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The podcast transcript features a discussion between two self-proclaimed ‘high functioning geeks’ who cover a broad array of topics. They discuss switching from Zoom to Zencaster for better recording features, managing unpredictable tech issues at work, and the stress of unrealistic demands from supervisors. They also delve into the effects of media and games on behavior, referencing shows like ‘The Purge’ and ‘Invincible.’ Additionally, one host shares his experience with a new Steam Deck, highlighting its pros and cons for gaming on the go. The hosts wrap up with personal news about family moves and observations regarding aging parents. The episode concludes with an announcement about an improvisational storytelling event.
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Transcript
Stephen: [00:00:00] I’d edit, but one of the things Zencaster does that zoom does not it. I have other tools now to do different things and 80 percent of listeners and website visitors, blah, blah, blah, are using mobile. 80 to 85 percent. So that’s little telephone screens or a tablet, which is totally different than you and I on our big widescreen monitors.
Alan: exactly. How sad, in other words, you think that to catch the full majesty of what we’re doing, you’d want to have the biggest screen possible, but,
Stephen: I come from a 640 by 480 day. So I used to have a, my Commodore as a 13 inch little TV. But we can still record with Zencaster, but what it does differently is it records our tracks separately, including video. It will. It’ll sync them and you can download one file or you can download them separate.
So one of [00:01:00] the I switched over to zoom with all this because other stuff I was doing use zoom, so it didn’t make sense to me to have zoom and this, and 50 things, but with the new tools, with the script that allows me to manipulate. And I can put our stuff on top of each other or side by side if I want and it’ll do automatic things like focus on who’s talking and, stuff.
So I wanted to try Zencaster to see, cause our biggest problem was for some reason we kept getting stutters on it back, a couple of years ago for
Alan: exactly, okay. I’m glad that, as opposed to being one of the many flash in the pan type things that tried to compete with Zoom or way long ago with Microsoft Office, not Office, Meetings or whatever else it might be, it’s cool they’ve continued to develop and found their niche like supporting especially phones and stuff like that so that just that us being able to get out as much as possible and eliminating the problems that we were finding out.
You think it’s not only about adding features, it’s also about [00:02:00] eliminating bugs and, getting more stable and getting optimized faster for all the various and different environments. And if it turns out that this is what enables us to go to multiple platforms with one, two, three clicks, not you having to do a whole bunch of stuff, that’s fantastic.
Okay.
Stephen: So here, I got one for you that you’re going to love. I had now have a new dictate that I need to give a report every Friday by three o’clock to our main CEO and basically give him an update for the following week. On what what tech stuff, what website stuff, that type of thing could have a problem that we might have problems with next week.
Alan: Okay, I guess that’s good for him to be able to plan resources to add.
Stephen: My question was
Alan: But
Stephen: like, my question was, okay, can you tell me when you’re going to have an automobile accident? Can you tell me [00:03:00] when a gas prices are going to go up 3 cents or down 3 cents? These are sometimes things we can’t predict. He wants to know what plugins. are going to cause a problem next week or what plugins could fail or what web pages may have a problem and have an error on it next week.
Alan: I guess that’s the way to give him the report is to say what changed this week and anything that changed, even though we beta tested it, stress tested it, got to, it didn’t get to production, just throwing it out there. But everything that changed could be, hey, and
Stephen: Yeah. I’m looking at, I’m just like, I can’t even answer that. And if I have to explain why I can’t answer that, we’ve got problems. I’m supposed to let them know what plugins. From the hundred different developers that made all the plugins we use on 12 different sites, which ones might get updated and might have a conflict with the other hundred plugin?
I have no idea. Neither do they actually. It’s just, [00:04:00] it’s an unanswerable question. I cannot give you a satisfactory report. Of what problems we will have next week. Oh, magic eight ball. Let me ask you,
Alan: it’s funny. I would take a run at it in the way we just talked about what changed, but also, is this going to be a way that you get, if none of that happens, then yay, he’s happy. If something happens and you called it, then yay, you get accolades, but what’s really going to happen is, something’s going to break that you didn’t see coming, and he’s going to go, why didn’t you see that?
I tried to explain that I do not have a crystal ball, and that these things have not two or three moving parts, but a hundred, and it’s really hard not only to judge each of the individual parts, but the mass of it working together. Honestly, when I was doing things for projects, I was pretty good at predicting how long it would take to get it done.
Is it easy, medium, hard? Is it, simple or complex? How many other pieces of the system does it touch? I was, I got pretty good at it so that I was willing to bid. Now my money, my, [00:05:00] however much I’m making is on the line and didn’t have many conflicts on that basis. But I also had other people that no matter what, that’ll take a week.
There’s a difference between 16, 24, 40 hours, et cetera, et cetera. Can you drill down and tell me about that? And also what people start doing is, I think it’ll take two weeks. We don’t have two weeks. You gotta do it in a week. Okay, I’ll give it a try. They just grab numbers out of the air. Whereas I actually had, as usual, a little spreadsheet that tried to say all the things I just talked about.
And then when I became More project management and less coder on certain things that that’s the kind of things that you have to take a run at it. And what you hope to do is build in that feedback loop that says, that Eric guy, he’s never right. And so I have to take all of his estimates with a grain of salt, maybe even double them.
But if we don’t have a double, then I have to say, who would I put on it to bail him out? Or how do I move Eric to something that he’s better at? You know what I mean? I guess it’s a different, [00:06:00] it’s unfortunate that you’re. being asked to screw yourself instead of, because when I would go to my boss and say, and it wasn’t week by week, it was like quarterly.
Here’s what we learned from this last project. And then I had enough numbers. But as an anecdote is what it is, but the plural of anecdote is not data unless you give it context, and two points don’t determine a line, three points don’t determine a trend. You have to have statistically enough information to say, where are we really inaccurate here, and how can we get ahead of that so we can predict it better?
And if they want accurate predictions just out of the air, I, being the devil, would sometimes go back and say, here’s how it broke, and here’s how nothing we could have done could have predicted it. And really, we looked at this, and this was black swan, whatever the terms you want to use that are what make it unpredictable, or what make it that it explodes.
It doesn’t just go on a nice linear path that if it breaks, it’ll be take twice as long. Some things go [00:07:00] asymptotic really quickly. As you peel the onion, as you find out, Wow, that’s deeper in the system than I expected, so even if we fix it, we have to test the bejesus out of it because it impacts so many other things.
All of that. Oh, boy. Okay.
Stephen: that they’re setting me up to say you’re not doing a good job, but I am also fearful that they don’t even understand what they’re asking and why these things break, it’s if you have a machine says this part will run for a thousand revolutions and I look at it and says, it’s done 950 revolutions we can only do 50 more and then it’s going to break and we might need a new one.
I don’t have anything like that. And I don’t, like I said, I have a hundred plugins on 12 different sites. I don’t know which ones of these is being updated by the developers. I don’t know how those updates are going to work with the other 10 plugins on that particular site. I don’t know what everybody else is doing.
