You probably use one of those ridiculous tops that you talk about on your… No, I'm just I'm just using plain old top. How do you manage? I mean, that's like Poverty Top. Ask The Hosts Episode 15 I'm Joe. I'm Aaron. I'm Mark. And I'm Martin. Hello, Chaps. The idea of this show is very simple. You send any questions to show askthehosts.com and we answer them. The catch is they can be about anything except Linux and open source.
Before we get started, just a quick thank you to everyone who supports us with Paypal and Patreon. We really do appreciate that. You can learn more at AskTheHhosts.com slash support and patrons get these episodes two weeks before everyone else. So check it out. Right, the first question. Ross asks, what celebrity do you look like? Well, I'll start by saying that Aaron looks exactly like Mikael Artheta, the Arsenal Manager. I was going to go for that guy from 300, at least from the nick down.
The joys of a podcast is that none of you know if it's true or not. But you do look exactly like we ask no manager. It's uncanny. This is one of the benefits of not being a football fan and that's probably just lost me any of the three followers I currently have. But as a Kiwi, then we sort of support the other shaped ball. Yeah, I used to be into football years ago and I know who our tetra is because he was a super point-winging player in my fantasy football league in like 2004 or something.
Oh, and attacking midfielder I believe and here end if my football knowledge. Well, I've never really been told that I look like a celebrity but I do remember once pre-beard. So this is when I was quite young going through some of my dad's old LPs and I found black Sabbath record. I think it was sabotage and I thought I looked quite a lot like a young Aussie Osborne when I didn't have a beard. Yeah, I can kind of say it, I suppose.
I mean, it's it's hard now to look at think of that not think of how Aussie Osborne looks now, which is not the most flattering. This is the thing. You see, I found it having been watching the Osborne's on TV at that point and I thought, oh, he hasn't aged well then. Is this my future? Well, I thought to myself, I don't know that I look like anyone in particular, you know, fairly distinctive, you know, sort of a blends in, nothing special kind of a way.
So I thought to myself, I know, I know how we do this. We ask an AI. So, I'm with a few photographs and some random AI on the internet. I uploaded some photographs and well, mixed results. So I think I was writing that I don't particularly look like anyone because the best match I got was 33% match. And this was for rock Hudson who's been dead since
1985, but was an actor back in sort of, you know, the 60s, 70s, 50s, that sort of era. And I'm going to say, I think that the main category for matching me up with rock Hudson was the photo I uploaded for that one was a black and white photo of me. And it was a black and white photo of rock Hudson. And I think that was the overwhelming comparator that had been used here to come up with that match. So I uploaded some color photos and there was one match that came up several times, not the first
one all the time, but they were always in like the first three or four at a 28% match. And that was Kevin James, the actor who is known for Moulcop. And again, I think the AI is a little simplistic here because what we seem to have in common is we are both smiley plus size gentlemen. But on the upside the Chinese government will now find it much easier to follow you around the streets. Do you have a watch? Would I lie to you? I'm aware of it, but I've never seen it. I've only really aware of it
from the memes. Wherever I watch that, I have a little chuckle to myself because I always imagine Martin as David Mitchell and Alan as Lee Mack, especially where Alan's bit a bit more beardy. Well, I don't really look like a celebrity as such. I look like a character, a beloved animated character who's green. So if I did not have my beard, I look like Shrek. It's the bottom line. And it turns out that that was my nickname behind my back for many years
in my local town. So that made me almost believe in conspiracy theories because they kept it from me for I think two or three years. But then it did come out eventually. So maybe conspiracy theories are a lot of bollocks. He's a nice guy though. The things I have never been able to stand track because of his terrible accent that is just like it's just like a bad Scottish accent.
I just have never watched it as a result. And then I found that out and I was like, right, I'm literally never watching that. Up PSP asks, what method of reading books do you prefer? As in traditional books, ebooks, audio books, and what are your favourite novels? I find stories immensely enjoyable, but I find
the act of reading and the physicality of a book to be quite hard work. So I do listen to a lot of audio books and very much enjoy them occasionally and a lot in the past, particularly when I was commuting, I would have ebooks with text to speech as a way of consuming them on the go.
Doesn't that just get painful though after a while? Not really. I mean, I've found some reasonably good voices and you kind of zone out the oddities and you can like when you're reading a particular book, you can add in like correct the pronunciations that come up a lot that it gets wrong. Oh right. Like names and stuff. Yeah, names and places and like common acronyms because it was mostly sci-fi. So you'd always end up with like names of planets and aliens and stuff that it
would get wrong. But if you typed it infoinetically once, then it would then get it right the rest of the time. I did listen to the Martian. No, you mentioned sci-fi books and I remember being out and about walking, listening to it and just staying out really late, just walking around around. Just I wanted to, it was a real page turner that I don't know what the audio book was like about it. I'm going to steal a term from Gary and say yes in response to this question.
