762: ‘Tis But a Misalignment

14:53Jason DeFillippo:So according to Reuters, they've registered 420 autonomous vehicles in Texas, only 45 of which are cybercabs. It's not clear how many of the latter are actually carrying customers to their destinations and how many are just being used for testing. Because God forbid we know any of this when you're under investigation and we're supposed to have regulations.

15:13Brian Schulmeister:I sent you the video of the guy basically doing the hokey pokey in front of the cyber cab. It was pretty funny. That's the thing. It's like all you got to do is just like walk in front of them. And just you can punk anybody that's getting a ride in one of those things now, which is great. Here's the other thing, though, Brian, that, you know, they're under investigation for not having a steering wheel and a brake pedal. Yeah. I watched a breakdown of the car and like somebody was, you know, doing a walkthrough of their ride and all of that stuff. There is no door handle, period, on this thing.

15:41Brian Schulmeister:It is a button on the outside. Which normal Teslas are already in trouble for. For having a shitty door handle. This doesn't even have that shitty door handle. This has an even worse one, which is a fucking button. Yes. What the fuck?

16:01Brian Schulmeister:This episode is sponsored by CleanMyMac. Look, if you use your Mac for actual work, podcasting, editing, exporting, uploading, scripting, doom scrolling through 17 browser tabs while pretending it's research, you know the machine eventually starts fighting back. CleanMyMac is built to remove that friction. It helps clear space, reduce background strain, and keep performance steady without turning Mac maintenance into another annoying side job you have to do before you can get any actual work done. You can use cleanup to remove stale system cache files, broken downloads, duplicate files, and old development leftovers.

16:39Brian Schulmeister:Space Lens gives you a visual map of what's eating your hard drive. My Clutter helps find duplicate files and similar images. And the Menu app gives you quick system insights right from the top menu bar. It's all notarized by Apple, built by MacPaw, and designed to help your Mac stay out of your way so you can get your work done. I've used CleanMyMac forever, and it's in my quiver of go-to must-have apps. Get tidy today. Try seven days free and use our code OLDGEEKS for 20 % off at clnmy.com slash OLDGEEKS. That's OLDGEEKS all in caps. Or just click the link in the show notes. It's a lot easier.

17:18Brian Schulmeister:But once again, Old Geeks for 20 % off at clnmy.com slash oldgeeks, all caps.

17:31Jason DeFillippo:Well, relatedly, in an event Elon Musk has called weird, an Amazon cargo plane involved in a tragic crash on Sunday in Miami very nearly wiped out a parking lot full of Tesla cybercabs. Last week, Tesla announced that the cybercabs, its gold-colored autonomous vehicles with no steering wheels or pedals, and apparently buttons for door handles were now available to provide rides as part of the company's app-based ride-hailing service but only in a very limited coverage area in Austin, Texas. On Sunday an Amazon Prime Air cargo plane at Miami International Airport experienced some kind of malfunction in the air just before touchdown and ended up overshooting its runway.

18:05Jason DeFillippo:There were five fatalities but the strange thing for us is that it stopped just shy of a parking lot where for reasons unknown there were hundreds of Tesla cybercabs parked. Just sitting there. They don't have anything going on in Miami. They're not allowed to drive them in Miami. There's just hundreds of cybercabs parked in a lot there. That's creepy.

18:27Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. This is creepy. Yes. I like how Elon calls a tragedy where five people died weird. Weird. Yes. You're fucking weird, Elon. You're very fucking weird. Ah, yeah. So, yeah. The tragedy is that that plane stopped short of the cybercabs. That's what the tragedy is. Take them all out. Take them all out. Yeah. The plane was operated by Amazon Zoox, by the way. It was a self-driving plane. It was a fully self-flying plane. It was a fully self-flying plane.

18:58Jason DeFillippo:Says so right there on the software.

19:01Brian Schulmeister:Well, let's get back to some old school news, Brian. Hackers exploited a vulnerability in Bitcoin's Liquid Network, a side chain designed to enable faster, more flexible transactions, and drained roughly$320 million in digital assets. That's pretty flexible. And very flexibly, yes. Did what it said on the tin. So the attackers reportedly returned most of the funds, retaining about$47 million while describing the incident as a white hat operation. That's our bug bounty. That is it. I'm going to go rob a bank and I'm going to steal$10 million. I'm going to keep one of it and then just say, look, I was just testing your security, bro.

19:41Yeah, God.

19:43Brian Schulmeister:Security researchers and industry observers are questioning whether the hackers acted to expose a flaw, profit from it, or both. Well, I believe both. It was just a misadjustment. That's all. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Oh, God. The incident highlights the risks of complex blockchain bridges and sidechains where a single compromise component can affect large sums of digital criminal money. Investigators are still working to identify the attackers, determine exactly how the exploit worked, and assess whether more funds are at risk. Where was ChatGPT, Claude, and Muse when this attack took place? What were they doing at that time?

20:23Brian Schulmeister:They were out and about. Yeah.

20:26Jason DeFillippo:Well, Massachusetts State Police will have to disclose where license plate readers are in the state and submit to audits about when, where, and what data they're collecting. A judge ruled this week. It's a huge win for groups demanding transparency on how agencies are surveilling people. A Suffolk County Superior Court judge ruled on Wednesday that the state police did not justify withholding information obtained from the automatic license plate readers. Filed in November 2023, ACLU of Massachusetts v. Massachusetts State Police was a suit involving public records about the state's deployment and use of powerful and unregulated surveillance technology, according to the summary.

21:01Jason DeFillippo:So good. The state's ACLU chapter said that Massachusetts was unlike 16 other states that lacked oversight as to how law enforcement was using the collected data, did not require a warrant or court order before obtaining the information. So this is coming as surveillance devices, Flock in particular, have come under scrutiny not just in Massachusetts, but nationwide. Increasingly, cities and counties are turning their backs on renewing contracts with Flock, and residents continue to take matters into their own hands, sometimes quite hilariously. This is my favorite bit of videos on the internet right now.

21:35Jason DeFillippo:People knocking out flock cameras. Your flock and surveillance backlash continues, and increasingly it appears the legal and legislative systems are feeling the public's anger and actually doing something about it.

21:46Brian Schulmeister:Yay. Yep. Yep. And, you know, all they're doing with the flocks is they're replacing them with Axon cameras. I know. And the Axon people are like, can you make an enclosure for our cameras to make them not look like flock cameras? So, I mean, the Axon cameras at least do not have the same problems that Flock had, where Flock cameras are all networked across the country. Axons are just for that, whoever bought them, you know, whatever that jurisdiction is. They're closed networks.

22:11Jason DeFillippo:Yeah.

22:12Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, yeah. That doesn't mean that Barney Fife from, you know, Mayberry can't call up Gomer Pyle from Fudge Packer United and whatever and say, hey, give me your data because, you know, my girlfriend was seen off with a fireman last week.

22:25Jason DeFillippo:My ex-wife lives in your jurisdiction.