We had a problem where some things [00:08:00] disappeared. It turned out like a month ago, somebody was told something. They interpreted it differently and deleted a bunch of stuff, but didn’t remember. Nobody noticed it. It’s where’d this go? Why’d this happen? We can’t let this, slow down. That’s, the big thing, but I’m like, Oh we’ll see how this goes.
Alan: Yeah. It’s, if anything, that process gets its own feedback loop as to we started trying to predict things, and we hit half the time. So is it valuable if we did half the time, but we couldn’t predict which of those half it was? How do we get in front of it so that we could You know what I mean?
Just, I feel, I’m sorry for you because you shared many stories where people don’t really know what’s going on, but they know that they want to push. They know that they want, more for less and in less time and that’s your pre perfect. And now pick two out of the three, because you can’t get all three.
And where are you willing to take on the
Just, I don’t know. Everybody has their stories. The last project that I worked on at Progressive was working on replacing table tool that substituted as [00:09:00] a database in all different kinds of stuff that we had that would just keep important things in memory.
And as I started to uncover where it was, and it was everywhere, and it had stored procedures so that you had to know what code was going on inside of it. And eventually. I started to get, not stonewalled, but foot dragged into, I have six different divisions I need to learn about this from.
I need someone to work with me when we have to fix this, and I need someone just to get to what the estimate of fixing it might be. No one could give me resources to fix it, and every time that I would go with I know that it’s here and here. Do you have someone that can just look at the code, much more familiar with it than I, and tell me, What’s the extent of it?
We’ll get to that when we can, but we’re adding features over here. You know what I mean? And I kept going back to my boss saying this is rife with possibilities of disaster. And in real context, this tool is going away, out of support, not being available from the vendor anymore. We get to keep using it.
They don’t demand its [00:10:00] withdrawal from our systems. But it really is going to be that if anything breaks spectacularly, we’re on our own. We are totally on our own and internally. We don’t have anybody that understands this thing well. I’m becoming that guy from all the investigation that I have to do. It was the time frame by which we knew it was going to go away.
And at Progressive, I don’t, it’s funny, I don’t think I’m seeing anything particularly. Trade secret about progressive compared to anybody else. They had uptime was a main thing for all their website, all their presence, and so much so that it was like everybody’s bonus in the IT department was largely dependent on that.
So keeping things up stable. both in the website thing and in the overnight batch run that still ran on Big Iron and had to be done before the website came up. You had transaction processing, you used old transaction monitors, and as they complexified it, you could see that let’s get done by 2. 30 and don’t worry, we’re going to be up by 6.
- And then it becomes 3. 30, 5. 30, [00:11:00] and you’re like, if anything goes wrong, our website’s not going to come up correctly. And that absolutely costs everybody their bonus. Who’s not giving me resources when this is? I’m not making this up. The risk management we’re trying to do here is because this is getting harder.
This it was very frustrating to be like, I have done many projects where I came in to fix things where the people had broken it, or I don’t know what, I don’t seek to be the hero, but I was often the person that could understand it well enough to give us a plan on how to go forward. And I just couldn’t even get to the planning phase well. And don’t worry you’ll code something up. What we really need is someone that understands the entire Windows Foundation classes. So that when we have to fix this and how it ties into Oracle and UDB and SQL Server, the databases that we made use of, like I don’t know that in here, as well as other people that we could call on, but you’re not even giving me Eight [00:12:00] hours, four hours of their time.
I’m telling you that I think things are going to break badly. And I guess you’ll get rid of me. I guess it’ll be you get that Balthus guy out of here and get somebody who really knows what they’re
Stephen: Yes.
Alan: you’re going to put the next guy in exactly the same fucking eight ball position behind the eight ball, I should say, but
Stephen: And it’s
Alan: I.
Stephen: We hire the best people, but we have no idea what they do and we don’t understand what they do. And we just push them to go more because this is business and we got to have this done by tomorrow. Even if they say it can’t be done till next week, it doesn’t matter. And then when they don’t do what we want, or if something goes wrong and they can’t snap their fingers and fix it in three seconds they obviously don’t know what they’re doing.
It’s that that, it’s business.
Alan: When we talked about this before, I think I mentioned some of this, this is my big project after I came back from being out from melanoma. I had survived, and back to progressive we go. And the biggest weirdness about it was even after I told people this is the possibility of what’s going to go [00:13:00] wrong and so forth then, after this particular project really being just rife with difficulty, they started to. Interview people in the firm to reclaim their job. They had level one through seven technical people, and the people that had been there for a long time, and they were the ones that, you know, if you’re in a soup making company, and you’re the guy that knows how to adjust all the dials so it’ll come out just right for Campbell’s Chicken Noodle, you don’t get rid of that guy unless he’s trained an apprentice, or unless you’ve got an expert system, or whatever else it might be.
And,
Stephen: That’s a good day. Hey, you, can you train this new guy on exactly what you do so we can fire you?
Alan: We should get rid of you! Exactly! And so not just me, but all my other peer 6s and 7s were getting having to re interview for their job. And I’m like, I just, I can’t believe, and this is how I always refer to it, You’re an insurance company. You’re all about judging risk, and how much is it worth paying to avoid the risk so that the right trade off is there for [00:14:00] the cost of the risk is high.
Don’t you want to do a lot to prevent that? And you are shooting yourself in the foot in every different division by you think that your best guys are what now? Sitting around? Not, they’re not the most current and the most accomplished. And if they’re the guy that takes the call at two in the morning to fix it.
And you get rid of that guy, can’t you just look that little bit into the future and say, what are you going to do?
Stephen: Though, it just makes me feel good that this is only like a corporate level thing. It’s, it makes me feel really good that. People like that are really in charge like our government. They don’t do stuff like that at you know at all So we can run the country.
Alan: We can indeed, you’re like, hey, let’s get rid of all the nuclear power people. Oh, wait, you mean the things that the possibility of a Fukushima three mile island disaster is doubled by you doing that? And then. When they, you must have read about this, right? When they go to try to get some of them back they had stricken them from the system.
They don’t even have contact [00:15:00] information for how to reach them at home. I knew you knew how to reach them at home because they were the guys that were on the red, hot fucking phone in case something starts to blink at Homer’s death.
Stephen: Oh my god, I’m blinking call the guy
Alan: And I don’t know how many horrible lessons we’re going to have to learn
Stephen: How many plane crashes that we had in the last two months
Alan: I Just that. Plane crashes, nuclear meltdowns increases in salmonella attacks, bird flu running rampant, because they just decided expertise doesn’t matter. I want to buy two cheap people in exchange for the one good one, but they don’t know what the one good one does. And we’re going to see it. And what’s going to happen is all the time will be spent not on rehiring them or on getting people better. It’s all going to be about the cover up. No, that’s not what happened. We’ll tell you the story of why this went wrong. It must be Biden’s inheritance. It must be some Democrats DEI hire.
