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Relentless Geekery: Gaming Updates & Technology Toys In this episode of Relentless Geekery, two high-functioning geeks explore a plethora of topics ranging from video game updates including the new Harry Potter game, Diablo Four, and No Man’s Sky, to retro games like Wizardry and D&D. They also delve into the utility of new tech gadgets, such as solar-powered generators for rural living and author booths. Additionally, the conversation touches upon movie trends, favorite old films, horror movie previews, and anticipated superhero movies like Deadpool and Wolverine. This episode is a rich tapestry of nostalgic gaming discussions and contemporary tech explorations.
00:00 Introduction to Relentless Geekery 01:00 Harry Potter Game Updates
03:59 Gaming Frustrations and Preferences
08:39 Classic Games and Nostalgia
23:01 Modern Gaming and Real-Life Impacts
27:30 New Gadgets and Practical Uses
33:11 Ensuring Home Safety in Extreme Weather
34:07 Prime Day and Black Friday Shopping Haul
35:42 Music Collectibles and Remastered Albums
37:51 The Decline of DVD Extras in Streaming Era
42:54 Deadpool and the Evolution of Superhero Movies
52:00 The Art of Movie Twists and Spoilers
56:18 Upcoming Movie Releases and Expectations
01:00:28 The Joy of Predicting Movie Plots
01:03:44 Podcast Wrap-Up and Future Plans
[00:00:00] Do you like conversation on a variety of topics? Feel like no one wants to talk about the things that interest you? Tired of only hearing the same political, sports, or catastrophe talk? We feel that way too. Join two high functioning geeks as they discuss just about anything under the sun. We can’t tell you what we’ll be talking about each week because we don’t know where our brains will take us.
It will be an interesting conversation though, so hang on and join us. Here comes the Relentless Geekery.
Stephen: Oh, you pop in my
Alan: usual adjustment for a display here. Otherwise, I look on night shifted in there for a while there. See, ready now. I’m ready. There we go. Okay,
Stephen: [00:01:00] real quick. Speaking of Harry Potter. So they’ve done two updates to that. Game this summer and I still am waiting to hear for sure that they’re coming out with the DLC on Xbox.
Cause I want to get that game.
Alan: Interesting. I’m so used to having to wait for things to make it from the consoles to windows to Mac, that I just like. When it shows up on steam, when I read about it somewhere being played, then I go get it. I really like Diablo and Diablo four has been out for a year now without my being able to play it.
And I and what’s funny is I should be able to play it under my Windows emulation, but it really ties into expecting a certain graphics card and stuff like that and emulation. I never notice that I get, poor quality graphics in terms of frame rates and sharpness and fog of war and everything, but it checks for like specific model numbers or something like that, and it won’t let me play it.
Oh I
Stephen: heard it’s something you’ll like in that regard. There is an indie game studio that created this game that was, doing okay on [00:02:00] steam and they pulled it, they had, they pulled it right off. You know why?
Alan: Why?
Stephen: They lost their source code and couldn’t make updates or improvements to it.
Alan: Oh, man. Talk about the keys to the king. So they really like they did a backup and they couldn’t recover or whatever. Or
Stephen: didn’t do a backup.
Alan: Wow.
Stephen: How do you become an indie game company, even a single person and not, Use cloud backup, not use versioning software.
Alan: It’s on a thumb drive at somebody’s home.
It’s on a, sometimes a lot of days, the code base, they don’t fit on there. But I know what you’re saying. There’s so many ways to guarantee against that particular thing and against malware that locks your machine up or whatever. Wow, I’m really sorry for them, but wow, that’s brought on themselves, like a dastard came in, that they did it to themselves.
So well,
Stephen: and interesting to back to Harry Potter. I’m really wanting to play that game, but I really want to have all the DLC here. The thing is, if they [00:03:00] don’t do that. There’s a good chance I’m going to get just get a PlayStation 5 at some point. So I’ll just get the PlayStation version,
Alan: that’s part of the plan I think is that they, there’s no reason for them to like undo platform loyalty if they know that if They outlast you. If they outwit you, eventually you’ll just say, I guess I’m going to have four gaming systems instead of three, or else it might be,
Stephen: but there is a new sports video game out.
That looks interesting. It’s your typical sports game. You have a campaign, you start. The low team, you work your way up through the ranks, blah, blah, blah. But you can play multiplayer online. You against the other team Harry Potter Quidditch.
Alan: See, that’s pretty cool. You know what I mean? And that obviously being a sports game and yet the fantasy elements of learning how to deal with the zero gravity, or at least the negation of gravity by magic and stuff like that.
That’s pretty cool. Yeah.
Stephen: So that’s a quick updates. I just happened to, video game updates of the week.
Alan: Yeah. [00:04:00] I, It’s a friend, Robert, introduced me to No Man’s Sky. You said that you had played it for a while as well. And I just can’t get into it. It’s, as it’s I’m trying, I’m not making fun.
It’s something like a quintillion planets. It’s just an unbelievable amount of space to go exploring. And they keep on, Enlarging it or adding to so that it seems as if the place is getting a lot. My big thing is the game mechanics. It’s very much like a console game. And in fact, Robert even loaned me, gave me an old controller and I’ve never, I don’t have the thumb memory that makes it just feel like it should in your hands.
I try to play online with my. regular computer rig, keyboard and a mouse, and the way that you do panning with a camera. In fact, a certain first person shooters have always been like that to me, that there’s a disproportion between how you move and how you look. And I can’t seem to get my mind retrained so [00:05:00] that it syncs up that I’m just not paying attention to where I’m stepping.
I want to go there. And so I do the things with your hands and your eyes to take you there. And so I have died too many times and especially like that shouldn’t have been able to kill me. That’s like a little, fuzzy bunny just happens to be an alien creature. And yet I can’t, there’s nothing more frustrating than knowing what you should do and not being able to coordinate yourself.
And I keep thinking, I should be able to get better at this. I’ll give it a couple hours. Okay. How many hours do I have to put into this until my brain gets out of its own way? And I just start because there’s any number of other things where it’s just such instinctive movement that I don’t spend any time thinking about that.
I just play the game and somehow that hasn’t happened for me yet.
Stephen: To me. I agree. The game didn’t quite click for me. I play a lot more console, so that didn’t bother me a whole lot, but it just didn’t have enough. Arcady feel to it. It didn’t have [00:06:00] enough construction and exploration. It all was like extra work to do anything to me, and I just, I don’t know.
It didn’t draw me. And now I have another game called the long dark. And it’s a survival game, but it has exploration. It has crafting. It’s just not alien planets. And I’ll sit and lose time. It’s Oh man it’s one 30 in the morning. I got to work. I got to, okay, let me just finish this one task, so there’s just something about no man’s sky that I didn’t appeal to me very much at all.
Alan: I’ve tried any number of things. First, you’re standalone on my box and then on online. And there, there’s any number of things that are what you just said, explore and construct, and somehow they have to get the balance of that.
Correct. So when I tried playing World of Warcraft, I really do like D& D type fantasy type games, and yet some part of it seems to be perpetually, I’m farming things. I just and you get what you need from doing that, but really that’s fun is to sit here and just make sure that I’m [00:07:00] finding or farming various different things.