22:27Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. Yeah. So it's it. But this is this is a good battle that we're having right now. I mean, it is a distraction from everything else, but, you know, whatever. It keeps people happy. Yeah. Yeah. Well, in June, the U.K. government told Big Tech it had three months to make taking, viewing or sharing images of child nudity on their devices impossible. Quote, I expect tech firms to make that happen, said then Prime Minister Keir Starmer. But if they choose not to, then we will act and change the law, end quote. While engineers from Apple and Google had been working with the government since June to make changes, quote, they do not meet the scale of this crisis, Lisa Nandy, the Secretary of State for Digital Culture, Media and Sport, told lawmakers on Tuesday as she introduced the legislation.

23:19Brian Schulmeister:For too long, technology companies have failed to protect children from the worst harms, Nandi said. And to be frank, I am not prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt that progress will continue at the pace we need it to while harm is being done now. I know she's British, but I'd like to give her some... Why do you make her sound like she's from Dukes of Hazzard? Because she's about as fucking dumb. That's why. I don't know what the stupid lady British accent is. I don't want to make her sound posh. I just want to make you sound fucking dumb because the proposed law would apply to existing and newly sold devices with companies facing fines and executives potentially facing criminal liability for noncompliance.

24:00Brian Schulmeister:Critics and everybody else that has ever listened to this show warned the requirements could create surveillance infrastructure by forcing age verification and on-device content scanning. This is what Apple was going to do, and they shut it the fuck down.

24:14Jason DeFillippo:Yes, we don't want you on our devices. Yes, this is a problem. Yes, it needs to be dealt with, but this is not the way.

24:20Brian Schulmeister:No, stay the fuck off my phone for like, here's the problem. Here's the audience. You know, you have to watch the video for that demonstration. The problem is a problem, but it is not a problem that requires them to look at every single person's phone on the fucking planet and see what they're doing. Yes, that's the problem.

24:40Jason DeFillippo:Yes. And how are you going to tell? Look, I had a child. There are pictures on my phone of me bathing my child. Yep. You're going to throw me in jail. And by the way, I don't want you looking at those pictures. Those are my pictures of me and my child.

24:56Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. So, you know. Yeah. This is just, we've been down this road so many times. They want the back doors into the encryption. They want the back doors into the content now. No, you can't fucking have that. Yeah. It's like saying, you know, here, I want to sell you a gun, but I want to make sure that that gun can't shoot anybody. No, that's called personal responsibility. If somebody shoots somebody, then you call the Bobbies to come take them down, you know, just because I have a phone.

25:26Jason DeFillippo:Not if you shoot a second person in the exact same way, because that's cool.

25:29Brian Schulmeister:Not as long as you're misaligned the first time, if you're misaligned the second time. Yeah. Oh, Jesus Christ.

25:38Jason DeFillippo:Well, some potentially good news coming out of AI. An AI-generated drug showed early signs of potentially slowing aging, according to a new study out today in Nature Biotechnology, possibly taking the first small step towards using AI to cure all the diseases that tech companies keep talking about that they're going to do.

26:08Brian Schulmeister:Well, here's the question. Did they use an actual machine learning artificial intelligence or did they use an LLM? Because the LLM people are the ones that say they're going to cure all the diseases, which they know they can't. And is this a machine learning algorithm that actually took all the data and figured something out? That's the problem that we've been calling, you know, attention to this since. How long has it been, Brian? Ten years? Eight years?

26:32Jason DeFillippo:As long as they've been shoving this down our throats. Yes.

26:34Brian Schulmeister:But it was before we've been saying this before LLMs came on the scene. When you talk about artificial intelligence, say exactly what you're talking about. But this is good news if it works.

26:45Jason DeFillippo:If it works, there are some there are some problematic aspects of it as you read through the article, which I'll just leave in the show notes and we won't get too into the weeds about it because they're having a really hard time deciding what exactly does it mean to be aging? What's your biological age? And there's a lot of different ways to kind of assess it. and, you know, what does this drug actually work on and how does it work? But as far as science goes, this is interesting. It's definitely doing something. And the way science goes is you build on it. So now we see what we do next and we see what else it can do and how more and what other ways can this work and all that sort of stuff.

27:22Jason DeFillippo:So this, I've always said, this is a good use of this technology. So keep at it, people.

27:28Brian Schulmeister:Right. Yeah. And you see this hairline? This is how I can tell what aging means. this hairline right here was not like that when we started the show. So if you can fix that, then I'm all for AI. Bring it on. I think they got Rogaine for that, Jason. I know. I think I just have to, I'm just going to have to start deep faking myself for this show.

27:45Jason DeFillippo:I tell you, we set up our avatars and then we're done. We don't even have to sit here. They could just read the stories and snark for us. I am.

27:52Brian Schulmeister:I'm fine with that. I would, I would love to go back to audio only. Having to, having to shave and, you know, show up. It sucks.

28:01Jason DeFillippo:I actually go out in the world, so that's just part of my normal life. Oh, I don't. Fuck that. Speaking of a return to normal life, Jason, the return of Twitter is getting even more complicated. We talked about this last week. A startup called Operation Bluebird preemptively launched a new social media platform under the name Twitter.now, while a judge was yet to rule on a request for a preliminary injunction due to trademark infringement. Unfortunately, they did finally offer a ruling, which has led to the new platform rebranding to tweet.app. So tweet instead of Twitter, because according to the ruling, judge says that using the Twitter name would cause confusion for consumers and infringe trademarks, meaning Operation Bluebird can't use that name.

28:42Jason DeFillippo:However, they did rule that X likely abandoned the word tweet and its bird logo, meaning those two were free, free and clear. All right. So you can go to tweet app and you can tweet or you can go to X and you can whatever the fuck they call it. Shit. Not to. yeah uh yeah again who gives you know i'm going to go to ex to either did you know that or did you not see that that's our new app pito or nazi

29:20Jason DeFillippo:how did we fucking get here man when we started this podcast did you think we would be where we

29:25Brian Schulmeister:are right now no fucking way man we had hope for the future we loved technology when we started

29:31Jason DeFillippo:this i was trying to hate it was zuckerberg i went uh we we went on a a trip um because it was the last weekend of summer here the kids started school uh the other day and uh we took a last trip with with some friends fam that have kids as well so we were we were all out there and after the kids went to bed we were all drinking wine and sitting around in the airbnb and uh they One of the other parents asked me, you know, I know you do a podcast about technology and AI. You know, what do you think about it? It's all pretty exciting. And I had to explain that, well, it was when we started. Oh, shit.

30:10Jason DeFillippo:Now I fucking hate everything.

30:14Brian Schulmeister:It was exciting. We loved technology. We loved everything about it. It was just this brave new world. No. No, just this dystopian hellscape. But, hey, we have a T-shirt for that now. So go get it at shop.gog.show. Now, this next one. Speaking of brave new worlds. Speaking of brave new worlds. Okay, the headline on this is great. To boldly dough. LaCrucette sends its new Star Trek cooking collection into space. LaCrucette is launching a limited edition Star Trek kitchen collection, blending the cookware's brand signature designs with iconic elements from the beloved sci-fi franchise. The lineup includes Vulcan-inspired oven mitts, baking dishes shaped like spaceships, and a communicator-style grater.

30:59Brian Schulmeister:The grater, I want the fucking grater. The grater's awesome.

31:02Jason DeFillippo:A friend of mine has it. She just posted a picture of it earlier today. It looks amazing. Was it like$800, though? Oh, it's got to be incredibly expensive.

