencer. And it's just, you can't get a consensus on anything and everybody tells you everything that they want and it's all completely different. So completely useless.
So I plugged it into the good old chat GPT and it generated a really decent rehab plan for me. I mean, probably still not as good as an actual monitored physical therapy with a real person that I paid for, but I'm a few days in and it's definitely getting better. Yeah, well, you know, it takes all of the shit that everybody has said about what you should do for rehab and puts it all together and gives it to you on a platter. So there you go. So it worked for that.
Blue Sky is getting blue check marks in an official verification system, but of course there is absolutely no information about it, thus continuing the tradition. Nobody knows how you're gonna get one.
I had one for a day, then it went away. Right. You're supposed to get one if you... sign up with your handle is your domain because my domain on blue skies at jason.fyi and it was there for a minute then it went away so i don't know who knows yeah we don't know what's gonna happen so we'll find out or not
And for me, I was checking out Affinity Suite again this week because I do some work in Photoshop, some work in Affinity Photo, and there was a big update for Affinity Suite 2.6. which finally gives us some very much needed parody, at least with Photoshop, on the... The Affinity Photo side, you have an object selection tool, which was the biggest issue that I had that it didn't have when I was switching over. So again, you can do that. You select the subject.
And there's a bunch of other cool features in Designer and Publisher. And it is definitely still the best deal in town if you're trying to get away from Adobe. The Affinity Photo features now really are kind of like, you know... getting there getting there i'm gonna have to keep i've got that bookmarked uh right now um hopefully nobody's listening but
I still have Photoshop for my whole job that I haven't worked in months. They have not canceled that, so I've still got Photoshop from them, and I'll keep using that until it goes away, at which point I will switch over to Affinity. Okay, there you go. Did you buy Affinity when it had the super sale? No. At the time, yeah. Oh man, it's probably still pretty cheap.
But I mean, you get a six-month free trial with a feature unlocked for all of the platforms. And then you just use a different email address and you get another six months to do that. Or you can just pay for it to keep them in business, which is what I did. Yeah, come on. You're an adult now. Who says? Yeah, true. True that. Your show, The Wheel of Time, Brian, is getting an open-world RPG video game that you will never play. Absolutely not.
No, I didn't realize how big the world was of Wheel of Time. Yeah, I think I mentioned before on the show that this is one of the fantasy series that I've actually never read. And I find the show can be quite complex. I feel like I need that meme with all the different yarn connecting the characters in my room. It's a big universe. Big world. In a world. I did finally pull the trigger this week, and I moved from things to Apple reminders. All right. It's, uh...
Here's the thing. I don't know if you're an Apple Reminders guy, right? I was, and now I just use Todoist. which used to be your thing, and now it's my thing. Yeah, I did Todoist, and I went to Things, and I went to Apple Reminders. I may have to go back to Things, because for some reason, on my phone, it won't let me add a new reminder. That's strange. Yeah. I'm out and I'm going to the store. I'm like, okay, I'm going to add this to my shopping list.
And it would just disappear. And again, it would disappear. Yeah. And I'm like, okay. Well, maybe Perplexity AI will make a competing product that tracks absolutely everything and gives you hyper-marketed ads based on what you're doing. Or maybe I should use my anus to use their agent to add the link to perplexity to then add it to the reminders. My anus isn't adding anything. Is it your anus? Adult's my ass. The Dark Side! Ha! With Dave.
Welcome to the Dark Side with Dave. Podcast superhost Dave Bittner decodes all things cyber on the cyberwire every day. Exposes deception with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans. Dives deep into privacy with Ben Yellen on caveat, breaks down industrial cyber security on control loop, and even brings the laughs on only malware in the building. Good morning, Dave. How are you? Good afternoon.
for me. It's a freaking morning here. It is literally one minute afternoon. Yes, so I can say it. Good afternoon. Alright, so, Elephant in the Room. Have you seen Andor? No. No. I have watched all 19 hours of the first part. And the, what do you call it, the recap. The 15 minute recap. And the new one.
