Episode 162 – Scary Times

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | Email | RSS | More

Overview

• progstock
• scary movies
• Doom guy
• gen – v series
• final netflix dvd

YouTube

Transcript

lan: That.

Stephen: Okay, nice

Alan: shirt. I got to see it in the full glory here. There’s the Prague Stock shirt. Yeah, it’s got, because Prague is dinosaur rock. And so they’ve really embraced the theme and have I only have this year’s, it’s been going on for six years now or something like that.

And each year has had various different dinosaurs, jamming dinosaurs, enjoying the music, whatever else it might be. So whoever they got doing these is really good in the detail and the coloring and stuff like that.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah, me and Casey have been working on some t shirt ideas and stuff. So I came up with a great one that I want to put out.

So we have tons of Halloween movie franchises, that like tons of movies. So I want to make them that say I saw all the Halloween movies and still had to get my own lousy t shirt.

Alan: That’s pretty good. Okay. It’s amazing. I really have sequels are not everybody’s favorite because That, they often tend to trail off in quality and stuff like that and once in a while there’s a revival where the original people return or someone who really gets what made the original special is able to embrace that and stuff.

But most of the time it sure just seems to be cashing in right you know so, but what’s interesting is because I’m a serial fiction addict. I like that. You don’t just get a two hour dose that story and you’re done. It’s cool when people can say what would have happened after that before that?

What happens if, Frankenstein meets the wolf man and whatever else it might be. So definitely. The Hellraisers have they started off as, I don’t know, gothic horror, and then they went into space, and then and, Jason meets Freddy,

Stephen: jason went into space too, in the future.

Alan: That’s right. It’s cool. Sometimes they really they strain it, and they’re just trying to say I have admired, for instance, the Saw franchise, Admired is not the right word. You know what I mean? Because they, because, but I like that they keep on making it mysterious that you don’t know, like with a spoiler alert for the people who’ve only seen the first nine, who’s going to be the next acolyte that was first was trying to catch the bad guys and then said, yeah, but I got a couple of people I’d like to dispatch to where, maybe that’s the kind of justice that we need.

I can only put them in jail this way. We can tear their head apart, whatever else might be going on there. They’ve actually, And of course, all the way back to when I was young, seeing like the abominable Dr. Fibes, there’s something crazy interesting about death traps, people that come up with a way like, I’m going to have this poke somebody’s eyes out.

It’s funny. Nothing. Those are my most. Perfect fantasy movies, because I would never do anything like that in real life. And yet it’s terrible. Sometimes it’s just grotesque. Sometimes it’s wish fulfillment, where the bad guy really gets it. You know what I mean? They really get trapped in a trap, maybe even the trap that they intended for others, they get trapped in it instead.

There’s a little karmic retribution going on. What do you think? You’re much more a connoisseur and a fan of horror than I am. What do you think?

Stephen: Personally, I like the original movies like that. The ones with Wile E. I. Coyote and Roadrunner. Those are, those type of ones are my favorite. There’s a

Alan: through line there for you.

going to do you know?

Stephen: As far as the sequels go, yeah, that’s the thing. Most of the first ones have some redeeming qualities. They were the first, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Freddy Texas Chainsaw, Chucky all of those, and then they usually go way off the rails, even Hellraiser.

It’s really weird that some of the knockoff ones that went straight to DVD. I thought weren’t too bad, but they really didn’t add to the mythology. There’s yeah, most of them do suck.

Alan: Another reason that I like them is I like where they not only establish the plot, but they establish that these things happen in a different universe.

And so when you see the things that go on in the conjuring or in the hell raisers or something like that, they like, keep expanding. This is what’s really going on hell and impinging on our world. These are like The, it isn’t fair to just say Freddie keeps coming back because he’s always around.

He’s a dream creature, Jason, just, oh, another time coming out of the pod or, it’s odd where sequels really are just a repeat and there’s nothing fresh to them, but where they expand that universe and they really have, I don’t know, like hardly horror. Actually, this kind of work, the aliens franchise going from alien to aliens have really done I think, and they’re each, if you will, their own genre.

The first one really was a haunted house movie. The second one was a military squad movie. You want to mean they’ve actually added to it. And I guess maybe because I like TV series that are like that, like the X Files or Millennium or whatever, they keep building out that universe. And then when you have repeating characters, it’s I don’t know, that’s reassuring to me that my friends are back.

Stephen: You a lot of horror movies. Horror has been a wonderful genre the last couple years. It’s one of the few genres making money on movies, it seems. And they’ve got a new Exorcist movie out. They have a new Saw movie out. Yeah. They have oh my gosh, I was just at the theater last night. There’s three or four movies horror

Alan: movies out right because Halloween October, of course, is the month, but now I just saw they’re going to have a Thanksgiving one where, if I saw the poster correctly, it’s a guy with a scythe or an axe or something like that.

And is there any holidays that they’re not going to despoil, what’s going to happen on Harbor Day, that kind of

Stephen: thing. And not only that, now they got all these public domain fairy tales that they’re turning into horror movies, like Winnie the Pooh was out and stuff.

Alan: See, that’s interesting.

That the reason that fairy tales exist is because they were supposed to be cautionary tales for kids. And everybody always talks about this, like the kind of the Baudelaire rise, the made safe versions of Hans Christian Anderson, or especially the brother’s grim that I read growing up when you read the originals, cause for instance, I written in German, there’s a lot more like.

Wow, that guy didn’t just die, he got his intestines torn out of him. You know what I mean? Hey kids, don’t go walking in the woods, or… Something beyond terrible. Lose your guts. Yes, exactly. Mein Gelinge. I that, that so many of these things speak to archetypes, and that they go way back, like those tales have had they’re coming from the human psyche of what are we scared of?

The dark, spiders, snakes the supernatural, things we can’t explain. I, everybody else talks about this, but it’s really true. I don’t really jump scares. You know what I mean? I think that they’re in some ways cheap, but when you get someone who’s really good and you’ve talked about this at doing the dread, that it’s not just a sudden thing, but they really are exploring the thing and things are getting quieter and then like people can craft that. So well, so that you really get your adrenaline going. I just saw an article along the lines of, what it provably the 15 most scary movies of all time. And I think the way they based it on was what’s the way it gets your heart racing, heart pounding. And some of them, I can remember like that particular scene, you’re like, not only, you don’t just jump, you like jump out of your chair.

You’re like, fight or flight is right, right on your mind.

Stephen: You know what I mean? I think Sinister was the top one. Exactly.

Alan: That’s right. Yeah. And. I’m sure that you must discuss this often in horror lasagna. One of the things that happens is, and maybe for instance, a series called Black Mirror is really good about this.

They’re not created out of nothing. They’re like this current world that we live in, plus a little extra, and often a little extra is a little disastrous, a little scary. So like, when you have a haunted house movie, now it’s no longer going to the gothic house on the hill, like Psycho might have been.

Now it’s a nice, crisp, suburban place, and everybody’s happy, except then. Someone is like in the house with you and you don’t know that or that force that like it’s showing it from the perspective of you can see that ghostly figure what’s what are these called where it’s you know, like almost like a first person perspective and they’re watching you sleep.

