Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | Email | RSS | More
The script is a transcript of a conversation discussing personal pain experiences, storytelling techniques, societal challenges, and various leisure activities. It begins with a monologue about dealing with the pain from a failed dental implant and the subsequent health issues. The conversation then shifts to a variety of topics including the complications of maintaining oral health, the ignorance and prejudice in society, and the impact of politics on daily life. Further discussions cover public speaking, the importance of effective communication, gaming experiences, and the enjoyment derived from ‘Oscar Shorts’ film screenings. The participants also touch upon their hobbies like attending festivals, upcoming travel plans, and enjoying the improvement in weather.
YouTube
Transcript
[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: Morning. How are
Alan: morning. So good. I’m I’m suffering because I had this implant go wrong and the whatever they did to fix it, giving me a bone graft and so forth. It’s hurting all the time. And I take ibuprofen and [00:01:00] Tylenol upon their advice, and it takes it away a little bit, but it hurts enough to be a distraction.
And a week being in pain, I, please, I’m not trying to, there’s people that live with pain their entire life. And I, yeah. I understand more fully how it really does debilitate you, because I really can’t easily sleep, concentrate, chew real basic life functions, so I’m Today is the last day of my penicillin, which was to make sure that it didn’t get infected and so forth, but I think I’m going to call the the oral maxillofacial surgeon up and say, So what can we do here?
Could you check it to make sure that it isn’t wrong, infected, anything like that? And can you give me something that’ll I hate taking things that woos me out, but already this is enough of a distraction.
Stephen: Yeah. If you’ve been in pain for a week and less than ideal functioning, how much have you lost anyway? Yeah. And I love that title. Cause that’s see if you ever want to get paid more, you just have to create a bigger title with bigger words and you get [00:02:00] paid more. That’s how it works.
Alan: I am now a maxillofacial consultant, exactly then. I think what happens is places start to specialize more and more, and in order to make that differentiation clear, they really have to say it’s, only like sinus and mouth. It’s not, throat or whatever else it might be. And it’s funny, while everything was going on, I process anesthetic quickly, and so I’m always worried, because I’ve had it happen to the dentist a long time ago, that they made me wait too much, and that my, I’ll get feeling back, and that’s marathon man territory.
It’s really terrible when you start to get feeling back. So they were efficient and so forth, but apparently It was like, and I said this online, there’s nothing like going to a doctor and then calling people in to say, have you seen this before? Look at this. This is a, and I don’t want to be the unique case.
I want to be this 9000th case that they’ve seen and they know exactly how to handle it. And here’s the protocol. And instead [00:03:00] I was a bit of a sensation, this usually is it’s bone and it’s a titanium rod and everything just works and is good for life, and who knows what it was. He said it was a manufacturer’s defect.
They have multiple providers of these kinds of things and it was the best at the time, but now they’re known to have Certain flawed situations and apparently my having a mighty jaw by being just that little, one micrometer off in my bite is enough to you do that a hundred thousand times. It’s kinda like you can erode anything , if you drip water on it enough.
And so I’m having to deal with, and it’s not go in, get a cap field and you’re fine. The bone graft is supposed to take six months to take to make sure it’s integrated into your body and then they can put a new one in. All the time that I was visiting my mom out in California, I was dealing with dental things.
And for instance, for a while I had, I was missing a, just off the center front tooth. And my mom, having Alzheimer’s and so forth, every single time I came in, she commented on, you’re missing a tooth, because she doesn’t [00:04:00] remember from one time to the other. I don’t want to, this is luckily in the back, and I’m not a hillbilly about it, but it really is weird. For instance, when I eat. I tend to alternate bites. I chew on each side of my mouth so that I wouldn’t get a weird jaw distortion or one side, I don’t write like that. I have to write with my right hand because my left is not. But everything else I try to do, that I take turns, if you will, and stay symmetric and balanced.
This is next to impossible to do that. I don’t want pressure, temperature, anything affecting it. And I know, it’s funny, I don’t mean to be complaining, and yet it is one of those things that’s on my mind so much, because it is ever present, this little throb, this little, right next to your brain, right next to your eye, your instinct is to say stop that, fix whatever’s going on near your face.
Nope, just gotta,
Stephen: But. But, and this doesn’t really help you but this just shows the technology of just our mouth, how that’s changed over the years. You watch all the old [00:05:00] Westerns. Oh, you got a bad tooth. Rip it out. Oh, you got a bad tooth. Rip it out.
Alan: Know, exactly that, tie your tooth to a doorknob and slam the door type stuff,
Stephen: now we’ve got, everything.
You don’t have George Washington’s wood teeth anymore. They’ve got implants that look pretty real, but, scary as hell. But
Alan: And so I don’t mean to complain, it’s amazing, we say this all the time, Colleen and I, all we’ve got to do is stay alive. And medical science keeps advancing so that our ability to stay alive is even further extended, because they’re getting rid of certain kinds of cancers. They’ve got all the vaccines that we need, all
Stephen: They used to, we got rid of all that crap that doesn’t help us now.
Alan: I’ve got a feeling that we’re soon going to have a multi tiered society that’s just going to be who’s smart enough to take care of themselves correctly. It’s not going to be a matter of dollars and availability. It’ll just be people that are willing to listen to action.
Stephen: what you’re saying is we’re going MAGA followers.
Alan: I think so. I think that we’re going to, already we’re seeing it with, it’s funny. The [00:06:00] whole point of this podcast has never been, let’s talk politics. Let’s talk the real world. It’s ever present, and so many of the things that are going wrong are really a matter of, smart people wouldn’t do that, fact based people wouldn’t do that and why are you letting them get away with it when it’s so obvious that it’s not?
Stephen: just say here, and I’ve said this before, Based on my life, personal experiences, it has always been, Oh, you’re the smart guy. We need to ridicule you, put you down because you’re making us feel bad. I haven’t done anything to make you feel bad. You just feel bad because you’re you feel inferior because you’re not as smart, but we’re supposed to honor the guys that are big and muscular and Oh, look how great they are.
I never understood that. I was born. With a certain level of IQ. I didn’t ask, I didn’t rub the genie bottle and ask for it, but I’m go get put down. It’s not surprising that we’ve reached this. Look, Trump has so much money and he’s saying the [00:07:00] smart people that we can, ignore them because they’re wrong.
We, he must be right. It’s really not surprising to me.
Alan: Maybe surprising is the wrong term that I use, because I’ve seen this coming for a while as well. What I always had, the way I always thought about it was, I knew I was a smarty from early on. There’s any number of Mensa members and other smart folk that they got so put down when they were young, or their parents weren’t nurturing to them and stuff like that, that they had to Take the Mensa test or whatever to discover, yes, I really do score in this upper thing.