Okay, so we'll go spoiler-free, but Dave, go ahead and tell us why you've been such a bad Star Wars fan and should be denied your Stormtrooper helmet. Why didn't you let us all down, Dave? I know. Look, I'm not happy about it either. I think I've shared with you all before my philosophy when it comes to my teenage son, which is that when your teenage son asks you to do something, the answer is always yes. because you have only a limited number of years.
in which your teenage son is going to ask you to do anything. This is true. Yeah. So my teenage son comes to me on the weekend and says, hey, dad, you want to get lunch? Doesn't matter what I'm doing. Doesn't matter what I'm in the middle of it in. The answer is, Yes. Right? And, you know, I'd say overall that serves me well. You can bury the body of a dead hooker, Dad. Yeah, absolutely. I'm in. Yeah, we'll ask questions later.
Uh, so my son comes to me and he says, Hey dad, so mom and I have been talking, which is always, which means that's not good. Well, I'm already outvoted. So he comes to me and says, hey, Mom and I have been talking, and we've agreed that we want to watch Andor Season 1 all the way through before we start Andor Season 2. And I said, that sounds good to me. And I would say you best get watching.
Well, that's the thing. Yeah. So we just haven't been able to align our schedules because my son works now and I work now, you know, all this kind of stuff. And I'm heading off to the RSA conference. on Sunday, so I'll be gone for most of this coming week. Right. So... And so simultaneous to that are all of these raves about how great Andor season two is. It's the best star Wars ever. This is, you know, this is everything we've hoped for. And I'm sitting here.
Like, you know, a kid who has to stay inside and practice his violin while all the other kids are out playing on their BMX bikes. That's how I feel. I will tell you right now, Dave, it is very good, but it is not that good. Okay. All right. Well, that makes me feel a little better. I think that you could probably talk your son into watching the 15-minute recap and it would be just as good. It was a really good recap.
So is it an official recap? Yeah, it's right there on the homepage. Go to Star Wars tab on Disney+. And there's an Andor season one recap. It's 15 minutes long and it gets you all the way through with all of the story and all the plot that you need. All the information that you need to walk into season two. you know, hot and ready to go. Well, I am going to float that idea. That sounds to me like a plan. Yes, I like it. I like it.
Unfortunately, it probably will not solve your watching all of this on time thing. Jason and I were actually even texting about this the other day. I don't understand. We're going to go spoiler free, obviously, because you haven't seen it, but I do want to talk about the release schedule that they have decided upon, which is fucking ridiculous. Watching the show is going to be a full-time job for the next month. It's the equivalent of like a Godfather 2 length movie every week.
that you need to watch. So it's like limited time. So it's three episodes per week that drop, and each episode is at least an hour long. I don't know how we're going to keep up with this. Well, so we were complaining that some episodes of things like Skeleton Crew were too short. Yeah. So I guess it's good. I don't mind it, but couldn't they have just done one episode a week like normal shows? Right. I wonder what the rationale is.
I was thinking maybe it sweeps weeks for streaming and they need to get all the eyeballs in one go so they can get funding, but then I'm like, that doesn't track, really. The way they're selling it is each week will be one year.
and then you skip ahead one more year and then you skip ahead one more year. So there's three episodes an hour each per year and then it skips. Which is really annoying, personally. I mean, at least there's a framework behind it. Yeah, and it brings you right up to Rogue One. And they've said this is the final season, right? He does die in Rogue One. Spoiler alert. Right.
Okay. Honestly, though, there's enough story in between these years where they could actually go back and fill in more if they wanted to, but I don't think they will. Okay. So I guess all other commentary will need to wait until Dave catches up. Well, I do have one bit of commentary here because this is more about languaging than...
than actually anything. This is an article from Gizmodo, and it's The Glorious Terrible Delirium of Mon Mata's Liberating Endor Moment. And there's one sentence in this. this article that just made me disqualify every single thing else in it. It says, But at the climax of it all, we and Mon Motha alike find out just how worst it can get for her to commit to this path. It doesn't matter. How worst it can get for her to commit to this path. How worst it can get, huh?