No that’s not a nightmare you know what I mean that you think you’re safe in your house but no somebody is actually touching you and then you think it’s just a little brush in the night, a little breeze or something like that. So they’ve found, they’ve become really good at how to take something that it shouldn’t be at all a bad situation and they make it terrible.

So the number of people staying in hostels must have fallen off the cliff. Yes. After all

Stephen: three of those movies.

Alan: Honestly, it’s Hey, I think I’m going to go stay in this place and it’s cheap and we’ll all be friends and then torture city. Sometimes I really do hate that in some ways where people know the effect that movies are going to have, and yet they do it like a single movie can wreck an industry.

That’s a terrifying thought,

Stephen: Some of the great movies, though, aren’t. Just being scared during the movie. It’s when it stays in your mind. And then you’re at night and you’re scared because we talked about this a lot that when you get a movie, no matter the era modern movies included with all the high tech special effects we have.

But when you focus and show the monster too much. It really loses its scare appeal when you can’t, that’s why Cloverfield didn’t do that a lot. It kept the monster hidden and hinted

Alan: at. Exactly. You heard skittering noises. You heard, you saw something just out of your field of vision or really quickly or something like that.

Yeah. Night Shyamalan is really good at that. You get that sudden look at it. And is that, did I see something? What I think I saw. Yeah.

Stephen: Yeah. And they tried to, jump scares, but I think that really loses the effect. Some of the movies that are really disturbing that sit with you for weeks, laying in the dark.

Alan: Honestly, I think I told you, that’s why I don’t watch a lot of horror, certain horror, because if you have a really good memory, it stays with you. And, and they’re great at imprinting that, planting that in your brain. And then this, so I went to school, University of Illinois and crowded campus, 35, 000 students, but.

There were places between different subsections of the campus where things got quiet and even dark. You know what I mean? They tried to have all the lamps along the places where students walked so there’d be no violence or rape problem or things like that one time. So I used to date a girl named Shelly and she, we lived at two opposite corners of the campus.

And so you could go into center campus and walk back out where it all be well lit. But often I would just take like out by the ag buildings where they go dark at night. And one time I was walking along the path, and I see someone walking towards me, and there’s just something a little bit off about them.

No lie, like a little too pale, or they moved different than regular. And so we pass by each other, and I say hi, and they do not. And so I’m just, my senses are like, this is really weird. And then we pass each other. And I, something had me turn around and look back. And I look back and the guy is just staying there on the sidewalk watching me.

And I, like I’m getting goosebumps right now over I did indeed keep walking the way I was going, but a little bit faster and a little bit looking over my shoulder and luckily already that I was a big guy, so I’m not easy prey, if you will. But I was really wondering what the hell is going on.

It’s just the two of us. I could scream. I could shout help and no one would come to my aid in time to stop. Mr. Claus from tearing me up or whatever like that. It was the spookiest thing. And in the middle of another one, I done that walk a hundred times with no ill effect. And then suddenly it’s weird,

Stephen: more than likely it could be from history points like, oh my God, there’s this big guy.

What if he’s a killer? I’m going to keep my eye on him. That’s all it could have been.

Alan: That’s right. Maybe he was just turning around like going, because I guess that’s funny. I sometimes don’t realize how. I can cut a pretty imposing figure. Back then I didn’t have the black coat, but I’ve had people like get outta my way without my saying anything just because I look like a hard guy in my mafiaa

My duster. It looks like you had a off shotgun in the long pocket and stuff like that. So having said that, and everybody has, and that wasn’t, if you will, a ghost story. There wasn’t anything supernatural, no. And then he faded away, it wasn’t like that.

But it just was. It’s cool that there’s a book called The Gift of Fear that talks about how, we really are, we’ve talked about this, people are like animals with a thin veneer of civilization on them. And so when you find yourself a little worried, a little like what’s going on here, it’s good to listen to that because your animal self is saying, Not moving right.

Looking predatory. This place is not safe. I have to watch my footing here. Even I don’t know why. You know what I mean? It’s just, and so I really do listen to those things, even though I’m a 6 foot 3 Viking of a guy,

Stephen: I don’t know if I have that sense. Very well developed. If I did, I wouldn’t have been married twice.

See

Alan: that kind of stuff sneaks up on you. Oh my God. The whole house is no longer safe.

Stephen: Okay, let’s jump back. I want to hear about Prague stock. What all do you hear? Cause I saw a few posts you had with stuff.

Alan: It’s a very cool event. Prague has never been mainstream. It’s got a couple things on the radio over the course of the years, lucky man and owner of a lonely heart and stuff.

And for those listeners who don’t know, Prague is progressive rock, and it’s usually complex and too many notes, a lot of like odd time signatures, a lot of longer songs. It’s just I love it because it’s More complex, there’s more to it than a three minute pop diddy than any rap or disco or anything I’ve had that really is dance music, and therefore has a, it’s got a certain basic nature to it.

And I like more than that. They’re starting to have festivals for these kinds of things, because often These groups that some can tour nationally, but a lot of times they really labor in love in obscurity, because they’re going to sell, I don’t know, 100, 000 copies of an album, instead of 500, 000 and 100, 000 is being generous.

More 10. Yeah, like 10, but I love going to these because the I let you get a whole bunch of bands like any other festivals, not I’m not going to go see a single thing. I must have seen, let’s see, 2000 bands over the course of the weekend, Thursday through Sunday, and there’s variations or sub genres of progs, of prog, and so I saw Jazz Fusion Night, and I saw American prog versus international prog, and some things are for instance, the there’s still big names in it, so there’s a guy named Patrick Mraz, who even if you haven’t heard of him, you’ve almost certainly heard him playing, because he was on But when we blues got revived with a long distance Voyager and then had five quite successful albums, and they didn’t sell out pop wise a little bit like Genesis did, they still had interesting symphonic complex rock, and that’s no symphonic is another genre where it really is like embraces the full orchestra if you will.

And one of the joys is that he. was such a great keyboardist that he, like, when Keith Emerson left the Nice to start Emerson Lake and Palmer the other two guys that were left from the Nice said, Hey, come be in a band with us because we don’t hardly know anybody that can match what you could do, but you can.

So they had a band called Refugee. And if you ever find that album, it’s fantastic. They do a thing, the Grand Canyon Suite, where it’s like the embrace of classical music. And it was back when the were first coming into play where you could recreate Anything, and you can create new sounds and stuff like that, and you could be a one man orchestra in a lot of ways.

Not only did he sub, if you will, for Keith Emerson, a more of a successor, but then when, yes Rick Wakeman left, yes, and they needed for the Relayer album and for a couple tours, they called in Patrick Mraz, and this is the guy, they have auditions for a bunch of people, and he would walk in, and they would just go home, like you see on the Guns N Roses commercial Really amazing and how he is so fluid with his keyboards.

He can create new sounds. He can play anything he’s heard. You know what I mean? And improvising and like composing. It’s more than improvising because it’s real huge multi layer compositions done on the fly. And not only did he do that then for yes, but then he went to Moody Blues and replaced who’s their keyboardist, Mike Pinder maybe?

So the fact that he’s got these chops as well as 30 solo albums and has done things like for Swiss television where they surround him with his keyboards and he composes on the fly, like a beautiful 18 minute symphonic rock piece. No lie, like just. Did it just made it up so

Stephen: that he’s like living AI,

Alan: it really is, all the influences that he’s had, and then it just flows out of his fingertips.