Wrecked this up. They have their stories, as you can see, already [00:16:00] prepared about how to fight a fire. They didn’t know what they were doing. They absolutely were the competent people. But you put a label on them, attack that label, and, I don’t know, this is a sad segue, but it’s just so true that’s exactly what’s happening now.
So who’s going to be the first one to say, you are so wrong, criminally wrong, you’re the one that’s going down for how badly you mishandled
Stephen: But there are people saying that And there’s other people saying, Oh, they’re just lying. Oh, they’re just liberals trying to take control of the government and do that. And so people are saying stuff, but they’re being shouted down and told that they’re don’t listen to them. There’d be, if you’re going to say that you’re out of here.
Alan: Eventually, we’re going to have something happen where somebody important dies, they die in a plane crash, their house gets burnt down, and then maybe they’ll say, oh, we’ve got to do something more than blame throwing, we’ve got to do something more than lie, if we’re really, and, what does my dystopic future say about this?
They’re [00:17:00] already building the rockets to escape the planet, they’re already building the bunkers to hide into when the world bakes from global warming, they think that it isn’t, just the guy who Runs the mine that’s killing people and has the slag pools that if that dam breaks, they’re going to flood the town.
They don’t live in the town. They live way up on the hill, out of harm’s way. And if it turns out that they all turn into flesh eating mutants and then attack their compound, then that’s somehow, they can’t even look ahead and say, if this comes out. They’re not going to fire me. They’re not going to claw back.
They’re going to kill me. And so the first time that someone actually gets dragged out of their house, axes, torches, pitchforks, and, I don’t know who’s going to be the first, what’s going to happen. You know what, I just, there’s going to be somebody like we had with the UnitedHealth executive. I don’t think that was a single thing. I think that more people, I’ve been saying this, not just now, it’s and hey folks, I’m not asking for this to be done. I am not the guy that’s calling for this, but can you believe it hasn’t happened more [00:18:00] often? All these Critters that are out there wrecking things, they still try to go out in public, they still have to go to rallies and social events, and I can’t believe that other people are going to say, I learned his schedule, my wife died because he killed off the program medically, my, whatever, someone’s going to lose a beloved one, and they’re going to say I have nothing left to live for.
Me and all the guns that you’ve allowed to be, ten times as many in the United States as there are people, they’re gonna go visiting.
Is that how we have to run our government? By vigilante justice? By, this guy drove me crazy, so I went crazy and did this terrible thing? We’ll
Stephen: story has been used on. Just about every TV show of some sort or another because we all can relate to it,
Alan: Absolutely. You know what I mean? How sad that we’re in that place and that whatever it is about people that don’t understand risk management, that don’t understand maybe they’re autistic and don’t get that a person will respond [00:19:00] not in a way like a machine, but it really will go wild, go mad in a way that you can’t predict.
If that’s the people you put in charge, you’re just going to have disaster. You’re going to have terrible things happen. And not only do they not get it, they take glee. in what they’re doing. So it’s, they’re not just going to be killed. They’re going to be dragged through the streets. They’re going to be dismembered and it’s put on poles.
Someone’s got to be made. Some many people are going to be made examples of like, how about revolutionary France? How about Bastille day? How about all the things where
Stephen: I’ve heard the The our government is basically saying let them eat cake all over and over again right now,
Alan: It I don’t know how many people were so fooled that now coming to realize, Hey, those egg prices aren’t coming down. Their benefits are getting cut. My grandmother doesn’t get her wheelchair anymore because Medicaid is getting destroyed. Like, how much will that do to save people’s lives? I guess we made a big mistake.
Stephen: beyond that, there’s still so many saying, look at everything they’re doing in [00:20:00] the government. That’s great. They’re getting rid of all the corruption. They’re getting rid of all the things that just cost money. They’re getting rid of all the programs that all the liberals started that are just slush funds for their own retirement, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And you can’t do anything but look at him like you’re so stupid. I don’t know what to say. What else can you say? Yeah,
Alan: we’ve talked I think about Steve Hofstetter at one time before, a good stand up comic, quite a bright guy, really good at taking hecklers down because he immediately sees what’s wrong with them, what they’re saying that’s really foolish.
He actually had a debate last night with a guy that challenged him to one And the difference in their responses, what facts they brought to bear and what reasoning they brought to bear was amazingly startlingly bad at the expense of the guy who challenged him to a debate. He’s got this set of crazy websites, all the conspiracy theory nut stuff, all the fact picking, cherry picking of facts that you might want to do.
And Steve was very [00:21:00] good at pointing out that’s not true because of this, or I’d have to see That one data point from 9, 2016 that doesn’t apply today anymore and no matter how many times he pointed those things out, the guy would make sometimes a concession as to maybe I haven’t thought about, maybe I don’t have complete data, but when it got to the summation part, he had not budged an inch.
He still believed as he did about you name the conspiracy theory, you name the who’s to blame for all these things. And I have hope that if enough facts come out, that it really will be somebody will change their mind. I don’t really have hope. I think it’s going to take vigilante justice from the smart people that say, Remember how we said that you would all die of bird flu?
You don’t get the vaccine now because you kept trying to cut it off. And die of stupid. Die of stupid like you should have. You know what I mean? I read recently that A lot of the bullshit, the evil shenanigans that the [00:22:00] Reds have played about, hey, we don’t want federal government, even though that’s where the experts are, and that’s where they’ve come with a good solution for all of us, because you know what?
Bird flu doesn’t stop at the border. It flies right over. It goes right to the next thing. Now they’re talking about We have red and blue states, and the blue states that are responsible for, name the number, but it’s not half, it’s 60, 70, 80 percent of the value of our country, California, Illinois, New York, that they’re going to say, we no longer subsidize all of what you’ve been draining out, because there’s all kinds of, studies don’t matter, statistics don’t matter, absolutely they really do, and Every single red state virtually is net negative in terms of what they contribute to the economy and what they take back out of it with all of their pet things.
And when that tap gets cut off, And they’re not allowed to have you name the benefit that they think is theirs by right. Sadly, because they’re white males, not because they’re competent, not because they’ve contributed to the economy we’re going to see that [00:23:00] maybe somebody will say I’m going to stop voting for the guy that lost me everything.
You know what I mean? He’s not my hero, my champion that’s going in there and getting me stuff, because that’s how I don’t know. Mafia people stayed in power because they kept making sure that in the neighborhood, the trash got picked up, bad city council people slash mafia, I think they’re interchangeable in corrupt cities, that they made sure that their constituents were taken care of at the expense of everybody else, or that they, while they were doing this 10 percent things, they were fleecing everybody of 90 percent and taking it away.
And so maybe there really will be enough times where, and I don’t think it’s going to be a problem. Out of sense, out of reasoning, I think it’s going to be out of boiling over frustration and anger. And they’re just going to have to kill somebody because grandma died. And maybe they’ll go to the state house and say we elected all these people and that seems to be where it happens.
Open up fire, the bomb goes off.