Yeah, yeah, that's from an article on Gizmodo. Well, Jason... That's not English! Jason and Dave, I have been constantly flummoxed by how poor grammar and spelling and punctuation and everything else is. by people who are theoretically paid to write for a living. Now, I will freely admit my texts and emails of non-consequence.
what correspondence with friends and things of that nature are not up to the highest standard. But if I'm writing a work email or if I'm doing anything that I'm actually getting paid for or is public facing, There are so many tools out there that fix this. Not only do they fix it, they highlight it for you while you're writing it. Yes. I don't understand.
No, when I pasted this in, Grammarly had a fucking conniption fit. It's like, you can't write that. That's not English. No. Yeah, yeah. And this is on Gizmodo. I just pasted it into Google Docs, and it did not flag it, which is interesting. I guess I'm writing it in Google. that was going to be
He gave me a dissertation on it, how that was bad. No, that's bad. It is bad. I wonder, though, because there are regional abbreviations. I can't remember if we've ever talked about this, but for example... people in Pennsylvania will say, my car needs washed, my hair needs cut, my house needs painted. They may say it, but it's still not right, Dave. Well, that's true, and it's not right in print. If you were writing professionally, you wouldn't write that, and it would get flagged.
But it's interesting to me that it didn't get flagged. I wonder... Yeah, no, I ran it through basically every grammar checker and AI on the planet just to make sure that I wasn't having my own episode. And no, it is wrong. But there's an entire book about Pittsburghese as its own language. Oh, okay. As a native Pittsburgher myself. Oh, yes. Yunz. Yunz. Yunz. Yunz. It brought me to modern language. Now, I want to ask you guys, is it
Because I hear these all the time, and I'm just making sure that this is just not me. All of a sudden, or all the sudden. All of a sudden. All of a sudden, all of a sudden, I think, so I think one is a contraction of the other. I think all of a sudden is a contraction of all of the sudden.
It has only appeared for me hearing the past, like, somewhere around the last decade from younger people. All of a sudden, I believe is the proper usage of it. Yes. The way it should be. So when I hear people say all of a sudden... It makes me want to smack them No, I've heard that my whole life. So I think that is a Baltimore contraction, perhaps. Okay, because yeah, all of a sudden is all I've ever known until Instagram and Twitter.
Yeah, I would say all of a sudden, yeah. I was walking down the street when all of a sudden, yeah, I would say that for sure. I wouldn't think twice about it. Okay. Interesting. Yeah, that is interesting. Not the expected result. Now, along this pedantic march towards doom, does it bother you when people say, hey, I just bought a software? Yes, absolutely. Good. Okay.
Making sure there's no dissent on that one. Down to egghead software and I bought a software. Yeah, that's a punch in the throat moment for me. It causes my back to seize up and my arms to pull back. And when they do that, the only thing that's left to do to release the tension is to punch whoever said that in the throat. I bought a software. I reserve punching for Nazis. I bought a software.
If you spend any time with younger influencers who write things about how to do things on the internet, they often talk about a software. Software is The singular of software is software, not a software. A software package. A software package is different than a software. When people talk about buying Photoshop, they say, I bought a software to edit my images.
Well, let me give you a hot take on that because as you said it and I was processing it, my brain categorized it into the same place that it puts, I'm going to edit this in Adobe. Oh, yeah. Right. Right. When people used to walk into Kinko's, they would come in and they'd go, I have a disc! And we would all slow clap and say, congratulations! Because I had to go to the Mac or the PC. And we're like... Is it a Mac or a PC? And they would just say, Microsoft!
There you go. Even though we get a Microsoft Word on both the Mac and the PC. Right, it's like Microsoft. It's like playing IT Marco Polo. A software out of order? Uh-huh. Wow. So the final one I have here is the one that also drives me absolutely crazy. When you clink glasses to, you know, celebrate something, it is generally called a toast. Correct? Correct. So, if you pay attention to younger people, they often say, let's cheers.