There’s a couple of people that are like that are made of music. Neil Moore from Spock’s beard is another guy that like, like I saw him once where he wasn’t only playing, he was also talking about the background behind the songs and stuff. And he would go so we did this and this was the original motif.

And then, it didn’t quite work out. So we did this and we did this. And he gives five variations. All of which sounded just great to me, but then he gets to the one that really was. It did all the classic things of, repeat the motif, invert it, come back to it do variations on it and it ends satisfyingly where it comes back and maybe there’s a key change at the end, so it uplifts you.

And he was explaining, and that’s what we’re trying to do here. And it’s I don’t know that I have all the words for, that’s how music works. He did and demonstrated it in real time. Cool stuff like that. Besides Patrick Mraz, they had Joe Deninzon, who has just become the new violinist for Kansas, which is a pretty big slot to fill after, Robby Steinhardt.

And I’m going to embarrass myself because I really like his work. It’ll come to me. And then Michael Sadler, who has been the vocalist for, Saga, a great Canadian rock band, and he didn’t do his own set, but he guessed it on a whole bunch of other stuff, and his voice is still strong, and he, like I saw him perform with Prog Eject, which is one of those that, five guys from great bands got together and did all their favorite prog pieces, which I just recently saw highlighted the show was Rachel So honestly, like a little lady, a slip of a girl, if you will, because she’s quite young, comes out and plays everything perfectly, does her own compositions, does, can do Tarkus by ELP and stuff like that.

And so just so fluid and so full of music, except that she’s also blind. Which is blows me away. You know what I mean? I know that sometimes when you lose a site, other sites compensate and so forth, but it’s incredibly uncommon to be able to do what she does. Just recreate anything that’s complex.

And she does it with this added feature of every time she orients herself on the keyboard. And then after she, it isn’t I don’t know how to explain it. You get an idea of what your space is and I guess that’s how I type. You type, you just, you have finger memory and your things go where they should.

She does that with an entire 88

key keyboard and stuff like that. the virtuoso musicians that have the ability to do that. Besides the people that I knew going in, Unitopia was a group that has Chester Thompson for the drummer, and Chester Thompson is the guy that had played Like in, in with Genesis touring, instead of where Phil Collins steps up to take the vocals and he had done great drum pieces for Genesis, Chester Thompson was able to handle all that.

And I think also, I know he played with Zappa. I don’t think he played with Weather Report, but a number of people in his band, it’s that kind of a jazz fusion and they’re, they were really great. A band called Unitopia. a lot of good integration of video with the music and in some cases it’s mixed in real time in some cases they got it all prepared which is always a little bit weird because it means like they got a state of the click track and stay in sync and stuff like that so it makes their performance is good but just not quite as human.

To be to just be recreating instead of being able to vamp a little bit and break into a solo and do things different on stage than what you heard on the album. I’ve been called mystery out of Canada, there’s a lot like saga, even like a kind of a sound alike vocalist, but that same wonderful overwhelm of too many notes and rock band, you want to meet where a lot of more kind of ethereal.

Dave Bainbridge and Sally Manier, who’s the daughter of Kelly Manier, who was the keyboardist for Gentle Giant, they did cool Celtic the best that you’d hear at an Irish or a Scottish festival. You know what I mean? Really cool Enya Clannad type things, but their own brand of that.

And the reason I mention all these things is because, a lot of these I didn’t know much about. And so they have all the vendors with all the CDs there, and I’m like, I might have to try one or two or three

Stephen: and so they did have CDs. You really had pretty much all

Alan: the downloads. Exactly.

So that because I, they cater to, there are still people that like. To read the liner notes, and find out who played what, and what equipment was done, and the beautiful artwork and stuff. One of the ways you can often characterize Prague albums is because they have beautiful covers. You know what I mean?

They really get, they had a guy there named Paul Whitehead, who has done classic covers for Genesis Nursery Crime, and Foxtrot, and Trespass Before That, and I think up through Trick of the Tail. I don’t know that he did Wind and Wuthering, but a very distinctive art style. Like when hypnosis has done the pink Floyd covers and things like that.

And he did, and now he’s doing artwork that looks like galaxies. And so in real time, they had a canvas being shown up on screen behind. And it’s a little bit like Jackson Pollock, a little bit of drip painting, but not quite as complex, but he drips things out and then he uses water to move things around, but they smear just right.

Because then it looks like a nebula and a galaxy and a scattering of scars and stuff like that. And him doing that in real time to some of the space rock stuff that we heard was like, what a cool multimedia extravaganza. That’s cool. Yeah. It really cool. They had Michelle Mooka Kesa Kousa. Who is the daughter of I can’t believe I said it wrong.

It’s Moog. There’s no cow. It’s Moog, not Moog. Sorry, Michelle. I must have, one of those things that the first time you hear it, that’s what comes unbidden. And I know I’ve been corrected and I do apologize. Bob Moog is the father of the synthesizer with a couple other, like for Deutsch, others were involved, but he’s really the guy that’s associated with the Moog that you see up on stage and that you’ve heard.

First time you heard Emerson Lincoln Palmer doing pictures at an exhibition of brain cell surgery and all that kind of stuff. So his daughter is there reading from a book that just came out called Switched On, because one of the first big synthesizer albums was Switched On Bach by then Walter Carlos, now Wendy.

And she’s so bright and spoken and like her readings were good and her answering questions from the audience were not just glib responses. She was really thoughtful and I just, she’s really a great lady and his legacy is in good hands. So now we, and the Mooguseum. I’m sorry, Moogseum.

So that’s, see that’s unfair because if you’re going to call it the Moogseum, and it museum is moo, having said that, it’s down in Asheville, North Carolina, which is a very cool city. It’s got Biltmore House, it’s got a great arts community, and restaurants and microbreweries and stuff like that.

So Colleen and I are going to make a little pilgrimage. It’s going to be like six, eight hours away, down through Smoky Mountain, Great Smoky Mountain National Park, and stay there for a couple days and explore the museum. They also have a pinball museum down there, so I’m like, hey Colleen, why don’t you go hit that arts festival over there while I go immerse myself in some pinball.

And so like they had performances, they had readings, they had art. They had interviews and it’s run by fans, like the fans that have put this together have stepped up to become quite professional about it. But it really is like they work all this out. So they get all these great bands to come from, over from Europe, up from the South America and that kind of stuff.

And a beautiful venue called the Williams center in Rutherford, New Jersey, it just couldn’t have been better. And the only thing is that I’m realizing sometimes I get overwhelmed. I really love this stuff, but whereas Colleen and I were just at a comedy festival and there’s enough difference between comics and material and breaks in between that it didn’t wear on me.

I really liked every single show I saw unless the comedian was crappy. But in this case, I really was, I’m going to go take a little walk because I really need to get out of the overwhelm of too many notes and the lights and the everything that’s going on in a concert venue. And By the end of it, I was like, I’m really full and I’m done.

And so I don’t know that, I guess I just know that about myself. And I don’t know that I always was like that, but at 64, I get to where I don’t need to go take a nap. I’m not, a doddering old guy, but it really is that even things that I love, Like we talked about, when you read certain series, you want to not read them all in a row, because if there’s a certain way that they present things, if there’s a certain sense of humor or whatever, you keep pushing that button, and it gets less and less effective each time you do it.