But I knew from how many things I could do early, from comparisons to how far I was ahead of my classes. And, honestly this, I say so many true things that I don’t say in public because it’s not socially correct. But I’m not one or two grades ahead. I was a lot ahead of whatever my precocious age was.
And my parents We’re good about not getting me double and triple promoted because there’s real societal punishment for being the [00:08:00] littlest kid in the class and being the smarty and all that kind of stuff. And so some part of my smarts I learned to Not exhibit it all the time, to hide it when it wasn’t the appropriate situation, and to have a sense of humor, and that’s a way of people not minding that you’re quick witted, not minding that you’re ahead, and you have more sources to draw upon to make jokes and so forth.
At, but still having said that, I had terrible problems in junior high and high school with Smoking area kids, jocks, people that they really thought it was some kind of cheating on my part, some kind of competition, and I really would, it’s weird how we really have such respect, maybe even reverence for, like when you see people that are Olympic athletes, you can say, Okay, I can understand what they’re doing.
They can just do it better than I can. They can jump higher and run faster and that kind of stuff. But when you can do it. Yeah. Things in your mind, there isn’t an obvious physical thing that they can say I could learn how to do cube roots. I could learn how to know multiple languages. They think it’s [00:09:00] witchcrafty, that it really was a gift, a talent, maybe an abused talent.
We’ve got more than enough references to mad scientists and stuff like that. But, I have seen, and Isaac Asimov has said it very well, you know what I mean, that when people start to have the problem of, my opinion is just as important as your knowledge, and they really won’t budge. You know what I mean?
They won’t I’m a lifelong learner. I love learning new stuff, especially stuff that informs me that maybe I’ve been laboring under a misapprehension all this time, and there’s a new direction. There’s new knowledge about, you name it, paleontology and dinosaurs, or quantum mechanics, or how people work.
There’s all kinds of psychological breakthroughs and other things being made about how our brain really works. And the folks that need to have Whatever I first learned and heard, that’s it. I’m staying there because, name it, it’s comfortable and safe. It’s, I learned it from a person that I trust, and they couldn’t be wrong.
You know what I mean? There’s all kinds of things but the world is so wide, big, 7 [00:10:00] billion people nowadays that you can’t help but get examples of people not like you, and yet that’s a scary thing instead of a wondrous thing to some people.
Stephen: Yes.
Alan: There’s a psychological characteristic that often has a fear of a stranger, or an embrace of new and strange.
It’s the conservative liberal thing or whatever else it might be. The novelty thing doesn’t work for some people and I love it. I need it. I always need new things. You know what I mean? And they’re not scary, they’re fascinating.
Stephen: To reach the wise wisdom of the venerable guru, it’s gone and it just being smart. Suddenly you’re a target and suddenly you’re making them feel bad and you’re flaunting your use. I’m like, No, I’m sitting here reading a book.
That type of thing. It’s like I wasn’t even near you, but you feel the need to cross the room to taunt me because suddenly I’m making you feel bad just because you’re not as smart as I am. But I don’t, but if I go across the room and taunt the big [00:11:00] quarterback all of them beat up on me then too.
What’s up with that? Maybe there was a reason that Batman created those belt gadgets to fend off people, I, how many movies or stories have we seen of the smart kid doing something like that,
Alan: I’ll tell you, it’s funny to geek it up for a moment. I love guy books, read them all my life. There was a series called Nova that came out probably 40 years ago now. And in many ways, it was a retelling of Spider Man because it was a teenager that had to learn how to use his powers. He was actually like inherited intergalactic.
Police power, if you will. The Nova Corps were the ones that patrolled our sector of the galaxy and stuff. And but it had a lot of parallels with introducing new villains and a good rogues gallery, that kind of stuff. But it also made a point of having contrasts where, like for instance, the bully in his school, the one that always picked on him, wasn’t Flash, the jock.
It was a smart kid who happened to also be an asshole. And because Richard Rider wasn’t A heart [00:12:00] of gold, but not as bright. He was continually put down by this kid that would make fun of, you don’t get it, you don’t, etc. I thought that was, wow, I don’t think that’s going to change people’s opinion, and all smart people are waiting to pick on you.
But that comic book series really captured, there’s all kinds of hazards, and that for all the regular people, you really must stink the first time that someone makes a joke at your expense and all you can do is take it. You can’t come back with a quick comeback because you don’t have that.
You don’t have that either quickness or flexibility of mind or whatever else it might be. So anyway, I all of our lives we’re going to deal with this and now maybe more than ever because there’s such an embrace of And then we talked about Survivor, it isn’t whether you’re smart or not, do you know how to start a fire, it’s whether you’re cunning or not, it’s whether you’re willing to betray other people that makes you a winner.
Those are terrible lessons for people to be learning. And yet, we’ve had not only Survivor, how many [00:13:00] reality shows has it been that’s what wins?
Stephen: Right.
Alan: Oh
Stephen: that’s one of the reasons Collins moving to Baltimore because Baltimore is a much more embraceable area for him than Portage County, Alabama, Redneck. Ohio, so that’s a sad thing to me you have to run across the country to escape people that just can’t be nice, plain and simple.
Alan: There’s a great book called The Great Divide, if I remember correctly, that’s out like 20 years now. This is the new thing in terms of the world polarizing, and it’s starting to be that, that geographically, people gather in red and blue states and cities. They really have changed where people are willing to live, because nobody wants to have, I, me and my wife are smart, I’m gonna have smart kids, and they’re gonna go to a school that only reveres Friday night football.
That’s not healthy. You know what I mean? They’re gonna get picked on all the time. They’re etc.
Stephen: whole TV show about that.
Alan: I, honestly, it, [00:14:00] and so I, the problem with that is that, and I wrote another great book, that was how cities are the best invention mankind has ever had in terms of how to become more civilized. Because by having a density of population, and on the same block you have people of every race, creed, color, religion, age, mindset, sex, gender, etc.
And that Seeing that it all works together, instead of seeing, oh no, they’re the stranger, they’re the alien, get them. That it, it shaves off all of those bristly intolerances and bigotries. Because you can’t do that in the city. You have to be on the subway right next to people that, you name it, they don’t have your same language, they don’t look and smell the same as you.
And
Stephen: how many reports have we had recently? I just saw on one newspaper or whatever, some guy, like at a park or something, Attacked and killed a mother and child because he thought they were [00:15:00] Palestinian and they weren’t they were something completely else And they were just like sitting there eating peanut butter and jelly or something, he’s oh i’m gonna kill them That’s what our leader is pushing people to allow to think they can do We got to get rid of them.