31:12Brian Schulmeister:It's with Crucet from, yeah, no. The collection is aimed at fans who want to bring Starfleet-style into the kitchen, whether they're preparing everyday meals are attempting something more ambitious. Availability is expected to be limited, so shoppers may need to move quickly, which apparently they do, because they said pricing and the official release date are key details to watch for. So shit, it's already out. And I probably missed the boat. Yeah. Oh, well. Patreon.com slash GOG if you want to get us a cheese grater, please. I'd rather have a working car. Anyway, I saw this come through. I've been following the Netflix apps and games things for quite some time from when they started.

31:52Brian Schulmeister:There's a really nice Stranger Things Mahjong that I finished like a couple of years ago. But now Netflix subscribers now get access to more than 80 iPhone and iPad games at no extra cost, including those on the$8.99 standard with ads plan. The games are ad-free and have no in-app purchases. Players download the titles from the app store and sign in with their Netflix credentials. The catalog includes acclaimed games such as Dead Cells, Into the Breach, Kentucky Route Zero, and a bunch of other ones that I've never heard of. But they've got different titles like Stranger Things, Squid Game, and The Queen's Gambit Chess.

32:25Brian Schulmeister:So they're pretty, they're good games. The ones that I played, it's like they're not really, you know, skimping on those. They're just, I'm not going to keep my Netflix subscription so I can play, you know, some squid game shit. But yeah. But, you know, for something that you just, you know, they got kids' games and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, but, you know, you've got a kid, so maybe check out some of the kids' games.

32:46Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, we do the TV game Boggle. We play Family Boggle off the Netflix app. So, yeah, it's fun. Yeah, the games look pretty good.

32:55Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, they're not bad. So just another perk. So we'll see. Now, I literally thought this next one was a joke, but it's fucking not. So hat tip to Uncle Bob on Discord for this. The Trump White House has launched Arcade.gov, a collection of five retro-style browser games built around administration policies and messaging. Rio Run adapts Snake, asking players to patrol the Rio Grande, collecting figures depicted as border crossers and receive a deportation tally. Build the Wall, Zombie Border Siege, uses Tetris-like block stacking to defend the southern border. Other titles include Flappy Bill, which guides legislation through capital obstacles, Supply Line, focused on removing disfavored foods from school lunches, and Trump Savings Tycoon, where players collect money and cryptocurrency for children's Trump accounts.

33:45Brian Schulmeister:How fucking embarrassing is this?

33:49Jason DeFillippo:Well, they're about to drop a new game, Jason. They're about to drop Pedo or Nazi.

33:54Brian Schulmeister:Pedo or Nazi. There we go. Is there a title for both? Yeah. President. Yeah. Ooh, Dimity. There you go. Oh, no. You're also going to have Dead or Alive, and it's just Mitch McConnell. You just keep hitting dead, dead, dead, dead. Dead, dead, dead, dead, dead, dead.

34:15Jason DeFillippo:I was just speaking. They released a statement saying he hasn't returned to work or whatever because he's still having trouble breathing. Of course, the entire internet said, yeah, that's really hard to do when you're dead. Dead. No shit.

34:29Brian Schulmeister:It is quite difficult. Yeah. God. Fucking, I can't. What the fuck? I know. My eyes hurt. My eyes hurt from all of this. What are we going to do?

34:55Brian Schulmeister:So we have an email from Philip now that we fixed our dealio. Philip says, one request. Can you mention the episode you actually watched when you say it was great? For example, in the UK, the last Star Trek Strange New World was bloody awful and can't imagine you were raving about that one. Silo, you mentioned the finale coming, but that was the only clue I had that you were talking about the second to last one or the penultimate episode. When I was listening to your podcast on Saturday, I'd already seen the finale. Keep up the great work. Well, you have a fair point, Philip. We kind of fucked up.

35:27Jason DeFillippo:Ish. I mean, we often do talk about details in the episode, which, you know, one would use contextual clues.

35:35Brian Schulmeister:I know, but it makes sense to just say, hey, this is the fucking episode we're talking about. All right, more work for us.

35:39Jason DeFillippo:Jesus Christ.

35:40Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, I know, I know. Patreon.com slash GOG if you want episode titles. Here we go.

35:45Jason DeFillippo:Star Trek Strange New Worlds, S4, E7, like chronitons through the hourglass. Boy, they went back to the dumb well real fast.

35:54Brian Schulmeister:Oh, man. I hated, hated this episode. Here's the thing about this episode. I hated the mechanics of the episode. what I actually really liked was the Pike story about the daughter. Yes, of course. Because something that, I mean, this whole thing was a vehicle to get to that. It was a really stupid vehicle. It was like a three-wheeled Yugo from the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War. It was just clunky and shitty. But that story itself is actually a story that was worth investigating investigating because he spent this entire lifetime in an episode with a family that he grew to love and he still has the memories of that so this is the first time we ever got to see that kind of you know how that haunts could haunt him you know as they dated star track the

36:48Jason DeFillippo:next generation with picard who did the same thing and then they revisit that much later on in the

36:53Brian Schulmeister:series and he has to deal with it but did they do it in the guise of q doing a a soap opera no thank

36:59Jason DeFillippo:Thank God, because they had better writers. What the hell? What the hell? Yeah, what the hell? Speaking of Star Trek, they have celebrated their 60-year anniversary the other day, September 8th to be exact, is the first date that Star Trek aired in the U.S. It was pointed out somewhere...

37:20Brian Schulmeister:At 12.32 p.m. CST.

37:22Jason DeFillippo:It was pointed out somewhere that it actually aired two days earlier in Canada. So Canada has had Star Trek longer than the U.S. has. Anyways, happy 60th anniversary. It's the 60th anniversary, Paramount. You own this amazing IP that has lasted for 60 years. So what do we get? Some baking items, a half-baked episode, and nothing on the dockets for the future. Nothing. Good job, Paramount. Good job.

37:49Brian Schulmeister:Well, we can send some people to the Ren Fair. Oh, wait, that's coming later. I time-traveled. I time-traveled.

37:57Jason DeFillippo:We also had the Silo season finale last week. I don't know the season. I can't remember the season or episode number, Philip, but it was the season finale. And it was really good.

38:09Brian Schulmeister:Season three, episode 10.

38:11Jason DeFillippo:There you go. Yeah. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed it. It was great. It took a long time to get there this season, but it got there.

38:19Brian Schulmeister:Oh, yeah. That was a lot of juice. That was a lot of squeezing for a little bit of juice there. But no, I enjoyed it. did you stick to the end to watch the trailer for season four?

38:29Jason DeFillippo:I absolutely did, and I cannot wait. And apparently, we don't have to wait too long. It's coming in the summer. July!

38:35Brian Schulmeister:They're saying July. So, I was hoping that this was December, and it was only going to be six months, but it's not, so we have a little longer to wait. But still, July is better than some of the other ones that we've had to wait for. Three years from now. Yes. Yeah. FUBAR

38:50Jason DeFillippo:in 17 years. Well, my wife and I sat down to watch some TV last night, Jason, and I also wish it was, it would have been December because we watched Ted Lasso, season four, episode six, don't jump around much anymore for you, Philip. And I do wish it would have been December because here, first off the episode, pretty good. Some legit laugh out loud funny parts where I was dying, just dying laughing. It was hilarious. I have to say that the, what's her face? Oh God, I'm blanking on her name right now. Tracy Ullman. The Tracy Ullman shtick has grown very thin. Like, I'm done with that character.