So that’s why I don’t read the Terry Pratchett’s all in a row, because they aren’t as funny, even though they are still funny, but I’ve overwhelmed my sense of humor button. You know what I mean? So we will see. Maybe I’ll go in the future, but only go for the best two days. And how will I know that? I I came away with, of course, 20 CDs.

Wow. You know what I mean? I kept finding bands that I liked and most of them were 15 boxes. They’re still like, More than my usual 7 price, but I’m like they’re all here and when will I see these in

Stephen: store? Yeah, you’re not gonna see those at the store for seven or yeah, that’s

Alan: exactly right There’s a scarcity and an immediacy going on that they’re all right here And especially like I have certain things that I got two of the albums, but they got all five of them It’s like I gotta fill in the collection.

I will not find these elsewhere So I kept you know, confessing to colleen. Hey, i’m spending a little bit of money here and she was Okay with it, because not to be weird, 15 is more than seven, but you can buy. 10, 20 CDs, and I still only spent 300 bucks. And that’s not an only 300 is a lot of money, but for something that you love and something that

Stephen: you’ll listen to, and

Alan: I’ll listen to them again and again.

I, it just seemed to be, and. I really I’m a Medici at heart. When I see someone that’s doing well, but they’re not well known, don’t you want to contribute to their success? Don’t you want to tell the world how cool they are? So everybody, go listen to Mystery. You won’t believe how good they are, even though you haven’t ever heard of them.

Don’t listen to Aziola Cry, because they were just math rock, thud rock, that was two, there was a lot of cool patterns, but you know what? You can’t repeat it 48 times without going, I got it. I got it. So I invested a little bit. I stayed in a nice bed and breakfast. I found a great cheap parking lot to park in.

And nowadays they have all the parking apps where you don’t have to keep running to feed the meter. You just download your app and give me three more hours and just. There that this part of Rutherford was tons of different restaurants of all different ethnicities. And so each night I have one that I had Korean and one night I, like pizza and that kind of thing.

And a wonderful weekend. And it really was what Colleen says about she doesn’t like going to those things because she goes into overwhelm, even sooner than I do. I. Might have hit where I have to alter how I do this a little bit. But having said that, Dave Bainbridge and Sally Manier, pick them up.

He used to be in a band called Iona, that apparently is even more like Celtic and Hyborian and all that kind of stuff. And I’m trying to think who else I would recommend. Like I said, Mystery Rachel flowers. Those are the ones that I was like very happy. And they also had a silent auction where they like bidding on stacks.

I think it was a 10 CD thing where it’s a whole bunch of pink Floyd bootlegs. And I don’t usually support the boots because I really want the artists to get the money from it and stuff like that. And yet they had 10 different live performances over the course of their career. I don’t know if I want it or not because they were going to announce that at the very end.

And then things went really late on, on Sunday night. And so I’ll get them in the mail or I won’t. We’ll see what happens. They’ll charge my car, but that was a cool thing too.

Stephen: It sounds like a great weekend. I haven’t been to a music festival like that in quite a while. And I love that they have the CDs, but.

And this is jumping, you know how we do, but you mentioned getting in the mail. I haven’t heard anything about the Netflix DVDs now that they’re done. If they’re actually sending those out. I don’t know. Actually. So

Alan: this is, I think I stubbed a toe on this. I thought I got an email from them. They’re saying that, Hey, what on our last day, the 29th of last month, we’re going to send you the 10 CDs that are in your queue.

And that’s the way of dispersing their catalog. And so it’s that’s great. What I also thought was if I bump up my monthly allowed at homes till I paid 31 or 35 to make eight instead of one, and then I got a whole bunch of stuff that I wanted, and then I thought I’ll get 10 beyond that.

No, I got a feeling that whatever was 10, if you already had a whole bunch at home, I just got two more in a trickle. And so I had rearranged my queue. We talked about this, what are the things that you want to see multiple times. It’s not just going to sit on the shelf and much of it was comedy and that kind of thing.

I got a feeling that I like paid 31 bucks unnecessarily because all the things that were top of my queue. That I got them by bumping my, but I do have, I have 10 CDs and little envelopes and stuff like that. I got some monkey Python and I got my dirty rotten scoundrels and I got love actually.

And we, and these were all things that Colleen and I both wanted to see. So just a good variety pack of, I always laugh when I see dirty rotten scoundrels and airplane. And I actually, this is funny. I got some of the faulty towers. And Colleen so much didn’t like them that I sent them back.

I didn’t make that some of what I got because she really doesn’t like the comedies where everything goes wrong. You know what I mean? So much of the faulty towers are like a problem that spins out of control because people just wouldn’t talk. They wouldn’t pay attention, et cetera, et cetera. And okay.

I wanted to get something that was good for both of us. And that’s, that wasn’t going to be so sorry, faulty towers. I really love you, but I’ll pick you up as a box set or something like that at a flea market. And then I’ll hide them, watch them on my own.

Stephen: Maybe I’ll still get some, I don’t know.

I was like dude, I’ve been with you guys since not year one, but like year two, I think, almost that whole time. So you haven’t received

Alan: any yet. No.

Stephen: Oh man. I never got the email either. I had to seek it out and get the link to go to right. And it said, oh yeah, okay, you’re good. But I never got that email.

And

Alan: see that’s so I, by clicking the link is how I said, yeah, sign me up for doing this. So this is interesting just to revive my hope, if you haven’t gotten any yet. And you are also in the program. It really might be that I’m wrong about it becoming 10 besides the eight I had out, I might still get a little bundle of 10, maybe the warehouses.

Constrained by well, everyone wanted that offer Wilson,

Stephen: It’s only been like a week and a half really, you got to figure that they got to wait, see if something’s in the mail and close everything down and shut it. I was like, okay, I’m going to say I got screwed up.

You can’t say, oh, I got screwed over. It’s not like that. That’s what I signed up for is I want some at the end. That was just a nice bonus. So

Alan: we’ll see. I had a top 20 really, because I figured A number of things that I like, a lot of other people must like them too. So it really might be that they ran out of airplane or they ran out of groundhog day or whatever else it might be.

And then I get my 11th or my 15th or whatever my cue. Let’s keep each other posted. It still turns out that we get like a little Halloween gift. That’d be cool to get a little, okay.

Stephen: So you were, we were talking about the Halloween horror stuff and the scares and all that, which fit right in.

I am listening to the audiobook for John Romero’s new biography called Doom Guy. He was one of the original creators of Doom. And there’s another book out. And I forget the name of it. It’s about doom. It’s like an official unofficial history of the making of all that. And it’s really good. It’s by David Kushner.

I forget the exact title. But now Romero came out with his own book viewpoint of the whole thing. And it’s not really like radically different. It’s not like the other

Alan: book, the record straight. Yeah.

Stephen: He did say, you know what, there’s a few things out there going around. I want to set the record straight on it.

It was like two or three little things. He’s but I totally understand that this stuff that’s out there already, quite a bit of it was done for dramatic purposes, for tension to get you to like, Oh, the conflict he’s some of it’s not as true as it seems. And so he was real generous about that.

