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Overview
Stephen attended the Pittsburgh festival of books and had some great things to tell – including meeting some wonderful independent comic creators. One with it’s own TV show also.
This leads to a nice discussion on supporting creators and how to do it so it helps them. A game creators also.
Recommendations
Heroineburgh Comics – http://www.heroineburgh.com/
The Theme of Thieves – https://www.themeofthieves.com/
YouTube
Transcript
Stephen: good morning, Alan.
Alan: Okay. Good morning, Steven. Never got the cool thanks Shirt on today. That’s nice,
Stephen: nice.
Alan: Keith. It’s actually, I don’t know if there’s a good comic strip. Let’s see, that has a feature called Life’s Little Victories. Have you ever, I’m talking about a guy named Yeah, I haven’t heard that one.
Okay. It’s it’s still underground. It has a couple books out, but I don’t know that it’s featured in that many. Newspapers, almost all those alternate newspapers and that we met, why can’t I think of his last name? We were at the eighth, the alternative press expo, I think out in San Francisco and had a chance to, it was like the booth right next to Bob, the Angry Flower.
Once you go alternate you that’s where life in Hell started off. You know what I mean? Was Matt Brittany. Such fame with the Simpsons and stuff like that. So I’ve always loved. The alternative newspapers, cuz that’s where you get the cool music and the cool comedy and stuff.
And almost all was, the comic strips they run are not your conventional peanuts type stuff. They’re the, they’re a little edgier. They’re a little otter. The artwork is, I don’t know. They’re just, I like having I have a, I. Sense of humor that has multiple facets and it’s nice to find something.
There’s one called like red meat where the art can be really off-putting almost like horror characters and yet they say very witty things. There’s one And who was it maybe David. Where it’s the same artwork every single strip, and he just comes up with different captions or different dialogue and has been doing it for years.
And it’s weird. I’m fuzzing out. I can’t tell you, but it’s like what? Incredible. I admire the creativity and the craft of someone who does always a new strip each time, far side and Calvin and Hobbs and all the other greats, Dilbert. And yet, Whoever can look at that same frame and find a new thing to say about it it’s amazing.
It’s, anyway, so that’s where this comes from. It’s his think strip.
Stephen: Got it. Yeah. That’s where you’re breaking, I’m sorry, you were breaking up a little. Oh, sorry. Why am I breaking? Ugh, that this whole transmission thing is driving me crazy with. I don’t know. Especially cause
Alan: I’m sorry, because you say that you do others and it never seems to happen and I thought I had a pretty good web connection and yet there’s something about our stuff that is like magically wrong.
I don’t get it, but that’s so weird.
Stephen: Yeah. But I love some of the alternatives girl Genius started off as a web strip and has branched out and has trade paperbacks and you can buy actual books and
Alan: stuff. Exactly. That’s I’ve known Phil and Karo Foglio for a lot. Not known, I guess I’ve met him, MCCs and stuff like that.
I’m not great friends with them, but they’ve been doing stuff in the ComicCon world and the like Renaissance Fair fil World, they have all kinds of influences where I really have liked their work for a long time. And then it’s very satisfying to see someone that. You’re worried about, boy, this is really a great strip, but it seems to kinda labor in obscurity, and then it doesn’t, it breaks out into the world and they actually get, more acclaimed their fan favorites.
They get books published and stuff like that. And that’s, almost, but I hope for you, I hope for other people that are creating beautiful things that they where the world finally says, yeah, that’s really good. I’m sorry that we didn’t pay attention to you for the first five
Stephen: years or whatever else it might.
Yeah, it’s what Bill has said. It only took ’em 30 years to be an overnight success. An overnight. Exactly. Speaking of underground in that I went down to Pittsburgh over the weekend Okay. To the festival of books that they have down there. And it’s fantastic little festival that the library puts on.
It’s really weird because it’s on a seminary school grounds. It was, I was waiting. I saw somebody walking around in robes, looked like a monk that I think actually lived and worked there, but he had bought some books. He’s carrying a bag that’s, it was pretty cool. And I said, is there an ATM anywhere around here?
Because I wanted to get cash out for some of the stuff I got. And they said I think down there I’m like, what monks don’t have an atm? They’re like, no, they but their
Alan: material needs are few.
Stephen: Exactly. Yeah. But it was a nice event. They had some local bookstores. They had the library, they had sections for adults and kids, and they had speakers and they had readers and some very interesting people like this one gal was set up, she had a nice backdrop and she was sitting there with their feet up and a typewriter on her lap.
And I’m like, So what is this? And she’s tell me your name and a few little things. I will type you up a poem. And I’m like, that’s pretty freaking cool. Creativity on the spot.
Alan: That’s pretty cool.
Stephen: Yeah. It’s, you get musicians that will ramp on some chords and sing something, she was doing it with poetry and a typewriter, so it drew because you’re clack, as you’re walking around.
And I’m like, I’m wondering if she’s going to get enough people to make the, and every time I looked over at her, she had somebody standing there with her typing away. So that’s very,
Alan: That really is, I’ve always loved going up to a caricaturist or something like that. Yeah. And just in real time, they’re gonna create something that I get to take with me.
I think that’s, Intoxicatingly cool. To be like, this is really me. It’s the only one in the world. I got a personalized sketch or poem or whatever else it might be. So I hope that, I hope her bus business was booming. Yeah.
Stephen: So very good. Yeah. And she was young, so she might have been a college student or something.
It, we’ve talked about the dearth of the. Beginner jobs? No, no more McDonald’s, no more cashier at Walmart. Just all these jobs that are disappearing. That are the beginner jobs. Exactly. This is what I tried to be preaching is she created her own beginner job. Yes. And there’s plenty of opportunity for that.
It’s just, I don’t think people think that way a lot. Yeah. Sorry. The whole Thing was just cool, but it was outdoor and raining and I’m like, so that’s good. Let’s plan a thing. Stuff like that
Alan: paper. Yeah. That’s so much. Not exactly. You gotta worry about the angle of the rain Yes.
Coming up and make sure your table is safe. Yes. Oh. But I’ve never heard of this one before, so I didn’t even know to think of going to it. So if it’s around this time each year Yeah. I’ll look into, Hey, what’s going on in May? And it’s, I love events like this. I love where it’s just that the way you’re describing it, it’s I wish I was there with you.
It sounds like it’s really a good one. Okay. It
Stephen: was fun. Yeah. And of course I took a picture and Marty replied and said, Hey, you’re in Pittsburgh. And didn’t even let me and Paul know, and I’m like I really didn’t have much time. I had to get back home. I said, but hey, how come the librarian isn’t at the festival of books?