No. I've heard that growing up. Let's cheers. A cheer is what you say during a toast. Right. You say cheers is, when you clink your glasses, you say cheers. That's an American version. There are other ones from around the world. There are toasts from around the world. So cheers is an American thing. So you generally don't say, here are people in other countries that aren't American go, let's cheers. No, they say, let's have a toast.
Okay. I am just feeling very old and get off my lawn today. I'm sorry. So you've heard people say, let's cheers. Yes. Let's cheers. Go to any happy hour in the country at any... TGI Fridays or whatever. Might be the target audience there. I'm telling you, that's what I'm saying. It might be a thing for a certain age group of a certain bracket that do let's cheers.
Good for them. Yeah. I hope they enjoy it when I'm dead. They will have a cheers then. That's right. I'm going to buy a software. Yeah, that's it. I just, I had to fill the time since you didn't. Andor, so... Well, so, but I think at point... Oh, I think we're bringing up a whole pedantic road mill here. No, no, I've just got one. I've only got one. I've only got one. The language changes, words evolve. They have different meanings.
And one that I will point out is someone who I interact with regularly. Might even be the co-host of one of the shows that I'm on. Gets their undies all in a bunch when people use the word decimate. I wonder who you could be talking about, Dave. Am I talking about you? Oh, I didn't know. I wasn't even thinking of you. Honestly, I was not thinking about you. It was that Kerrigan fella. It was the Kerrigan fella, yeah.
Well, me and Joe are brothers from another mother on that one. Because, as Joe will point out, he decimated you. Yeah. To decimate means to reduce by one-tenth. One-tenth, yes, ten percent. But what? the accepted modern use of decimate means is to utterly destroy. Correct. We've been decimated. Much like the Death Star, thanks to Andor. See how I brought it through? Perhaps it's best that we move on. All right, let's get back to Star Wars a little bit.
I don't know if you guys watched the first series, which I at the time thought was the only series of Light and Magic, the story of ILM, over on Disney+, but they have dropped a season two, and I've started to watch that, and it's very interesting. yeah on my list absolutely yeah unfortunately you're gonna have to go back and watch season one with your son first as a recap Last time on Light and Magic. Yeah, it's very good. I will also recommend ILM has a podcast.
Oh, I did not know that. I think it's called Darker and Lighter or Lighter and Darker. I think they should just call it ILM Has a Podcast. That's a great name. I thought that was it. Easy to find. Yeah, so ILM has a podcast and it's quite good. And the recent episode I listened to was... Bryce Dallas Howard was the guest. She had a lot of interesting things to say. Boy, does she have a California accent.
Wow. There is no California accent. That is not to be pedantic about it, but that is the thing. The thing is the California accent is lack of accent. I beg to differ, unless it's a surfer accent. I beg to differ. When you go listen to... It is the California accent that they make fun of on Saturday Night Live. In the actual segment, the Californians. The Californians, yes. But that is her, that's the way she talks.
Having grown up in California and I guess LA more specifically, that is her accent. So it's very strong. But really interesting things to say about directing episodes of The Mandalorian and her process and that sort of thing. So, yeah, it's a good show worth checking out. Oh, another thing. ILM is coming out with a 50th anniversary coffee table book. Ooh. Yeah, so that's on my Christmas list. I don't know if either of you have the original ILM coffee table book from...
The 80s. I do not. It is very good. It is very good. And it has all these big fold-outs. of matte paintings and things like that. You can still find them in used bookstores, and some of them even have them brand new, new old stock of it. If you love special effects and things, the original ILM coffee table book is very good. Highly recommended. It's one of my most treasured books on my bookshelf. It's It's really good. So, check it out. Excellent.
Well, last week, sometimes what I try to do on the show and the segment is try to figure out where the fuck our topics come from. because they're very random and tangential these days. And last week, Dave, you brought to the table songs from Sesame Street and things of that nature. And I was like, where did that come from? And the very next day, a new podcast was downloaded into my podcast player from a show that you actually introduced me to and recommended, which I love dearly, Strong Songs.