39:29Jason DeFillippo:She was a one-trick pony. It's a complete waste of time.

39:32Brian Schulmeister:I was done with her the second time she showed up.

39:35Jason DeFillippo:It's such a horrible waste because she's hilarious. She's a hilarious person, and you're wasting her in this horrible role. Anyways, my point being, here's the problem with these shows that drop just randomly whenever they feel like it, whenever they're done, or they don't have, you know, 32 episodes in a year and they go the whole year. This was a New Year's Eve slash Christmas episode. Another one? In September. That aired in September. They did this before, though. I know, and it just doesn't feel right. You know what I mean? Like, when you're watching a Christmas episode from a show, it kind of needs to be around Christmas time or else it just doesn't get you in the feels the same way.

40:18Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, it doesn't hit. I got to say, the last Christmas, But also, the last Christmas episode they did was one of the best Christmas episodes of any show I've ever seen. So how much better would it have been around Christmas? It would have been ten times better.

40:31Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. Well, this was more of a New Year's one. But, you know, they have the Christmas decorations. It's snowing, all that sort of stuff. That it isn't in 102-degree weather in L.A. Exactly.

40:42Brian Schulmeister:It's hotter than Satan's ball sack, as I like to say. But, God damn, I'm going to watch me some Ted Lasso and turn on the A.C. and maybe I'll get the feels. Yeah. Thanks for the heads up. Now I know that season four, episode six, Don't Jump Around Much Anymore, is the perfect episode to turn the AC on and maybe make some eggnog and watch that. So thank you, Brian, for letting me know exactly what episode was and what season. I appreciate that.

41:05Jason DeFillippo:Once again, that's season four, episode six, Don't Jump Around Much Anymore.

41:10Brian Schulmeister:We're just fucking with you, Philip. It's fun. Apple TV has reportedly begun developing a spinoff of its hit sci-fi series, Silo.

41:17Jason DeFillippo:That would be season one, episode one, Philip.

41:21Brian Schulmeister:We're waiting for the pilot, Brian. We haven't even hit pilot yet. Season one, episode zero. Yes, the news follows the completion of the show's third season, while its fourth and final season is already scheduled to premiere. According to Apple TV reporter Sigmund Judge, the spinoff could enter pre-production later this year, though details about its plot, characters, or timeline remain unknown. Probably unless you read the books. They're going to tell us what book it's going to be about, maybe? Nope. No. No, Brian? You're shaking your head?

41:51Jason DeFillippo:Nope. He wrote all of the stuff that they're, it's all in silo. So that's it. Okay. I didn't know. So the person that should be doing the spinoff for the hit series, A Silo, should be Hugh Howie, who has to write it. How about he does?

42:04Brian Schulmeister:Yeah. I don't know if that's going to happen. This is Apple, you know. The fact that they've stuck so close to the plot line from the books is very un-Apple-like. I know. Foundation. Foundation. foundation foundation all seasons all episodes philip yes yes um i see a lot of gen gen whatever the latest generation of dumb shits out there talking about on on instagram they're saying i just discovered foundation on apple tv why didn't anybody tell me about this this is the greatest sci-fi thing i've ever i've ever seen i'm like i guess you shouldn't read the books if you really want to keep thinking that.

42:42Brian Schulmeister:If you really like the show, do not read the books. Don't read the books. Don't read the books. Okay. I got to get to The Gentleman Season 2 on Netflix. Now, The Gentleman Season 1 from Guy Ritchie was great, and it was like seven years ago. And The Gentleman Season 2 was delayed for a fucking year. It was supposed to come out a year ago. I don't know why it was delayed, if they did reshoots or anything like that. It was worth the wait. This is the best eight episodes of television I have seen this year. I fucking loved it. I mean, I'm a Guy Ritchie fan, like big time. So it had all the feels and all the hallmarks of a general Guy Ritchie, you know, plot line.

43:23Brian Schulmeister:But this one was, season one was more tongue in cheek fun, like most of his movies are, you know. There's like complicated plot lines and it gets a little, you know, goofy and funny. This season was not any of that. This was a very, for the most part, serious straight run and it was awesome. I mean, every night we would watch two episodes and then me and my roommate would talk about it for like an hour. When was the last time, Brian, you saw a show and you sat down and you talked about the plot line and what could happen and who's doing what for any amount of time? Never. Exactly. That's how good this was.

43:58Brian Schulmeister:This was so well written. And it has been renewed for season three, which is great because this is a three season arc for this character, for the main character, Eddie. and man if you haven't seen the gentlemen you can start at the beginning and go through them and you are going to love them it is so fucking good i'm like i'm this we went to watch uh we actually went to watch a couple episodes of the traders last night after we watched this and it just seems so stupid we're just like oh that's no we can't even watch that we just ended up watching like old guys grocery games instead to clear the palette but um oh and by the way guys grocery games.

44:33Brian Schulmeister:Season 25, starting at about episode six, is when they do the guys' grocery games from home that they did during the pandemic, which are very hard to find. But thanks to our friend who gave us access to their Plex server, I've been able to watch those. That's what we've been watching. So starting at season 25, probably episode five or six, going all the way to the middle of season 26 when COVID ends and they go back into the store. Those are some great episodes of guys' grocery games that you will probably never see. But Philip, go feel free to check those out since I have given you the season and the episode numbers because they're awesome all right uh i have not watched

45:07Jason DeFillippo:south park for many many many years uh i think i did watch one of the first episodes where they had trump on with his love affair with satan so i did watch one but it's been it's been a decade plus since i've watched an episode of south park uh i probably will not watch season 29 which is coming up soon however i do have to applaud them because south park has changed the name for the upcoming season to South America. Inspired by the bravery and patriotism of Apple and Google, we are changing the name of South Park to South America. We especially want to thank our parent company, Paramount, a Skydance capitulation.

45:44Brian Schulmeister:I love these guys. They're so great. They're so great. Yeah, I watched that first. I watched the first two episodes, or maybe three episodes of South Park when they came back with a vengeance after their big fight. And I mean, it was great. It was great, but the joke worse then. You know, the joke worse then.

46:05Jason DeFillippo:It's on its 29th season. And, like, I probably watched the first 10.

46:09Brian Schulmeister:That was enough. Yeah. I watched the first pilot on VHS that went around. And, you know, then, because that was what was just like, oh, these guys are going to be huge. And then whatever. And a little follow-up for the Simpsons Black Mirror episode. Did you ever go back and watch that on Disney Plus?

46:26Jason DeFillippo:I didn't, no.

46:27Brian Schulmeister:Okay. You don't have to. I'm just telling you the first one was cute it was like a really kind of bad black mirror episode that wasn't wasn't that great um so I didn't I didn't I just skipped the second one but the I mean the second one was kind of funny because you you actually might like the second part of it because it dealt with you know uh the kid and giving him an ipad and and uh Homer's like oh you found her off switch and gave her give her the ipad but anyway let's talk about something more fun. Donnie Darko. Donnie Darko, one of the greatest movies of all time. Love it. Is returning to theaters for its 25th anniversary.