There we go. I took care of it. I’ve got guns and my leader he encourages this, he supports it. So this is what I’m, so we’re getting people killed for absolutely no reason,
Alan: For no valid reason. Unfortunately, it didn’t start with Trump. Back in the Bush age, when we first had war against various different Arab factions, people were like, the Arab clerk at the 7 Eleven, the guy who owns the dry cleaner of the hotel, they were regularly intimidated, if not attacked.
And one of the sad ones I read was, hey, that guy, somebody killed a Sikh, which are like the most peaceful pacifist. of one of the most of the religions, and so it’s because he looked foreign, looked turbaned, they somehow made the wrong assumption and not only were [00:16:00] you wrong, you couldn’t be more wrong, but you didn’t hesitate a moment to find out whether you were wrong or not, you’re emboldened to do these evil kinds of things.
Stephen: And that’s why here in Portage County, when that sheriff posted on his thing, Oh, wow. Let’s make a list of all the people that have a Harris and Biden signs we’ll add them to our list and we’ll take care of them later. That’s why when things are like that are said, we should be concerned and serious and they weren’t and reelected the dude.
Alan: Re
Stephen: no wonder Colin wants to go to freaking Baltimore,
Alan: you. You know what I mean? It, that kind of planning to be prejudiced, planning to act on. Your ignorance is much in evidence nowadays that everybody’s got an enemy’s list. Everybody’s got a, once I have power, it’s a roll kind of a thing. And it’s sick. You know what I mean?
That and yet it’s gonna be happening more, as you said, and more of our leaders give permission to that because they use it as an example. You know what I mean? They just At a very heartening thing where [00:17:00] at a big meeting of various different governors with Trump, the governor of Maine Chenette, I believe, spoke up of, we’re going to obey the law.
You’re not the law. We’re going to obey the law about all these various different programs. And like the next day, he sent his through Kash Patel, the new head of the FBI. There is nobody in his cabinet that isn’t the worst possible candidate they should have been for being in the cabinet. They have bad experience.
All they are is loyal and all they are is vicious in so many ways. That guy then said, we’ll make sure that we investigate her and every program that they’ve got going on in Maine. And it’s it the viciousness of going after people that dare speak up. You must have read about a woman at, in, in Goodleen, Idaho.
They just spoke up at a town hall meeting, and they like zip tied her and dragged her from the room. You can’t have that. You can’t have that. And
Stephen: The minute somebody speaks up sue them impeach the president day one of his term. He hasn’t done anything, but let’s impeach him
Alan: ruffled and
Stephen: don’t agree. That’s how it works.
Alan: and spend the night in [00:18:00] jail.
Stephen: And again, how does any of that make America great on either side? I don’t care. If day one, now, Trump honestly is a special case, but on day one, if the Democrats are filing an impeachment and lawsuit against him how’s that help anybody?
How’s it? I thought it was always okay. Our guy didn’t win, but we’re doing this for the country. Let’s find some common ground,
Alan: You know that’s not
Stephen: to do that. And you’re right. Like the, I would be afraid to put a sign out because now I’m afraid the sheriffs are going to target me and their redneck buddies in the middle of the night or go come and slash my tires, break my windows, kill my dog, I’m afraid of that.
So now I can’t put out a sign that I want to put out, the wrongness is getting worse all the time. And now suddenly. Ukraine started the war.
Alan: it’s unbelievable the boldness as you as a throw because it’s just so true every accusation of confession. [00:19:00] There is so much stuff that’s done to accuse somebody else of what you’ve done wrong to distract from the fact that you’re the criminal. You’re the guy that’s fucking things up. And that not only. Why didn’t everyone that was in the room when he first said that, every press person, everyone say, That’s absolutely incorrect. You’re full of shit. You shouldn’t say things like that. You sound like a Russian simp. And the fact that we don’t get that, like another chilling comment that I heard was, You know all those people that watched while the woman was dragged out of the town hall meeting?
They’re the same people that are going to watch when people are taken to camps. Fuck! We got 350 million people that can stand up to the couple thousands of whoever the evildoers are. And the only way that’s going to happen is if people stop it right when it first happens. No! I want to hear what she has to say.
No! Take those cuffs off of her. Who’s going to be the one? Maybe a segue. [00:20:00] We just saw the Oscar shorts, which we try to see every year. They have, sets of documentaries and live action and animation. And one of the live action was the man who couldn’t keep silent. And it was about like a train getting stopped in Croatia, and bully boys, an extra legal Croatian force coming on, and looking for Muslims, looking for anybody that they wanted to rouse. A guy, wasn’t any of those things, except he said, You can’t do this. You’re, this is, we live in a country of law. And of course they took him off the train, and he went to whatever place was going to happen to him next. And we, We need all those examples nowadays of, that doesn’t happen in Croatia. That happens right here.
We’re having to go through all that kind of stuff, and how much are we really going to put up with it? All the things we talk about for freedom of speech. If you have a gun to stop, a tyrannical government, how come you’re not? Because they’re there? You’re a tyrant? You never believed in America at all.
You had [00:21:00] no idea what it was to be a patriot.
Stephen: There was a, there was an article in the onion saying and our NRA apologizes because they forgot to use their guns against
Alan: To stop the overthrow of government. Exactly. I guess we’re going to have humor forever. We’re always going to have people that can tell the truth while making a kind of a joke. But it’s happening all around. And, the Oscar things, they really were as somber. We’ve seen them for about 20 years now.
And even the animations weren’t like Disney. Hey, look at the pretty dog sniffing a butterfly and stuff like that. They were. Telling grim stories often. I think there was one that had good humor, good laughs, had some whimsy to it, called Magic Candies, if I remember right. But at least three out of the five of the animations were, okay, that’s thoughtful, but that’s thoughtful in a oh, I feel bad after seeing that way.
Not a, oh, I’ve been enlightened, and that was a sneaky way of doing it. And as you might imagine, all the documentaries, all the live actions [00:22:00] were, here’s what’s going wrong in various different places around the world, and right here in the United States. And they make their point. But there’s so much. The points to be made nowadays are who’s getting screwed over, who’s getting oppressed what kinds of family damage is being done because of fanaticism, whatever else it might be, so I’m happy we see them every year because sometimes short features like that, they don’t have to entertain, they’re meant to be, let’s tell the truth.
Netflix sponsors a lot of documentaries because there are things that need to be, have a wider audience that know about it and stuff like that. But boy, it’s, coming out of the movies and not being, hey, did you see the way Captain America punched the Red Hulk? That’s wonderful. Instead it was, wow let’s, which was your favorite?