And I really like the fact that they have the incredible depth of being able to always have a different armor, different mounts to, to even build different buildings to build. And yet, the more that it gets granular, and especially where it’s like, Oh, I didn’t know when I put in the atomic thing instead of the electric thing, that it would have a certain.
Stopping point or a certain disadvantage, but now I’m committed, I know I’ll just build a whole nother castle and all that. I haven’t found many things like that at all that have the balance that it’s like, how much time do I want to spend? I don’t know, I guess I’m old school.
I really love dungeon crawls. I love where it’s All you’re doing is exploring the dungeon and the risk reward of can I defeat this creature in order to get the box of treasure that’s behind him, and that the dungeon itself has traps and stuff like that, but to be like I’ll go into this room and practice my axe throwing for a while.
It bores the piss out of me and I just won’t do it. And unfortunately, if you don’t do it, [00:08:00] you can’t win. You can’t get ahead, right? Oh
Stephen: I’m not big on the online multiplayer games either. I’ve played I played EverQuest. There was a Star Wars one. My friends play. They used to play a superhero one and they played Marvel and DC and all those, let’s all get together and get online and we’ll equip our I just wasn’t that interested in them didn’t care for him a whole lot.
But I do like those type of games. I’ll play the solo or I’ll sit and play with people locally. It’s just those online ones. And it’s minor things that I can’t even identify. What is that? But that just reminded me, and you’ll like this coming from the Mac world. You remember wizardry back in the day.
You know that great game they, I think they finally ported like three over to the Commodore or the Amiga. I never got to really see one or two and that dungeon crawl 3d perspective, that turn based fighting, the original fighting fantasies were like that. There’s a whole lot like that.
They did a 3d [00:09:00] remake of wizardry and it’s coming out to the consoles.
Alan: That’s interesting. You know what I mean? It’s funny. I don’t know that I necessarily need the full 3D effect to still get it to be a good game to me, but then when you see it, it’s like that looks really great. You know what I mean?
Especially dungeon wise, when it really looks like, or, and I often comment on this, I love where they’ve really gotten smart about, you can hear things, scritching around in the distance and it’s an early warning system in some ways and it really builds like your body reacts to it with tension and fear.
Oh, yeah, I, I used to. Yeah, I don’t think about that is that there really are things like one 30 in the morning, and it’s I really need to go to bed. But I’m so wired from having played this things jump out at your game or whatever else it might be that I really need to. I don’t know if I just go play solitaire for 10 minutes because I need to do something that is not out of my control.
Especially when they started. This is, I know I play games where only as you advanced, did you become [00:10:00] aware of that there were things around you and you had to confront them. And when they started to have things where you could just be sitting there regenerating trying to get better and something would come at you that the game was running in real time and that you didn’t have to go forward into danger, it would come find you.
I really was unnerved by that whatever escape I find in games. It’s I don’t want to live in a house where I’ve got roaming crazies outside breaking in you know all the all those home invasion movies. Yeah. I just, that’s one of the worst things to me is taking an idyllic existence and wrecking it.
And they’re all wearing masks and they’re all like, they’re just crazy for no reason. There’s not even we heard there’s treasure in your house. And so we’re trying to get it. They just, there’s a whole series of one night a year, like the president urge that everybody can go take revenge that there’s no laws that night.
And I, that’s man, if you want to get an idea of, to me, that’s the collapse of society to others. It’s finally. Finally, I can be an absolute bastard that I’ve always wanted to [00:11:00] be, and over petty nothings, that guy cut me off in the parking lot, time to go kill him, time to go burn down his house, I, and, oh I don’t know, like why I don’t like scorpions, it’s not that they’re really lethal, it’s that they’re unpredictable, they move in that skittery way, and I just need to either kill it or get away from it, because I, whatever it does to my brain of feeling really stressed by this random thing.
That’s what those kinds of movies are. You know what I mean? You didn’t go to the haunted house and now you pay the price for your, then instead they made your house into that dangerous place. Yeah. And
Stephen: what you said about the enjoyment, that’s the one thing. So I would go back and I would play the 1982 2D Wizardry the text, mostly text based.
I’d play it. I’d enjoy it all day long. The 3D remake, the fear is, and I’ve seen this in other games, that they said this is a new modern version, so we’re going to make it real time. We’re going to change this about it. And it’s a whole different game. It [00:12:00] does not eat. I have no problem with that.
It looks 3D, but it plays like the old game. In fact, there have been a couple games that did that, that remastered things, but you could literally hit a button and it goes, and it looked just like it used to. And then it goes back to the 3D and stuff.
Alan: Exactly. It’s one of the joys of being a veteran of this kind of stuff is there really was great playability in the Bard’s Tale games, Ultima games and Wizardry.
And as they got. More complex. I don’t know that they got better, but they expanded the games, if you will. And so a lot of that is Maybe it’s meeting current standards, modern standards to have it really be 3D photorealistic or something like that, but that’s not what made the game so well done. It was the spell trees and the quality of monsters and and going from a hundred to 200 monsters, it’s a cool thing because you have to learn more about what will, hey, any animal thing, you should try to charm it and put it to sleep.
And, there were not cheat codes, obviously, but the more you knew about those kinds of things. You didn’t have to [00:13:00] throw a fireball at everything. You could say any undead, I should be able to do a dispel or some kind of defense against Necro, if you will. And it’s like the one spell unit thing.
And so no matter how mighty the thing, you can kill the Lich King by just giving them a little not a magic missile. They got double hits against undead and stuff like that. But I always liked that. And it wasn’t about being cheap, the economy will in some ways it was if you go in with 60 spell units and you blow them all within your first five steps of a heart and this have to get back out.
That doesn’t seem to be like you can’t even get in for long enough that they start to regenerate and you can keep going. I like the things where the more that you knew the more that it worked for you. And, but also the tension of, the higher you get the higher the monster is. It has a percentage chance of working.
And if it’s 50, 50, it’s worth throwing an easy, something at a bad thing. And then even if it gets a hit on me, I will survive. But if it’s down to a 5 percent chance, it’s I don’t know that I need to say [00:14:00] spell units as much as I need to make sure that he doesn’t kill me with one shot because that spell didn’t work.
And they really were good at how they would build the. Percentage of success rates and stuff like that to go with a really strong vampire, a really strong witch, whatever else it might be, but no matter the werewolf, if you really could cast a charm, because you’re any human brain is better than the animal brain was like I put the little puppy to sleep ish, you know what I mean?
And you step him. So I. And not every gaming system treated all those things the same way. So you’d go into a new thing and try things that had worked elsewhere. And it says, Oh no, now it’s only holy items, not spells. And I liked learning that. Now I might have to play a cleric. Because I really liked, as much as I’m not a Christian guy, I like the fact that the power of the gods can be with you.
Against various different creatures, anyway, boy, did I, have we ever talked about this? Did I did a [00:15:00] lot with PLATO at the University of Illinois. It was one of the first truly interconnected, all that kind of stuff. And I actually did a nice talk about it and talk about, I, I was not anywhere near one of the big PLATO guys.
I knew so many of the people that made things work and I helped them with the maze driver, whatever else it might be. One of the joys of doing all that research was, To discover they already had Play Doh, still had Play Doh, running in emulation, and that not only did I like go and get the old, wow, this looks just like it did when I would go in and do my, shift term to order a pizza, all those things, but I got to play a couple games again, space conquest games or D& D crawl games like Orthanc, and I just, it was so easy to like, I got to go buy some graph paper.