Alan: Exactly. I didn’t answer that. I’m expecting to meet you here are just slacking off.
Stephen: Exactly. Yeah. Okay. But I did run into
Alan: just. Of discovering those things. We look at the Yeah, no, please go ahead. Oh, no,
Stephen: no. Finish. We’re, we’ve got a lag here, so we may have a little This thing. Go ahead.
Alan: Okay. One of the things that Colleen and I have done, I’m in town in Cleveland area for 20 plus years now.
I love small town festivals. I love just finding out we, there used to be a very cool calendar that came out that had collected like every single one. And for the first couple years that it was being produced, it’s no longer being produced. We were like, Let’s go to the potato festival. Let’s go to the hot air balloon display and almost every weekend for the, let’s say May of September the summer, months plus we could find out how far are we willing to drive to go to the Sauerkraut Festival.
I guess it’s three hours and we just had such a nice time. 80 90% of the time it was. That wonderful festival feel. It was like I dunno, always good food, always good company. Sometimes a little crazy crowded sometimes. The heat or the rain or the too many dogs or whatever else it might be.
But I just love that every little town finds a way to put its best foot forward and say, we’re gonna have the Duct Tape Festival, we’re gonna have, I love those and literary events like that. I know that Wooster used to have They have for whatever reason an an extra number of used bookstores.
And so we would go down to that and say, for today we’re gonna go and visit every bookstore and visit every bookstore cat. We’re gonna find some treasure. You know what I mean? You can find a treasure for a quarter or a buck or five bucks, but it something that if you’re a book fan, you and I have talked about that when we were doing.
Brain freeze five, five years ago now, or something like that. Yeah. You and your family were like, whoa, we’re not only doing ice cream, there are bookstores to be explored here. Yeah. Until regularly broke away. And we love doing that kind of stuff, especially if you’re looking for. Interesting non-Amazon type books.
Little bookstores don’t always have their entire inventory or just that by an arc fact of, hey, it’s in I don’t know, Aberdeen, Ohio or something like that. They’ll have a different selection than everywhere else cuz it’s just by luck. Whatever. A collector there, when they died, the estate sale, all these books went to this place and I have found treasure, like a book I hadn’t seen in 40 years.
And a place has it, it’s like, why? And not only sometimes I needed it and sometimes I was like, I have to buy this just so I can give it to a friend cause
Stephen: you know what I mean? Yeah. So anyway, and I did run into a table. Luckily it was under a nice little shelter area that had three guys that were selling their independent comic books.
That’s great. And I was like, oh, that’s pretty cool. And we started chatting a little bit and I of course bought some, one was a retelling of Be Wolf in Modern World. Okay. One was like time traveling. Western guy. And the other one was turning Pittsburgh into Superhero Berg. Essentially.
Yeah. So I grabbed those, but we were chatting and they know Ted Sakura and they’re like, oh, if you like Cleveland based books, check out Ted Sakara. I’m like, yeah, I got it already. Talk to him. Yeah. And exactly. But they, I told ’em, they were like we just started chatting and I’m like, oh, I do a podcast and I’ll probably talk about your stuff.
If those guys are listening the Bea Wolf, the berg and I, forgive me, I forget the other one, but I’ll put show notes in there. Okay. They said they’d go, listen, I’m a little shout out to them. Like we’ve always said, people, go check these little festivals and things out.
Support local independent creators and authors and artists. Oh, and there was a group there that had a contest for short stories and they made anthologies. So I’m like, okay, I love short stories. I love supporting this stuff. So I bought a couple of those and I opened the first book and it says, cover Cover painting by William Keith.
Oh, hey, I know that man too.
Alan: Honestly, I think that there’s often that wonderful support network that, everybody that’s in this place of trying to make a living at it, trying to be discovered it and et cetera, et cetera, they all kind of band together in support of each other because the rest of the world has given him a little shoulder.
You know what I mean? So it, in fact, we should, we could even start today, but we should do an episode. We, by having. Been in the, these fields, multiple wonderful literary or geeky fields. We have all kinds of friends that we should say, Hey, I have a friend, Kate Hutchinson, who’s been doing chatbooks of poetry, like for all of her life, just about, and I have bought many of them for Colleen for birthday or Christmas presents and they’re great.
You know what I mean? It’s one of those I’ve undiscovered I, I don’t know how many copies she sells, but whenever I write to her and say, Hey, what’s your latest? Could you please personalize one and send it to Colleen? They’re just, It’s very cool to be in support of those people and very cool to give Colleen something that the rest of the world doesn’t know about.
But then if it’s really high quality, you wanna pick it up and go, everybody, why aren’t you reading this? This is so good. So I, as we start to think of, Anne Mosconi has done beautiful puzzle books and a verdant Earth series that I really liked. And I’ll tell you that’s one of those where she actually sent me either sent me or I bought a copy and then.
I was bad in that I didn’t do a review of it on Amazon or where I should. And one of the things I should do is go through my collection and. Assist that. It’s not only that I enjoyed it, I wanna put it out there and say, Hey, if you’ve never heard of this, trust me, I’ve read a lot and this really stands out.
And in fact, shout out to bear with me, Mike Lucas. I’m feeling really foolish and guilty. I’ve been colony Colleen is at a conference this week. I’ve been working on like Elf Magic. I’ve been cleaning the house and doing all kinds of stuff, getting old furniture down to the street and actually free cycle worked and they picked up these end tables.
Nice. That, they needed a little bit of repair. So having said that He sent me a review copy of called Finding Your Funny Muscle. He’s a standup comedian whose work we had really enjoyed. He lived in Cleveland for a while, and I think he’s down in Texas nowadays, but I really wanted to get it done by the 15th because that’s when his book went on sale.
And because I was doing these other things, I didn’t get it done in a timely fashion and now it’s on sale. But I really want to post something that says, Not only, Hey, Mike’s my friend, but I read the book and the book is really good. So don’t just take it as being blandishment from a friend. It’s it the book is about everybody wants to be funnier.
Everybody wants to when you’re looking on the dating scientist I want someone that’s, rich and funny or something like that. And it really walks through. Here’s how to do that. Here’s how to think more humorously. Here’s how to have that more in your life.
Here’s how, how to commit to taking that little sideways view of the world. How to just be working your funny muscle. Always be thinking of what’s the odd thought I can have here. The play on words. Experiment with your friends. You know what I mean? Sometimes you don’t start off being funny.