Which was the one you think is going to win the awards, and it’s not yeah, that one really made me laugh. It’s more like, all right, that was really important. That was really a gut punch. You know what I mean? I want to recommend them to my thoughtful friends, but I’m aware that, hey, if people already have a trauma [00:23:00] sensitivity, you don’t want someone watching something that’s just gonna make them feel not bad for a day, but for a week, and things like that.
I want to recommend them, but boy, it was a tough series. We went one each day for three days in a row. And each day it was like, please lighten up. Please. Oh
Stephen: So speaking of shorts Reese discovered a YouTube channel that is extremely interesting. It’s called Amaletto and it’s movie makers around the world students independents people with no money, essentially doing short 20 minute or less. Little movies, like a TED talk but it’s a movie and they cover everything.
We obviously were talking about looking at the horror channel. They had all sorts of little 20 minute horror movies, but they had drama, they had westerns, they had sci fi, they had the gamut of movies, and I
Alan: They’re a tryout so they can get seen by Hollywood or seen on YouTube and build their own following without [00:24:00] having to, like if they have no money, you do guerrilla filmmaking. You know what I mean? You don’t get the big
Stephen: we talked about that, that in today’s world, you can get a 600 camera that produces video. Good enough to show on a big screen and you can do stuff. And that’s what these are They’re not necessarily like you said to make a message. They’re movies. There’s all sorts.
They cover everything but speaking of that This year so far. I have seen three horror movies that have become some of my top horror movies that They were fantastic. I know that’s not your big genre So we saw hard eyes And we saw monkey. Both were good. You probably would not like them either one, especially monkey.
If you do not like Colin said, we need to make a t shirt and have the monkey, with the big grin saying silly murders, make me smile. It was full of, Oh my God. So this lady was about to jump into a pool. And the heating unit electric [00:25:00] cue shorted and hit the water just as she was hitting it.
She didn’t just get fried. She exploded. And like her leg went tumbling and almost hit somebody. And it was blood and guts everywhere. The, they talked about one guy in a sleeping bag that got trampled by 67 horses. They said, it looked like somebody blew up a raspberry jelly in there or something, and they showed it, but they should, it’s so I wouldn’t recommend those for you. That’s not your thing. The one I would recommend is presence. It was only shown in limited theaters. Colin said it only had a budget of 125, 000 total.
Alan: Okay.
Stephen: but it is probably one of my top horror movies of all time.
You would like it. It is not horrific, but the story, the atmosphere grips you. So give presence a chance once sometime, if it comes out on streaming and you have to see it, I think you would enjoy it. And there’s [00:26:00] no, no real graphic anything. There’s no jump scares. There’s no, none of that. And that’s partly what makes it so good.
But going back, I’m a letto is a YouTube channel. I’ll give it a try,
Alan: There you go. It’s, I really always appreciate the leads that people give me, you know what I mean? I just had a discussion about, we went to see the Paul Picasso on paper exhibit at our local art museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and I find, in general, cubism and some of those more modern art movements to be silly, to be ridiculous, to be, like, it’s not only that I don’t get it, I get what they’re trying to do, but it seems like Wow, that didn’t take as much work as if you tried to make it realistic.
It seems, and my biggest criticism is that they’re not pretty. Somehow I have an expectation of art that, maybe in a gallery you have different expectations, but I would never bring anything into my home that I wouldn’t want to see every day. Colleen talks about a picture is what you’d [00:27:00] want to see like looking out the window, and if it’s ugly, you don’t want to see All kinds of different subjects, so it, that’s what I find those things to be, is they’re off putting, discordant difficult, that I don’t get enough out of them in terms of now I understand, the various different planes and getting multiple viewpoints embedded into a picture without it being realistic, but all of it, what it, makes me think is, wow, that’s just so many shortcuts the guy took and churned it out.
You know what I mean?
Stephen: but you don’t enjoy it. You don’t really care to go see it, but you’re not campaigning to get it removed, to get it banned, to get it burned, that those people should be shot. You’re not doing that. You’re like, I don’t care for that. I don’t go see it. I like bugs, bunny cell animation. You might not, that’s what, you prog rock all over the place.
I listen to hair metal. That’s okay because you know why? They both exist and we can enjoy what we enjoy.
Alan: There’s not one true music that everybody gets to, one of those, [00:28:00] there’s litmus tests. There’s like indications of where someone’s wrong. They’ve lost it in terms of being rational, empathic, decent, etc. A long time ago now, probably 40 years maybe, there was an art exhibit in Cincinnati, which is a relatively conservative town in Ohio.
It’s just on the border of Kentucky. So the south bulges upwards a little bit. And it was the I just lost his name photographs and artwork from,
Stephen: Ansel Adams,
Alan: not Ansel Adams. It was,
Stephen: my favorite.
Alan: It’ll come to me, but they had a couple that were difficult. They had one, if I remember right, that was called, oh boy, Piss Christ, where it showed a crucifix in a jar of what looked like urine, tentapis, and of course, people were up in arms of you can’t be heretical like that.
You can’t insult all of Christianity like that and so forth. And so shut down the exhibit. And I was like, there’s 10, 000 [00:29:00] things here. If there’s two, three, ten that you have difficulty with, walk past them. Go to the other gallery. There are tons of other things that you can see.
Stephen: And ruined it for everybody else.
Alan: by the way, it was Robert Mapplethorpe.
Stephen: Oh, Mapplethorpe. Yes, that’s right. Yeah, he caused a bit of a stir.
Alan: of oh no, that might be that those guys are together. And not hiding it at all, but pretty I don’t know, just the act of showing naked men, or men doing things like everybody else in the world does, was somehow controversial and must be stopped. And I just, whenever I would talk about that, and people would say, yeah, they did the right thing.
It’s did you not get the part of? It’s 2 10 out of 30, 000. It can’t be that was some of the first
Stephen: when did that become not free speech?
Alan: So bad and how is it not free speech and once especially once you’re not going to enjoy it Don’t go if you know that’s where the bad things are in the Mapplethorpe part [00:30:00] of that thing then go to the other 10 out of 11 galleries and have a wonderful time and leave that stuff to the people that I have a different opinion.
It’s just a matter of taste. Art is always a matter of taste. You know what I mean? And,
Stephen: You can go and buy Consumer’s Electronic Magazine. Somebody else can buy a Vogue magazine. But just because Playboy exists doesn’t mean we should wipe out every magazine that exists.
Alan: That’s
Stephen: That, I’ve said this before, that’s how, what America’s, is. Oh, we have a problem. How do we solve that problem? We do a 180 degree flip, screw all the problems that causes, we solve this problem.