Stephen: led by the nose. That’s, I saw it as a very similar thing. It [00:24:00] was an investigative report. This whatever news company it was Alabama. They went to a local school and it, they’re a red state. It was the teachers and vice principal were, Republican all the way and voted for it.
And they’re like, we’re dependent on these federal programs that they’re cutting. Like 83 percent of the kids are in the poverty level or below.
Alan: Exactly, that’s where they’re getting their school lunches, that’s where they’re getting their bus rides, all of
Stephen: And they’ll keep the principal actually said I didn’t think they’d cut these programs.
Alan: Yes, because we are, as the special yeah
Stephen: so the numbers that this report said, and I don’t have these exact, but it’s general idea. So they’re the five states. That pay the least in the federal programs are all Republican states on average for every dollar they put in, they get 3 back the nine states that pay the most in the federal [00:25:00] programs are all Democratic for every like three to 6 that they put in, they’re only getting one or two back.
So these five states that are red are getting funded by all the blue states. And that is a fact number that they showed on this thing. They showed the numbers of it. Now, of course, I know people, I could tell that to the, Oh they just made those up. Okay.
Alan: I’ll tell you, so what’s going to happen when the states start closing borders? And the border is not on the basis of, oh no, you’re not the right color, it’s on the basis of, I’m going to need to see how you voted last election, and we’re not accepting any more idiots in California, Oregon, Washington, Illinois, New York, the Northeast in general.
You know what I mean? We’re happy to have our working economy and our working civilization here. And you guys just to get to fight over the scraps some more. I, there’s, I know there’s a couple books out there now that we really are already two different nations. That the [00:26:00] divide between the red and the blue is worse, if you will, than it was before the Civil War.
That the propaganda and the disinformation and it so much doesn’t match the reality of what really makes the United States run. And I, again, I so much don’t want this to happen. I don’t advocate any of this and yet I have read enough fiction where one of the more satisfying things is where the villain has a master plan and the hero says, if you do that, it’s going to backfire on you.
Don’t do it because you’re going to be the one that pays the price. He cackles gleefully and goes ahead and indeed just what the hero said was going to happen does and I don’t want every situation in the United States to be that pulp level plot of how the Avenger or Doc Savage tried to tell John Sunlight you really are blinded by your power lust and by your thinking that you are, you’re more, you, name the guy, more of an expert on [00:27:00] hurricanes, more of an expert on healthcare, more of an expert, name the thing that he is absolutely not equipped to talk about decides, hey, I know how to solve that.
Release the water. Release that water that there’s no, in fact, to go back a little bit, at one point the guy on the Hofstadter debate was talking about there’s a way to take that water and have it actually move down the state because it, rivers all interconnect and so forth. And Hofstadter had to say, That’s just not true.
There really aren’t any tributaries or any canals and all it did was flood the fields where it was going. And the only way that it will go is if it evaporates and rain moves over and drops down somewhere else, but there is no interconnectivity. You can look at a map. You can look at the geology, the reality of it.
He couldn’t budge. He’s read something that says, no, don’t worry, it took a while to get there. Because apparently it, trickles. Or it’s connected with the aquifers, and there really might be something about that. Draining this aquifer [00:28:00] doesn’t mean it flows to an, you know what I mean? He really didn’t understand all of what you have to understand.
geologic systems, water flow systems. And so seeing a guy who is obviously not an expert, but he watched a video in two minutes, he became an expert. He read this little thing that is all the bullet points of total utter BS, but now he can’t help but parrot them, repeat them back. And so Ofstedter’s frustration was how many times he said Here’s the expert report, and it doesn’t agree with what you’re saying, but the guy, no one will listen to expertise anymore.
How many things are you going to break, and how many
Stephen: You probably haven’t seen these. And I didn’t intend to until recently. It just yeah, okay. I’m going to watch it. The purge series of movies.
Alan: I watched part of the first one, and I don’t really like torture porn. You know what I mean? That it wasn’t just justice. It was, wow, these are people that have a grudge over nothing, [00:29:00] and yet they’re going to torture the whole family.
Stephen: Absolutely. And that was why I avoided them. I’m like, eh, this isn’t core to me. This is, eh, people run around killing people. Yeah, big deal. But the first one was just the story to get us into what’s going on in the world. There have been five. I’ve watched all five and the television show, and I’ve gotten a much greater respect and appreciation of the movie series watching all of them.
Yes, on the surface, they are people going crazy, running around and killing others. But the underlying message, it’s like we always talk about with comedy and sci fi, how it’s a reflection of society, and it can point things out. This is that same thing done with horror though. And
Alan: Talking about current problems in our country. Talking about how justice doesn’t really work, and that’s why it comes to this.
Stephen: And it’s basically by the end of the five movies and the TV show, it’s coming out that [00:30:00] the people in charge wanted to be powerful and more in charge. And what was stopping them was having to deal with all the low level poor people, as they put it. So they did something that would allow legally allow them to kill off all the poor people by letting them kill each other because throughout the shows it started showing that the rich would pay bounty hunters to just capture people, bring them in so the rich could kill them in a safe environment just for fun and not have to go out on the streets, but all the people going out on the streets and then what the other movies did, what they did really was each movie focused on different people and the problem they were dealing with and how they thought of the purge and how they dealt with it.
So it showed multiple sides and things going on. And that’s
Alan: this is a sequel where it’s a repeat, but actually stretching out what the original premise was. Interesting. Okay.
Stephen: So originally I [00:31:00] like, eh, I don’t care for the movies like that, just like you said, but after I watched them all, I’m like, That wasn’t bad. Yes, there’s a lot of killing and yes, there’s a lot of bloody gory violent killing I will give you that and that’s but If I ever meet jason bloomhouse, i’ll say hey, I respect what you did there.
I see what you were doing It’s your political message. It’s your way of using horror to draw attention to problems and what’s going on
Alan: very interesting. I’ll have to see if I can I don’t know that I can watch them to get the message if I’m flinching, and every time that I watch something that even features guns and explosions or any kind of screaming, Colleen kind of gives me the, why do you watch that?
Stephen: yes, I get it.
Alan: Satisfactory going on there. It’s I could try to say I’m trying to get the message that Blumhouse put together, but it’s also, is that the best way to learn that message? Or is it like, wow, after I got totally revolted, then I put it together. So I’ll have to think
Stephen: way over [00:32:00] the top and some of the stuff that goes on, but again, it maybe it’s doing all of it at once, but I’ve seen some of the same stuff in zombie movies. I’ve seen a lot of the same stuff in old Vietnam war movies. Watch some of those. There’s some stuff that goes on there.
That’s pretty disturbing. And almost and the problem is almost in a way. Yeah. All the violence and the killing, you become immune to it as you watch the movies. And that’s a problem with it. And the unfortunate thing is I think guns people will watch and go, yeah, all right. That’s what we need.
This is a great, they view it incorrectly and get the wrong message. I believe.