47:06Brian Schulmeister:Fathom Entertainment will screen a new 4K restoration from October 2nd through October 4th. Screenings will feature an exclusive introduction from Richard Kelly, who is the main guy, who is also he has a sequel novel planned later this year. Now, the thing about Donnie Darko is If it's the director's cut, go die in a fucking fire because the director's cut is shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. It's like the director's cut of Amadeus. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit. The original Donnie Darko, fucking masterpiece. Absolute fucking masterpiece. There you go.

47:48Brian Schulmeister:I can't wait. I hope it's the good one. I hope it's the good one.

47:52Jason DeFillippo:We'll find out on October 2nd. So, yeah, I hope it is too. But what do you care? You can just watch it from home. You're not going to go to a theater.

47:59Brian Schulmeister:No, I want that 4K restoration of the original. That's what I want. I'll buy that. Oh, steal it from Sweden.

48:06Jason DeFillippo:Right. Well, speaking of disturbing movies, there's some upcoming techie movies that all look pretty disturbing. We've got like short trailers for most of these are out now. I don't have the links in the show notes. Sorry about that. Artificial, which is about Sam Altman. That looked pretty good. There's an Elon Musk documentary just called Musk. Oh, that looks so fucking good. That one looks really good. Four hours it's going to be, Brian. Four hours. I don't know if I can take four hours of Musk, but... Yeah, I don't know about that either. And I know I can't take three hours of this next one.

48:38Jason DeFillippo:You can see everything, which is the Elizabeth Holmes doc. And that teaser trailer has gone very viral. You know, something that she wouldn't have been able to detect with her blood tests, viruses, or anything.

48:52Brian Schulmeister:Oh, oh, oh my God.

49:00Jason DeFillippo:yeah so i i watched uh i watched the what 30 second uh teaser and that is about as much as i can take i don't think i'm gonna watch that one because fuck her i was watching that because i had

49:11Brian Schulmeister:i had no like gabriel pagan posted it to our discord and i just went into it cold and i'm watching it and i'm looking at it and like looking at her going why do i know her why is this so creepy why is this creeping me the fuck out why is my skin why does my back feel like it's trying to run out of the room at the same time see the psychopath in her you can and i'm just like and here's the thing i was like i'm trying to picture who she was i'm like who is because i thought she was an actress i'm like okay this has got to be a horror movie or some shit like that because the other guy the guy who made the film is talking to her and he's just as fucking creepy and i was It's like either this is one of the greatest actresses of all time.

49:53Brian Schulmeister:But then they pan back and then the whole day they do the wide shot. And it's just, I mean, it is the greatest horror movie trailer I've ever seen. Hands down. Yeah. Wow. I don't think I'm going to be able to sit through it. Oh, I guarantee you I'm not. Yeah. No. No. Yeah.

50:25Jason DeFillippo:well we've talked a lot about libby and i can tell you what the downside of libby is uh you you talked about how great this is how you lose the time war is so of course went straight to libby because i'm trying to not buy things from amazon and punched it up eight week wait now seven now seven so i am patiently waiting in 10 more episodes to get to it. Actually, I got a notification this morning that I can do an early checkout, but I only get it for seven days. So I guess I'll be reading this week.

50:55Brian Schulmeister:Well, it's a novella and you read like 800 pages a day. So I think you could probably get through it in one or two good shits.

51:01Jason DeFillippo:Yes. Well, in the meantime, while I got disappointed by not being able to get that book, I was scanning around in Libby and found a book called Orbital by Samantha Harvey that was very highly acclaimed. and it's also a very short novella and I read it. And don't read this if you're expecting sci-fi. This is more like a tone poem of what it must feel like to be an astronaut in space. Now, having said that, that sounds fucking horrible, but it wasn't. It was actually really good.

51:32Brian Schulmeister:Okay, cool. Yeah. Very good. I just, I want to know why you didn't go to A Gift of Time by Jerry Merritt that I talked about at the same time I said, you know, this is how to Lose the Time War was so good. Because I'd had a gift of wine and I didn't remember that one. Okay. Well, I'm putting it in the notes here. But I did find out that Jerry Merritt did write another book called Time Pebbles. It is not in the same universe, but it is another time travel book. And I got that on Audible right before I canceled my subscription. And because I had to, I had to burn through my last credits before I canceled it.

52:07Brian Schulmeister:So I did get The Infinite Extent Babaverse Book 6 by Dennis E. Taylor, which comes out tomorrow, which will be the day that this episode airs. So I know. Give me those fingers out. I have to wait like six months. Oh, poor baby. I get to listen to it. So yes. That's going to be awesome. And I used, well, here's the thing. I used the credit that I had spent on the book that you recommended or talked about at least, The Nerd Reich. so not to be confused with the turd reich which is a series of street art pieces which i linked to the show notes which you should go check out and print and put all over your office and everything because they're beautiful um so i took the nerd right credit and spent it back on the infinite extent bob averse book six by dennis e taylor which i get tomorrow and you don't because i started to read the nerd reich and it gave me so much agita that i had to immediately return it yeah i was like there's no way we could read this book no no oh man these people are just so fucking horrible oh hey nazi or pedo that's what they should have just called this book nazi or pedo and it would have been both spoiler alert oh and it seems like our discord channel has spoken on dungeon crawler carl uh book three seems like everybody had problems getting through it

53:26Jason DeFillippo:you know i'm not even going to go back to it for a while i i guess i'll i'll slug my way through because people seem to think it picks back up after book three, and sometimes you just got to work through. It's like reading The Gunslinger, if you're going to read The Dark Tower. The Gunslinger is a slog, but you have to get through it. You have to, because the whole rest of the series is awesome. No, it's not.

53:46Brian Schulmeister:No, it's not. We disagree on The Gunslinger. I hated it. I hated it. I hated that. And what was the other one? The Stand. Oh, I love The Stand. So thousands of pages you've made me read for shit that I hate, but I did it. I stuck it through. So whatever. But you should definitely go back and get instead of a gift of wine, get a gift of time by Jerry Merritt. It's a great book. I will do both. Okay. Welcome to the dark side with Dave featuring cybersecurity's hardest working podcaster, Dave Bittner. When he's not covering the daily cyber beat on the cyber wire, he's busting scams with Joe Kerrigan on hacking humans, tackling privacy with Ben Yellen on caveat and proves there's always room for one more cybersecurity podcast with only malware in the building.

54:33Brian Schulmeister:What's up, Big D? It's good to be back. Glad you're back. Trying to get some energy in here, guys. Come on. Let's go. It's good to be back. Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. You might pay for the whole seat, but you're only going to need the edge.

54:52Jason DeFillippo:This is in that midweek slump, I guess. Yeah, that's true. We do record on Wednesdays now, and it's always kind of like, meh. Yeah.

55:01Brian Schulmeister:It's better than Fridays. A couple more days left in the week.

55:04Jason DeFillippo:Yep.