But, speaking of horror, doom. He talked specifically about how they wanted to get that feeling of dread and they wanted to play with the lighting and they, there were so many firsts that they had for Doom and even Commander Keen and Wolfenstein before that and Quake after that. So many things they did first that people take for granted.

He’s talking right now about game engines. He’s game engines didn’t exist. You can get unity or unreal and make a game. We built the game engine. They were

Alan: one of the first ones so that people could do their own modules and make it a professional enough quality. You know what I mean?

I totally agree. I need to get that. I’m fascinated by people talking about their craft, especially computer people. You know what I mean? Because there really is. Amazing craft to it.

Stephen: So his book is doom guy. The other one is called masters of doom. They’re both really good. I love both of them. And then there’s the other one I listened to console wars or something.

It’s about Sega versus Nintendo in the eighties and nineties. Those three are so good. And, listening to all this stuff with doom, I’ve listened to the first book several times on audio. I have the book actually, but every time I’m like, I gotta go play some Doom. Because he, he’s talking about how they were working with lighting and being able to scare the people, like what’s in the lighting and using that for the feeling of dread and using sound and all the right things.

Cause he’s a horror movie fanatic, not just a big, scary monster. That’s huge to fight because we get that all the time, but it was really, and. I have some stories of playing that game and getting the crap scared out of me to where I’m like, okay, I gotta stop, because it’s right. Yeah, that’s a recommended book.

Alan: One of the things that I love, and the world has woken up to, you really need to capture a lot of this history, while people are still alive to tell it while, it’s still relevant. You know what I mean? Like a lot of times when you read art history, it’s this is all got to be third hand because, Magritte is no longer around to tell us his story.

Whereas I love that they’re doing it. They’re capturing Appalachian music that people are still performing it and that have been doing it for 60 years and we’re about to lose them and all kinds of other things. There’s film things, there’s video game things. I love the honoring of video games to be like, it’s.

It’s it is art. It’s just like literature or film or a painting where there really is incredible consideration that goes into every one of the choices and that there’s a whole bunch of false paths. Then you get on. Then there’s collaboration. I think I mentioned a while back.

I’ve got a book called the friendly orange glow. That was the history Plato. And that’s the same kind of thing that I got is, I was there for some of the really cool time of it, 77 to 83. And as I don’t appear in the book, but I know so many people that really do appear in the book. And it really is what they were like, that they were brilliant in this way, they were obsessed in this way they were, but the kind of cool things like, seemed like every other month, like something would appear that was like, Man, this is such a labor of love.

It’s so well done. Everybody gets to try it and play it. We all get to give them feedback so it gets better with each iteration. Very cool to be, late 70s, early 80s. That was not. Video consoles and computer games yet it predated all that kind of stuff and the building of community and the going in as a party and how that became its own culture is a really cool tale and that’s really what is talked about there a lot.

Stephen: And I’ll definitely one of my pet peeves. And this pertains to video games and movies with video games, people will say this game sucks. So the new Gran Turismo is coming out and the new Forza is coming out. That’s Xbox and Sony’s realistic sim racers and a little bit of competition, going on with the new Gran Turismo movie.

A lot of focus is right now is on Gran Turismo and people are comparing them and they’re like, it’s obvious that Forza wins this generation. That’s okay. What do you mean it wins? I have an Xbox, so I’m go get Forza. It doesn’t matter how good Gran Turismo is or I have a PlayStation.

That’s why, and here you want to know why I saw several people talking about this, about why Forza obviously wins and Gran Turismo should just give up because the lighting on Forza are better than Gran Turismo. That’s it. That’s

Alan: the one thing to focus on, really.

Stephen: That doesn’t make the game for me.

And Doom is such a perfect example. I can go back and play Doom, and I’ll play Doom for hours if I get sucked into it. And it can be, my heart will be beating and I’ll be tense playing it. That game is 30 years old. And the reason is because they did all these things with the lighting, the sound and creating the things just to just right to make it.

Oh, my gosh, what’s around the corner. And I hear something experience. Yes. And the graphics are 30 year old graphics.

Alan: Even though they look pixelated and et cetera, et cetera, today, you look primitive but they still have that ability to transport. The game. That’s

Stephen: very cool. And movies can do the same.

There are some older movies that are great stories that are very intense to watch. And you get this modern stuff. It’s okay, we’re going to spend a million dollars on the CGI for this monster. So we want to focus on it all the time in the movie. And you’re going like, okay, yeah, it looks so lame after a while, It’s not the graphics, it’s not the money.

Alan: I don’t know how much Romero goes into this, but I remember reading articles about Doom and Quake and the continuing advancement. They talk about how, what has caused computers, especially computer graphics to get better and better. It’s video games and porn. It wasn’t scientific experiment being able to show a galaxy better.

You know what I mean? As much as we’ve been from that. I know I’ve read articles where He was very attuned to how does human perception work, that if you’re going to be doing. Ray tracing and how things really either capture or reflect light and how deeply it penetrates into things. If you’re going to be doing the different if you’re going to be in a dungeon, you have to have it so that the walls look not just like bricks and blocks, there has to be a certain amount of niter and Algae and decay, whatever else going on, and that as the light goes, it has to capture that it’s not a clean thing, it kind of stutters across because there’s unevenness to the surface and stuff like that.

So the things they did with the tables of like when you’re looking directly ahead and where your focus is going to be, they made sure that was at its highest resolution. But while you’re running down a corridor, you just know that there’s most of the walls, but and if you turn, then it like.

In real enough time shows you because you’ve given it your focus, what that really would look like, because you’re looking for a secret door, you’re looking for a sigil that’s going to guide you to the next thing or whatever like that, but they put a ton of effort into this is how you really work, how your eyes really focus, how your ears pick up stereophonically and that, that people really do this to try to get exactly in space where a sound is, because we got a little radar dishes and stuff, and They knew all that and used it in order to make it so that given the limitations of the technology, the resolution of video and the quality of things, they still made it that it’s wow I’m in here.

I’m seeing not just a cartoon. They really did a lot of great work with the surfacing and stuff like that.

Stephen: Absolutely. And that was the first. Time that happened. That’s what people need to understand. Historically, not just is a great fun game. It was the first game with deathmatch in the way deathmatch was.

It was the first game that was truly a 3D type engine, even though there’s some. But seen with it, that is not true 3D. It was like you said, the textures mapped and being able to see it in 3D and running around. There was so many firsts and it’s one of my obviously top games of all time. You know how many times I purchased that game?

I have the original MS DOS disks I had. I have it for Xbox 360. I have it for Xbox One. I bought it on Steam and I bought it on GOG. And, and even more fun in the last Eight to ten years, he has released two new levels for Doom out into the world. Yeah, brand new levels that you can go and download and play.

And my

Alan: level meeting, it’s like complex and huge, not just, Oh, I made another room. You know what I mean? There’s a playability, a lot of play time to it and stuff. Yes.

Stephen: And They talk about that. The piece I just got done with, he’s talking about how they have rules for making a level and they were experimenting with not just very linear level that you would have to go to this spot and you’d see a yellow door, but you don’t have a yellow key.

So you go to this other spot and oh, that needs a red key. I saw the red key here, so I finally got the red key. Now I can open the red key. Now I get through that. Oh, there’s the yellow keys and I can go back to here. Oh, but now I have to go back to. The beginning, because that’s where that secret door just opened that I hit.