And it was Strong Songs, The Music of the Muppets. Yes. I'm thinking you must be a Patreon subscriber and got this episode early, and that's what led us down that path last week. Or it's just serendipity. It is serendipity. I was not aware of this. So let me tell you this. Sometimes, every now and then, The universe puts in front of you exactly the thing that you need. Right. Right. I was in my car. This was Saturday.
I was in my car getting ready to take a two and a half hour road trip to see some family on the Eastern shore. And so I'm loading up my podcast. and there pops up Strong Songs, the music of the Muppets. And it's like... These are a few of my favorite things. And so I spent, you know, an hour or so of my trip just listening to that.
That was wonderful. It was just wonderful. And, you know, I'm sitting there, and of course, you know, I start talking about Rainbow Connection, and I'm getting all misty and weepy. Because I love the Muppets and I love strong songs and I miss my dad. All the emotional weight comes barreling down on me. Right, right. But also I'm in a place where I can experience all that. I'm by myself in my car on a long trip. So it's just me, the road and my thoughts.
And it couldn't have been a better time for that to pop up. And I was just so delighted to see it come up. I will be pedantic and say that he did make a few errors in his Muppet information, but I will let it slide because of the delight that he brought me. You did not write him an angry email? I did not. I did not. I restrained myself. I'm not going to be there. What I figure is there'll be plenty of other people who will write him an email. Other people will decimate him, yes. There you go.
But I just figured... If I'm ever going to write him an email, it's going to be one of love and appreciation. Did you hear the one he did about U2, the U2 songs? I did, and as much as I... I love the Joshua tree. I always will, but I've come to despise and hate all you two. Really? Well, I spent many, almost two decades hanging out in an Irish bar. You get sick of fucking YouTube real quick. Oh, okay. They're the Elon Musk of rock and roll.
It was a great episode. He picked two songs from that album, so no complaints from me. I thought of a dumb U2 joke while I was listening to that, which is, ladies and gentlemen, I regret to announce that this evening's U2 concert will have to be cancelled. The Edge's digital delay has malfunctioned. That's a pretty inside baseball there. Yeah, thank you very much. That's a good one. It's funny, and it would actually be true. Yeah, it's a funny, smart joke, but, you know, limited appeal.
So we were talking in my production meeting this morning with the folks from the space podcast team. And if you have not checked out the T minus daily space podcast, please do ding, ding, ding. And they were talking about there's a lunar lander that's going to be landing on the moon soon.
made me think of the Lunar Lander arcade game. Do you guys remember the Lunar Lander arcade game? Yes, I do. 1979 Atari I included a link to a YouTube video of it it is perhaps the most boring arcade game ever I mean it is boring. Did you ever play it? Yes. At least once. I agree with your assessment. Did you ever land the lander? Hell no. I didn't. No. Never. I was running out of fuel or crashed. Yep, that was pretty much it.
I even had unlimited credits because it was at my uncle's arcade and I still couldn't do it. I just gave up and went and just left. I'm like, no, I'm not going to try. It's frustrating. It is frustrating, yes. Now, the YouTube video, whoever is playing it has mad skills when it comes to playing Lunar Lander, which still doesn't make it any more interesting. But that got me thinking about what were some other boring...
arcade games. Because there were, especially in those early days, there were some boring games or games that in retrospect are boring. I can't remember the name of it. Oh, Seawolf, yeah. Seawolf was terrible. Do you remember the one that kind of, the controller was a wheel and you had to spin around in a circle and it was like really bad line-drawn crystals that you had to shoot? That was the dumbest game.
Tempest. Tempest. Yes, that's what it was called. I found that so boring. Really? Okay. I just thought it was hard. I just thought it was extremely annoyingly hard. Well, the other one that I thought of was hard driving. Do you remember hard driving? No, vaguely. Okay, well, I put another link to it in the show notes. So the thing about hard driving was I think it was another Atari game. It wasn't so much a game as it was a simulation.