I got to map this dungeon. I love mapping the dungeon. It isn’t that it auto maps and that you just go exploring. You really had to keep track because once when you were a pud character and you fell down to shoot from one to four and suddenly you were surrounded by things that could [00:16:00] wax you really easily.
You learned how important it was to always know where you were and How to get out. How do you’re down to four hits out of your 20. Time to not do any more fighting, get out and go regenerate. So I really did probably for two weeks, fall back into it and had all the fun. And I mapped out like eight out of the 10 levels.
And then it started to seem very not only repetitious, but the incremental advancement that you got from, I was a really strapped character and had all my good weapons and stuff. But I just kept seeing the same things that had a limited danger set. It had, it wasn’t like, am I really, and if I remember right, it really did go up like by powers of two, what it took to get to the next level.
So when you’re going from 1, 2, 4, 8, 16 32, it’s pretty easy once you get to going from like 128,200 to 256,000, wow. You really have to work to get those things done and it [00:17:00] wasn’t worth it. And I literally just kinda said, okay. Boxed my little papers up into a nice sheet and put him in a folder and said, I remember how much I love it, but it’s not the best use of my time.
It’s not a relief from other things that I used to get stressed out in college. Now it’s a distraction from things that I could be working on. And I was done. In
Stephen: 1980, when your choices were a handful of those type of games, great. I love it. I’m going to do it all the time, but think of all the gaming you’ve done since then.
So your experience has grown and I’m not saying everything has to improve and change. Like you said, those are still fun. Now it’d be interesting if somebody could. Bring those into the modern era without changing what it substantially is. Do you still want a map? If we made an auto mapper, would it benefit you or what about, and I always thought about this.
It’s like, why do we have to go from it does no mapping to it does all the mapping. What about. That’s a power you have to earn, or it’s a [00:18:00] magical device you have to get to give you the map or it shows you part of the map, but Fog of War or everything else, unless you have this item. And there’s things I just never saw implemented.
Alan: I know that I like, they had things that were, as you gained various different spells, you had spelled it was like the equivalent of a a. A spark floating around you and it gave you sight of one square around you. And then you get where’s the equivalent of a little sun and it would give you three squares around that thing of exploring a dungeon where you really have an expanded version of what you can see and therefore, See monsters earlier, anticipate where you have to go, that kind of stuff.
It really felt and they timed it perfectly. So that when you got to that level, you needed it because you were going into places where if you, I don’t know, stepped into a slime mold or something like that, and it started like it made you, it adhered your feet to the floor, started to eat your armor.
It really was worth. Avoiding the things that with only a single step you might stumble into things like that. [00:19:00] I, there really are people that have done that kind of like the, whatever the tree is of what capabilities you get and what armor and weapons you get and what things you meet so that it was continually a challenge instead of I might’ve mentioned this story.
I used to play D and D for real with people. And we had a game in college where someone had a thing that a big chart of one to a hundred and you roll dice to see what weapon you got out of a chest and someone got Mjolnir Thor’s hammer when we were like third level characters and then it was absolutely no fun you like walk into a room boop kill a 10th level monster because Mjolnir is Mjolnir and it was it was a one in a hundred chance you know what I mean most of the time you just get the regular stuff that goes your level but you have to protect against that you when I think I told you this story, I walked in to where everybody was trying to be the millionth character.
Maybe it was 3 millionth character playing a game and I stumbled onto it and I got, plus 3 [00:20:00] armor plus 3 shield held all that kind of stuff, plus 3 sword. And it emboldened me because now I’m the mightiest thing in the thing, but it doesn’t work against me. Everything. And if I remember like a face spider got me, one of those things that it gives you one to 20 hits.
And so most of the time it’s just one. And it’s I got a beast thing, but if it hits you three times for 20 hits, it’s and they’re fast. You know what I mean? They really can jump you. And it’s that’s exactly what should have happened. I got all fucking full of myself.
I got this lucky and lucky can make you stupid. And I, and within a day I died and all that stuff. It doesn’t like, They didn’t have dungeons back then where it lays in a heap and you can go and retrieve it if you’re daring enough. Just went back into the ether that is the dungeon. And, I, if I remember when that happened, I like left, I usually had a whole gaming session for at 10 at night until six in the morning, once a week, you could put aside your college studies and go do this thing.
And I left and consoled myself with a piece of pizza at Garcia’s. And like we, a bunch of us would [00:21:00] play together, not in the same game, but, and they were all like, they didn’t want to leave, but they were like, I guess I looked suicidal or something like that because they all went with Peter Garcia’s and gave up some of their valuable playing time to just, that shouldn’t happen, man.
Oh man, that shouldn’t happen. It’s just, it’s funny. Some of that first people talk about, this is one of the things I talked about in my Play Doh talk, It was that first suspension of disbelief on a personal level in a role playing game where people really do inhabit their characters.
And if they do really well or really badly, it affects their real life. And I don’t people and also all the signs of addiction, when people would play too much and all of a sudden they get crappy grades and they like, we had a couple of people that. I went to school in Champaign Urbana and there was like Lakeland Community College, if I remember right, was the local community college.
They went there to go fix their grades so they could come back to real college, if you will, and they had done it all because they couldn’t stop playing [00:22:00] Oubliette or whatever it was, some dungeon crawling game. All their smarts as a coder went into, How do I avoid the monitoring system that lets me only play one night a week?
I create different identities and I am continually one step ahead of the law because I so much need this, that I’m willing to lie, cheat and steal to get to play.
Stephen: And it’s funny you say that because I’ve thought about those types of things. I’ve had my games, that I’ve Atari, whatever Commodore,
Alan: you had to put away.
Yeah.
Stephen: But even then, when you look at it, You’ve got two types of people and it’s what you want out of the world. You’ve got the people that create content, create things for others. And then you’ve got the consumers that just consume all the stuff created. And in this case, especially in our society now, it’s the entertainment.
Our biggest export in from our country is our entertainment. It has a conglomerate. And that includes the sports, that includes the video games, that includes the movies, and even books [00:23:00] and everything else. Look at all these people nowadays that, oh, I’m an influencer. I create videos for YouTube and I make money because people sit there in a rabbit hole and keep watching everything.
Alan: And what are you producing? Not anything really useful. No! Oubliette’s way more useful! And yet people are like so much wanting to have he’s just like me, except he does this. And that’s what kind of who I want to watch. It’s not really heroic. It’s not really accomplished. It’s my same complaint about a whole bunch of the.
Music games is you’re not learning to play guitar. You’re learning to tap the fake guitar. And
Stephen: is it any different than using a keyboard mouse with a sword and shield to pretend you’re an elf fighter? That’s what people always said. Oh I play rock band. You could just learn to play a real instrument.
Hold on. I play real instruments. I can sit down with rock band and a couple friends. And for an hour, we pretend we’re a rock band and we jam out to some songs we love. That’s what video games are for. But all you people sit [00:24:00] there and play pro football sports games. Why don’t you go learn to play real pro football?
Or NASCAR. You’re racing NASCAR? Go buy a car and really race NASCAR. I’ll, I’m going to transform myself into an elf with a shield and I’m going to hunt dragons. That’s I always told people, I’m like, look, it takes years to get good at rock band. If I’m having a party with friends, I can play 10 songs right now and have the fantasy.