It’s not like you were born that way. Some people have a, an interesting view of the world, but then you have to kinda I don’t know. Colleen and I often talk about how you don’t so much have a sense of humor as it has you. I think of funny things all the time, and you know what? Funny things aren’t always appropriate, or if you get like half a dozen different ideas for a joke, you don’t just spew ’em out, like kinda like Tourettes, you think of.
What’s the best of those? What, you craft it, you think of the right words and that kind of stuff. And so developing those skills of how to phrase it, brevity is the soul of wit. How to experiment with your, your audience and know that, telling a crew joke when you’re in the seminary is not gonna fly as well as if you know so and how to do it in real time, not have that.
Ghost of the staircase. I really have to remember the perfect French phrase. It’s like lato de escal or something like that where you think of a really good joke 15 minutes after you’ve left the party. You really need to be able to do it in real time so that people think you’re quick witted.
And so I’m gifted a little bit in that way. I’m a relatively funny guy, but I’m also a quick witted guy. And there’s any number of times where not only did people laugh, but they were like, How did you come up with it so quick? And I don’t know, somehow my brain fires so that I go through, I get a whole bunch of different alternatives and you say the word red, it’s that could be communism or that could be apples, or that could be, And you go through that and then you pick the one that it like, not only is it the funniest, but hopefully this crowd hasn’t heard it before.
I don’t have Jokes pre-loaded that I’m looking for an opportunity to use my Brigadoon joke or whatever else it might be. I’m sometimes amazed, like I don’t know where that came from and yet it made me laugh when I, when it made me laugh inside when I thought of it and I figured I’d share it with you, so
Stephen: it, it’s cause you’re actually an ai It’s chat al. I
Alan: do have people talk. I don’t have multiple voices in my head, as spooky as that might sound, but I know that. I can think of multiple things and be operating on various different things at the same time. Kinda like parallel processing instead of cereal.
And when something comes up that’s worthy of notice, then it bubbles up and it comes to the fore. And so it, and we’ve talked about this, whatever that Refraction period. I’ll use that even though that’s an inappropriate term, but that’s part of what’s funny about being funny is you think of what’s the thing that’s everybody knows what it is, but it’s inappropriate, but you say it anyway.
When we have a thing where, I can’t quite think of the word or the fact I don’t like. Try to come up with it. I just keep going with the conversation, and in the meanwhile, my little file clerks in my head are going through things and they’re going like, ding. Oh, that’s an eoo.
And I’m amazed at how often it happens with, like I said, instead of the 15 minute, oh, now it’s too late. Oftentimes it’ll pop up in. 15 or 20 seconds when it is still appropriate to the conversation. And every time that happens, it’s brain, thank you so much for whatever little quirky thing you got going that you can not pay full attention, but be working on something and then it still comes out.
And then you have the craft to be able to work it into the conversation. And sometimes, comedians call that a callback where the act has moved on, but then you make a reference to something that shows people you really were listening to what they were saying. And it’s still funny and it can bring you back to something that wasn’t fully discussed or whatever else it might be.
So I like all of those things about humor, about, how the brain works. It’s I read a lot about that too, like, how does your brain really work? And a lot of how we’ve figured out how the brain works is like when people get, they have things wrong with them, and you’re like why is it the language center now?
It doesn’t work as it used to, or that they’re, they used didn’t used to be colorblind. They took a blow to the head. And how it affected their mighty holographically integrated brain is they lost their sense of distinguishing between colors. It’s and then you there must be, A particular place that it most got bunked or that the exact, between your how was it, you got a left and a right brain and there’s a corpus callosum in the middle that kind of joins the two.
And so if you’re left and your right brain are the the wordy part and the physical part, and then if they join together all those things that we know a little bit about. Where’s your language center? Where’s your emotion center? What’s your reptile brain? That, that, those kind of things before you can even think of it, they say, get away from the fire.
And the more that we understand that, the more that, it’s fascinating to me how much we don’t understand, oh yeah. That people are amazing. 17 layer cakes and who knows what’s really going on all the time. I’m saying all this without pre-thinking it. It’s just coming out so amazingly fast and cool that I can come up with something that isn’t just word salad.
It isn’t just gibberish, even though I don’t know before I say it, where I’m going to go. And I love that when I speak it is often like that. I have the loose outline and things come out that are still. Relatively coherent, relatively interesting. And I love that my brain’s got all these things ready to share.
You know what I mean? Like when I go to a topic, it’s we got a hundred things and I don’t think we can get through a hundred things in an hour, so let’s keep trying to go to the top 25. And that kinda thing.
Stephen: You said you don’t have multiple voices in your head. I’m sorry for that. But right there.
And what, and then you also said about the reviews and, I’ll jump in with that because I don’t think people understand how important reviews are for authors, especially independent authors in today’s world, that I would give somebody a book if they said they were gonna leave a review. It doesn’t even have to be a glowing.
Five star review a four. I’d even take a three if that’s what they really thought. Now, if it’s gonna be a one or two and I gave you a free book, just keep the book. Don’t gimme that review. I’m okay with that too. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
Alan: Thanks for that feedback. Yeah.
Stephen: But the thing is people don’t really, people are afraid to leave a one or two star review for a friend because they’re like, oh, it’s going to kill it.
The idea is to have a thousand reviews, not two or three, and those ones, and twos get. Lost the shuffle. People don’t even really usually look at ’em. They just see, oh, there’s a thousand reviews and it’s got a 4.3 average. That sounds good to me. And they’ve shown
Alan: that’s the groundswell of interest and the overall thing.
Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen: It is super important to leave reviews on Amazon, on Cobo, on Barnes and Noble, on Apple, on Google. Leave the, even if it’s just, click the four star or something, don’t leave a long review. That’s fine. But yeah it’s such a big deal for authors. Yeah.
Alan: It’s that’s worth going into a little bit.
When I when the net first started to be useful to people and the first Crowd review sites type opened up where Yelp reviews or travel, for Travelocity or something like that. And unfortunately the first ones were really authentic. Someone’s been there, they, and then they had to come up with an authentication mechanism because they found out that all kinds of people were saying to their friends, Hey, Why don’t you talk about what a wonderful time you had at my restaurant, and we’re gonna get a whole bunch of 4.6 reviews and stuff like that. And that’s like fakely biased towards what you want is a, an authentic one.
You wanna and people I think sometimes can sniff out when something is just almost AI driven. I had a wonderful time, the places neat and clean, et cetera, et cetera. They have they looked at the keyword list and they said, which ones are they going to include?
Helpful staff? That kind of stuff. Whereas, When I write a review, I really try to make sure that it’s still my voice that’s saying it so I don’t come off as a review robot that these guys just turned on to bolster the number of reviews that they have. So it I have used that when I’m planning, I’m, I, we are calling and I are traveling and there’s multiple places that we could stay and you read a couple bad reviews that really seem to be.