Alan: So I’ve been, I I’ve been making a point of watching more animation online because I really like the form and I haven’t been current with it. So I watched Creature Commandos because you guys had recommended it so well. And I really like it. It’s full of intrigue. It’s got all kinds of wonderful comic book references.
But it has some of the most visceral [00:33:00] violence. It isn’t just someone got shot. It’s Someone got their arm ripped off, and they, and in slow mo, they show the brain exploding from, and I also watch Invincible, which I really liked Invincible the comic, but I already knew that it was like, just like Kirkman did with Walking Dead.
It doesn’t have a certain polite point. It carries a lot of things to their logical terrible extreme about what it’d be like to live in a world full of zombies. And that the monsters, as they’re not the zombies. They’re what all the people do in order to survive no matter what. All the betrayal and all the, and that’s the same kind of thing I’m seeing in Invincible is. Good people are forced to make terrible choices and happenstance, but also behind the scenes manipulation that sets that up so that they really have to make terrible choices because it’s a way of, inuring them to violence so that then they can turn them into the weapon that they need and things like that. I, for a long time, I really had they often demonized. music and video [00:34:00] games for being what was leading to the destruction of our society. These poor kids were listening to devil music in the backtrack on whatever that album was and what the one so I really did no that’s People are going to be who they are, and it might be that a violent situation incites violence, but they were prone to it in the first place because of what really matters, not the video games.
It’s their socioeconomic status. It’s do they have terrible parents who either not only didn’t parent them, but actively parented them to turn them into criminals too, and whatever else it might be. But then I saw a whole bunch of studies that they try to do all the controls for all of those things. And what they determined was, a little bit of what you alluded to, watching a steady diet of that, participating in a steady diet of those kinds of games, it really does make you a worse person. It hardens you. It opens possibilities to you. If you play Grand Theft Auto, and, Hey, I discovered that I [00:35:00] can be with a hooker, and then kill the hooker and get my money back.
And I’ll do that a hundred times. That’s how I make bank. It’s not that I go and have a plan to rob a bank and all that kind of stuff. I’m gonna do terrible things consistently because they didn’t think about that enough when they were designing the game that people would do the absolute worst thing they possibly could to get ahead.
And many examples of that kind of stuff where, you’re in a party and you’re trying to do something together. You’re always ready to betray the people in your party in order to get a bigger share of the treasure. You’re always ready. It was all the Again, controlling for every other variable, it really, and I think that it’s, if you will, akin to, we’ve had 20 years worth now of Survivor.
Of all the stories about these competitions, people trapped on an island, and it isn’t a matter of, do you know how to make a fire better? Are you the person that builds the team better and makes sure that everybody gets food? Seemingly, I don’t know what the number is, 80 percent of the winners were the ones that manipulated everybody else.
They were the ones that [00:36:00] were not only backstabbers, but they saved that backstabbing until it really would hurt someone the most and take them out of the game. And so what lesson is everybody learning about, it isn’t a matter of being golden rule, good, try to build a better society in the games context.
The way to win is to be the ultimate bastard.
Stephen: And it’s,
Alan: Oh,
Stephen: totally believe what you said. I don’t believe video games themselves, but if you’re playing all the wrong video games and that’s all you do, listening to all the wrong music, the same lyrics over and over of, shoot the cops and, beat your girlfriend and if that’s what you listen to that and everybody around you is thinking that, yeah, I totally.
See that happening. And it’s the same argument though as to why they’re saying we need more black people in TV shows. We need to show the reflection to the kids. That it’s not just white people that are cops, there are black people that are cops, there are Asians, there’s Armenians, there’s Hindu, see all of that in there.
And that’s the [00:37:00] same argument. that, you know, we’re reflections of, Oh, the one podcast I listened to he’s an entrepreneur. His is thing. He always ends with is you are the sum of the five people you hang out with the most. So make the right choices and, go have a great. And it’s like when you think about that, it’s very true.
If you’re hanging around people in a gang that are going to go rob the liquor store and drink and beat up people. That’s what you do.
Alan: I I sure agree with that. I don’t know, for 20 years or however long I’ve been on Facebook, it really has made a big difference in my life with who are my friends, and how do they act, and that the word friend means a different thing to different people, and there’s some people that I have gotten rid of, I’ve blocked them, or I’ve put them on every time that they would comment on my stuff.
It wasn’t crazy, but it was consistently [00:38:00] negative. And I just I don’t want that negativity in my life. If I joke around a lot and people don’t know how to get a joke, but to nitpick at it, or if you try to share something that’s reasonable, they’re the ones that are determined to find the exception instead of that makes sense for the majority, and how do we run our lives?
Not to take care of every single possibility, but it definitely is you make Assumptions all the time not in a prejudicial way But in a data way a statistics way as to what are the odds of this happening? And what do I want to happen the most so steer yourself towards the best course and if continually by hanging out those people You’re gonna get steered towards a worse course and for a while.
I don’t even want that input I, my statistics are, they’ve had ten times now that they’ve had a chance to comment on this, and ten times they’ve made the worst possible comment they could. And after a while, I am
Stephen: Right?
Alan: so much a free speech advocate, and yet, in my personal [00:39:00] life, I’m aware of what, who do I want to surround myself with, and what you just said, my top five people, I hope that the people that were, it, the people that want to have a way of inveigling themselves into your life and wrecking you.
They talk about you don’t want to be in an echo chamber. You don’t want to have just Pollyanna talk. It’s I don’t think Pollyanna talk is honor matters. Truth, honesty, nobility matter. It isn’t a matter of what you’ve been saying, which is suspect everyone, be ready to betray everyone. And I say this all the time.
The Golden Rule is so much how I think of it’s the most basic thing. It’s how every code of ethics, not just the Bible, but everyone, is based on do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And when I see people that so play fast and loose, if not actively reject and betray it, I just I think your brain is messed up.
I think you’re wired so that you don’t have the empathy or the long [00:40:00] view that allows you to say, If I do this, they have to do it back to me in order to get me to stop. Why would I set myself up to make situations worse instead of better? Why would I lie and think it doesn’t matter? Because it does. And hopefully they’ve lost enough friends.
Good people like me, that eventually it gets through to them, but I’ve not seen it. I think people are
Stephen: Some people.
Alan: You’re eight years old. You’ve got a little stinker, a little liar, a little bully, a little whatever. What has to happen to traumatize them? I want to think that jail time can make a person become not a recidivist and maybe turn them around.
But there’s so much proof that people just get wired by how they grew up, how they were born, whatever else it might be. And when someone shows you who they are, believe them. I don’t, I’m not expecting it to be any other than that. You know what I mean? I just, my odds are don’t let you where you could do me harm.
I’ll have a conversation with you, why not? But to go in business with you? To depend on you for a ride when I really don’t think you care about [00:41:00] keeping the deal as much as I did? I’ve had my share of betrayals in my life. And each time, some part of what you want to do is reclaim your agency, your power, and say, I’m sorry.