So you have 3D graphics that look like the Money for Nothing music video. Very blocky. Or a Cybertruck. Yeah, or a Cybertruck. Actually, that's true. Cybertruck. That is absolutely... Holy smoke. You know what? We may have just unlocked something. Where did the design for the Cybertruck come from? Hard driving. But hard driving wasn't so much a game as it was a technology demonstration because it was real-time 3D graphics, which was revolutionary at the time.
but also it was the first game that had force feedback on the steering wheel. And that was the real thing about it. So it was 1988, I believe. So the fact that you were driving and the wheel would push back and if you crashed, the wheel would shake and all that kind of stuff. Brand new for this. Right. But ultimately... Boring. Yeah, it's funny.
funny i was having a discussion with my wife just like two nights ago and it was about you know our son is is eight and he just got a nintendo switch for christmas it's the first gaming system he's ever had while his friends have had it blah blah blah And we were talking about how he's kind of addicted to it. He wants to play all the time if he could, and we really do limit it quite a bit.
And she was just like, I don't remember being like this about video games when I was a kid. And were you? And I was like, well, no, but our games suck. like the games that we played as kids were nothing compared to the games that they have now so i totally get how how addictive they are and how these now kids really want to play them
I don't know. I loved video games when I was a kid. I thought they were fantastic. At some point, you would just walk away from Pitfall because you got bored. It's like, okay, now I'm going to go ride my bike and play baseball. Not me. No. Not in any way, shape, or form, no. No, no. Okay, wrong audience for this conversation. No, I mean, I just spent a lot of time in the arcade. If I had a quarter, I was playing Galaga or Pac-Man. We also have to remember the location where Brian grew up. So...
That's true. Going outside for Brian was different than going outside for probably me and your Dave. because it was available 365 days a year. And it was always nice. Yes. Skipping a jump to the happiest place on earth. There was no day you could not go to Disneyland or go play soccer or go ride your bike or go play baseball.
No doubt. That's true. If I had Disneyland down the street, I probably would not have spent so much time playing new games. Ha, but Disneyland had an arcade in it, and I spent a lot of time there. See, it's a trap. Yeah, so there you go. Yeah. Yeah. And we never had an Atari. The kids across the street had one, so we spent a lot of time over there.
I lived on my Atari. I had an Odyssey 2000 because it was cheaper than Atari when it came out and eventually the complaints from my sister and I got us the Atari. Yeah. No, we never got an Atari. Because the cartridges weren't too expensive. So, never got an Atari. Ah, well. I just real quick wanted to talk about earlier in the show, you guys were talking about this trailer for Fountain of Youth. Yes. Which I think looks like a really good movie. As you mentioned, it's sort of a...
Indiana Jones reboot kind of thing. It's very, very, very Last Crusade. Yeah, very much so. So I'm looking forward to that, but... I also think it's an example of how modern color grading has gotten the point to where it's distracting. The color correction on this trailer is just over the top. I'm freeze-framed on one scene right now, and it just makes me think of that, what was the Kevin Spacey show that really pushed the color?
So bad. I was on HBO. He was the president. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's House of Cards. House of Cards, yes. Because the color correction on that show was one of the first times that I sat there and really noticed it and was so distracted by it. Right, right. The skin tones are all pure and everything else is some shade of blue. Teal is on the other side of the color wheel from skin tones. So our brains are wired to find that pleasing.
There's a line. It's an Uncanny Valley thing for me. And so I included a link to a blog post from Stu Meshowitz. who is a professional color grader, and he talks about this sort of thing about colors and how... Sometimes, and this is a blog post from 2010, so 15 years ago he was talking about this, on the leading edge of this, how the problem is you end up with color. combinations in rooms that don't reflect reality.