Ooh, that sounds authentic and it doesn’t sound too good. You know what I mean? If this is, wow, the hotel’s really nice except at night when it’s a crack den. You know what I mean? Sometimes it’s people not only giving too many good reviews for other, like maybe competitors, torpedoing a place, cuz that happens too, unfortunately.
So you, you have to be, Just like everything else, I guess a good discriminating reader to say which ones seem kinda like the Olympic judging, right? You throw out the best scores and the worst scores and you look at the mass in the middle that say that’s a more in its totality, authentic view of what’s going on.
And so I need to be, I should be more in the, when Amazon first came out, when various other things like you just said we’re the places I could leave a review, I tried to get into that maybe 1, 2, 3 paragraph thing where I really will highlight how it worked for me and enough.
Enough so that it seemed like it was me, that it was a real person. I need to be back in that habit because sometimes when you’re so much a consumer, you’re not necessarily spending time reviewing what you just read. You’re onto the next thing. But then top 10 lists like we’ve talked about doing.
I really need to jump on that because pick a way of looking at the. Particular criteria that you might use and then these are the best books that were, that occur in Lithuania and who knows why that would be. But still the more top 10 list things that people That they appear on, then you’re like, wow, of all the things that this guy has read or all these people have read, it appears on three out of those top 10 lists, there must be something there.
You know what I mean? I, if this guy’s read 10,000 books and it’s in his top 10, that’s pretty rarefied that’s a pretty good benediction. So in, in that way not only for our friends, but for the people whose work we really respect, it’d be nice to give that shout out and it. Very, I’ve never been able to do this before these last two years.
When you talk to someone that you really and you’re like, I have to do a podcast. If you would like to be a guest on our podcast, we would like to give you an hour worth of, we ask pretty good questions. You’ll have a nice time with us. You’ll get whatever that little, tiny bit of familiarity and fame from having been forever now on our podcast.
And I hope that the folks that we’ve done for Catherine and Ted, and, John. That they’ve gotten a little bit of. They can also say, Hey, I was interviewed on a podcast. Somebody thought my work was not only like blip, put ’em on a list, but let’s talk to you for an hour because this is weird.
A lot of people, I don’t know that they even ever get a straight hour when they’re on a panel. They get a fragment of the time that’s available. And how often do they get featured like that? In this, in that little way we can. Encourage our friends and support our, the people whose work we admire and stuff like that.
Yeah. And it’s out there forever on the web it’s got some permanence to it. That’s kinda cool. Yeah.
Stephen: And so you mentioned other panel, so I might as well use that as a quick little segue. In September Memorial Day or Labor Day weekend, sorry, labor Day weekend. Western Pennsylvania always does their annual gathering, their regional gathering on that weekend cuz it’s a longer weekend and there’s a lot of stuff going on.
Well, Saturday of that weekend, I’m holding an author panel at the rg and right now I think there’s five or six authors on there. It could vary, it’s still a couple months away. Things change. Okay. But not only is Bill going to be on it, so we’ve got a professional writer that’s been doing it traditionally for 30 some years,
Alan: and with great success, he’s regularly on the lists.
You know what I mean? Yes. Ok. Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. In fact, humble Bundle just had a Battle Tech book. Sale going on. And the first two were Bill’s books. So I was like, ah, hey, how cool is that yeah. But I also am going to have a 10 year old kid on there that’s an author that wrote a book that it was part of a school project that he wanted to turn into a published book.
And his mother, when I was talking to her, she was like, oh, yeah, we learned a whole lot about publishing really quick. But he’s going to be on the panel. He is 10, but he wrote it when he was like seven or eight. Wow. And then there’s going. Okay, there’s gonna be a lady on there that’s 74 and she just started writing poetry books and publishing those.
So this huge range of independent and traditionally published and young and old and the whole gamut. And I’m like, this is gonna be the coolest author panel.
Alan: That sounds great, and just that, the perspective that we’ll get from each of them and that they’ll get from each other and stuff like that.
It’s kinda funny. Colleen and I used to be regular attendees at the Pittsburgh RG, and then started to be that there was always a, like a cookout and stuff like that was right on Saturday. And so fragments it, and yet, you know what? It’s, we miss it. We miss that group of people. David, Shirley, are there all kinds of Robert Goldsmith.
And your program sounds like I, I wanna be there. I wanna be there to hear what all these people have to say. So I’m gonna ply Colleen with my wild. If we go, we can either just for once miss other things, we can take it. And the fact that she’s gonna be retired as of June 30th, so our schedule is.
It’s not only that it’s all ours now, it’s that we’re wanting to try new things or break existing things and just say, you know what we wanna make some changes just to see how things can be different. We’re gonna experiment a little bit. And so the, whatever it is with friends and family that you got disappointed once in a while.
It would, and it’s it’s not Hey, we’re now, we’re doing this otherwise forever and we’re never gonna see you again. But it just is okay to once in a while say, you know what? We need to take a break. Yeah. We need to do something a little bit different.
Stephen: So Covid taught us all that. Hey boy
Alan: is that true too?
It has already emboldened us to say you like, sorry, can’t do it. Covid. And I want to keep using that, that’s
Stephen: not the code word. Sorry. Can’t do it. Spanish flu.
Alan: Exactly. You’ll come up with a. Barry Berry, sorry,
Stephen: I might get rickets so I can’t come.
Alan: Having said that, it’s terrifying to be reading about what’s the latest disease that really is rampaging across the united, apparently Lyme disease.
You’re like, however, our climate is changing. It’s making it, that you don’t get the timing of the. Seasonal changes is different. The hard freezes that used to kill bugs and stuff like that. Lyme disease is one of the ones that’s born by ticks, if I remember right. And Colleen and I love going hiking in the woods.
And on a hot day you wanna be out there and just muscle shirt and shorts. Not anymore. Not if you got ticks, wouldn’t to jump you and give you this debilitating disease. What a sad digression, but that’s the kind of thing where I don’t want to pick the wrong disease. I don’t wanna be, oh yeah, I got Lyme disease, and it says, my son just got Lyme disease.
You bastard for that. So I have to be careful about not picking the wrong plague. I. Pittsburgh it is. That sounds good. Okay.
Stephen: Yeah, that’d be great if you guys, I was also thinking of doing a program and I don’t know I’m debating this. I’m gonna ask Robert. I was thinking of doing on Friday night, just a quick little talk on the differences and similarities between customizable card games, living card games and deck builders.