I listened to audio books and I read e-books quite a lot and I read physical books. I tend to read a lot of e-books because I really like reading with the backlight on the book and that's much easier than having a light on or finding a good bit of light on the train or whatever and they're nice and thin so you can just slip it into your work bag without noticing whereas I still use the library
believe it or not. I go and get books out of the library and sometimes you don't know what you're going to get so you end up with some big hardcover version of a book and that can be quite big in there with your laptop and everything else. Don't you get audio books from the library? Yeah, I get mine from the library as well, the on borrow box. My local library doesn't really have much in the audio book
catalog that interests me. I ended up strangely getting into reading or listening to a whole lot of Charles Dickens books on borrow box and so I ended up reading or listening to a whole bunch of those because there was some point I was jumping on a plane or something and I grabbed the first thing I saw and the list of borrow box available e-audio books and then ended up listening to that and once I'd listened to one I listened to a few of them but they're pretty full on.
There's a project I think it's called Leigh Bravox which is like Project Gutenberg but for audio books so it's people recording their own version of out-of-copyright books as audio books. So I think I've listened to quite a few Sherlock Holmes books like that. I don't think I could do that because I know instinctively that the editing is going to be bad. Oh yeah, some of them are pretty terrible. Yeah, but there's lots of cut-off breaths and you know words running into each other and
stuff like that just classic editing mistakes. Surely you can just get Popeys voice to read out all of the public domain books these days. Yeah, we should get on that. I have only ever listened to one audio book. So as a format that doesn't really do anything for me. I read a lot of e-books but not for pleasure. It's mostly for research and learning so and I tend to do that at my desk so it will
be on the big screen and I read it at my leisure and it's here in front of me. When I read for pleasure it's usually family holidays and I stack up six or seven books for the trip and it's part of the going away thing that I have actual books that are new. They smell like new books. They feel like new books. It's that whole. It's like the sense and smells on Christmas morning, you know, there as much as the Christmas morning experiences, you know, the turkey and the oven and opening
the presents and what have you. So I love to read proper books ideally with a Long Island iced tea next to me on a sunbed under under under the shade. You know, that's my ideal and I can do that all the live long day, you know, for as long as we're away. I love it. To be fair in that sitting, I think I could do any of ebooks or audiobooks or anything else. It sounds pretty tranquil. I will say that the difference between audiobooks is vast and there are some of them that are full cast
productions of different characters. I remember listening to the His Dark Materials series and they had a full BBC cast for that that was very good and some of the others like the new Terry Pratchett Discworld novels have been redone with good voices and things like that. And then you get other ones and I just can't stand the person reading them and yeah, and I just move on. Well, yes, especially when they start like doing terrible voices and stuff.
Yeah, I'm currently going through the the new castings of the of the Discworld ones. I listened in my youth, I listened to the abridged versions on tape, which were read by Tony Robinson, which are absolutely fantastic, but the unabridged versions are pretty poor by comparison, whereas these new ones are absolutely fantastic. But I got the audiobook of one of my favourite novels, which is Jennifer government by Max Barry and the yeah, the audiobook of that is just dull,
lifeless. So I don't really read novels. That was the question, what kind of novels? I don't really read fiction. I never really have. I've read a few books. I read like Fight Club and Fear and Loving or that's kind of fear and loving sort of half fiction, half truth and the Martian.
But apart from that, I used to listen to a lot of audiobooks before I got into podcasts and it would be almost exclusively science books about evolution and stuff like that and physics and I would say popular science, not textbooks or whatever, but just nicely dumbed down for the simple man science books is what I was into. Well, like thinking fast and slow that sort of thing,
or I've not heard of that one. I'm trying to think it was such a long time ago that I can't even, like some of the Dawkins books, for example, before we started going on about atheism, he had some very well written, easy to understand books about evolution. Yeah, Bill Bryson's got a couple of books. One of them I think is called a brief history of nearly everything or something like that. That's sort of a whistle stock tour of science from
the Victorian era to the modern day. It's pretty good. Yeah, but then I discover podcasts and there is that. Now my attention span is so low that I just can't be doing with it. It's the idea of listening to eight hours of a book. I just, oh, wait, we did actually listen to one for Linux after Dark, Cal Newport's book Digital Minimalism, which was just like the most ridiculous like West Coast American nonsense I've ever read. Well, and again, I listened to that as well,
but I listened to it. I think at like 1.5 speed or something just to get through it. Yeah, glowing endorsement that. Are any of you reading any novels at the moment then? I'm about to read the last book in a trilogy that I have been reading for decades. Mark mentioned Discworld and all the rest of it. So I definitely subscribe to that genre of books, the sort of the fantasy, science, the humorous genre, whatever, you know, that categorizes.