That’s what video games are for,
Alan: I really do see that, but I think that not everybody is able to distinguish between being good at the game and being good at the real world. I’m watching the Olympics. I’m watching the hell out of the Olympics, and I know that there are people that are really good at.
Skateboard games, but they couldn’t skate to save their life, right? And it is cool that they get that thrill and capability of being able to do gravity defying stunts and really be agile and all that kind of stuff. And yet I, I always think I like being a participant instead of a spectator.
And there’s all kinds of things that now that makes the virtual experience. That people mistake it for what it’s [00:25:00] really like to go play golf to go, shooting deer or whatever else. Maybe not. Maybe I think that people I know that people have problems distinguishing between fiction and reality in a lot of ways.
Just
Stephen: look at our politics, though, I have heard many times, though, people say, you know what? When I was younger, I played rock band with my friends and I really got into it. So I learned to play. It really did learn to play guitar.
Alan: I did. That was a stepping stone instead of a stop. Yeah.
Stephen: Instead of, being that you shouldn’t buy that game.
You just learned it. There are some people that will never want to play music. This is the fantasy. It’s the same as when I drive in NASCAR races on my Xbox,
Alan: so it’s funny. I think we might not have talked about this before. The first time that I saw behaviors in real life that mimicked video games, I knew what it was.
It was like, Oh, my God, it crossed over. Have you ever seen where a guy is he breaks free in a football game and is running towards the end zone. But he doesn’t cross the goal line. He runs along the goal line to [00:26:00] burn some time off that straight out of Madden and other games like that. And I laugh about this all the time.
Nowadays, when people don’t say, I’m in a lane in the road, and if I want to go slower, I go to the right. If I want to go faster, I go to the left. Now, every lane is equal because that’s how it is in many racing games. And if I’m in the middle lane, I really still have to I’ve had to discipline myself to not have expectations about the right hand lane that I check it now instead of I know that I’m going this speed and anybody who’s in the right handling should be going slower than me so I can just move over.
No, I regularly am surprised by people moving up into my rearview mirror, and often zooming past me, and I keep thinking I’m one of these days. I don’t think I’m a bad driver, but I’ve had to learn after that happened a hundred times, a thousand times, there’s a shift. And I think it’s a generational shift in the people that have expectations about how the road works because they play games and they bring that right into real life with them.
Stephen: [00:27:00] Yeah.
Alan: Oh
Stephen: or the people that it’s 70 and they’re in the left hand lane doing 65 and refuse to move no matter what.
Alan: I don’t think it’s a video game thing. That’s just a I don’t break the law. I’m going to go the speed limit and that’s it. And they don’t have a sense of the other way to do it is to be.
In line with what everybody else is doing, because it’s everybody is going the same speed instead of people weaving in and out because some people are slow and some people.
Stephen: But if you’re going under the speed limit, get out of the left hand lane. Simple.
Okay, so we got other stuff but I have a couple fun toys I’ve gotten recently one really cool one.
We live out in the country. Storms happen at least once, maybe twice a year, we lose electricity. Usually it’s a very short time, not a big deal. Every three or four years, we lose electricity during a monsoon. We don’t have our sump pumps running in our basement floods
Alan: all
Stephen: the time. Three, every three or four years, almost like clockwork.
Alan: Okay.
Stephen: So I said, before I said I should get like a [00:28:00] generator. That I can run those things. Okay. And I’m like, yeah, but I hate having one of those big gas generators, so I’ve always said, you know what, I’d love to have a generator so I can watch movies up in the forest, get the projector, get the screen.
We all sit around the campfire,
Alan: battery powered or solar powered or something.
Stephen: Yes. And, but then what finally kicked me over was I said, you know what? There’s some things I’d like to do at my author table. When I set up at book events and I’m selling my book, I want to have a TV that shows the video game stuff.
I’d like to, I have the TV and like really be working on something and people watching being worked on, but you’re going to have electricity.
Alan: A hundred dollar hookup that they’re going to ask you in case you want electricity at a boot.
Stephen: Yeah, exactly. So I said, okay, you know what? I know there’s other generators out there that are not.
Gas powered. Let me see. And I found one a couple years ago but I needed like the 700 model or up to, to, I’m thinking the [00:29:00] projector, smaller ones will run a small T led TV for an hour and a half, two hours or something, but I also wanted to do the sump pump in the basement. So I didn’t want to get four or five, just get a good one.
And I’m like seven, 800. I’ll think about it. Prime days, they had a sale and I did the choosinator stuff. And I started comparing different company brands. I’m like, why am I like, sold on this one brand because it was the one that got advertised to me. I’m like, no, I need to look.
So I found another one that had just as high a rating from all the people that used it, lots of great comments and stuff. And the 300 model was on sale for 230 bucks. And I’m looking at it and I’m like. This looks like it would handle everything I need.
Alan: Pull the trigger. So I
Stephen: got it and it’s, I should have brought it, but it’s like this big.
That’s it. It’s just a small little, it’s a, like two shoe boxes. I tried it on the sump pump and I tr it charged up in less than an hour. It was [00:30:00] at 40%. So it did this last 60 and less than an hour, picked it up to the sump pump and poured some water in there. It went three times before it dropped down to 99 percent charge.
I’m going to test it. Obviously, if it does the sump pump, it should do an led TV, but I’m going to get like a demo loop, my Raspberry Pi and led TV and see how long it runs on there. How much does it take after an hour and start getting the numbers? So I know
Alan: not always obvious what the power drain is.
It’s a very different thing. Sometimes they’re dirty. They put out a lot of EMI, but also sometimes they just, Wow. Why is it taking so much amperage in a way that I would never have expected the drain,
Stephen: and I know people are like you could do the calculations and run the math and get the numbers.
I’m like, you’re correct. But now I have to look that up because I don’t know all those electric calculations by mine. And I have to look up the tech specs for the TV and the tech specs for the Raspberry Pi and plug those in. And I’m like, you know what? I can sit here working. I can just turn it on and say, Oh, it’s been an hour.
[00:31:00] Oh, now I got the percentage for an hour. That’s just as easy.
Alan: I’ll tell you, it’s the peace of mind thing. You know what I mean? Now, you know that you’re some pump. You’re not going to ever have to worry about the flooded basement again. That’s worth 30 bucks. That’s fantastic.
Stephen: Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Alan: Do you remember?
Stephen: Echo flow.
Alan: Echo flow. Okay.
Stephen: Yeah. So I’m going to play with it. And the cool thing is like at my tables. Or if we’re out selling soap somewhere, we can have a TV running like on a loop with videos and slideshows and stuff. It’s a good attractor to the table. Plus then we still have room to plug our phones in to charge them while sitting there.
I’m like, it’s got to the time I’m going to use it plenty. It’s one of those things that’s going to be worth the money for the next 10 years.
Alan: Exactly. It’s funny. Bye. Oh,
Stephen: no, I was going to say, and you can do solar power, but you have to buy the solar panels separate. It shows you how to hook them up.
And it, it doesn’t like charge like that. It’s really like a day and a half thing [00:32:00] to charge. It’s really just to give an emergency phone if you need it in a couple hours.
Alan: Got it. It’s my needs are different. You know what I mean? I don’t know that I’m going to shows. When I was doing presentations all the time, I never had to worry about power, but I regularly had to have every adapter I might need.