And now I have a new thing, and they were talking about that, which again, hadn’t really been done before. So yeah, it’s definitely not only a historically great game for our modern gaming, it’s still fun. It is still fun.

Alan: It’s another thing that I’ve always loved is they not only have they would have recommendations.

You have to have at least this much horsepower in your machine to be able to run this. A certain CPU speed and that kind of stuff. But then they actually did the work to say, if you have the latest video card that gives you a better frame rates and higher resolution and stuff like that, they tuned the game.

So it would automatically have, now it’s not just. A blur from fog, the fog actually wafts through the air and you want to meet and difficult effects, like how to do hair, how to do water, how to do that kind of stuff. They made it more and more real that when you upgrade your system. And whatever that I’m sure that every one of.

Intel and AMD and NVIDIA and whoever else was doing those things at the time, they, hats off, they must have said to these guys that are saying, they’re not buying our highest grade video cards for, again, like nowadays they do it for crypto and for exactly, they do it for AI and stuff like that.

But back then. The biggest seller was when a new game would come out and you would find out by playing one to the other, that it was a whole different experience when you were going through the swamp and there really were like tons of little swamp gas bubbles going off and all that kind of stuff that you do and you go through the preferences panel, and there were so many things you could choose for the level of resolution or for the fog of war, like in myth and stuff like that.

And it’s I can’t turn that on. I want to turn it on. What do I need to get? How do I need to upgrade my rig?

Stephen: So that I can get the full freaking issue? And it’s not just the graphics. This was when sound cards were starting to come out as separate things other than on the motherboard.

Sound blaster was the big de facto. It became the big de facto, but, and people don’t realize that. Now that sound is one thing. It’s there. It works. But back then you had to get the card and you had to do dip switches on the back of the card to fit your motherboard and your CPU. And you had to do setting.

Sometimes MS DOS typed in settings to get things to work on the games and all that. And not all games took advantage of it. Have the

Alan: parameter file. They had to update the load sequence file and be able to make sure that it tapped into that. It’s I often think some people must listen to this and saying, oh, that’s just ridiculous that you had to do that at one point.

And yet I think it really made you appreciate like what it took to get this at highest resolution, best sound, all that kind of stuff. It taught you like how your computer works. You know what I mean? You really learned what a boot sequence was and how to make sure that like back nowadays, as everything is plug and play.

You attach a hard drive and it shows up. And there was a time when you had to set. Dip switches or SCSI address selections. Oh my God, SCSI,

Stephen: geez.

Alan: Why didn’t they call that sexy, by the way, instead of SCSI? Yeah

Stephen: It’s nerds.

Alan: Exactly.

Stephen: And for Sound Blaster, you had to set the interrupt. 220. Make sure you got that Sound Blaster interrupt on 220, man.

I still remember that. Just like I remember the code to start a Commodore 64 game. 64. Oh my God, now I do forget it, but it’s like 64186, so yeah, that stuff you had to do.

Alan: I love it. It’s, I think there’s a certain kind of person that loves doing that kind of tinkering. And when you can get the direct feedback, oh, this really works better, runs faster, looks better, et cetera, et cetera.

You get, you’re all proud of yourself. You know what I mean? I actually cracked open the machine, blew the dust off of it, used my little can of compressed air and. And I didn’t screw anything up. Of course, I often did. You know what I mean? You get away. It’s not coming. It’s not booting.

And then you go back and reread Appendix D of the booklet. They sent you like, Oh, I forgot to do this and this, sometimes you can just change the dip switch. You actually had to like, take a wire off because that you want to meet. I’m trying to remember

Stephen: for the hard drives, you had to put the little in Whatever in the right slot for however many you

Alan: have a little you that would attach to the right things and then sometimes change power so that it was no longer from the motherboard from a new power supply.

So with all the things that are fraught with danger, you and I both have done, I’ve put Like solder on, to make sure that it had the right heat paste, but not too much. And it really was, man, I really could fry my machine. If I really am clumsy, if you don’t know what I’m doing, don’t force anything.

Things don’t bend a pin on a 36 pin, something or other, because you’re just fucked then you just, that little new CPU that you bought is toast. So I had. Hardly any true disaster disasters, but there’s never a time when I wasn’t like more white glove, static strap on just okay, nobody interrupt me for half an hour because I really have to do this perfectly.

So it’s fun. Just like people used to work on cars or people who are, there’s a bunch of people that just are automatic tinkerers. The people that you go to a makespace now and they know how to make that 3d printer. Sing with how to change out various different, it doesn’t matter if that I’ve always liked, not only it works a lot of things I’ve gotten where I just want it to work and I don’t want to spend the time to have to make it work, but it’s also really cool to understand.

That’s how that works underneath. And now, if anything ever goes wrong, I have a quicker Hey, Possibility of figuring it out. My solution space is different than if it’s just a total black box. It’s maybe if I hit this button, maybe this button and you’ll turn it off. There’s a little bit of control and power and I don’t know, awareness and feeling part of it.

When you understand how things work internally. I just, I like that feeling inside of my head feels better when I understand something

Stephen: harder nowadays, people ask me, Hey, my computer is not working. Can you come look at, I’m like, you might as well take it in. Cause if it’s hardware, there’s, it’s not as much I can really do nowadays, or not only have I gotten rusty, cause I don’t do it a lot, but I don’t have all the updated tools.

I don’t even know all the, this new computer I got my hard drive. is just a memory chip. And I was looking at going, this doesn’t look like a hard drive. How is this a hard drive?

Alan: If I’m big enough to hold all the stuff I’m going to put on there. I’ve had that same shock. Exactly. If they came out with some drives and this is , 500 mega or a terabyte.

And it’s like how , I mean I know that’s from the future, from Johnny Mnemonic you had that kind of stuff. But nowadays really do have that. You can have a library in your pocket. And the first I iPod that came out where it’s like 10,000 songs in some that looks like a, a pack of gum.

Yeah. But I love that kind of wow, that’s impressive. That’s the future is here. Yeah. You know what I mean? They figured out how to do all that.

Stephen: Very cool. So you mentioned The the Gen Z or the Gen V spinoff for the boys, which I didn’t know a thing about. I saw the trailer last night. So me and Colin have been going to 5 movies in Kent on Mondays a lot.

Yeah, we went and saw the creator yesterday. And I said, Oh, okay. It’s a good solid sci fi. I didn’t think it. Did anything to outstanding and, it was good. It was great. Okay, I

Alan: know nothing about it because I guess I just haven’t seen that trailer or anything like that.

Stephen: So it’s in the future.

And AI is part of our world, but there they get this defense. And so their answer is we need to drop a nuclear bomb on L. A. Boom. There you go. We fix things. So now it’s civil war between the remaining humans and A. I and and then it’s this guy is tasked with getting rid of their ultimate weapon.

That’s going to take out Nomad, which is our space station. battle station that’s wiping out the AI. So he goes to take out this weapon. It turns out to be a kid that is growing an AI kid. That’s like growing like a normal person. And then there’s the conflict then. Cause he doesn’t want to kill this kid.