Okay. Because they’re similar but different. And I know I’ve talked to a couple people at times like, oh, there’s this deck builder you wanna play, and I don’t like those games. I don’t get into those. And I’m like why not? Cause I don’t have the money in both. No, it’s not a trading card game. It’s a deck builder.
They’re different, so I just wonder if some people don’t understand the differences between the different types. So I thought, oh, it might be a fun little talk.
Alan: There would be, and I’ll say a very, a good geeky talk in terms of to be able to. Here’s what, here’s the characteristics of each of these various different things, and they’re not absolutely distinct.
There’s a lot of Venn diagram crossover as to why it’s interesting and who can play and what the age range, whatever else it might be. So I, that’s another talk I’d love to do. In fact, I need to talk to Robert and say, I’ve been, for a while I worked on my drinking from the fire hose. Talk about, if you’re looking to. Watch and play and read the best things of all time. How do you do that? And I’m probably doing it at Halloween in Chicago, but I kinda like to have a few rounds before I do it at the ag is not available this year because they’re getting such high quality outside of Memphis speakers that very few.
Internal speakers got the knot. I did not. So I like to do a talk a couple times and it gets better each time. You get an idea of what, what really seems to resonate with the audience, what things you learned in terms of doing further research. Every time I do it, it’s a quarter different, and then by the time I get to the end, it’s really a well honed thing. And so maybe I should throw it out in Pittsburgh and see if they’d like to do it. So anyway. Okay.
Stephen: Yeah, that’d be cool. And I don’t know what I’m gonna talk to Robert. What gains and stuff are tournaments because that’s always a touchy thing.
People always want the same tournaments, but then other people are like, eh, I’ve played that tournament a couple times. I’m not, so you get something different. Like I know when exploding kittens got big, they started having exploding kittens tournaments, and I know the kids always love that. That’s a good one.
At. PA one.
Alan: Okay. We just played zombie kitten recently with Colleen’s sisters, and that’s where now you don’t just die, they actually come shambling back as zombies. And so it was a fun one of those things where once you hit, you try to keep doing new variations to. Sell more sets and stuff like
Stephen: that.
I just listened to a podcast with the creator and business owner of the Exploding Kittens. Oh, and I did, I knew it wa you know, it had gone big and exploded and stuff. And it was an interesting podcast. It was an entrepreneur podcast. I’ll try and find which one and put a link.
Okay. But, They did a Kickstarter. That’s how it started, that they did the Kickstarter and pushed it out there. They were hoping to get $10,000 and sell a couple copies and move on. Do you know how much they sold? Hundred
Alan: thousand, 10 times as much.
Stephen: 9 million.
Alan: Wow. That’s a life changing
Stephen: cool thing.
It was absolutely,
Alan: If they were looking for, Hey, I’m, besides this, I’m still working at a desk job and whatever else it might be. And that gives them freedom. I, that the Medici thing where that sponsors them to look into all the other creative things they wanted to do.
Absolutely. You know what I mean? They don’t go and spend it on, Hey, now I got gold plated toilets and stuff like that. It’s more. I’m gonna like forever be a creative person. Yes. Doing new games and
Stephen: having fun. Alright. And they’ve done that. If you go look, they’ve got their stuff in Target and Walmart and that.
And if you go look their company, they’ve got multiple games on the shelf and they’ve put more on there. And one of the so the guy Ilan he worked for Microsoft before that and Okay. He was, he said one day he got. Said, Hey Steven Spielberg is in your office. He wants to talk about the game for the new movie.
And he is are you kidding me? And it was that’s so funny. But that he did an interesting thing for the Kickstarter. Now I’m assuming most people listening to us have know what Kickstarter is and probably Kickstarter Indigo. Exactly.
Alan: Okay. Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen: So they want, they said, Kickstarters do well with stretch goals.
You gotta have those little in incentives. And they’re like we have this exploding kittens game. There are no other cards, there’s no other stretch goals. So they started, they said, we don’t know what to do exactly. So they started doing things to build community. And this is like such a good lesson for everybody.
They said, if. Five people send us pictures of cats playing poker. Then we will do this for the game. And so they got all these pictures. So it built this community of people saying, oh, I wanna see the pictures. Oh, I like that one. And oh, I wanna do the next one. And, all this type of stuff.
And they said, That’s when it shot up. They said usually, you get all your friends and family and they had reached 10,000. They’re like, okay, so what can we do now? And they did all this community stuff and went from like 10,000 to 9 million. Wow. How
Alan: heartening, and in fact that’s, we talk about this often cuz it really is a theme. I love the fact that people talk often about the web, about how it’s a megaphone and amplifier, and often they go to the negative. They, oh, we got, the crazies now that, the conspiracy theorists and stuff like that.
But think of all the things that have come to be because of Kickstarter and indiego, Indiegogo Where someone could have labored an obscurity in, neighborhood Chicago and maybe done things at their local gaming store and stuff like that. But now the world is their neighborhood and they really get to say, Hey, I’m thinking of this idea for, not Lord of the Rings, cuz that’s a licensed product, but like elves and wars and that kind of stuff.
And they’re going to an amusement park. And the fact that they can, like the net has always been about, You don’t make big plans and then execute them once you know it’s perfect, you try things and whatever the best of the various different tries works and more people start to pick up on it in an ad hoc way.
So the fact that you can do all this experimentation and see what works, there are winners and losers. Not every idea is a great idea or doesn’t have the lightning bolt, the lucky streak that makes it, but. All kinds of stuff have come into being because, hey, I decided I was gonna do something interesting and I was curious as to whether other people would find it interesting and how heartening it is to be not just a hundred, not just 10,000, but 9 million people said exploding kittens.
I just like saying that it’s a funny, inherently a little bit cruel, but in, funny type thing. And yes, the fact that they were. Creative enough and industrious enough to run with it. And as you said, build community, try various different variations. Now they got multiple games from that same gaming house and stuff like that.
I love seeing people given that opportunity, if you will, so regularly. There’s never a time nowadays where Colin and I, where are we gonna eat? Where are we gonna travel to? What, what’s the We regularly use crowdsourcing in the ways alluding back to earlier. You gotta be a discriminating consumer of that kind of stuff.
But there’s so much great information nowadays. Lynn Hartwig, a friend, just posted how her having a smartphone, she’s been a traveler for a long time. And it’s changed her life in terms of you go to London and instead of being, if I didn’t buy the right guidebook, if I don’t speak the language, London perhaps being an exception though they do have a different word for everything.