I started carrying my own projector because there was just enough time that things were not correct. And but that’s, I really liked getting to where I was independent. And oftentimes It’s funny. You don’t intend to be the guy that saves the day, but if you’re the one that everybody knows has every adapter, when they show up and they don’t have it, find Al and any number of times I gave, the right HDMI to whatever adapter and things like that.
Probably we’re going to get a, and I think it generac is the brand that Costco recommend. We really would like it to be like that. We have a whole house power without fail. And I think it’s yes. Powered. But it’s 1 of those things you can just set it up so that it’s automatic kick over and stuff like that.
And if all I have to do, that is go fill my little [00:33:00] gas can every once in a while. I don’t think that there’s any. Maintenance to it, and it’s, whatever the rating is for a whole house. I don’t need to do a lot of research. It’s just going to be 1 of those things that. Okay. That’s the next thing to make sure that on a really hot day or really cold day.
We can just stay brought into our house and be safe. The elements, yeah.
Stephen: We, this won’t run heaters it may run it for a little while, but not if it’s like a three day blizzard, I realized there’s some limitations with that. I wasn’t looking for a whole house thing
Alan: bring in and putting it under the table at a show and knowing that you really you’ll be the one guy with power and everybody will be like, how’d you get that going well.
And then you can go off your technical expertise by I expect it out. And I don’t want to do this and just things moving at your table, instead of just people with static books and talking, you’ll attract a certain amount of attention. That’s,
Stephen: The hope and we’ll see what happens. So it’s, it was like, It’s not really something you play with.
It’s not like I’m going to do things with it, but I was [00:34:00] like anticipating it. And I’m like, Oh, cool. Let’s like, check it all out and let’s plug it into some things. And then it’s okay, it works. Set it aside. Let’s go.
Alan: I honestly, this never before have I on prime day or black Friday or anything done so much shopping for all those little niggling things.
And I said, I should get that one day. And for whatever reason, the combination of seven and 15 and 30 things, Oh, I got a dozen and we’ve already like we use the little it’s a strainer that you don’t pour water out of a pot into you actually clip it onto your pot and then just tilt the plot and whatever, soft silicon and like it just works three bucks or whatever it was and all kinds of other things like maybe I’ve already gone over this.
We saw on the baking show a masher cutter, where it’s not only for mashed potatoes and actually if you’re doing ground beef, you want to get it to a certain level. Granularity and this thing is and you’re done instead of doing with a spoon and trying to cut the big pieces and then they bop out of the way because you didn’t get right on the edge.
It’s just, there’s so [00:35:00] many things that are little quality of life things and for 7, so all kinds of things that I got this year that are like that, that Wow, I, and I’m sure it’s going to be how did I live without this? Why did I not buy this when I first learned about it?
I waited for it to come down from 20 to seven, but then I didn’t have this thing for five years. I’m not, sometimes I’m foolishly cheap about trying to get a bargain, waiting for the price to come down, waiting for just the right, I thought it was five blades instead of four. And then you wait five years for someone to make an OXO that has that.
I. I’m getting to that point now, maybe because, as you don’t have 40 years ahead of you, you have. When you’re 30, you start thinking if I’m going to get it, I want it now so that I get all the use that I possibly can before I gag,
Stephen: speaking of getting things and set your 7 album price there is a new anniversary edition of pyromaniacs 40 years old this year, and it’s got unreleased tracks and cuts.
And I’m like, ah, damn it. How many versions of these albums do I need? [00:36:00]
Alan: I keep getting terribly tempted by. In the prog world, Steve Wilson, the guy from Porcupine Tree, regularly redoes, remixes albums where they sound so much better. He really knows what he’s doing. He works with the original artist. So it’s not a crapped up version.
It’s wow, if I would have had the technology at a time, that’s what I would have done to get the separation and the stereoscoping and stuff like that. And that every single Tal album from the very first to two broadsword and a beast the broadsword and the beast. has now been done that way and they’re all like 40 bucks but you really get four albums and one of them is a dvd from a live concert of that album near tour and lots of liner notes where they talk to ian anderson about you know who was in the band then and what were you all thinking and what was your high points and low points and so i don’t know I really, and what I’m worried about now is those have come out like every year or two years, maybe on the anniversaries, like you’re saying the 40th anniversary, the 50th anniversary, [00:37:00] but they don’t come out with, there’s 100, 000 copies out there.
And whenever I want to get what I can go get it, I worry about that. Now, if I even try to find some of them, all the tall heads have snatched them up and I am going to be no, I don’t get it for 40 bucks. Now I get it for 100 if someone sells it as a collector’s item. So I didn’t get on that train because I am an old head.
That kind of money, six times what I usually spend on a CD for this thing. And yet if they’re going to do it, I like what, it’s not just the album that it was plus one or two unreleased cuts and haha, we made you pay money again. I love it where they really do it as a celebratory. It’s got a libretto, it’s got the whole box and it’s got a special little tall doll in there or something.
You know what I mean? It’s cool that they’re. They’re taking the time to really celebrate it as an anniversary thing. And that might be how I’m tempted.
Stephen: Here’s something that existed for a blip and has pretty much changed and gone away. When was the last time you took the time to watch all the special stuff that came on a DVD or Blu ray?
[00:38:00] Because we’re all streaming. They don’t have that as much anymore. There’s a few, but.
Alan: I have absolutely noticed that. When Early on, Netflix only had the thing to watch. It would be like, sometimes maybe the artist had said, Hey, I have to make sure that you make available also what was the extras on the DVD, but that stopped being available a lot.
Nowadays, I really miss that because I used to have fantastic, like anything from criterion had great interviews with the director, the stars the people that put this thing together and really told you about. Here’s the whole background about Chinatown. Here’s the whole deal about Citizen Kane for that matter.
And I learned a ton and they weren’t all great. There were sometimes people really weren’t good speakers or that. This is funny. They used to have from the Harry Potter movies, they’d have three or four of those kids that were for each of the movies and sorry, they just, they didn’t have enough life experience.
So they were like, Oh, this is a really cool part. Watch this. And said tell me [00:39:00] more, tell me about what was going on with you or tell me about how they, I don’t know, what was it like working with Chris Columbus and things like that. And so quality can occasionally be uneven, but I remember someone loaned me their Lord of the Rings 17.
Oh, that’s such fantastic. Not only did they have the each of the three hour movies, but they had. Here’s how the armorers created all those weapons. And all kinds of cool background stuff. And I must admit how he was not as geeky as I was when I started not only watching, she doesn’t really care for the movies that much because she thinks too much marching, too much stuff that’s going on in between the climactic story arc elements and stuff like that.
But having said that some of those things, when they went into here’s, we really tried to figure out. What Okian was reading and doing and thinking while he was writing these things. So they talked about his influences and that he was part of the Inklings and I just learned so much. You know what I mean?
They really made it scholarly. They really did their research [00:40:00] and it wasn’t just fanboy stuff. It was cinematically correct. And I love that was probably the one that I. Wow. I watched nine hours of movies and then I watched like another 20 hours of all the other things. And yet it was cool.
It was okay to really appreciate the crap that went into the making of here’s how we had 10, 000 creatures fighting. Hence versus, anyway, it, I love that.