We’ll deal with the other 10 new problems later. I, that’s always the reaction and okay. I’m going to segue a little bit. You made me think about, before I forget, we were talking music we were talking art and entertainment. I’m really trying to get back into some gaming. Because I think last year was a overall bad year for [00:31:00] me with work, with other things going on.
I didn’t game hardly at all. I didn’t even watch. Movies and books. I just seem like I didn’t enjoy anything last year. So I’m like, I can’t do that I you know, I don’t want to hit 70 and go well, that was a worth Waste of time,
Alan: Where’s my self care? Where’s my just giving myself a break? You know what I mean? Okay.
Stephen: So Amber, Thursday night, is doing a a game night, so I’m going to go to game night. And I had some friends on Saturday say, Hey, I got this new game, I want to try it out, come on over. So I had my Writer’s Festival and I went to that afterwards. It is not what I would have said, Oh yeah, let’s get that game and play it.
It was Insane Clown Posse Deck Builder.
Alan: Oh my.
Stephen: I was like, okay. I always say you gotta try it. I’ll give it a try. I like deckbuilders. First of all, I’ve never known too much about Insane Clown Posse. Not my thing. Yeah,
Alan: festival. Bugaloo? Anyway, okay.[00:32:00]
Stephen: juggalos.
Alan: Juggalos. Not B. Okay. Exactly. Okay.
Stephen: okay, like you said, I’m judging it, but I don’t really know anything.
Learn me what do you got? Cause the guy that bought the game loves that stuff. Okay, he’s a, he’s an okay guy. He’s normal. He doesn’t need canceled or any or shot or anything, folks. But he played. Insane Clown Posse, all afternoon when we were playing, multiple games for hours and we played this board game.
He told us the guys that started it were high school friends, loved D& D, they were nerds, and they wanted to create this art medium that was very much like KISS, or GWAR, or some of those other
Alan: Costume bands, if you
Stephen: exactly, yes. So that’s what insane clown posse was. They developed a story over five albums about this dark carnival coming to visit and that was the apocalypse end of the world.
And that was the story they were telling. That’s what insane clown posse was. Now they do it [00:33:00] in that humorous way where they’re going over the top and sounding very extreme. But when I listened to the music, it had a little tongue and cheekness to it that yes, we know what we’re saying is over the top.
Laugh about it. That, that type of thing. So I was like, okay, I could do this. The music wasn’t horrible, not my normal style. I’m not going to go get an insane clown posse album, but I wasn’t like, okay, I got to leave. This is horrible shit. I can’t do it. I was like, okay it’s rap. It’s got some rhythm.
I can deal with it. So the board game, you would think, oh, that’s probably a piece of crap. No. These guys are like many of the people in their position. Yes. We created this entertainment group, but we’re smart businessmen and nerds. So they created a high quality game, high quality materials. It looked fantastic and it played very well.
It was a very standard deck builder, but. Just enough alterations to fit the Insane Clown Posse. We played multiple [00:34:00] games, and it was fun, and it’s like Ascension and DC Deck Builder put together a little bit.
Alan: Okay.
Stephen: I picked it up. They didn’t even really explain it to me. They told me one or two things, I started playing, boom, I was good to go.
High quality materials, just as fun as any other deck builder, and it was, I blew out my prejudices or my assumptions about Insane Clown Posse a little bit. I enjoyed the evening, had a good game. Looking forward to going to some more gaming this week to get back into playing some more games.
I’ve got plenty, dear God, I’ve got freaking hundreds of dollars worth of cardboard sitting on my shelf. I need somebody to play with it if Colin’s leaving me.
Alan: I hear you. Honestly, without having vocalized up till now, that might have been the case for Colleen and I as well, that we had a more insular in the house, or we were out traveling, so that meant that we missed regular games days, regular meds to have some friends have, and that kind of thing.
We Amber’s Meeple People group. Is it Thursday night? I thought it was Saturday during the
Stephen: they do. She [00:35:00] does two different ones. Saturday is meeple people, but like board gamers of Akron does one in green on Saturday, something like that. And I think board gamers of Akron does first and third Friday of the month. Then there’s one at Kent library on, on second Sunday of the month. There’s
Alan: made some reference to that, that it wasn’t, the one was not only a MENSA event, and so she won’t be putting that one into MENSA calendars and stuff like that, because people are sometimes odd. I only want to play with MENSA. That’s its own prejudice in a weird way, too. But, yeah.
Stephen: mentions are the worst ones to play with. Honestly,
Alan: There might be
Stephen: about the rules to
Alan: a larger percentage of rural Nazis.
Stephen: People play apples to apples and get mad if you pick the card that you thought was a funny. That doesn’t define. That’s not the definition of the word. We’re not playing word dictionary definitions.
We’re playing apples to apples. It’s like I, I can’t play with people like that. And that’s a large percentage of [00:36:00] menses at times.
Alan: There’s, it doesn’t even have to be a large percentage. All you need is one in the group to spoil a
Stephen: seems like a large percentage.
Alan: Exactly. Okay. That’s one of the having been to mind games a whole bunch of times now, where you playtest a whole bunch of different things, after a while you learn the people that you don’t want to play with, they’re pleasant otherwise in their life, but if you’re really trying to evaluate a game and their only lens that they’re using to evaluate it is literally, not looking for nuance, not looking for fun, you know what I mean?
I say this all the time, I have a, I’ve had a couple people that I’ve had to distance myself from, because I make jokes all the time, and they will point out the wrong thing that I said. And it’s I hope you can see that I took a little bit of artistic license. I know a spider is not an insect.
It’s an arachnid. But you didn’t get the joke, but you got what you could point out that I said wrong. Do you think that’s fun too? You know what I mean? If this is supposed to be in the spirit of fun.
Stephen: That’s the type of attitude that [00:37:00] people put down smarties about, that always correcting, always feel that, but that’s not everybody. That’s the problem. That’s
Alan: having said that, more games, I agree, we miss it. Sometimes there’s no better thing to do for an afternoon than to say, put all the real world stuff outside and let’s see where they’ve gotten this distillation of, it’s about color matching, it’s about trying to build a forest, or there’s all different kinds of wonderful things, and I like the kinds of things where you don’t know much going in, and as you play, you get I think this is going to be important, so I’ll hold on to more of those, or I’ll, this is as much reading the people as it is reading the rules, so you get an idea of what kinds of players you’re with and stuff like that.
And it’s, I think you learn more in an afternoon of gaming about a person than you learn in a week’s worth of conversation. You really get to see who are the the experimenters, or the more conservative, the vengeance takers, or the, it’s just part of the [00:38:00] game, and after a while you get who do you like to play with, and what’s funny is I don’t really, I’m not a big vengeance taker myself, and I don’t know that I appreciate their company, but once in a while it’s really fun to play with a vengeance taker and thwart them. There’s something in my psychology, maybe from my older brother having been occasionally a little intense, a little aggressive.