55:06Brian Schulmeister:Anyway, I threw this in here because this just comes back to the old, they're not listening to you, they're listening to you, they're not listening to you, they're listening to you. Well, a new report claims that some LG smart TVs may be collecting more audio data than viewers expect. The televisions reportedly use built-in microphones and voice recognition features to detect spoken commands. But questions remain about whether ambient conversations can also be captured or processed. Thoughts, gentlemen?

55:31Jason DeFillippo:Well, we only ever said our phones weren't listening to us.

55:35Brian Schulmeister:That's true. That is true. Here we go again.

55:39Jason DeFillippo:I've seen some more reporting on this, and people have been using packet sniffers and all the various technology that we have available to see what's coming in and out of our networks. And, yeah, these guys are going to get sued.

55:56Brian Schulmeister:Good.

55:58Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. From by all accounts, I mean, they are just they're keeping conversations. Even if the Wi-Fi is disconnected, they're storing conversations on board and then sending them off to to to the home network, you know, when when when they reconnect. And, you know, it's just I'm going to guess that they put this in this very, very small print somewhere on the manuals that they don't give us anymore. But the EULA, Brian, the EULA. Yeah, I'd imagine so. But I think this, you know, this this is just unfortunate timing for the for LG, perhaps, because we are very much as we'll just as we discussed earlier in the show, there is a pretty big private privacy backlash happening right now.

56:44Jason DeFillippo:People are pissed. People are angry. People are destroying flawed cameras. People are getting off their butts and actually going to city council meetings saying, we're not cool with this. We're not cool with the police doing this. We're not cool with the police doing that. We're not cool with these cameras. We're not cool with you not telling us what we're doing. And yeah, people are fucking pissed about this online with these LGs.

57:09Brian Schulmeister:yet yet yet millions and millions of meta ray bands are being sold every year yeah but that's

57:16Jason DeFillippo:something that you're buying to that's something so you can destroy other people's privacy not your privacy being destroyed true that true that i'll just reiterate my advice for anyone who buys uh any kind of television that has internet connectivity which is all of them today just skip by the internet connectivity get yourself an Apple TV or one of the other dedicated devices and let that be how you communicate with the world and I choose exactly what I do yeah I choose the Apple TV because of all of the major suppliers I distrust Apple the least.

58:00Brian Schulmeister:That's about the extent of it. Yeah, I have my Apple TV hooked up to my Amazon Fire TV, which generally will not run without an internet connection, without a reboot every three and a half minutes. It is the worst television that I've ever paid for in my life. And, you know, I've tried, I've tried unplugging it and taking it off the network and not even setting it up and it will barely boot half the time. So, and, you know, there was two weeks where it wouldn't even get past the, it died in the update cycle. And I had to like force restart it, factory reset, force restart, factory reset three more times, and then plug it into the ethernet to get it to fix itself.

58:39Brian Schulmeister:And now it's like, well, it's tasted the outside world and now it doesn't want to let go. It's just like, I've tasted freedom. You will not, you know, not putting TV in the corner.

58:51Jason DeFillippo:I had, like when I first moved here to Toronto from Los Angeles, we left behind TVs and all that sort of stuff because they were all kind of outdated anyways. And I did a bit of research because I knew I'd be buying two TVs at least. We ended up with three. And Samsung at the time was pretty top of the list in terms of privacy, even if you leave the stuff on. So I got myself some Samsung TVs. and when I plugged them in to set them up, I had one Apple TV with me. That's all I had at the time. So obviously the main TV, the Apple TV went and no internet connectivity off, all that sort of stuff, just the Apple TV.

59:30Jason DeFillippo:That's the only thing allowed connected to the net and the Samsung TV is just a dumb old TV, which it's supposed to be, but then I put one down here in my basement and I didn't have an Apple TV yet and I figured, let me take a look at this. Let me just see, you know okay you can get all the apps in here it's not it's not as intuitive and nice as an apple tv but it will do and i don't have to spend the extra you know 150 or whatever it is for the apple tv and lo and behold as soon as i brought it up and then i saw i saw there's a fucking ad in here there are ads oh yeah ads in my menu bar fuck this right so i immediately ordered the apple tv I'm not buying my money.

1:00:12Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, even if they're not destroying your privacy, the whole idea that I spend, you know, upwards a thousand plus dollars on a really nice TV that then just feeds me fucking ads.

1:00:25Brian Schulmeister:No. No. Don't buy a Roku TV then. That's for damn sure. That's all we've got. It's just ad, ad, ad. So, yeah, it's ridiculous. It's ridiculous.

1:00:36Jason DeFillippo:My main TV, like on the sort of, I guess you'd call it the living room in our house, which is probably where most of the TV is consumed. It's the one facing the couch. When we shut down Pixel Workshop a few years ago, we took one of the old Panasonic studio monitors. It was a big, I don't know, 40 something inch plasma display. So very high quality, but dumb. Dumb as a fence post. No smarts in it at all. And hosed up an Apple TV to it. And since then, Panasonic no longer sells televisions in the U.S. They got out of that market. Oh, wow. It's a tough racket to be in. Yeah, because of people like Vimeo, you know.

1:01:19Jason DeFillippo:Yeah, Vimeo and Amazon and, you know, everybody putting out these super cheap TVs that just suck up your data.

1:01:25Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, right. Right. I tell you what, though, those Samsung smart TVs, I bought three of them for my studio back in the day. They all came from a resale shop. So I got them used cheap, like 200 bucks each for 55 inch, really nice TVs. It's too bad it had that KFC menu burned into it, isn't it? No. You know what it had? You know what it had, though? It was part of like some porn. No, no. OK. It was part of like a retirement community that had all of the apps installed. They all were still logged in. So I got every single channel from every network on those TVs. And up until recently, I gave the last one away to a friend whose TV broke.

1:02:07Brian Schulmeister:And like as of like, you know, six months ago, they all still worked. That's years. Like I bought those in 2002 or 2003. So those Samsung TVs hold on to those credentials really nicely. So, Brian, do a factory reset before you get rid of them. I remember you did the one.

1:02:24Jason DeFillippo:Years ago, there was a thing making the rounds about somebody on Craigslist was giving away a free plasma TV. And this is when plasma TVs were still the pinnacle of image quality. You can't buy a plasma TV anymore. And it's basically, you know, free plasma TV warning. the burned into the screen is the uh opening menu for ass masters five

1:02:53Jason DeFillippo:so if you're willing to hey take the tv when it's completely black or completely white this is what you will see but like somebody had uh i guess uh taken care of business fallen asleep and the menu was on overnight and burned itself in there and there was no getting rid of it So that's great. Oh, that's awesome. I put a link in here for something that crossed my desk this week. It's yet another searchable database of Usenet. This one's pretty, pretty powerful, pretty useful and just plain fun. I don't know how far you guys go back on Usenet, but I certainly left a lot of breadcrumbs back there.

1:03:36Jason DeFillippo:And it's just, it's strange to visit your past self, public facing past self from 30 years ago and see what your writing style was and what was important to you. I have to admit, I have the first, I think you found one of these and talked about it quite a while back. And I had bookmarked it with the idea of eventually looking myself up because I go way back as well and remember my usernames. And then I decided out of sheer, I just don't want to know. I don't want to know. I don't want to revisit that past. See, I lack that discipline. But now I will have to re-go through this whole temptation because you have put another one in here and I will circle around this drain for a couple of weeks.