Stephen: Voodoo still does offer extras and bonuses. If you buy a movie, a streaming movie through Voodoo.
Alan: Okay.
Stephen: If it’s available. Cool.
Alan: Yeah, one of the reasons I think I mentioned, blockbuster is gone except for one store left.
No, I
Stephen: think it actually closed up in Alaska or Wisconsin or something, right? Portland
Alan: or something the, when Netflix went away, DVD wise, that’s where you really, if you got the disc, you got those kinds of things sometimes. But there’s a place called, why can’t I remember? Is that Scarecrow?
If I remember it, I think it is out of either Seattle or Portland. [00:41:00] And you can still get tons of discs and they really will send you the whole, clamshell package of it’s got the extra disc and it’s got all the things in there. And I don’t make use of it enough. But for some things like, I don’t know if I’m going to watch The Godfather.
I really want to see the commentary by. Scorsese or by Puzo or something like that. It, there’s something that’s, I want the whole experience, when I watched the X Files, I watched them all in a row by renting them from Netflix and they almost always had, maybe three or four episodes per disc.
And they, and out of a set of four of those, the last one was Chris Carter talking all about. Here’s what went on with each of these episodes and how they built the mythology and guest stars they had and stuff and he’s really a bad speaker, by the way, but the information that he was putting out was really great.
He
And really seems to not have a. He has a disconnect between what he’s going to say next and it coming out and the people that do and all the time, [00:42:00] they, someone should have taken him aside and say, why don’t you write this, but then let like your assistant director say it.
Stephen: If Scarecrow was smart, they would have snatched up Redbox’s inventory when Redbox.
Alan: That’s a frame in this. With all that inventory, I hope it just doesn’t go away, go into a landfill, go into, just even collector’s hands, but the trash heap, because you have all kinds of things. We talked about this a couple episodes ago.
One of the reasons that I like having atoms as well as bits is because I really want to be one of the people that when they’re looking for, Hey, there used to be comic books, not only books with Doc Savage in there. It’s You mean like the ones that I have of all of them love and they’ll just be so nice to be the guy in the Omega man who hold up in a library and saved the knowledge of the world.
That is fortress. Maybe I’ll be that guy, we’ll see. Speaking of, did you go see Deadpool yet? Yes, we went on Sunday. [00:43:00] And I’ll, a little bit of what you commented about with Star Wars. I’ve seen, I didn’t read anything about it beforehand, but I’ve seen since then all kinds of criticism.
And what movie are they watching? I have
Stephen: no idea.
Alan: It broke the fourth wall in all the right places. It poked fun at all the people who try to make too much money off of movies. Here too much about the mythology that like you can’t suspend your disbelief just to make this entertaining It was really canny in how it mocked all the right things while still being a solid action adventure Superhero movie it made so much fun of the multiverse.
Oh that you know what? That was supposed to be Like the next big thing, but it can also be the destruction of now there’s no continuity. Now all bets are off. You can just say, how about an evil version of Howard the Duck? Why the fuck would he, they, He’s going to say it.
He’s going to say
Stephen: it. He’s going to say it. Avengers. Flame on. What? What? That I was,
Alan: spoiler alert folks. Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen: If you don’t realize too bad.
Alan: [00:44:00] Honestly they just, that they really. The fact that some people have played more than one character in the MCU they let you get they, they are great at the para prosdokian, the garden path thing where they lead you just as far as it takes and then do that left turn that totally throws you.
Yeah really well done. Until you’re 90. Two of them is good. Y’all just. I don’t know. They’re definitely, as always, people say, they’re not for kids. There’s all kinds of, not only naughty words, but the concepts that are talked about. Like the insults are so lurid. And yet, they’re hilarious.
They’re, just, if you want something that really is I hope, They’re maybe like Mad Magazine, that they’re a parody of superhero movies. They weren’t meant to be an installment in the MCU and move you towards the next Avengers movie or whatever else it might be, which is worth talking about, because apparently now Doctor Doom is not going to be in a fantastic.
is going to be an Avengers movie, which is okay, because he’s always been a bit, a [00:45:00] larger than life figure in the Marvel universe, at least in the comic books.
Stephen: I’m not sure if I’m pleased with what they’re going to do with the storyline because of their actor choice. I
Alan: think that it’s very cool to see someone that can be both heroic and not I really, I’m curious.
I have. I’ve been so impressed in so many incarnations of Robert Downey Jr. as Sherlock Holmes, as Tony Stark, whoever, all kinds of things, as Dr. Doolittle for that matter. I think it was him, right? I just I trust him enough. I want to see what, it’s just like I’ll see anything that Willem Dafoe is in.
I don’t need to know anything about it except it’s him. He has such craft and such.
Stephen: I just hope they didn’t say, you know what? All of our movies have been failing. It really sucks. Instead of trying to make a good movie with a good characters, let’s just bring back a really popular actor. That’ll save it.
I hope that’s not the thinking.
Alan: I don’t think I, another guy I’ve come to trust. I think I mentioned, I really have a boy crush on Jon Favreau because he really seems to get Star Wars and various other things. And I really liked Kevin [00:46:00] Feige. It’s funny. I think it’s Feige, right? I never hear him sound out loud.
He has done so many good things, many more than he has missteps, or it doesn’t always seem to be a cash. And it doesn’t always seem to be, I’m going to be extending the brand. So I, whatever it is about, Avengers face five, or just growing the MCU. One of the cool things about Deadpool Wolverine was.
All of the cameos and they were just like the ones where there was really hunger where they went into limbo. You know what I mean? They really had a character that could have used a few more stories and had a couple more movies. As
Stephen: Colin pointed out, it was the whole thing was basically saying goodbye to Fox that they were all Fox characters.
That’s right.
Alan: Yeah. I always think of him as Sony. I don’t think of him as Fox zone. I think of him as Sony owned. Is there like a crossover there that I’m not aware of? Because the Spider Man coming into the MCU was very much rather than Sony. But I guess I’ll have to go do a little research to find out whether I’m talking full of shit here.
Stephen: [00:47:00] So the floating zombie head pool, you know who that was voiced by?
Alan: No.
Stephen: You didn’t catch it either. We didn’t catch it till the second time I saw the movie and looked at the credits. Nathan Fillion.
Alan: Oh, that’s funny that he’s got a way to get him in there too. That’s cool. Yeah. Just think you have enough voice, but I guess there just wasn’t enough amongst all the chaos of what was going on.
I picked that out and it’s funny. They It wasn’t just the MCU that they were playing with. It was that’s very Mad Maxian. They learned how to do the dystopian. No, that
Stephen: would be an IP franchise.
Alan: They wouldn’t. And then they did it. And then also they had let’s see the scene with the 100 alternate Deadpools was like, to me, out of the Matrix where 100 Agent Smith show up.
I so the wonderful series that planetary that I like where they had all the alternative versions of various different planetary trios and quartets show up to see the rescue. And it just was what craft to go [00:48:00] into neuro identifiable. And yet that is that’s how they could have been slightly different.
If it would have been male, female, black, white man, dog, I just, I love the fact that They play with it enough to give you like, really interesting, slight variants. And then also, what if they were all protoplasm? What if they were all robots or whatever else it might be?
There’s real creativity and joyful release in, it could be anything. It could be anything. So why not go to the anything part as well as the, oh, that’s him with his hair parted on the other side, so I really, I was entertained and I, everything about it. I just I didn’t have expectations going in except it’s going to be that rougher Marvel version.