That when someone’s trying to push you around or bully you, it’s really good to get their goat. And that’s what’s funny about dealing with the people that are just trying to steamroller every situation. You know what I mean? He’s mellowed. I’ve mellowed. There were all kinds of times when I was young like, That’s not what a brother should do.
What the hell? Oh
Stephen: all right. So what else is going on? We’ve talked about many things.
Alan: Let’s see. I’m trying to think what we had. Oscar Shorts. I really so you might remember probably six months ago or something like that, I had this fun phenomenon on Facebook where if you click through to look at a set of books, you’ll often say, hey, special, I’ve got [00:39:00] 10 books out now and I’ll sell them to you in a special bundle, either on Kindle where it’s really cheap or if you want print, then they, print on demand and that kind of stuff.
And I was looking for new things to read and I read all kinds of the descriptions of what’s going on and the reviews from various different people. And I bought into a half a dozen different series. You know what I mean? And the one that I have now decided I like the most, got it, Benjamin Wallace, who does a post apocalyptic series.
You know what I mean? It’s after there was a nuclear exchange and maybe some diseases and all that kind of stuff, but the, at least in the United States, things are much reduced. We’re back to savagery, but people trying to get back to civilization. And, much like The Walking Dead the real monsters out there.
are not necessarily the zombies, it’s the people that are taking advantage or can’t, they’re so damaged by what happened that they really are awful. And yet these books have what it is to be a hero in those times. What it is to just keep your word and be in a situation and say I will not lie, cheat, or [00:40:00] steal, nor countenance those who do.
Not in my purview. I will not let a bad thing happen. And how they sometimes win, and sometimes they get it in the freakin neck. You know what I mean? Because there’s bullies tend to bully together. And stuff like that. You start to get big tribes and sets of whatever else it might be. But having said all that, they’re not heavy.
There’s a great sense of humor to them. And they’ve been, every book has been a good read. About a new situation, And the ongoing characters and introducing the new characters and stuff, they, I just, I have been very satisfied with what I spent for those. Whereas a couple others trailed to, oh, this is just like the previous book.
You know what I mean? Sometimes sequels are just redo it instead of exploring new territory and whatever it is about writing a good series of books that you keep expanding, not just repeating. And some of them have not been enough cool new stuff. I’ll wait until I read more of them to say whether I should really condemn, but I guess, in this case, not a disrecommendation, a big recommendation for the Tales [00:41:00] of the Apocalypse by Benjamin, the post apocalypse nomadic warrior books by Benjamin.
Stephen: what you said. Benjamin Wallace.
Alan: There we go. So very fun. Very good. I.
Stephen: Oh, go ahead. Go ahead, please.
Alan: The thing I was doing about getting back into comic books, I think I’m not going to continue.
Stephen: Yeah, that’s what you started to say last week. I was going to ask about that.
Alan: It hasn’t had the fascination that it once did for me. Having taken a break for 15 years now of buying actively, I just, it’s a lot of money. It’s a lot of time spent reading those various different things. The joy that I used to get about knowing everything about the Marvel and DC universes, all the various different things, the interaction with the characters, the growth of the characters, the great artwork.
It just, it’s Now it seems man, I’ve only gotten to I, and I’m stalling out. I know I’ve still got the S Superman titles to go. I know I’ve got the X Men titles. I know I’ve got things to look forward to. And I guess I should just go to those, the ones I’m actively looking forward [00:42:00] to. But there’s been any number of things that I used to like, and now they seem a little bit repetitive or derivative, or I’m trying new things, and they’re like Wow, they, whatever it is about, that makes a character an archetype, they don’t know how to do it.
There’s some old authors and new authors, and a lot of the new authors, they think that the way to forge a new path is to not understand storytelling. And so that’s one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. You’ve been doing a lot of going to workshops and getting good interaction and criticism with fellow authors.
And that a lot of it is learning to be better at your craft. I wonder if they have those workshops in the comic book field, because comic books, they should only be Biff Bam Pow, or it shouldn’t only be anti heroes. How can I make the worst version of this? Because now they’re a zombie version. Now they’re a corrupt cyborg version, or whatever.
It seems to be that everybody is corrupting and dirtying things, and that we’ve lost Is there any Captain America left, where they just are a good guy because they are? And I like that kind of stuff. The [00:43:00] nobility. So anyway.
Stephen: it’s funny you mentioned that because I’ve talked to several teachers about this. And I think in school, we get so focused on spelling lists and spelling tests to make sure you spell things right. And learning the grammar rules because you got to learn all the exceptions. And learning just, Ripping apart a sentence because, it’s definitely looking at the individual trees, but never looking at the whole forest.
I’ve said this several times. I’m like, when I started writing, I sat down, I started writing. I hadn’t had English. I didn’t go to classes. I didn’t read books. I just started writing. It was horrible. When I sent it to an editor thinking that they’re going to be like, Oh my God, this is the best book ever in the world.
And instead came back with everything’s red and marked off. I’m like, Ooh, ouch. But I said, okay, this is where I got to learn. And I started looking at it. I’m like, Oh, I agree with their points. I understand this. And each time I’ve done that, I’ve gotten [00:44:00] better that. And I’ve heard this argument with people saying, Oh Harry Potter is just a ripoff of Star Wars.
Okay you realize that they’re both ripoffs of the big monomyth that they’re both ripoffs from the ancient Greek stories.
Alan: Exactly.
Stephen: It’s not ripoffs folks. It’s that we have stories in our system and they need to have certain elements. That’s what it is. And
Alan: journey and things like that.
Stephen: so I think the problem in school is kids are learning all these rules.
But they’re all individual esoteric rules that don’t mean anything that if we spent first through fourth grade and then beyond, but first through fourth focused on writing, just write it. Tell me a story. Doesn’t have to be written. Tell me an oral story. Record a story. Then we’ll learn how to write it down.
I’m not worried about comments. I’m not worried about spelling. I don’t care if the grammar is incorrect or whatever. Tell me a story because [00:45:00] once you tell a story, Okay. All the rules and spelling and grammar and everything else makes a lot more sense. So we don’t ever do that. So I think that’s part of it.
I heard many authors that would take a book. Their favorite book and sit there and literally rewrite it by hand like in a monk doing the Bible
Alan: Interesting.
Stephen: And the things they learned just from writing by hand and copying this out was immeasurable and you’re
Alan: Wow. I’ve never done that. I’ve never Okay, that’s interesting.