1:04:25Jason DeFillippo:Right, right. Right. The next thing I'm sharing here is I guess I'm not going to be going to Renfest this year.

1:04:32Brian Schulmeister:Hang on, guys. I'm sorry to break in here. I actually went back and I just put in my old email address was Thor at Interaccess.com. I have an announcement here from February 6, 1995, where announce modest www.cyberpunk site. There is a modest cyberpunk site at Interaccess.com slash spew. This was my first website. This is the first announcement I ever made for my first website. Wow. And it's actually here. That's amazing. We are looking for contributors desperately. We have the whole pretty page thing down, but we need contributors. Check it out and let me know what you think. And it's got my email address and all of that stuff.

1:05:11Brian Schulmeister:Wow. February 6, 1995. That's when Spew was born.

1:05:16Jason DeFillippo:It reminds me of what Yoda said, you know, old friends long gone.

1:05:21Brian Schulmeister:Yep. You know what I really like about this, though, too, is on all of these old messages, they have links to the Wayback Machine. So you can click directly on a link and go to the Wayback Machine straight from there. Oh, that's nice. That's pretty cool.

1:05:32Jason DeFillippo:So you can see it all threaded.

1:05:34Brian Schulmeister:Yeah.

1:05:35Jason DeFillippo:Cool. I still will not be tempted. No. You shouldn't be. Give it time. It's all right. Someday your kids will look you up. That's, you know. Well, luckily I never used my real name back then. They were just going to get this podcast and hear me talking shit. Okay. Okay. See, I was not that smart. So anyway, I guess I'm not going to be going to RenFest this year. Here in Maryland, we have a very successful RenFest. It sells out way ahead of time, and it's hard to get tickets to, and long lines to park and get in and all that sort of thing. It's very, very successful. But this year, the Maryland Renaissance Fair has banned furries.

1:06:16Brian Schulmeister:What? What?

1:06:17Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. Yeah.

1:06:19Brian Schulmeister:They might as well ban turkey legs. What the fuck?

1:06:22Jason DeFillippo:Or cleavage. Yeah. Right. What the hell? Well, they said that furries make people uncomfortable. Those are the people we don't want the red flag. They're quite comfortable to sit on. Yeah. Yeah. So, of course, the furries are not taking this sitting down. As they shouldn't. They should be leaping and hopping and skipping and jumping. Chasing their tails. Frolicking. frolicking in protest uh it's funny that you put this in here because um i i tend to spend a lot of time not engaging on but reloading threads for some reason i i've found it the most interesting of the social media sites these days just because it tosses up weird topics for me it's it's not a very good algorithm because it's not stuff that i would normally be interested in but i do like the rabbit holes it tries to send me down and one of the ones that just tried to send me down just two days ago and i did chase this one down a little bit because i thought it was hilarious uh apparently there's there's this whole subculture going on on threads about how uh gen z has absolutely no fucking sense of humor and um it started or at least the the biggest thread that i saw started because of renaissance fair and some gen z woman went to a renaissance fair and was aghast i tell you aghast at how many people were showing parts of their bodies and how could this be because this is a family-friendly event and we must ban renaissance fairs because there is far too much cleavage oh boy and this person ever been on the internet this person just got fucking everybody just piled on like fucking grow up aren't you an adult what the fuck is wrong with you people how does your generation not know how to have fun yeah no they don't as a matter of fact so so i think that there is a the push to to kind of i don't know cleanse everything these days and we you know cancel culture has gotten to red fest and the

1:08:19Brian Schulmeister:furries i can't believe it well see the thing about renaissance fairs is they're very family friendly because many families are made at renaissance fairs too much mead and next thing

1:08:29Jason DeFillippo:you know exactly you're off in some tent somewhere um yeah i i similarly followed a little Renfest rat hole that I came across on Reddit. And this one happened to be, what is the most annoying costume that people wear to Renfests? Any guesses as to what came in? Jack Sparrow? Pirates was up there. Pirates was up there. Yeah, I guess pirates aren't considered really Renfest-y canon. No, that's like people just all cosplaying it. No, number one with a bullet was Star Trek Away Team.

1:09:12Brian Schulmeister:Oh, man.

1:09:14Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. Yeah, okay. Actually, I find that really funny.

1:09:19Brian Schulmeister:Yeah, that's great. That's absolutely great. Right.

1:09:22Jason DeFillippo:I just imagine the RenFest people are like, oh, there's another Star Trek Away Team. Oh, hilarious. Oh, so funny. How clever you are. What about Doctor Who? Right. You need a Doctor Who guy coming through there. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But actually, someone did say that an actual clever Star Trek away team would be to just dress as poorly costumed Renfest people. Yeah. And have like the Spock ears and that sort of stuff. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. But no, people in actual Star Trek uniforms, they've had enough of that. That jokes run its course. OK. Fair, I guess. Yeah. Yeah. So moving on to our favorite topic here, which, of course, is Star Wars.

1:10:09Jason DeFillippo:I wanted to just reiterate where I will be on February 19th, 2027, which is the day that the 50th anniversary IMAX 70 millimeter presentation of the original theatrical release of Star Wars is coming out. I don't know where you're going to be, Brian. I don't know where you're going to be, Jason. I will be at the next link in our show notes, the Empire Strips Back A Burlesque parody. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, no, I'm kind of excited about this. I never saw the original Star Wars in theater. I was too young. So I remember seeing it on a VHS probably after I had seen Empire Strikes Back in the theater. So I would like to see, I want to see Han shoot first in glorious IMAX.

1:10:59Jason DeFillippo:I think that would be great. I had no, I mean, I guess I intellectually knew this. We've got Star Wars celebrating their 50th anniversary on February 19th. We just had Star Trek celebrate their 60th anniversary. So I did not know that Star Trek preceded Star Wars by a full 10 years. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

1:11:21Brian Schulmeister:I saw Star Wars in the back of my dad's Cadillac Eldorado at a drive-in in Des Plaines, Illinois. That's where I first saw Star Wars. And we saw it twice. So that's it. That was my only theater experience. So it was outside in a noisy, you know, drive-in with people going crazy and stuff. I barely remember it, but I do remember, like, making my dad take me back the next night. So I liked it enough.

1:11:48Jason DeFillippo:Yeah. I saw it at least 10 times in the theaters. And I do remember one of the times was we had a theater near here that was like an old classic movie house and they had 70 millimeter projection. And so I did see it once in 70 millimeter. but so let's let's skip over and we will swing back to the empire strips back because it's definitely worth talking about but this seeing it in 70 millimeter brings me to the last link that i put in here which is a comparison between the stereo and mono sound mix of the star wars releases so it turns out historically the initial release of star wars was in stereo and 70 millimeter, which was six channels.

1:12:36Jason DeFillippo:And it was about a month later because they did not anticipate the popularity of the film. A month later, they came out with a mono mix for all the other theaters that wanted Star Wars, but hadn't yet upgraded to stereo. Hard to believe that back in the late-ish 70s, many, many movie theaters were still just projecting in mono. I mean, what about those movie theaters that just got John Williams' score and they had to play it on the organ. Right. That would be interesting to see, wouldn't it be? A theater organ version of... Someone must have done that. It must have been done. I'm going to do it at the next Ren Faire.