I didn’t like that some of the people that they had from the first two movies They really didn’t, they wouldn’t figure into the plot of the movie, they figured into the birthday cake scene, and that was it. So seeing Teenage Negasonic Warhead not go off, or seeing Colossus not be in a fight.
Stephen: But, looking at it, think of how things would have [00:49:00] been if they tried to get those other X Men in it. A lot more. And people would be like, Oh my God, just get rid of them. We only want Wolverine. And they even said, it’s this is what they paid for. Let’s give them what they want two or three times.
So I think that was their balance. They wanted to include them. They didn’t want to say, yeah, you guys are too bad. But they just couldn’t work it into the story and make it the story. Everybody wanted it. And which I think they did.
Alan: Yeah. I liked that they were very self aware of Okay, so finally he’s gonna wear the X Men costume.
He’s all in yellow and blue. It’s like, how scary is that? And then he puts on like the hawk helmet and you’re like that actually is spooky.
Stephen: Colin about Pete, his pants with that costume. He’s like Ryan Reynolds said that took 20 years, and here’s the other thing I was thinking about.
Name another movie was this successful that was this much fun and well written and you want to go see it again That had like pretty much [00:50:00] no bad guy the bad guy was really wishy washy on paper Somebody’s going that’s not a good bad guy, but nobody cared and it worked very well that it wasn’t it’s it was blowing my mind when i’m thinking about it because i’m like this movie broke my heart All those story conventions that they would say, you have to have, you have to have that big villain.
You have to have that conflict and stuff. It was very minor conflict.
Alan: Yeah I really did like that. If anything, one of the good innovations of the TVA, the time variance authority is. How it’s just this horrible faceless bureaucracy that really does have the ability to erase people from reality.
And so everything they’ve had in Loki and then were they in the Wanda series? I think so. Like them coming into the whole Kang thing. It was that there really would be people that’s their job. It’s just to be like, Stamping papers, but it has the weight of as if Galactus had visited your world, they really can alter [00:51:00] reality, right?
And I that maybe that’s one of the villains is that level of people that Nope, I got a process. I got a protocol. I’m going to follow up. I’m going to follow no matter what. No matter how you try to explain yourself, no matter that you might be a hero, but not in this timeline, we need you gone from this time.
Stephen: I loved him at the end. And if you haven’t seen it, yeah, it’s got a little bit of a spoiler, but not a lot. He’s yeah, they were heroes. I, I tried not to, I tried not to let them go, but they had to do it. And then you hear, yeah, Bob, I’ve been laughing so hard because that was so good.
Alan: The fact that they even like the. Wolverine in Logan had a really good heroic ending and so forth. And then they found a way to alter that retcon it without being just, it wasn’t just disregarded. It was. Okay, there really is a reason for that not to have been the end, and also that they had a couple of false starts of him like digging up the corpse
Stephen: montage [00:52:00] scene.
And I must say that Logan movie is one of the most powerful superhero movies I’ve told people look, if you don’t like superhero movies, Logan’s the one to go see because it’s
Alan: not about that. Yes. It’s about family. It’s about what legacy do you leave? How do you take care of children? How do you take care of your phones?
And it was
Stephen: so good to see X 23 again. I thought they screwed up by not making an X 23 movie right after Logan, which was still littler. And, not that she’s old, she’s young, but, somewhere in between then and now they should have had a Laura movie. And I would have got, I’ve been like, I’m there, immediately.
Same thing. I said,
Alan: why a crossover, same thing
Stephen: with the little princess Leah from OB one, they should use her before she’s, later teens and, that transition
Alan: back into movie continuity, aging out of the program of that opportunity
Stephen: and, keep Ellen McGregor in it because.
I, I will watch anything that man does. He’s fantastic. And [00:53:00] Hayden Christensen, you know anyone that wants to dis on Christiansen? , he only said the lines he was given in the movie, let’s say that. But he was so good in Asoka, and those scenes in Asoka were so good. I loved him.
Alan: Did you have this experience, by the way, they have previews of course, before every movie now 20 minutes worth of previews and advertisements, but we had all horror movie stuff.
And did they really think that Deadpool Wolverine is a horror movie or maybe because it’s an R that you get to have the red bar that says this has been approved for with this film, right? I’m trying. It was like I was. Are there no more hero movies being made that they could have made an allusion to that?
Hey, coming soon is Iron Man 5 or whatever else it might be. It, I was surprised, the most I’ve been in a long time, by what they thought were companions to this kind of movie. It really was darker than I ever would have thought. We saw a
Stephen: Captain America 4 trailer. Have you seen that with Falcon? No, [00:54:00] have not.
Why was that not there?
Alan: Honestly, what the hell is going on? Oh, wow. You need a new movie theater, man. This was at the big, Megaplex down there in Valley View. Yeah. Yeah. This is one of those movies, Colleen and I went to, and a bunch of friends, probably half a dozen of us.
And I might need to go and see it on a Tuesday at two in the afternoon. In the theater, just so I can really Drink it all in, pay attention, all the references they have. I’m sure there’s Easter eggs that I did not see. Oh yeah. There’s
Stephen: websites with a whole list of that stuff down. Yeah. Have you
Alan: seen
Stephen: the Captain America Ford trailer at
Alan: all?
No. Have not. That’s what I’m saying. I and I know that there’s. All kinds of things I need to watch online just a little bit, just to get my appetite up,
Stephen: it’s Falcon, and I know there are some people like that’s stupid. Yeah, I’ve done that because they’re just doing it.
Cause it’s woke and they need the black guy to be, I’m like, dude, this was in the comics like 40 years ago. Shut up.
Alan: Boy, how many posts do we have to make nowadays about so [00:55:00] ignorant and so arrogant in their ignorance that people are fools and the fact that they don’t think education is a good thing.
Learn about it. This isn’t really a spoiler
Stephen: because it’s in the trailer, but Harrison Ford plays Thunderbolt Ross and Thunderbolt Ross history.
Alan: Okay, exactly. Honestly, after I had stopped buying comic books regularly, but started to go to the libraries to catch up, and I got a whole bunch of stuff involving Green Hulk, Gray Hulk, Red Hulk, and I did not catch on as the, spoiler alert, because it’s now 20 years old.
Who that was for a long time, they played it very canny about who would have not only the anger, but once especially to displace the Hulk and have almost like military precision in how he attacks and stuff like that. And then it all made perfect sense, but they were very candy for years about the identity of the Red Hulk.
That was cool when he was doing, like I said, Thunderbolts and stuff like that. And they were, a [00:56:00] whole bunch of that is based on reformed villains coming in, but also never quite knowing who the leader was. And then there was not only the leader, it was other people that were coming in with either.
They want a chance at redemption, or they just want to use this as a vehicle. For being able to do whatever they do that they have a different agenda, okay.
Stephen: Yeah. So look, go look for that. Yeah, there’s, there’s not a lot coming out the last half of the year. There’s a few things, but, it’s not like 2018, 2019 when we were getting a movie every month or 2 movies a month type thing,
Alan: exactly. It’s I I’m looking forward to seeing what else is coming out and maybe it’s all going to get crowded into Christmas or something like that. I’m not sure. I know there’s ebb and flow to the year that they always talk about. There’s a big 4th of July movie. There’s sometimes a big Labor Day weekend movie, but otherwise it’s also don’t they have.