What could I have done differently? And most of the time it was because I was too trusting. Too faithful, and I don’t want to be become a suspicious person. But when you see someone that you have to be suspicious of, rather than waiting for that to happen, I just say, I’ll just usher them out of my life.
I don’t want to deal with, and it’s everywhere. It’s in people I play cards with, people that I goof off in Mensa with, people that I’ve been in business with. It’s in my family, and I should say extended family because I think that both my brothers are pretty good. But not always.
When I think back on what’s happened in my 65 years of life, it’s Man, what they did I never would have done. That wasn’t golden rule. That wasn’t decent. And, I hope that whatever I’ve done on balance is I’ve made mistakes, but they were never willing, [00:42:00] vicious, evil mistakes, that they weren’t mistakes at all, that I really intended on being Mr.
Screw, it’s that I, what’s the I’ve always loved the Jewish apology, that you, Say you know you did wrong, and you say what can you do to make it better, and you promise to never do it again. And then if you see someone who’s capable of doing that, that the apology isn’t, I’m sorry you feel that way, but it’s, I’m sorry I did the thing, you have, that’s a way of building trust.
And others are not. Others are, I’m going to find a way to snake out of this if at all I can. What
Stephen: you mentioned video games. I’m going to segue. I got something else to show you. I got a new toy. Didn’t really plan on it. It was one of those, eh, maybe someday things, but like a deal fell into my lap. I’m like, okay, I’ll do this. So I got a steam deck.
Alan: interesting. Oh my!
Stephen: Yes.
Alan: In other words, it auto connects, it has games embedded in it, what makes a Steam Deck
Stephen: you have a steam account, right? You probably have a gog account too, [00:43:00] but you have steam and you have dozens of games on steam I assume. So basically you turn this on log in the steam and there’s all your games and you click on it. It installs it and you can play it on the go.
Alan: Interesting. So it auto connects and takes away the need for a Wi Fi connection or whatever else it might be. Because that’s, or does it? Do you still have to be net connected for some things?
Stephen: you have to, obviously you have to connect the download and install games. And most of them check in with steam to make sure you have the license and it’s a legal copy, blah, blah, blah. But it’s every 30 days. So if you keep it offline for a month, it’ll say, Hey, you can’t play this till you get online.
Alan: Okay.
Stephen: But, so here’s the thing, like I said, I didn’t plan on getting it. And I’m like, eh, it’s a good deal that I’m getting. It’s from somebody I know. So I know it’s not a piece of crap. He took care of it. It’s fairly new. So out of all the games. I have online only [00:44:00] 16 of them are definitely playable on the steam deck and only 33 of them Total are definitely playable or at least mostly playable.
So out of 150 games. I’ve got 33 that I could install.
Alan: Games have to do whatever they need to optimize themselves for that platform, that new smaller, whatever the screen is, and, okay.
Stephen: Now, part of it is what I’m discovering is that a lot of what I have are older games that they’ve brought in through a VM, a virtual machine somehow. Those don’t work so well on here. Newer games work better for the most part. So just, that might. The other thing I found is it’s a handheld, it’s a Nintendo switch.
It’s a game boy. So civilization is not the easiest to play on here.
Alan: You’ve only got this much real estate, and you really want to have both keyboard and mouse
Stephen: Yeah. You’ve got a pretty big screen. It’s a pretty good size. And it [00:45:00] does have these little pads here that’ll do the mouse, but not all games use them when they should, especially older games. So you can hit a key and pull up an onscreen keyboard, but that covers up half your screen. You can put it in the dock, hook it up to your TV and hook a keyboard up.
But I’m like if I’m going to do that, I’ll just use my. A laptop,
Alan: The point of this is portability, not I can go dock at another place, or
Stephen: so I would say it’s not necessarily I know somebody who is dying to get one, just hasn’t been able to afford to get one and they’re like, Oh, I just gotta have it, gotta have it, gotta have it. I want it for all my games and they don’t have a ton of steam games. I’m like, you might want to check to make sure they run before you get this.
You if they don’t
Alan: somebody has a vision of I really want to play Iron Sky or something like that, and that’s in particular the ones that doesn’t run well.
Stephen: exactly. Now, one of the other things that you can do is put GOG on here, so you can get access to your GOG games. That took [00:46:00] some work. It’s not like a feature that Valve says, Hey, just do this, and you’ve got, it’s an
Alan: It’s Steam Deck. Not Steam and GOG Deck. Okay, exactly.
Stephen: yeah. You can get it to work. So I found, I tried three different methods.
The third one, finally, Allowed it to work and show my games and install them. And I could see them again. The others just weren’t quite all there. It may have been different methods. I’m not sure, but I finally got so, Oh, look, there’s my games. Oh, look, I can install it. It’s there. Not a single one of them has played though install, but none of them have played and I’ve tried 20 different games that I wanted to try.
Alan: they don’t have the emulation working correctly where it’s capturing it. They don’t have the, sometimes it’s just a matter of they’re dependent on a specific chipset GPU or whatever, and that’s not what the Steam Deck has.
Stephen: the thing is it’s a Linux OS Linux based OS so they’re already putting [00:47:00] Virtual machines in there to run a lot of that stuff. So I’m not sure, I did hear there’s a way you can a lot of things you can boot off the SD card so you can install windows on the SD card and then you could run windows and then you can install the games.
I’m like. That is way more work than I really wanted to worry about, but you can also do the same thing for an emulator. So I could get the old Nintendo and Atari and PlayStation and stuff emulated on here. And I’m like, that might be worth some time to try and do the emulator,
Alan: some of those things, it’s not only that I want the games to play, it’s that I want the knowledge, the experience of how to get it to run on a different platform. And I’ll learn something from it that’ll help me troubleshoot things into the future. But the more you get finer and finer it only runs on certain distributions of Linux, or it’s only, it requires very specific chipsets. I don’t know that I’m ever going to change whatever graphic chip I have in my machine to move forward and be able to use them. I get, there’s overhead associated with some of these things am I really that crazy about civilization that I’m going to do an incredible amount of [00:48:00] work just to be able to play on this new platform?
Stephen: I do have doom. I’ve got quake. I’ve got a couple of games like that and they run great. A lot of the CCG card games like star realms and dominion. Those work great on here. You got to get used to, when to use. touch controls, when to use buttons and stuff
Alan: yeah.
Stephen: but those work great. I was playing Ascension and Star Realms and Dominion last night.
You can get online and play people online those work wonderful.
Alan: So the point of this, it fell into your lap, but it’s so that you can go sit on the couch or go relax somewhere else. Whereas I must admit, part of the psychology of why I do computer games instead of TV games and various other things is I want to be able to limit the amount of times that I spent gaming by being, I’m at my desk and I choose to do that.
And I have the other things I could be working on and I’ve got enough of them that the monkey is off my back. I’ve made enough. So now I give myself, is that a reward? Where it seems like you have things on your phone or on the couch, like you, you [00:49:00] could easily lose track of time and say oh my god, I hadn’t intended on playing until two in the morning, but I was just so comfy and I had my drink and my heat up and that kind of stuff.