There’s just embolden to be like, I really know how it’ll find where the tube station is and that with my phone, I can probably even not have to worry about. English money, if you will, but I’ll be able to do that. It does in real time. And what’s the good restaurant to eat at? What’s the best time to go to Madam to sos wax museum?
Because on Tuesdays they have it special or it’s just, it’s the least crowded on this day and it emboldens you to just go exploring, know that you got this wonderful connection to all the world’s knowledge in your hand, and you don’t use it just to watch kitten videos. You use it to what’s I love that we’re in this world and I talk about lustfully.
I can’t wait to have the AR goggles so that I can look at things and it’ll name that mountain for me and it’ll tell me what the price is and whether there’s a better price just two blocks away or whatever else it might be. But the fact that you can do that in near real time on your phone. When Colleen and I have gone to Toronto for our comedy festival, it’s been so cool to We know how to use the public trans system.
We regularly find restaurants that we wouldn’t just from walking the blocks, you wouldn’t necessarily have stumbled out to ’em. But if you’re looking at, Hey, where’s the best Thai food in Toronto? And it’s that’s right on the path to our show on Thursday night. We just have so much benefited from all that information being available.
And if you learn how to tap into it, it opens your world. It explodes the world of possibilities for you. Yeah. And gives you safety. We know this only runs until one in the morning, so don’t be waiting on the street for the muggers to find you at one in the morning. You know that you can, these run all night.
These don’t where, what’s the neighborhood that it’s really nice with nightlife up until this point, and then it gets a little seedy, so get out. And we, it’s just I know. I just, wow.
Stephen: And our phones have been pretty useful for almost two decades. Yeah. They grew really quick.
Heck, I remember when Megan was born in 2002 that I had a Palm pilot and I had put Laura Tarzan on there, and I was reading Tarzan while we were, in between everything. Yeah. But now, It seems like more and more, there’s so many things I can do with my phone and I can do almost all my work from the phone now.
It’s much more difficult to program and develop and upload files, but a lot of the other services that I do with work are right on the phone. I can, keep, do so much from the phone. It’s crazy. Exactly. Today that. So much of that is available even more than two, the two, three years ago. Yeah, I’ll
Alan: tell you, I dunno if you would do this, we talk, it’s kinda funny.
Everything ties together in our podcast. So I don’t have multiple guys in my head, but I have multiple threads that I’m continually thinking of, partially so that I don’t miss things. And so all the events that I have going on some things are. So infrequent, but I don’t want to miss them. That I don’t want to give ’em too much attention, but I don’t want to miss ’em.
So you get an app that says, when’s the next possibility of the Northern Lights being visible from within reasonable driving distance of Cleveland? I’m willing to drive up into Michigan or into New York, or, go close to a great lake where there’s this. Expansive blackness at night, it’ll give you a better view than if you’re grounded by city light.
And so you get the cool app or like, when’s the next solar eclipse coming? I can tell you exactly the path and that’s why I’m gonna be in Norwalk with Nick and Kelly and all of those interesting things that calendar that I talked about, who was a physical calendar. I love that I can browse through events.
On Facebook and go, huh, another arts festival I’m interested with in reasonable driving distance, and here’s the potato festival and here’s the, it’s just very cool that it’s made that marketplace of ideas where people can put out there Hey, we’re gonna be having a Duct tape festival and we really don’t know how many people are going to come.
But there’s a multiplier that comes with putting into this event list that. Millions of people can look at, and I regularly have so happily stumbled onto, I didn’t know that George Thu was gonna be touring. If not in Cleveland, then close enough we’re getting tickets to go to Pittsburgh or and actually we’re seeing him in Cleveland, but all those kinds of things. When you, and when you develop a new interest, like we just saw a bunch of magic shows in Vegas. I know that there’s a magic club in Erie, Pennsylvania, and so now I’m on their mailing league list and it’s regularly, I don’t even know that much about that, this guy or this gal, but if it’s an hour and a half away and I got like a Magic Jones going, maybe I’ll make a little weekend out of Erie.
I’ll drive there, see the show, stay overnight next day. Go to pres is state park and take a walk, or I’ll go play some mini golf, or I’ll have a nice brunch or whatever else. It might be the fact that you can wake up and say, where’s the best brunch in Erie, Pennsylvania? And get a relatively good clue.
That’s just magically cool to me. Yeah. You know what I mean? That you have so much information at your fingertips. So
Stephen: it. And you mentioned Facebook. Facebook is wonderful for events and finding events and looking things up. And a little tip, and I may have mentioned this before on my phone, it doesn’t work on the desktop that I’ve seen, but on your phone app, if you look at an event and you click on it, cuz you get a list of events and you can click interested or going or whatever, just from that list.
But if you click on the event to open it up as the only event you’re looking at. And then you click on whether you’re going or interested or something, you can go in the settings and it will automatically add it to your Google calendar.
Alan: To your calendar. Exactly. I’ve done that multiple times. So it is just, now I’ve got this and I hope that I’ll get a prompt from them.
It’s that I put something in my calendar and sometimes I’ve had to be, oh, without knowing it, because I’ve done this browsing through events multiple times. Now I see that there’s three things going on that yes. And I’m gonna have to choose one or there’s any number of times. Colleen is a little bit.
Fatigued by, we can go here and then we can go here that same night. And she doesn’t necessarily like to do that. I have stamina and voracious appetite and stuff like that where it’s like, can we just pick one? Can we just kinda not run around, go into various different things. Most of all, she’s up for it.
A lot of times she’s. We’ll do that next year,
Stephen: well, one of the problems I’ve found with it though, is under my Google account I’ve got multiple calendars for different things. Yeah. Like Collins’s work schedule and activities and just different. And I can turn ’em on and off so I can look and see.
The problem is it only adds to the default calendar. You can’t choose to add it to other calendars. I’d rather put it on my activity calendar that I can turn off if I just wanna see the important stuff.
Alan: Instead of it mixing into other things that, yeah. And I, for a while I had that I used IAL as well as Google Calendar and ial, I did the same thing.
I classified all different kinds of stuff. So it was like the kind of event, or it was family or friends or whatever else I might, and for whatever reason, at one point my default caliber got set to like, Medical slash dental, cause I like to keep track of those appointments. But then all of a sudden you’re finding out, oh, that Strawberry Festival’s apparently a medical event and I had to go cleaning up a little bit.
And then you get good at how do I find those and how do I change ’em? Either singly or in bulk, but don’t change all of them. And so I got. From that little glitch for a while, I got better at how to differentiate between those. And then you find out, oh, I have one museum and one museums, so now I gotta join those two together.