And I’m like yeah, it was good. Colin goes, oh my God, that was like the best robot AI movie I’ve ever seen and stuff. I’m like, wow. Okay. Good for you. I just didn’t think it was like, it was great. I would see it. Yeah. And I think I don’t think they planned it that way necessarily. I think it was just somebody saw AI on the horizon and thought it’d be a good thing.

And then, bam,

Alan: there’s been a couple of great speculative movies like that about, like X Machina was, you doing a real life touring test, how do you know from communicating with another movie director? Person, whether they’re real or machine and how does the machine know that about a human being and stuff like that?

You know what I mean? That those lines blur. It’s very interesting. Like it begs the question, what makes us human? You know what I mean? Is it length? Is it a sense of humor? Is it compassion? And how do we make sure that we raise our kids, our AI kids to have some of those things, just a good parent tries to raise a kid, not a monster.

Stephen: One of the subtle plots they had was orphans, human orphans were getting raised by AI and help. And basically it was the AI are more caring for the kids than the humans are. And the A. I. Is like only fighting back until the war ends. And then there’s no vengeance on them. They’re not going to try and get even.

It’s the humans who keep trying to get even

Alan: interesting. Boy, tell me that isn’t against screaming from today’s headlines. Yeah. Oh my God, we’ve had 4, 000 years worth of problems in the Middle East, and it’s never going to stop when you have three of the world’s religions all think that this particular two square miles of thing is the source, the sun source of all of their religious belief.

Who’s ever going to give that up? Who’s ever going to… It’s insane. And, there’s too much to talk about in terms of there’s nobody that’s in the right. I get that there’s people that are more in the right than others. But when will that ever end? Not when you’ve had Armenian genocide, not when you’ve had other places where, like you were saying, what are we what are we fighting?

They attacked us back in 1918. And finally, we’re going to get them back. It’s so you’ve raised how many generations of teaching your kids that these other human beings are not human beings, but are animals, but are evil. And I just, it’s weird that we do have that, but man, humanity can hold a grudge, can’t it?

You know what I mean? Yeah, I guess it’d be like. Clear that onto the next task. You know what I mean? I’ve .

Stephen: Yep. Wow. So one of the trailers for that movie was the Gen V for the spinoff from the boys, which I didn’t know a thing about. And I love the boys, I love Gareth ENIT Enis. Enid en yeah.

I love him. I love the boys. I love the TV show. And I’m like, wow, this looks. Interesting.

Alan: Yeah. So I knew very little about it until maybe a month ago. It really had gone uncovered and unhyped. Oftentimes when they’re doing a sequel and whatever else it might be, they have people that are trying to break into the cordon of silence around it and find out spoilers and stuff.

And instead it’s like has magically appeared. I think it’s one episode a week, like they do nowadays, that in the British bacon show. So I can’t just bid in. I have to get my regular dose. It’s a very good addition to the universe. Where, Voigt Corporation has Compound V, which can give people superpowers, but can also give them they’re good or disastrous.

You know what I mean? It changes something about you. So if you have a telescopic vision, that’s great. If you have laser vision that you can’t shut off, like Cyclops, like the first thing you do is open your eyes and incinerate your mom, et cetera, et cetera. So this has. It’s teens going to college.

And as you might imagine, the world is it’s not easy on teens. They’re remarkably smart and capable because they’re already like adults, human beings, but they’re driven by hormones and they’re driven by societal push. And there, there’s all kinds of like young love. is incredibly intense.

Young hate is too. And so they’re just showing that by making this kind of a teen drama combined with superpowers, there’s really possibilities of nobility and heroism and there’s real possibilities for disaster and hate and all that kind of stuff. And they’re amazingly creative in kinds of what superpowers are we going to have and how we’ll raise different things.

Is there automatically Almost like elements. You know what I mean? Do fire and water always have to be enemies just because internally who they are is a very diametrically opposed force or something like that. And as you might imagine, it’s not just these kids are getting involved in hijinks and they’re all on their own.

There’s all kinds of governmental manipulation and monitoring and you know anybody who’s too powerful where they’re not a kid, they’re a munition. And so you got to make sure that you’re training them up, right? Loyal United States. And what if they. kid is schizophrenic, or he really is schizophrenic because he hears voices, various other things, but a little bit of multiple personality disorder, someone that very easily flits between various different identities, but then is there a core one, or are they?

Lost amongst all the possibilities before them. And so they’re really investigating some various different things and like screaming from today’s headlines. It’s not hard to think of, kids don’t have superpowers for real. But nowadays there really are people that by depending on how they’re outfitted, the information haves and have nots have very different capabilities about how they interact with the world, how they deal with money, how they deal with relationships.

And. So just, throw grinder into the mix of superpowered people, and, look how about if people not, don’t take rejection really well and they can actually tell who rejected them? ’cause they’re cyber aware. You know what I mean? I can, they’re it’s very well done.

And I say this predictably, which is funny ’cause what I’m about to say is I really like things where I don’t know what’s gonna happen next. You know what I mean? I just, after a while, there’s certain standard plots and they’re a little bit predictable. And there’s something satisfying just seeing, I can see this coming and yes, they executed it well.

But it’s also, I just love every single episode has been like, Oh, that’s a great idea. And they’re really just blam, put it out there. It’s I think Seth Rogan, a couple people. Oh, wow. Eric. So is this good? People are involved

Stephen: with this. So is this a amazon prime tv show only spin off? It’s not a comic.

Alan: It’s right. It’s amazon prime. And I think it’s supposed to be either eight or 10 episodes. And I think we’re on episode four and boy, I think we’re It’s graphic in a way that I’ve not seen before, like full frontal nudity, including male, which is uncommon. And you’re like, Hey, it’s about time the guys should get their turn.

And yet, wait until you see.

Stephen: Now I’ve got I’m behind on the boys, so I got to catch up on that too.

Alan: So that’s. That really is a great series, and very much the comic books that were done, Derek Robertson and Garth, is it Enis Ennis? Ennis, Garth

Stephen: Ennis, yeah.

Alan: Two Enns, I think, right? Yeah. And really well done, and very much aware of all the comic books that have come before them, and then all the ways in which things should go really good or really bad.

If you really were a super powerful person, and you could do whatever you want. Thank God you’re a Boy Scout like Superman, because what if you weren’t?

Stephen: What if you were Homelander, who’s a little

Alan: psycho? Exactly. He’s a little psycho and has learned to pass. It’s not like the entire world is aware of how really bad he can be.

And yet it keeps, there’s in a world of constant surveillance, someone’s going to get a picture that is undeniable of he just. Hurt a lot of people or it very interesting, the shifting alliances and especially another thing that’s interesting about it is the not only is the government involved, but of course, so is industry, about corporation wants to control or at least have some interest in these various different things.

And what would happen if people really liked this. Oh, they’re so special. They’re special like Taylor Swift or Kanye or I’m sorry, he is that what he is now. Yeah, I have no idea. It’s there’s all kinds of Tracking of their every move because they want to know what do you have for breakfast? Who are you dating?

What kind of car do you drive? That kind of stuff. And so there’s polls as to who’s the favorite superhero on campus. Who do they think is the most powerful? And that’s not always the favorite. So that creates its own interesting tension. And all the gossip, all the if anybody’s seen with anybody else, they must be dating now.