Stephen: and the things Like you said, with the comic books, we talked about that before. People don’t realize comic books are modern serial pulp fiction and they don’t get treated that way. A lot of times they forget about that. They think that they have to do, gosh, I’m bouncing all over. This is the problem we have with the Marvel movies right now.
Everybody saw end game is at all. Wow the next movie better be bigger and [00:46:00] better than that.
Alan: Up the ante each time. Exactly.
Stephen: do that until you drop back down to nothing and build back up. That was, that endgame was so good because of the 20 movies before it. You can’t break all the rules doing Spider Man and create this whole new thing without starting with what the Spider Man rules are and you got to build to that, I think that’s a large part of the problem. Right there, my ramble.
Alan: Honestly, I like a lot of what you said. I don’t know that we can do I don’t know, why can’t we do both? By that meaning, there should be things that are about learning to use good grammar, write correctly, spell correctly, and there should also be that storytelling isn’t that you got it all correct, that it’s you told a convincing story, that you know, a lot of times people will say, speak your truth, and you, you gotta make it so that people would Be engaged by it and want to follow your truth to the end.
And how do you do that? It’s not just a matter of blurting it out. I know all kinds of people that probably have big stories inside of them, but they haven’t learned [00:47:00] how to draw a reader in. And even get a conversation where someone would be, Wow, I’ll listen to you for 20 minutes instead of, Okay, that’s enough, in fact I was funny. I hadn’t thought about talking about this till now. Friday night there’s a cool thing called This Improvised Life. Friends of mine that did, were in improv classes with me way long ago in Second City they continue to do improv and they’re so great at it. In this case, they bring in two storytellers and they give ’em a keyword and they say, tell us a story about that.
And then based on what you talk about, they do improvisations that are meant to be little takeoffs, little, maybe a little mockery, maybe a little bit insight, whatever else it might be. And so I just did that a Friday night. I was, for the first time for them, a storyteller, and the word was shake. And so I talked about we Weight Watchers, we learned that a milkshake is like the biggest calorie bomb you could do, so don’t do them.
And I talked about how at one point, even after I started Weight Watchers, when you do it, Your body adjusts so that you can’t have certain [00:48:00] things after a while, because you’re a more fine tuned digesting machine. And having had a shake, it almost made me like poop myself while I was driving on the highway, because my body was like, oh my god, get this out of here!
And then I talked about how the reason I stopped weight washers, because I got melanoma, and I had to go take care of that instead of continuing to lose weight, couldn’t have two systemic stresses at the same time, and that the shots they gave me of interferon that helped me out conquer melanoma. Didn’t they give me flu like symptoms three times a week, so I got the shakes and it went a little over I was supposed to do it in six minutes, and I think I went eight and but that I wasn’t Larding anything I was very happy that I had a whole list of what I wanted to cover And I put it on the easel and I went and talked and what I wanted to talk about came up Very naturally, very engaging.
I got a couple laughs from the audience. I used my vocabulary. I was not just sometimes people, they just recite or you can read off
Stephen: they said they wanted to do this. [00:49:00] And then he went into that thing and he did this,
Alan: And I know that’s how people that have a fear of public speaking overcome that. They know if I got this and I got, I have to look up occasionally and make eye contact, but I was I thought, pretty good, quite engaging, and I’m pleased that I’ve developed some of those skills.
As I’ve talked many times at Comic Cons, Mensons, technical conferences, and it wasn’t always just the dry material that I was putting through, that I have an engaging way of speaking, and that I, I make sure that I have highs and lows, and shorts and longs, and fasts and slows, and whatever it is that I, learned how to do because of crowd reaction or whatever I did that I read a couple things of here’s how to get them without a good opening sentence and make sure that when you end with a call to action and those I’ve tried to do some of that but I also know that public speaking is people’s number one fear and so it’s really been a huge leg up for me in all my career and all my life to be able to be the guy Sure.
In fact, for [00:50:00] this thing, we had to get a key word and talk for six minutes. It’s you could give me any word and I could fill an hour. You know what I mean? That I would here’s what I know about it, and here’s a couple digressions, and here’s some humor so that you’ll stay with me, and all that kind of stuff.
And I don’t think it’s arrogant. I think that I really have shown that, and in fact, way long ago when I was in debate in high school, they also had people that did extemporaneous speech, and a couple times I subbed in, and it was like, I could be doing this one really well. It’s not quite as disciplined as debate, but I already had that confidence of you could, peanut butter, and I’d be able to talk about peanut butter for an hour, my experiences or what, and it’s really cool to gain the confidence of being able to do that because it’s not every time is a presentation in front of 10, 000 people at Macworld or something like that.
It’s just in an office setting. You know that you I’m, I put on my consultant voice and speak so I sound a little more authoritative. Or I pace myself and I really watch what’s going on in people’s eyes and are they fidgeting or are they staying with me? [00:51:00] It’s very handy to be able to communicate in that way well, because it matters in all different kinds of places.
It matters at city council meetings. It matters that,
Stephen: only if you want to get arrested and drug out.
Alan: How you’re saying it doesn’t matter as much as what you’re saying. And then you get thrown in the hooscow. Exactly. Oh well. So for that, hey, for all of our geeky friends, if you think that Only being a geek, being the best, Arduino coder is going to get you ahead.
You might want to learn how to also represent yourself by speaking well. Take your gaze off of your shoe tops, get out of your timidity and your shyness, and learn how to do it, because it really matters, so
Stephen: something I’ve talked to other people about and found a few people that feel the same as me for me. If you put me in a room, go to ween. And set me down at a table with six, seven people that are talking or playing a game or whatever. That is extremely uncomfortable for me. [00:52:00] At least at start until I get to know them.
But getting getting myself to sit down with people I don’t know and play a game. Gets very uncomfortable until we get started and get rolling in and, relax a bit. But like you said, if there are 400 people in a room staring at the stage and they say, go on stage and talk about shake for six minutes, everybody’s okay.
And I’d stand up there and talk, like you said, Oh, it’s been eight minutes. Sorry. That is not a problem. Way different. And I’ve talked to a few other people because people are like, how could you do that? I’m like it’s easier than sitting down and talking to five people. Oh no, that’s way easier.
Alan: It varies by person, exactly. I normally read things like, I didn’t have the time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. Which, the paradox in that is exactly what? To get things tuned and good. I had gone through what I wanted to talk about a couple times, and it said, I really, what’s the highest points of these that I really have to include?
And I had done my own editing, I’m not gonna be able to get in six minutes, even if you think you’re a fast talker and stuff like that. That’s not a lot of [00:53:00] time. And so I had already done where I had winnowed it down, and I still didn’t make it. But next time, if I ever do it again, I really will keep that.