And a little bit of cleaning that up every year actually makes the overall experience much better. Yeah, I my same with my email. I have all kinds of folders for all different kinds of things, but then if he hash it too hard. You get, wow, I, I have so many things now that I don’t go into those folders and the first time you go to, oh my God, it went on sale and I missed the presale, and now I’m not gonna get tickets to George or Good.
It’s, I have to get into the right habit. The right combination of, I segregated it, but then I have to go look at that segregated folder instead of missing it, just coming into my inbox box. And I,
Stephen: anyway I have to some, sometimes I start rushing, oh, I got this, things to do.
So real quick, okay, I wanna remember that. And I add it to my calendar and then, seven months later it pops up on the calendar. It’s check up site. Check up, what site, what checkup am I doing? I’m like, stupid idiot. Put a better descriptor in there and put something, what you gotta, or it pops up and says tickets four and then nothing.
Tickets for what?
Alan: I really do try to always make sure, like you said, I give it the right subject line, the right title. I had a friend. D who has left us, but every time I got an email from her, it was like, oh, a mystery box that the subject line said nothing about, interesting. Or so, she had all these like standard things and I guess that’s, she was an early purveyor of click through. You can’t know what’s. Yeah, what it is from the subject land you had to click in, but it was when you’re used to scanning a whole bunch of stuff and seeing what needs to be handled now and maybe later it was always that little bit of, oh, d please, and I mentioned it to her, wasn’t I just, fre it in silence.
It was like, Dee, you’re, especially I. When we were both working on Cleveland area, Mensa stuff, when I would get some things from her that were, that orientation or personal or whatever else it might be, you’d need at least to differentiate between let me know what things are urgent or important or CAM related or whatever else, because otherwise I, I blip through when I don’t have an idea of whether I should read this or not.
And not to be weird. My time is. Like valuable and sometimes there’s not enough of it. So please for your sake, make a point of standing out because otherwise I really do just, pass through all the things to say a look it. It’s almost always them. Spammy, not worth taking a look at if you know what I’m trying to say.
Anyway.
Stephen: I love when I get the emails with something to do and it’s this big long subject that they put ev all the instructions of what they want in the subject. And I’ve got my thing’s, fitting. So I’m reading it and it’s two words and I’m like, what the heck is this? So I have to open it, I have to stretch the whole thing out and I’m like, ah, it’s just annoying.
Alan: It’s there. There used to be, etiquette, you know how to do good email, good messaging, that kind of stuff. There’s been, because there’s now such a. Cross pollination between who’s texting and who’s emailing, and who’s Facebook messaging and who’s, et cetera, et cetera, that people don’t look at the media that your medium that they’re using and tune it to that.
So I regularly get things like, I don’t know. I just, if you make it hard on me, you might not get me, you might not get me to read it. You might not. And so I try to do that. I always try to think of what would be the best things to include for how it’s gonna appear to them at first, and if they open it, that it really does have all the information neatly lined up.
Not read a terse, not even a terse, read a flowing paragraph and how to pick out the things that you need from there. So it. When I was doing calendar editor stuff for Cam, for instance, I really tried to have a standard format that in my mind and from talking to others, it really does work. If you do it, like you can scan in four lines, you know when it is, where it is, how much it’s gonna cost, all that kind of stuff.
You don’t wanna have to dig for it. And if you hit a standard, Then stay with it. Don’t go experiment, like maybe experimenting for the first couple times until you get it. But then not only would I put my own stuff in it, but of course I would put everybody else’s stuff in it, and the folks that would say, don’t change my copy.
It’s so please let me give you a little bit of advice. I really wanna change your copy cuz you will stand out as the one that is different than everybody else’s and it’s gonna stand out in a way that it’s worse than everybody else’s. Not better. You know what I mean? And some people don’t want to hear that and yet there’s a combination of information and efficiency of transmission that is the sweet spot you want to hit when you’re doing that kind of stuff.
You know what
Stephen: And you mentioned etiquette. I was noticing this the other day when cell phones were first starting 25 years ago or whatever. It was common that if you were at a checkout line, you would end your conversation. Now, people talk on the phone and go through the whole process, and the kids at the checkout counter allow it because they’ve grown up doing the same thing, but I remember people would be like, oh, I gotta get off. I’m ringing out here or something, and they don’t have that anymore
Alan: as much. Yeah. I must admit, I still have a bad reaction to if they’re on the phone so much that it’s affecting their ability to efficiently transact with the person.
And there’s three people in line behind them and they’re all delayed because this guy won’t get off the freaking phone. We sometimes people really will say, Buddy, take a minute to put in your order and then go back to your call. But don’t do it at our expense. And we, Colleen and I laugh all the time about the IPOs.
That thing of when the light turns green, people have to come out of their phone in order to continue driving. It’s if you’re not paying enough attention that you can’t, even the four cars behind, you are gonna have to wait that three seconds it takes you to come out. I really have not been a jerk in the past about honking at people.
And yet nowadays, instead of giving it five or 10 seconds, I give it like three to do that helpful tap that’s gonna wake them up and say, if you’re not paying attention, we all are. We’ll help you. We’ll help you come out of it. You know what I mean? That’s, I don’t blare at ’em. Keep this stop, stop doing this at our expense.
You know what I mean? I’m not accepting of it in every way
Stephen: but there, that’s so much better than so many people. I’ve been at a light literally. The second it turns green, the guy behind me is laying on his horns like, eh, right? And that night, and I’m like, oh, and I hit the brake. I look at the light, I give it a little gas and pull for it.
I’m like, if you’re gonna be a complete jerk about it, I didn’t even have time to bring my foot off the brake when it turned green and you’re laying on the horn behind me. Now, if your wife is in labor, I guess I can understand it, but there’s nobody else in the car with you now you’re really go get ticked off as I waste all your time going through this green light.
Kelly and I, Colin does the same thing when he’s checking people out at the store. If they’re on the phone and there’s other people in the store, he’ll set their books aside and says, we’ll ring you up when you’re off the phone. When you’re ready, he brings up the next guy, you
Alan: know? Okay. Exactly it.
Colleen and I regularly, when we’re in traffic and you see someone who’s. Cutting people off and stuff like that. We kinda laugh and say I hope that doctor gets to his open to heart surgery appointment in time because exactly. There’s no reason he should be doing this other than critical emergency.
You know what I mean? And no, some people are just, oh I, it’s a combination of being on the phone and not paying enough attention, putting other people in danger. We regularly man, I, that’s such a bad combo. I don’t really Driving. I was driving dri like we always talk about you can learn about by people gaming about what they’re like and stuff like that.