1:13:19Jason DeFillippo:Right. But, so in that month of time, they made changes. Ben Burt, who was mixed and did all the sound for Star Wars, updated some things. So the mono sound mix of Star Wars has some differences. It has different takes, different, the actors doing different takes that are in the stereo version. There are added sound effects. But the thing I remember specifically from my childhood was the joke in Star Wars when Han Solo is running away from the stormtroopers on the Death Star and he's shooting at them and he runs away and you hear a stormtrooper say, close the blast doors. And then you see Han and Chewie running for the blast doors and the blast doors are closing and Han like barely makes it through.

1:14:07Jason DeFillippo:And then the stormtrooper says, open the blast doors, open the blast doors. Right. And it's funny because he just told him to close it. Now he wants them to open it. Well, the close the blast doors line isn't in the stereo release. It's only in the mono release. They added the joke for the mono release. And I remember seeing that in the theaters and thinking, oh, that's a really funny joke. But then I also remember seeing it again and going, wait, where's the joke? Because I must have seen it in stereo after that. So I think that was my first experience of, what's the thing where things change over time?

1:14:49Jason DeFillippo:You know what I'm talking about? God, guys, I'm dying here. I'm told. The Mandela effect. Mandela effect. Thank you. Are you talking about the Mandela effect?

1:14:59Brian Schulmeister:Yes. Talking about the Mandela effect.

1:15:00Jason DeFillippo:My brain blinked on it with you. So I was right there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. The Mandela effect. Yes. But it was real in this case because there were different versions. Anyway, this YouTube video. It's not like Star Wars to continually fuck with the way the movie is presented. Oh, my God. Right? So from the outset, they were doing this to us. Yeah. But it is interesting to watch because there are some minor things beyond Han shooting first. there there's some subtle changes to the lines that they say that make a little bit of a difference so if you're a star wars nerd like us it's worth checking out and it is fun so we'll see which version uh comes out in when it's in 70 millimeter imax it'd be maybe it'll be a whole new mix all right very cool and if you're a star wars nerd that likes cleavage at renfairs you should check out the empire strict sack burlesque parody yes we originally covered that in episode 613

1:15:54Brian Schulmeister:and uh every like for i think a good solid two years my instagram feed i got ads for that every

1:16:01Jason DeFillippo:day and i didn't skip them yeah i got an ad for it uh i got an ad for it today which is why it made it into the show notes i just re-popped back up so is it coming to a town near you uh it is it has been to toronto i did not catch it i think it's currently in los angeles and my phone still thinks i'm in la for some reason so i see yeah yeah it did come to washington dc and I was tempted to go see it. But how do I say this? In order for me to go see this, someone else would have to instigate the trip. Like the wife. Well, no, you're getting to the core of it though, which is that my wife would not be the one instigating this trip.

1:16:43Jason DeFillippo:So one of our friends would have to instigate the trip and say, hey, we're going to see the Empire Strips back as a couple. Would you guys like to go with us? And then I'd go, oh, that'd be fun. You can bring R2. Right. And my wife would go, OK, I'll go. And that would be that. And so. But yeah, I'm going out on a limb here and guessing that this would not be her thing. But yeah, I'd be there. I'd be there. It is a parody.

1:17:08Brian Schulmeister:So, you know, say, honey, it's comedy. We're going for comedy.

1:17:11Jason DeFillippo:Look, if we were in Paris, you'd be going to a burlesque show. Right. Right. It's like I'm just watching. Because there it's classy. Right. I'm watching all these 1980s HBO after dark movies like Porky's and. Oh, God, Porky's. Because of the comedy. I'm watching it because of the comedy. Yeah. Tim Cattrall is legitimately funny. That's right. Comic sensibilities are second to none. on that bombshell yeah may the force be with you always now let's get to the people who make this

1:17:48Brian Schulmeister:show possible over at patreon we've got no new subscribers which means that you who are listening or watching this show right now should go to patreon.com slash gog and for as little as three dollars a month and you can actually get a discount if you pay for the whole year and you can give us more if you want you can get the show early ad free and in high definition and it helps keep the show on the air. So the people who have signed up at patreon.com slash GOG and then continue to support the show are Nathan, Gilbert, Stephen, Marcus, Mrs. BGK18, David, Ed G, Alex, Martin, and Anonymous Economist.

1:18:22Brian Schulmeister:We thank you all for your continued support of our showgram. Who said showgram? Who used to say that?

1:18:29Jason DeFillippo:I have no idea. Okay. Okay. Over at PayPal, we got donations from online computers and Gordon who gave us a big$25 donation.

1:18:37Brian Schulmeister:Thank you. And we do have memberships over at YouTube if you'd like to sign up and get the show early and ad-free for the most part. Yeah, you do get it ad-free if you sign up. So, hey, go get that too. We've got a couple of new people at Keith Metcalf 1439 and at Asa Logan B2N. So thank you for signing up over there. And over at the tip jar, we've got Patrick and hi, John. So thank you all very much. And we sold some merch, Jason. Yeah, tell us about all these people that bought the merch, Brian.

1:19:05Jason DeFillippo:Our shirts are flying off the shelf thing. Roger from Tucson. Matthew from Australia. Francis from Asheville. Jason in the Armed Forces Pacific. Steve from Menlo Park. I'm sure that shirt will be popular there. James from Maine. And Craig from Ohio. Thank you all.

1:19:21Brian Schulmeister:Thank you all so much. And, yeah, and, you know, last week I mentioned that nobody was buying the, you know, Elon Kills Babies shirt. That has actually been picking up steam, you know. So granted, our You Are Here shirt has definitely been the most popular sales item, but I think we've sold like five or six at least of the Elon Kills Baby shirt. So if you're going to go see Musk the documentary, what better shirt to wear? Oh, my God. Absolutely. Absolutely. And you know what you should also wear it in when you're taking your first cyber cab ride in Austin? Or at least if you're doing the hokey pokey in front of it and fucking with the people inside the cyber cab, you should really get one.

1:20:00Brian Schulmeister:That is the way it should go. For sure. There you go.

1:20:03Jason DeFillippo:Agreed. And I guess that's about it, Jason. I'm tired and I'm grumped out. Until next time, I'm Brian Schulmeister.

1:20:10Brian Schulmeister:I'm Jason DeFillippo. Thanks for listening to Grumpy Old Geeks. Get all the links and goodies from today's episode at GOG.show slash 762. Want to keep the grumpiness alive? Toss a few bucks our way at GOG.show slash donate. Every penny helps keep the show on the air. Love the show? Share it. There's a share button in your podcast player. Use it to spread the grumpiness to friends, foes, and everyone in between, and we'll love you for it. Swing by GOG.show to join our Discord and chat with us and other show fans. Got thoughts? Feedbacks? Cool links? Feedbacks. Got some feedbacks, Brian? I got the backs of the feeds.

1:20:40Brian Schulmeister:We got the backs of the feeds. Hit us up at GOG.show slash contact. And hey, don't forget to leave a five-star review at GOG.show slash review, and we'll read it on the air. And guess what? If you haven't listened to the show yet, we've got merch. Snag your grumpy gear now at shop.GOG.show and stay grumpy.

1:21:00You