Maybe it’s February that they. Dump a whole bunch of movies in that they don’t know what else to do with, but they put the money into making it and they’re like we want to be able to be up for Oscar consideration. And so let’s put it here. And so once in a while, there’s gems amongst that, but a lot of times [00:57:00] it’s they didn’t know what to do.
I just let’s see. Only lovers left alive. I just had dinner with friends last night and they talked about, it’s a vampire movie where people that have been around for a long time interact with various different historic figures. And so just that, if you were around for a long time, I guess you would know Christopher Marlowe and hear about how much he hated William Shakespeare, that kind of stuff.
So it was just at the Cinematheque and I missed it. For whatever reason, I keep getting on that places mailing list and then I get dropped off and then I read a review like in the scene that says, oh, that was a great movie over this last weekend. It’s gone now. I just, I can’t tell you how many times that’s happened to where it almost has me like.
I’m just not going to go. I’m just not going to try to get better at this because I keep on trying to do it and they thwart me somehow so that you guys can just go to hell. But having said that, there’s all kinds of interesting smaller run movies that’s apparently it’s a great place to see a show.
They have a new [00:58:00] home. That’s a whole beautiful theater and Institute of Arts or something like that. And so I will look for the world of superheroes becoming so popular and maybe of horror. There’s all kinds of like. Crossovers, and you don’t know it’s a horror movie until you realize this isn’t a coming of age story.
It’s the little boy’s girlfriend is a vampire and things like that. And I like when they’re very canny about that. I think we mentioned we talked about the cabin in the woods. Where it’s wow, they’re throwing everything in the kitchen sink in here. And I saw so many great Creature Features and Creamy Yellow Theater, John.
It’s I recognize all those things. When have you ever seen them in one place? Just like Ready Player One and other celebrations of video games in general.
Stephen: Yeah. And Cabin in the Woods is interesting because it’s a parody without being a comedy. It’s a, it’s an actual horror parody of horror movies.
Yeah.
Alan: Exactly. I honestly, the premise, very smart. You know what I [00:59:00] mean? That if there really are Elder Gods and they’re hungry and the way to stop them is to occasionally throw them a bone, that being a human sacrifice. And again, I hate. I, if you haven’t seen that movie, I should have said spoiler alert and maybe if you haven’t seen it, you’re not going to because you haven’t seen it in 20 years.
And yet that’s such a great surprise. There are some movies that have such a great surprise that I don’t want to count on that. You haven’t seen it purposefully, but it just might be happenstance that you were busy when it came out and then it went off and you want to mean. So there’s all kinds of you.
Stephen: I’ll title the episode spoiler alert. If you haven’t seen any of these things, go see them before listening.
Alan: Honestly, we really might need to start putting that in. Every time we talk about an M. Night Shyamalan movie, it’s like many of them have a good twist. And I don’t want to give it away because I want people to have the joyful experience of, oh, that’s what’s really going on.
You know what I mean? That it’s really a good part of the movie. And maybe Mystery movies, of course, never want to tell [01:00:00] that when we went to see the mousetrap in London at the end of the show, they really please don’t tell anybody the ending. The reason that this has been so successful for 70, 80 years is because people have.
hung together about making this a good experience for everybody to come. And I had no idea what we were going to see, what the solution to the mystery was, if you will. Now I want to go see it. Yeah, honestly, it’s really good. Especially oftentimes, while we’re watching, have I mentioned this?
Colleen gets We’ll be a third of the way through a movie, and I’ll be like, I think it’s that guy. And like, how do you know that? It’s I’m not sure, but that doesn’t jive with what we know so far. And I know that movie makers of this kind of movie like to throw something in there that if you’re really watching close, you’d be like what’s going on?
And so she has any number of times that I, it’s hard to fool me. And I really like being surprised. I really like, I don’t necessarily. Sit down and try to figure it out. I don’t take notes. [01:01:00] I’m not trying to do it, but you know how it is. If you see many movies, you can see when the craft of the movie is such that they’re trying to put a red herring and mislead you with this guy, but really who wasn’t on the scene that could have done something in the background while nobody else was watching.
And somebody’s in there right now, like glass onions. It could be any number of six people because they all had pseudo alibis and Oh
Stephen: me and my buddy, Eric, back in college my mother and sister went and saw presumed innocent with Harrison Ford based on a Scott Terrell book. And they said, Oh, my God, it was so good.
The twists and we couldn’t figure it out. Blah, blah, blah. You guys got to see it. And they took us to see it. And we’re like 5, 10 minutes into the movie and me and Eric are go. It’s the wife, isn’t it? Spoiler alert, anybody, but and they both looked at us like why do you think it’s the wife? I’m like it just makes sense.
So we hate you guys, I guess it’s the life.
Alan: This is very funny. Movies don’t necessarily get you laid. And yet I know I went to the very first M. Night Shyamalan, Sixth Sense. And [01:02:00] everybody gets it by the end and I think I was maybe halfway through there was a particular scene where I really did lean over and I go, and she really was like what are you talking about?
Hadn’t seen any of that coming. And then when it proved to be true, she was really impressed with the old Balthus noggin that somehow impressed her. It was actually, if I remember right, it didn’t, I just laughed about Gizzly, we, we were, there was friends and it didn’t turn to anything like that, but once in a while, it’s very fun to that’s a place that you have competence that you know story so well that you understand movie tropes and stuff like that you can get ahead of the plot. I’m very pleased. I think I mentioned this to you as well. Colleen is a little bit weirded out now where we watch certain, series and stuff like that.
And I’ll start saying the next line of dialogue before and it’s really close to what I say and she’s Have you seen this before? And after a while, she stopped saying that because she knows I haven’t. It really is first run nest. I’ve [01:03:00] filmed the series, but it’s just if I was the guy in the writer’s room that was saying, how would I use the right Transcribed by https: otter.
ai gravity of the words. And that’s how I would write it. And I’m so much not a screenwriter. I don’t, I haven’t ever studied that. But you just watch enough of them. And you’re like I’d make it serious, but funny. I’d say it in that guy’s voice. And I must have done it. Dozens of times now, the next bit of, so maybe I just am, how your mind works.
I talked about this. I’m waiting for the world to catch up a lot of the time, but now it’s actually coming in handy where I can show off to my wife. It’s nice to get the wife to think that you’re special. You know what I mean? So I
Stephen: got to get rolling.
Alan: Okay. That’s very good. We’ll see you in a week. I think that we’re we have A trip the third week of August and then a whole bunch of stuff in September.
And it really might be that even if we have that, if I can coordinate it that I’m on the boat and I have wifi and I can do a [01:04:00] wonderful relentless geek from , then that’s what we’ll do. It’d be very nice to even if it’s like there’s my point.
Stephen: Yeah. Do five minutes, hey, out, give us an update. Cool.
Exactly. Exactly. Don’t take away from the trip.
Alan: I’ll be calling Joss at the is of surfing, during the Olympics and stuff like that. Yeah. Okay. Alright man. Take care Stephen. Always a pleasure. Bye-Bye.
You have been listening to the Relentless Geekery Podcast. Come back next week and join Alan and Stephen’s conversation on Geek Topics of the Week.