I think that you can learn so much by watching out. People drive as to, yeah, are they paying enough attention? Do they have consideration for others? Are they, do they take risks knowledgeably and willingly or are they just a menace? Yeah. And I think I’ve mentioned, There’s a weird thing nowadays.
I think it’s video game related. It used to be that left was fast, the right was slow, and if you’re in the middle lane, people should go to the left lane to pass you. Yeah. How many times? Half the time at least I see people pull into the right lane to go past me and I guess they’re going to the exit and then when they pass the exit, but now I know you’re just a jerk.
You know what I mean? So I regularly more hang in the right hand lane because. If I need to get over, I’m not used to. I’m getting more and more used to checking their right hand to see somebody’s crept up into my blind spot because I’m not used to people passing me on the right. They’re training me as well as I’m trying to train them.
Occasionally when I see someone come zooming along and there’s not an exit, cause I know the roads that I regularly travel for a while, I really will pull over to the right lane. Not cutting ’em off, but just say, buddy, please learn to go around me on the left. Maybe it’s, you don’t wanna be in the left-hand lane because that’s where the police will find you.
Maybe it’s because. In a video game, it doesn’t matter what lane you’re in, they’re all equal. But it does in real life. So it, I’m sure that there’s all kinds of, maybe generationally saying you don’t know what you’re talking about. Everybody drives this way. No, not quite yet. And as long as we’re all sharing the road together, please.
Fast left, slow. It’s better for everyone. Absolutely. In terms of just that little bit of consideration and awareness of, there’s rules for the road, suggestions for the road, and every time you violate it, you make it harder on everyone. I, yeah.
Stephen: Mean it’s just I love when people are going way too slow and people are coming up like, oh, geez, I don’t, or worse, like a truck, you’re going around a semi.
And I’m going a little bit over the speed limit trying to get around them. That’s what you should do. I know that some people like will park next to a semi and just go to the same speed and block it, the convoy,
Alan: everybody behind them. Exactly. Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. But the ones that, again, the ones that annoy me are I’m going over the speed limit.
I’m going around this truck. And some guy comes up behind me and starts flashing his lights at me. I’m like, I can’t move over. I’m beside a truck. You moron. Oh, I’m sorry. Was I going too fast for you? I’ll slow down. And then they’re like flashing their lights and honking the horn. I’m like, Hey, you know what?
If you hadn’t been a jerk, I would’ve been around them already. Come on, it’s, I’m sure it didn’t teach ’em anything other than to say, oh, everybody else on the road’s, horrible drivers.
Alan: It’s a lot of how I think about that. And of course it, it isn’t always this way, but what I maintain is if I go four miles over the speed limit, oh no.
I really am breaking the law. But that seems to be enough that the police never pay attention to me and it’s with the flow of traffic and I’m doing right flow of traffic. I’ve read that if you go eight miles over the speed limit, that still is like the policeman’s limit where they won’t be tempted to pull you over.
And so what you’re just saying, if I’m going eight miles over, cuz I’m trying to pass somebody and somebody zooms up behind me, it’s now I’m not gonna put myself at risk of being the one noticed because maybe the policeman will pull me over instead of you. So I’ll keep going 68 instead of 60.
And if you’re tailgating me, it’s like as soon as I pass this truck, you’ll have all the open left lane that you need, but I’m not gonna go. 70 and 72 and 74 just because you are impatient and I know I shouldn’t be in the left lane doing nothing. I don’t dot along at 60, but 68 is that’s how much long I’m willing to break for you.
That’s how much, sorry, that again. Sorry Doctor. I hope you get to that special operation in
Stephen: time. Yeah, and that’s, that’s the other thing. If you are in the left hand lane, the passing lane and the, the speed limits 70. Get out of the left lane if you’re only doing 65, please.
Alan: That’s right. Be because I really try to regularly be aware of my circumstances, aware of the road, when it goes from 60 to 65 to 70, I’m bumping my cruise control up appropriately. Oh, I, I think that there’s a big Venn diagram crossover between those people who are tailgating cuz you know that they’re putting both of you at risk and.
Name the asshole category name, the, they’re also probably the guy who would cut you off in line in real life. The guy who has a gun in his car. The guy who I’m willing to attribute these probably will
Stephen: also, you wouldn’t wanna play a board game with them.
Alan: That’s, yeah, exactly. They’re not, And it’s funny.
R Road is almost by definition like, I’ll never see you again. Why should I care what you think of me? I’m gonna do, I have a friend named Brad in Chicago that regularly talks about I do the speed limit. I won’t go over. He must have had, I think he said he had bad experiences with just, being the one busted out of 10 people that were driving poorly.
And nowadays, whatever a ticket is, 75 bucks, he just doesn’t wanna do that anymore. But, And maybe that’s a little bit slower than the flow of traffic, but by having how many people he’s had flash the lights, honk the horn, et cetera, et cetera, when he’s really the one obeying the law, that’s an odd thing that if, is there any situation in life where people are more breaking the law than how they drive?
Yeah. And not only breaking the law, but taking on risk and doing it foolishly it. We haven’t even talked about, if I’m going along at 64 and it’s. Raining cats and dogs. I don’t want to be the guy that’s gonna hydro plane into the bridge abutment because you tried to get me out of your way, et cetera, et cetera.
It’s, I you, you’re not aware of our circumstances. You’re not aware that it’s possibilities of black ice pla
Stephen: possibilities of plane. Oh, I’ve got a, I’ve got an u v, I’ve got a pit, I’ve got a truck. I’m good. Not necessarily,
Alan: I guess. Exactly. Physics and also, Colleen and I regularly go to things and then we drive back late to get home.
If it’s 1130 at night and someone is like zooming around, it’s like, buddy, where do you have to be? I am willing to step outside myself and attribute to them, what’s the emergency here? You need to get your midnight flight at the airport. Nope, no airport around here, et cetera, et cetera. It’s this isn’t an anomaly.
Stephen: You do this
Alan: all the freaking time, I’m pretty sure you’re just a jerk. Yeah. You know what I mean? And so take your jerk this elsewhere. How about that lane? Go to the other lane anyway.
Stephen: Yeah, absolutely. Alright, I need to jump off cuz I got in our meeting to jump too. Okay.
Alan: So what was a pleasure? We got through very little of what was on our list.
Yeah. But some the talent goes. I’m glad we got a chance to talk about Pittsburgh. So happy that you had a wonderful time there. And next week what is, we’ll talk about. Crosser puzzles and kind all other cool things
Stephen: as all. And I gotta tell you about the book that took me 42 years to read
Alan: the Ghost story.
Exactly. Yes. Okay. Peter, sorry, Steven Peter
Stephen: Ghost.