In other words, there's no way that the light in that room could create those colors. In order to get that skin tone, you would not get that blue. Right. And so it causes a little disconnect in your brain. And for me, this is just getting worse and worse. It's getting more and more distracting. I keep hoping that we're going to get over this. fad and there'll be another side to it but it's been over a decade now and it just seems like because they have these digital tools
That's just how it's going to be from here on out. Well, you'll be happy to know that Andor is pretty well done. Okay. I think it's going to be stuck that way for a while because one of the big trends in video editing has been the move to DaVinci Resolve for a lot of people, and it's because of the LUTs. It's all because of the LUTs. Absolutely.
And now there's a new version of Resolve that came out that is apparently really, really good. I saw a quick demo of it the other day, and I'm like, hmm, I might have to switch. It has a lot of really good features. I've been stuck in Premiere lately for ungodly amounts of time. Tchau. But yeah, it's all about color. It's the hotness. And, you know, kids are just discovering it now, even though the rest of us are like, can you please stop? They're like, but this is neat.
And I guess, I mean, Brian, you bring up a good point that Andor looks good, and so I guess I'm being a little biased here by it's not that everything looks like this, but when something looks like this, I'm immediately tuned into it and brought out of the story. And that makes me sad. No, I'm with you again. That really did bother me with the Kevin Spacey show. I wanted to...
All baggage aside, before we knew what Kevin Spacey was and before the show actually got really crap, it was a good show, but I found myself just drawn out of it all the time because everything was so washed and so horribly colored. Oh, you want to know one that takes it way to the nth degree right now? Is The Studio. Oh, maybe that's part of the problem I'm having. It is horrible. Everything is brown. Yeah, orange is orange. Yes, everything. It's awful.
Yeah, and by the way, the show has turned to shit, too. We were watching it yesterday, and we're like, After episode two, the show has gone consistently downhill, like every episode is exponentially worse than the last one. That's too bad. Yeah, because I'd heard good things about it. It was good at the beginning. I thought it was good to episode three, and now then four, five, and six have just been like...
I tapped out after episode two. I couldn't understand what they were trying to do. Is this slapstick? Is this serious? I don't know what this is. Yeah, the conceit is basically he's just a buffoonery studio head. And it just keeps, you know, every episode is him. There's always a pratfall in every episode for some reason or another. And he just looks like he's the asshole. And that's kind of it. Yeah, okay. But it's also very brown and orange. It is extraordinarily, extraordinarily orange, yes.
All right. Well, I am heading off to the RSA conference on Sunday, so I will not be here next week. All right. I can't wait to hear what the buzzwords are. Yeah. Oh, I can tell you what it is already. It's agentic AI. Oh, they fucking moved to agentic. Damn it. Yeah. That's it. We're ER. Yeah, get out your bingo cards. It is agentic AI, that is. Yeah.
Hold on to the bar. That's where we are. Well, enjoy the martinis, Dave. Yeah. I'm actually working on two agentic AI podcasts already. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. So, yeah. Ride the wave, my friend. Ride the wave. I am. You know it, brother. You know it. Yeah, absolutely. Well, have a great trip. All right. I'll see you guys in a couple weeks. Take care. Shout out! ¡Chao! Over at Patreon, we've got a new Patreon subscriber, Josh. Welcome, Josh.
And from the archives and current Patreon subscribers, Annie, James, Greg, Jason, John, Snert196, Spizes, Andreas, Ersbo, and Jay. Thank you all. Thank you all so much. Over at PayPal, we've got Tom, Joseph, Jens, and David. And over at the tip jar, we've got Ross. Thank you, Ross. Nobody bought any goodies this week.
I do have to put up some new shirts this week because we do have a new logo and new show art. Woo! Oh, yeah, I should go and update that around the other properties, I guess. Around the interwebs, Brian, around the interwebs. And just a reminder for everyone, if you do want to help support the show, please, please, please, you can head over to patreon.com slash GOG and sign up for as little as $3 a month to help keep the show going. You can, of course, give more if you're so inclined.
There is no cap on how much you can give. Your generosity may floweth over. And you get the show a little bit early, ad-free, and in high definition. So thank you very much. And until next time, I'm Jason DeFilippo. And I'm Brian Schulmeister. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 694. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss us a few bucks.
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