So some part of it is me knowing me, that I don’t allow myself to fall into too comfortable a situation. Because I want to limit the amount, I want to like time box things and choose how much I’m going to put into this.
Stephen: And I’ve got some paranormal cryptid shows and stuff I’m going to this year and they’re overnight things. So I’ve got, after everything’s over, nothing much to do, I, I’m not the kind that I’m like, Oh, I’m gonna go run around the city and see what’s in the city and go to a big expensive restaurant and maybe go to a movie.
Maybe go try. Is there a, I might see if there was a fair festival, but I’m usually more akin to, Either go back to the hotel or tent, depending on if I’m camping or whatever and
Alan: this gives you the ability that it goes right into the backpack or whatever your luggage kind of a thing is. I understand that too. I have both a desktop and a laptop and I try [00:50:00] to get to laptop like with everything that I want to be on the road and all the adapters, whatever else I might need so that if I wanted to, I could Chromecast something onto their TV or whatever.
You know what I mean? With the fear of what if I leave my dongle behind and but I get that. Okay. And if it’s
Stephen: I’ll keep playing with it, I’ll see how it goes. Like I said,
Alan: if it’s not a great deal, what does it cost? 500 bucks?
Stephen: the lowest model one, I believe is like 400 and 450, something like that. So this is a lower. The lower model version, but I got an extra SD high speed card with it and a docking station. So if you add that to the 400, it’d be like a 550 to 600 to add those things. So I got this for less than three.
Alan: the reasonable laptop realm, so that’s the reason I haven’t gone also in many tablets, is because I a full keyboard instead of a virtual keyboard. I just don’t type as well on it. So I think out of habits or out of what I’m already comfortable with, I haven’t found [00:51:00] I don’t know, what do I do with my phone?
I use it as a phone, and I regularly do like certain things. I do some banking. It’s what I’m out in. But I haven’t made that into a gaming machine, because that’s not how my mind works, is this. Is this little size. I like having the expanse of Skynet. You know what I mean? I got three monitors. Have I mentioned that I have three monitors running now?
How many is that? Two? Two is not as great as three. Oh! Okay,
Stephen: I got a really big first monitors.
Alan: And all of mine are flat. I don’t have the cool curved around,
Stephen: mine’s a little curved, this first
Alan: Exactly.
Stephen: It will do Bluetooth, so I can Bluetooth headphones and a mouse and keyboard for certain things. I’m gonna keep playing with it and see. But, if nothing else, I do enjoy being able to play some of those card games, laying in bed or sitting in the recliner or something, rather than having to be in my office at the computer.
I, but the thing is, I have some of those same ones on the iPad,
Alan: okay. And it’s I know, I can see why you want to have dedicated things, but hopefully everything [00:52:00] is one license to get to everything that you want to. You can install it in multiple places as long as you log in correctly, it’s good for you. That’s cool. Okay.
Stephen: So I got one, you got something else. I got one more thing before we get rolling. We didn’t mention this last week. We were talking comic books, but Colin is moving to Baltimore
Alan: Oh my,
Stephen: like in a month.
Alan: how interesting. What is drawing him there? What’s a
Stephen: So I’m not sure the whole thing. So I guess I don’t want to go into his whole, he was dating somebody and they had talked about going to Baltimore. And then they broke up, but who he’s with now they talked about it again. He said a large part of it is he’s afraid living in Portage County because it’s a redneck MAGA Republic Alabama backwoods joint is where we live.
He’s I really am afraid of living here. Number two with, we knew that with his eyes and he can’t drive. It’s best for him to be in [00:53:00] a city.
Alan: in an urban environment instead of a
Stephen: yeah, so that was always going to be a thing. I just didn’t think it was to be six hours away. I thought it’d be an hour away. But he also said, we looked and for the laws and the community and what, how people are treating is like for the LGBTQ community.
Baltimore is one of the best places to live. He’s we’ve done, we’ve talked to people, we’ve looked, blah, blah, blah. So we would feel more comfortable there than just about anywhere else. And Eli can switch his job to still work, just transfer Colin knew somebody that had a couple stores, comic book stores.
That’s not going to work because those are further away than most of the places they were looking to live. But he’s
Alan: exactly.
Stephen: Yeah, he’s there’s 10 other places I could get to work. There’s a possibility his girlfriend or Eli’s girl, Eli’s sister knows somebody that could have a job [00:54:00] at some pharmacy or something, it’s not, but I was really proud of them.
Eli, they already figured it all up. They could survive off of Eli’s pay alone. So they know that and they have, several tens of thousands of dollars saved to move. They said we can survive without anything else for eight months to a year without either of us working at all.
Alan: A good job search instead of just taking the first thing that comes along and a good house search so you’re finding a good place to live. Wow that sounds good. I don’t know enough about Baltimore. But to know that it was a good community for LGBTQ and all that kind of stuff, but I like the fact that they did the research and said, it’s got to be above the Mason Dixon line.
It’s got to be an urban area. It’s got it. You know what I mean that this for The kinds of things they like doing and who they are, it’s very cool that they think they’re moving to a safe haven. I have one of my nieces and her boyfriend, now [00:55:00] husband, they moved to Portland just out of having done a big survey and saying, we want to get out of Bloomington, Indiana, maybe the same kind of thing, very red state.
You don’t have to get much outside of the university community to be, good lord, this is redneck city. They went to a place where they wanted to have better values, a more accepting environment, a more, I’m curious, like just that it’s not, hey, everything that was in the 50s, that’s just fine.
No, you might want to think about moving forward into the future. So they seem to be very happy there. And I think now that, importantly, but right outside maybe Corvallis, I’m trying to remember, but it, I like the fact that they had the boldness to say, let’s pick where we want to live and we’ll make a world there.
We’ll make a living there. It didn’t have to be that they had to have everything figured out. I guess it seems that moving there when you have some resources that allows you to not just get immediately whatever the first job is
Stephen: So Colin’s excited because he’s they found an apartment. They applied for, they think they’re going to get it. They’re working something out that they had one little snag with. They’re [00:56:00] working it out. But he’s look at where I’m at. The zoo is here. The library is here. He’s this library has a whole room just with movies and a whole room with music.
They have a whole. A big selection of trade paperback and comics. You can go and actually rent a room to watch a movie. They have projectors from some of this stuff.
Alan: Not bring it home, but actually reserve the movie room. That’s cool.
Stephen: he’s like I can get a bus I can get anywhere in the city in an hour or less on a bus I can walk to these places close by he’s like I could say hey I don’t need to do anything today.
I can take a five minute walk and sit at the zoo reading. And, he’s just he’s very ecstatic. He’s this is going to be so cool. Cause I think he likes here and he and I, do a lot, but he can’t drive. So he has no freedom. He has to ask people, he has to wait. So I think this is really something he’s really excited for.