We’ll tell that to the person that they were dating the other person and now they’re feeling slighted. It really captures that paparazzi rapaciousness that we have about the intrusion that we’re willing to do into people’s lives that really, you maybe could give them a little space, you could let them go, especially if they’re on the edge, and that their edge is not going to be If Get away from me.

It’s going to be get away from me and throw a bus at you,

Stephen: And I really loved Karl Urban in that show his character is absolutely fantastic in that exactly

Alan: Billy Butcher exactly so hardly they make allusions to various different characters from the boys, and some have made an appearance but it isn’t at all them as the main focus.

It’s the up and coming kids, and there’s some legacy stuff involved, like A Train’s son, if I remember right, is going to this college Goodenkin University. It’s got all those kinds of cool things, which I always loved in comic books, where they started to have Infinity Incorporated, that were the children of justice society, and how that can really help you, or really screw you up, to have a legacy to live up to, or to have, there was always a way fighting crime.

I have no relationship to my father, they’re capturing a lot of those cool things. It isn’t just Biff Van Powell superhero stuff, it’s wonderfully soap opera y, and mystery, and I really, I can’t wait. I love every episode that I’ve watched so far, and one of the few shows that I want to rewatch those first ones to make sure I didn’t miss anything.

You know what I mean? There’s so much stuff going on that even if I’m watching it actively, it’s okay that I think that meant something happened before. Did they tell that back story or is it that they’re going to reveal it in the future? Or I just want more going on. So I write recommendations.

Stephen: I will definitely go catch up on some of it. And now is not the worst time of year because I watch a lot of horror and then I watch a lot of Christmas stuff. So and then January is usually Star Wars Loki

Alan: yet. I just watched the first episode last night. Man, it is so much. It’s great. But it’s like not Loki from the comic books. It really is so much about the time variance authority and that whole fighting Kang plot, if you will, and that Loki is presented very involved and heroic. So you really got to put aside all of the Thor Loki enmity, all of him being the trickster God.

I’m sure some of those things will come in very handy when he has to make use of his magic and those skills. But right now It’s a science fiction show through and through it’s time travel and the effects of that and how do you oh my god it’s really, it could be Dr. Yeah, and even though they just introduced a character called the aura Boris, you know that the snake swallowing its tail.

That’s The guy who maintains the plumbing, the electronics for the Time Variance Authority, and what an amazing, interesting thing that while these guys are supposedly making these big decisions that affect the universe, there’s somebody that’s got to keep the power on, somebody that’s got to make sure that things stay tuned.

And I don’t mean to give it there’s no spoilers involved except what a great new character and they really are good at introducing characters and having them be like of course that would have to happen and it really will figure into it but you don’t know how yet really arresting I really pay attention to certain shows because there’s so much cool stuff going on so my having been at this prog festival and then coming home last night to no lie catch up with baking with Colleen.

And then go up here and watch my guns and explosions things, my superhero things, because Colleen is not the biggest fan of those. It was like, wow I am fully back into life at home and what a great dose of all these great things. And then I actually had to watch the the doctor strange to the multiverse of madness movie, because I just.

And dealt with the multiverse time variance authority wise, and that was Marvel’s first big, even before the Spider Man movie, a big preview of all of what goes on in the multiverse, and about incursions, and universal champions, and variants of various different people. And I just wanted to reload that as well.

Really quite good. Biggest complaint about that movie was the short shrift they gave the Illuminati, who were like, The most powerful people in the marvel universe, which kind of like flick dispatches them. No, she’s really mighty, but you would have to give them. Enough respect.

Stephen: Not only that, but it was cool to see all the different universe characters showing that we’re acknowledging all of this at least.

Alan: Yeah, and I say this every time if you haven’t seen this movie, there is a sequence where they get pushed. Out of our existing universe and they go through a whole bunch of things for momentum until they land in another one. And those snapshots of the water world and the dead world and the paint world and the, and the computer world are just each one of those.

You want to like pause and take a good look. This is enough. Version of how reality might be. It’s very well,

Stephen: which just for everyone to know, we’ve been able to see a lot of that stuff in comics for decades. So we get more detail than you get from that little clip.

Alan: That’s really true. Thank you for saying that.

I, there’s been backlash lately from Martin Scorsese, a couple others about maybe Meryl Streep, I think about how comic book movies are like killing the movie world, and that we need to have more human stories and more smaller pictures. Isn’t that kind of stuff? And honestly, I’m okay with we need to have a whole spectrum of all those things.

I want there to be independent cinema and foreign cinema and all the kind of things. Comic books were like held back for a long time. And they really do have amazing mythology and stories and a backlog of cool things that we can bring to the world to get people thinking about what is justice?

What is nobility? What is reality? And I don’t think we’re done. I think there’s all kinds of cool things still to do with. With that 80 years worth of comic book mythology that hasn’t, not a tenth of a tenth, a thousandth of it has been presented to the world. Please, Martin Scorsese, continue to make your great movies, but it isn’t either or, it isn’t that these are the only movies being made.

Big boffo blockbusters are going to be making a lot of money, and so they’re going to cater to those, but I continue to see the wonderful independents, whether they’re in theaters or at film festivals or something like that. There’s always going to be room for everybody. And don’t take my good stuff away from me and don’t take the world, its chance away of being exposed to all these things that have fascinated me all of my life.

And not only that, there’s not everything is great, like everything, 90 percent of everything is crap. And yet the 10 percent best comic books. Boy, they deserve to be seen, we need to have a version of Dark Knight Returns. That really is that version of the future Batman, not just the Joel Schumacher, et cetera, Batman, because man, it, that will rock some people.

Maybe Sin City did it. Really urban, gritty. It’ll

Stephen: rock people. And not that against Scorsese, but it sounds almost like Sour Grapes. My movies aren’t as popular anymore. Is it Marvel’s MCU fault or? Are your type of movies just falling out of favor? Are people not as interested?

Enough

Alan: gangster movies. We’ve seen lots of gangster movies. Yeah. It’s like we had seen so many Westerns that we just stopped making them. We explored the Western genre really deeply.

Stephen: So Leone Sergio could say we need to stop making all these great dramas. So people watch what more Westerns again, I’m not saying he’s totally wrong.

I’m just saying you can’t. Taste change, people change what’s popular changes and somebody’s always going to want to push the envelope to make it more popular and make more money off of it and that, that’s what they’re trying to do. He, Scorsese does have a new movie coming out that Colin’s excited about.

It’s a Western moon.

Alan: I just thought, yeah, exactly. It’s based on true things where people were killing. Landholders in Oklahoma, American Indian landholders to take their land because there was oil underneath it, right? And lots of killings went on investigated because, hey, we’re okay. We moved them from place to place.

We gave them polio blankets. Now it’s coming down to individual targeted killing. It’s a shameful, there’s all kinds of shame to be found in

Stephen: American history. Make America great again. Let’s go back to what made us great. There you go. Exactly. That’s a whole talk. All right. I need to get

Alan: going. All right.

As always a pleasure and we’ll see you in a week. I hope stuff coming up to get ready for Halloween, costumery and stuff like that. And After all the being out of town, it’s so good to be back home with your bed and your shower, your toy and your

Stephen: refrigerator and 20 new CDs of music to listen

Alan: to.

I’m going to be digitizing in just a moment. So all right, man. Later. Pleasure. Okay. Bye bye.