Unless it’s essential to the story, unless it’s a really good joke, then don’t make the digression. Stay with it and get done, because part of what you’re in service to, after you’re done, then do improv based on it. Any time that you took time away from them. That’s not fair. There’s a group of six people that are ready to jump on this, and I just stole some time out of their act?
That’s not good. So I need to be better about those kinds of things.
Stephen: And that’s a skill too, being able to hit that mark, go that time and get what you wanted to say rather than just ramble forever. We had, you mentioned the Writer’s Festival Saturday there was a publishing round table which I went to this same one last year. It’s basically the writers group from Reed Memorial.
They do a publisher’s round table, which is fine. I shake my head at the whole group though, because they meet the second Tuesday of the month at two 30 in the afternoon. Okay
Alan: Any working person is [00:54:00] not going to make the
Stephen: so I’m like, whatever. So it’s supposed to be a round table. As a round table, you have a moderator proposes an idea or a question, and then different people get two minutes to answer that.
And there may be a little discussion on the differences. The moderator follows up with another. idea or question and everybody gets a chance to talk. Maybe not on every single one, but it’s like Oh, I’ve been doing a romance writing. I got the answer for that. Yeah. I do horror. Go ahead and move on to the next question for me.
That type of thing. No. The moderator was sitting there on their phone the whole time and basically said, okay so and so go ahead and talk. And then they sat down and so started talking that it wasn’t a cohesive thing. It was each person talked about something with their experiences and just what they thought was the right way to do things or whatever.
And this person was like 25 minutes out of an hour just rambling.
Alan: The whole point of a roundtable is if you’ve got [00:55:00] ten people at the table, everybody gets a tenth. And if you’re not disciplining yourself, then the moderator should be, That’s enough, Billy. Let’s move on to somebody else. You
Stephen: So I’ve sat in on it two years in a row and it was the same thing both years. So I’m like, okay, I’m not going to this again next year. What’s it’s not worth my time, especially because last year they got a little irritated with me because I kept interrupting them to correct some of the stuff they said.
That they were, just flat out wrong. Oh, it only costs about 25 to publish on Amazon. Actually it’s free. They don’t charge you a thing and Oh yeah, the ISBN that Amazon gives you, you could use everywhere. Actually you can’t, it says right there, it’s only usable on Amazon. If you go somewhere else, you have a different ISBN.
So if you want to get in the. Libraries by an ISBN. Oh, so they got a little irritated with me But I’m like you’re giving people wrong information and they’re coming here for that information.
Alan: Yeah. I, wow, since [00:56:00] we just talked, part of being a smart person is you don’t want to be the know it all in the class, but sometimes it’s really necessary. The whole room there has an hour to learn a bunch of stuff and part of it is they’re being misled You’re really like that’s not been my experience.
You really have to chime in because you, it might not be that the discussion comes around to you, and you’re having to take notes as to point two that this guy had. Wrong. Here’s how it really is. And it’s it’s better, I think, to be interactive. I’m sure that you didn’t do it in a carpy ha, I caught you way.
It was like, this is really important. It really is free. And et cetera, et cetera. You know what I
Stephen: there’s a commercial out and honestly, I don’t remember what it’s for the danger of commercials. You like the commercial? No idea what the product is But it’s like this dad and daughter sitting there looking at the stars and they’re talking to their AI bot And says what’s that constellation?
Oh, that’s disco rat formed by the breakup of the third moon, huh? I didn’t know we had a third moon,
Alan: that’s funny. That’s its own world of there’s so much misinformation out [00:57:00] there and there’s people that actually love doing it. They love trolling. They love putting things out where they, they label a photo of somebody wrong and they must know that either they should have looked it up and gotten the correct thing, or they know and they’re just trying to see if they can get away with it.
And I’m tired of pranksters that are like, you’re making the world worse by all the ways.
Stephen: problem is a lot of them now aren’t just pranksters or for fun. They’re honestly trying to disrupt and be subvertive. There was that recent picture that came out showing what, somewhere in New York of armed guys in, at this hospital or something. And see, this proves whatever, what was an AI picture?
If you look at it, the one guy’s got his arm up and there’s a gun coming out of his arm. I was like. you people can’t tell, but they were trying to cause, Yeah, we need to go invade and take care of the police because this is the type, they really are trying to use it to cause problems, Not just be the ugly troll in the basement.
And that’s a problem all on its own too.
Alan: That, to me, that’s [00:58:00] unfortunately one of the big, we talked about AI, and oh my god, what if AIs get sentient and take over the world? I’m more worried about all the bad people that are taking AI tools, and like you said, trying to say, I can create a scene of anything now. I can make deep fakes that are almost indistinguishable,
Stephen: can make deep fakes and I’m not that great with art.
Alan: how many people are going to start doing that? They’re going to start having a scene that never happened, but they’re going to put it out there and create all the disruption and maybe get a reaction.
Stephen: part of it is, also then, when the real stuff hits, They’ll be like, no, that’s fake, they faked that, they made that up. So no one will know what to believe anymore. That’s part of what they’re doing. Also, I think
Alan: One of the better comebacks that I’ve ever heard with the people that like think the moon landing was faked is that you have to say to the guy, Oh, you’re one of the people that believes in the moon.
Stephen: That’s good.
Alan: just to take it to the next absurd step.
Stephen: Yes I love that too. All right. Yeah, it’s been about an hour. I’m gonna have to get rolling. I’m sure.
Alan: Okay. Always a pleasure. See you in a week. And It’s getting warmer. Yay. I [00:59:00] was I don’t mind being home and reading and stuff like that, but having to be home and getting a little bit of cabin fever, it’s great to be able to get out and take a walk. You know what I mean? Get
Stephen: I’ll let you know I’ve got signed up for multiple shows coming up a lot of cryptid paranormal shows a few craft show things We’re doing so I’ve got a busy year ahead of me. That was another thing. I think Going to do some of this stuff gets me out, with calling gone I’m not going to worry about him.
I just got to take care of nanny, which that’s a whole nother thing. I, you
Some of that, but so I’m trying to get out a little bit and do some of this stuff. So
Alan: I hear
Stephen: I’ll tell you about all these fun events.
Alan: Okay. Very good. I’ll tell you about comedy festivals and the American Cross Proposal Tournament. We have other things lined up. A couple of cruises where we’re going to go. Let’s go to Hope to See the Northern Lights and stuff like that. You know what I mean?
Stephen: All right, ma’am.
Alan: Take
Stephen: you later.
You have been listening to the Relentless Geekery Podcast. Come back next week and join Alan and Stephen’s [01:00:00] conversation on Geek Topics of the Week.