And I’m glad for him. I’m going to miss him obviously. And a lot of the things we always did, but. That, [00:57:00] that, he needs to spread his wings and get out on his own,
Alan: Absolutely. Congratulations to him. You know what I mean? Honestly, when I have fond memories of getting out of the house, first going to college, then coming back, but not moving back in with the parents. You know what I mean? It really is important for your sense of self to say, I paid the bills. I have a place of my own.
When I close the door it’s all mine. It’s, my noise level and my stink level and whatever it might be.
Stephen: It’s not that I’m wishing stress, but you got to get some of that to grow is I have to make sure I get this bill paid. I have to make sure I take care of this, not just, Oh, father will take care of it.
Alan: Exactly. I’ll tell you, having gone through some of those difficulties, it sure makes you appreciate when things are better. You know what I mean? I lived really lean in college, and really lean a couple times in my life where it was, I gotta make sure I make bills, and so that means I’m not going to every show.
I’m not buying all the comics that I want, and whatever else it might be. As, maybe as a show closer, having just talked about comic books and the wonders of them, After [00:58:00] three months worth of orders that I’ve put in, and working my way through, I’m now up to I, the fascination is not there that once was.
I think I’m not going to continue. And it’s a huge thing, having said, now I have the ability, I think I have the money, and if I spend 400 bucks a month, in a year that’s only 5k. I have 5k a month a year. If I wanted to put it into this, when I look at all the other things that I want to do, other books I want to read, other media that I now put in, and a little bit of what he talked about, I’ve got a library right here that has an enormous room of graphic novels.
And not only that, the library systems that I can tap into. So when I look at what I can view on Comixology, And the experience is not as good sitting at your monitor instead of laying on the bed with a comic book on your chest. But you know what? That’s free, isn’t it? I pay 120 a month or, I don’t know, a year for all the comic books that I could possibly read from almost all the vendors.
I really have gotten to, I’m not going to do it. [00:59:00] And I actually wrote a note. M& M Comics, who I buy from. I’ve been with them for a long time. On again, off again. And I said, I know that I started up again. And I really appreciate the care that you’ve taken for my orders and stuff like that. But I think I gave you like false hope.
I’m not going to continue. And honestly, I really am fine with it. I really thought I miss them so much. What would it be like if I had that again? And then when I saw the size of the stack and how much, a little bit of what I complained about, there’s so many ads, there’s so much repetition, I haven’t Maybe the X titles, all the X Men stuff, very interesting stuff, Doctor Doom, Fantastic Four, very cool stuff coming on, but then because I try to be a completist, am I really gonna buy just the titles that I want and let everything else go?
That’s not my ideal, and so I think I’m not gonna pare back. I’m just going to go cold turkey.
Stephen: I totally get that. And I think, things change as you go through different ages and different where you’re at. And I’ve had the same [01:00:00] thing. I’ve cut back a lot on the comics. I do get and enjoy and Colin’s asked a couple, Hey, this is coming out. You want it? And I’m like, yeah, that’s okay.
Are you sure? Yeah. I still get a few and there’s. Some that I’m probably even now eh, maybe I won’t get that new offshoot series. There’s only so much Spider Man you can enjoy in a month. And honestly, I have so much Spider Man now that if I stopped getting everything, I could probably read everything I got for the rest of my life before I get through it all.
Alan: Yeah, exactly. Another thing is just like I watch, when I choose what to watch on TV, I read like the best of lists and I say the best 12 series of. Of comedy, of adventure, or whatever else it might be, if I watch all of those things, then I’m not having to wade through all the crap to find the good things.
Hopefully somebody with good taste will turn me on to that. And maybe I don’t get it right when it’s first coming out, but then I also don’t waste a lot of time. And I’m counting on that being the case. There’s all kinds of review sites that say, What’s the best stuff to come out from Marvel this last year?
And hopefully, because it’s the best and sold well, that’s [01:01:00] exactly the ones that they will collect into the, collected editions that I’m going to be able to get the library, but a year delayed. I’ve never had that need to know what’s going on right at the time that it’s happening thing. A lot of people are really about, they want to be in the know, and I’m like, I want to read it.
I want the story of it, not
Stephen: still playing games that are 35 years old.
Alan: Like that. All right.
Stephen: So real quick, have you watched any of the rookie yet? This season?
Alan: Yes, we’re up to date on the Rookie. I just started Preacher. I’ve been
Stephen: Oh, I haven’t watched season three yet. I was, I told my mother, I said, we watched season one together and then season two, I watched it. She didn’t. So she started watching it the other night and I was walking by and I’m like, you’re watching season one.
She goes, I am. I says, yeah, weren’t you on two? She goes, Oh it just started playing this and I don’t remember it. So one, she’s watching season one before two. And I got to wait to watch three. If I’m going to watch it
Alan: reloading. Okay, that’s okay.
Stephen: a little concerned. We’ve been, you [01:02:00] understand, we’ve been noticing more and more things.
She’s been forgetful and,
Alan: Oh, no. Okay. Yeah.
Stephen: So I’m like it’s probably good that I am here, cause if me, if my sister lived elsewhere and I, we wouldn’t notice all that. Cause I mentioned it to my sister, we were talking about it and she’s I haven’t noticed anything. I’m like, yeah, but I’m with her every day.
So I noticed some of this stuff.
Alan: I know there have been jokes about Alzheimer’s. Things were like, you get to hydro and Easter eggs. You get to, you really get to enjoy meeting new people all the time. So maybe it’s okay that she still gets pleasure out of it, even if it didn’t, it’s like,
Stephen: And she’s quite capable and she’s out with friends right now at some get together. She’s good. Just keep an eye on her, like my father, he got Bell’s palsy. When I was in high school that’s, pinches a nerve and your face droops.
Alan: droops a little bit. Exactly. No,
Stephen: So I made him a t shirt, I made you a t shirt.
Alan: right. Oh,
Stephen: says my mother warned me. My face would freeze like [01:03:00] this. I was like, you gotta laugh about it. What are you going to do? It’s not like we don’t notice. And it’s not like people know that. What’s wrong? Joke about it a little bit. No, he did not like that shirt. He burn it. Oh,
Alan: Oh it was worth the attempt for humor and for just being, that’s a way of dealing with stress can be a bit,
Stephen: There’s a kid on Facebook, really popular. A lot of people, he does videos and stuff. He’s got some really, degenerative disease. He’s in a wheelchair. He can’t walk. And he calls the monster laughs or something. And he just makes fun of himself. So
Alan: wow. Okay. All right. As always, hey, have a great weekend. We’re coming right into it. I’m a storyteller tonight at This Improvised Life. So that’s a cool thing. I get to tell the story and then they make it’s grifts for the improvisational mill. And people that I went to improv classes long ago at Second City here in Cleveland, those are some of the people doing this.
So it’s wonderful to be invited to do this by old friends that we
Stephen: talk about that next week then.
Alan: There we go. [01:04:00] Exactly. Okay.
Stephen: Later, man.
Alan: Okay. Have a great weekend.