And so this trilogy is The Brentford Trilogy by Robert Ranking. And that is now a trilogy of 11 books. The first of which was published in 1981. And the most recent was published in 2019. And they include such bangers as The Brentford Triangle, The Brentford Chainsaw Massacre, Sex Drugs and Socied Rolls and Lord of the Ring Roads. They are vivid, brilliant stories full of the most
oversized characters. And they're just joyous to read. And when you get to the end of them, you feel like you've left a group of friends with all of these characters that are no longer in your mind as you you've finished the book. So there's 11 of those to read and enjoy. And I highly recommend them. So as I mentioned, I am working my way through the Discworld audiobooks at the moment. I've been through the Death Family series, which ends in my favorite Discworld book,
which is The Thief of Time. And one of my favorite books, I've now working my way through the Watch series. So I'm currently on the fifth elephant. Oh, yeah. Yeah. In terms of what I'm reading, I read a lot of, I don't know if you'd call it low fantasy. Is it high fantasy? The sort of elves and Lord of the Rings stuff. Yeah. I have read books like Lord of the Rings and stuff. But I'm not so into that. And tend to be more into ones that are a little bit unrealistic. More like,
I don't know, the painted man or the name of the wind or magician, those sorts of ones. And at the moment, I'm reading some of the John Gwynn trilogies, which are about angels and demons effectively. And the sort of medieval people who have to deal with them and do magic-y stuff to kind of deal with them, but just good kind of gritty low fantasy books. Ian asks, can you separate an artist's character and wrongdoings from their art? Well, now I instantly thought about Michael Jackson maybe.
Rock and roll Christmas is no longer in our Christmas playlist, so no, I can't. Who's that? Gary Glitter. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. That's understandable. I think it depends like all of these things, right? If you're talking about one of those people who defines their art in their kind of protest, then no, like Banksy without politics doesn't make any sense or the sex pistols or even like some of the Beatles, you know, Antibiot Nam or whatever kind of music doesn't make any sense
without it. But like, I don't care who some pop singer votes for in the elections or whatever. I've been thinking about this. And I think, of course, I can because otherwise, I'd basically never enjoy anything. I'd spend all my time researching people to find out if they've ever done anything wrong before I listen to their music or buy their books or see them in a film. But then it springs to mind that there's a few people who I absolutely can't separate. One of which, bizarrely enough,
is Guns and Roses because although I enjoy some of their songs, I saw them. Well, I saw what was built as Guns and Roses, but was mainly Axel Rose having a tantrum download festival one year. And since then, I can't listen to their songs without just being annoyed about it. So my answer to the question is mostly, but not always. I think I'm a massive hypocrite about this because I won't listen to the Smiths anymore because of Morrissey and his politics, but I will listen to Michael Jackson.
I won't listen to the Smiths either, but for other reasons. Yeah, sat down with you, Mark. I really used to like them, but I just can't do it. Well, Triris, up my alley, look at this. The 80s were bad enough without him cruelling about all of his misery. I wouldn't remember. But I think with Michael Jackson, it's because maybe because it wasn't like officially proven and then he died and then you can kind of have plausible deniability, even I will know he was a wrong owner. I didn't prepare
a particularly long answer this question because I was like, it's complicated. And when you start thinking about the complicated nature of this, there are people that have made a significant impact on sort of popular culture or history. Who in retrospect, we have found out, I've got some pretty unsavory characteristics about their personality or their behavior, but you can't deny the contribution that they've made to sort of global history and culture. And it's very difficult to
separate those things. And I think Michael Jackson definitely falls into that category. I'm sure everyone has heard songs by Michael Jackson at some point in their lives and enjoyed them because they're good songs on the whole. However, I draw a line at Gary Glitter. Yeah, yeah. I think if this has done something like really, really apparent and proper bang to rights for it, then yeah, I would never listen to Gary Glitter, even though he did have a couple of bangers.
So I think the thing there with Gary Glitter, sort of the distinction in my mind is if they're still alive, I don't want to be doing anything that might be in the service of them making an income. So I suppose that's kind of my sort of approach to this, but it's not black and white, it's complicated. What if you went on the pirate bay and downloaded his albums, then he definitely wouldn't get any money from it. I'm not in a hurry to go and download the back. I can't
get a lot of Gary Glitter to be honest with you. But it's funny that you said politics don't bother you, but they do to me like massively. If I know that someone is voting for the wrong side, then it really puts me off them. I think it might put me off the people, or maybe I can kind of separate the music from the people unless it's sort of inherently part of the piece of art itself.
I don't know. I might have particular views about Kanye West when he's tweeting, but then I can listen to Gold Digger and appreciate the merits or like they're of, of that song independently of what I think of Kanye West. But I do take your point, Wimpy, about supporting people and making a bit of a moral stand with your choices. But normally when I'm listening to music, I'm not putting that much thought into it. And sometimes it just happens, right?
The music just comes on. I play mixes all the time. I could well be listening to people that have done bad stuff and I might not know. I'm not very aware most of the time of what I'm listening to. I heard a song the other day and I thought, oh, this is quite good. I wonder if I can find this. And then found out it was like the current number one. So clearly I'm not the most up with things.