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Overview
We’re old guys. we have (hopefully) some wisdom to go with our experience. What we don’t have is the quickness needed for video games nor the desire to waste our time dealing with things we don’t have to.
Seems to have become our topic for each discussion today.
First it’s playing video games with millenials. Then its hotel and fast food expectations. Then its our coffee pots.
We reminisce about collecting and how that has changed – maybe not for the better in all aspects.
Recommendations
Maybe not a recommendation – https://www.sonder.com/
https://www.netflix.com/title/81150303
YouTube
Transcript
Stephen: All right. Good morning, Ellen.
Alan: Good morning. We’re at the moon landing, huh? It is August.
Exactly. I it’s just, I have this, all these backgrounds available and I rotate amongst them and that’s its own kind of weirdness of oh, I repeated this one. I don’t wanna use the same one.
And yet yes, moon landing. I think I actually have changed it since what it, the real date was and stuff like that. But this just seemed like optimistic and Hey, there’s our beautiful blue marble there’s so much going on nowadays with, we only got the one planet we’re not ready to go terraforming, Mars, that escape yet.
Stephen: So there, there was a cartoon based on a comic book that I used to love called the. And there was a bad guy that wanted to blow the moon and his response was, whoa, you can’t do that. Or they wanted to blow up the earth. I’m sorry. They wanted to blow up the earth. He goes, whoa, you can’t do that. Where would I keep all my stuff?
that’s pretty very tongue and cheek way of looking at it. Me, I’ve got the same background and it’s because guess what? The parts and technology for putting your computer together is way different. And for some reason I’m not getting anything coming up on my put together computer right now.
So I’ve
Alan: gotta get it used to be, it just, they kinda worked and it fit and then you turned it on and, oh my, oh no. Yeah.
Stephen: So I’m dealing with that. I got my, I got a hard drive and I looked at it and said, this is just a really big USB stick. Where do I put this? and there’s new connections to
Alan: put in there, SSD.
Exactly. I think I mentioned Colleen. SSD in her MacBook air has gone south. And I have done, I have all kinds of tools. I have tech tool pro and drive genius and things like that. And they kept on fixing it and stabilizing it, but then it didn’t stay stable. And so I kept, I was feeling really foolish and guilty over, Hey, hon.
I fixed it up and now I gotta go to California. And then two days in she’s dead in the water. So luckily besides her laptop, everybody has a phone nowadays. She has a work laptop as well, but all kinds of stuff that you do on your home laptop, if you really divided your life, you don’t wanna start mixing between, you don’t wanna on a work laptop. You don’t want co-mingling of personal files and stuff like that. So I bought an SSD. I’m sorry if I went through a little bit from a place called other world computing, that’s great about, oh yeah. What kinds of Mac enhancement and other systems as well.
And I have had difficulty getting. It’s into the new Mac, so that it’s the bootable drive. I put it in. I say that it’s the startup drive something doesn’t work. So I swapped it back out. It has a little enclosure. I don’t have it in front of me. And now it’s I the conclusion of this last time we might’ve talked about it was I stripped the screw.
These have those little Torx heads. Oh yeah. That I didn’t think I was doing anything forcing nothing. And yet can’t get one of the screws out. So now the bad drive back in her laptop is trapped in there. Now I actually have to go to apple or go to a, at least a Mac friendly dealer.
There is one right down near Baldman Wallace college, believe it or not. And so I might do that or I can send it into other world computing, but I was as much as apple and various other places have really started to get out of the no to closed system, stay out, or you violate the warranty. They’ve been doing a big hundred 180.
Out of we do want you to be able to crack the case, go into your laptop or your phone or whatever. Here’s all the videos telling you how to do that. SMU. Yeah. I watch those videos. It doesn’t talk about tox groups. So anyway This is just, we’re, we’ve been in tech a long time, but things change you get a little out of it.
Stephen: So I’m looking at some of this I’m going, I don’t even know what this connector’s for. And I don’t see one on my motherboard. Is this important? Do I have to worry about it or not? But on the flip side, I went and I was playing with Colin and Ethan, some Mario Cartt the newest version on the switch, which I’ve never played.
I’ve not used a joy con, but I’ve played Mario Cartt before. And they kicked my butt. I was like in 11 to 12th, place, every race and they’re in one and two and I’m like, okay, hold on. I’ve never played switch. I’ve never played these boards. I’ve never played this version. So give me some of that. I’m like, but man, I’ve become that old guy.
I don’t, I can’t put my own computer together. I can’t win it in video game. I need to just did this work. My VCR is blanking. That’s right. Where’s Zork just gimme Zork. I’m good. Part of the reason I wanna do it is because I don’t wanna be that guy. I don’t wanna be Mr. Helpless and have to get tech help from a 14 year old.
Alan: I kinda wanna keep my hand in, but it hasn’t been easy. You know what I mean? And I don’t know, I have all kinds of other peripherals. I got everything seems to hook up pretty well, but one thing I’ve discovered is it really does matter the quality of your cables. I have various different things.
I, I, the house is WID. I have that, but things like the direct route from my router to my laptop, I wanted to be on an ethernet cable, cuz that way I get the best throughput. And in fact, we ran an ethernet cable from here down through the floor to second floor. So I could Jack into my, at that point, the TV now went to the Roku box and then do a splitter and that kind of stuff.
But something’s gone wrong with that table and I’m like, I didn’t take it. I didn’t. So I’m what am I gonna do to replace these things? Am I really gonna replace things going on to the second floor and have to rerun that I really don’t want to wireless is fast enough and good enough nowadays, but this little like yard cable between my router and my thing, this is really my it’s Skynet.
It’s the command center. I don’t want it to be that’s something. So I made a point of buying. Like you, you go online and immediate, like even though I know a little bit about it, you’re a wash and not. The difference in the tax backs, but the difference in the claims made yes you for a long time, I knew that for stereo, for instance, when they talked about, oh, you should have gold instead of copper, and you should have all the threading and shielding and so forth.
And 10% of that is true. And 90% of it is hype monster cables knew else did those kinds of things. When they did lab testing, it really was, no, you get no different through, I wanted to get cat seven instead of cat five. So I really do have additional shielding. I have so many things out here putting out signal nowadays that I don’t want EMI you interference affecting me.
And because that cat seven is five bucks instead of four bucks, why wouldn’t I spend a dollar for the premium cable? If it was 25 bucks? Am I an idiot? Am I are really gonna do this? Not a peace of mind, but more like paranoia. So those cables are arriving today and we will see whether that and I’m not used to a cable, did it honestly, did I kink it?
How did it spontaneously stop working as well? Port on my router, bad is the ethernet
Stephen: port. It’s like a ethernet cables get installed for decades without moving. Exactly. And by guys that kinda like they,
they treat ’em rough. Yeah. You
Alan: stay working. So I have to, I don’t know.
Lemme think how to say this. I have a number of diagnostic tools, tech tool pull being one of the ones I mentioned, and I specifically check my internet for on my Mac and it’s fine. So part of the discipline of doing the debugging is step by step, eliminate what it could be and then what remains, however, improbable must be the case, right?
I’m sure I call when it really is I’ve never seen this before. How would, how did this go wrong? It’s weird to have something that’s worked all the time, like as if your car stopped and it’s It has always worked. I’ve done nothing different. You don’t even know where to start because something that you was dependable ,
Stephen: that’s part of it too.
Being the old guy. I don’t know how much I feel like. Chasing bugs and fixing these errors. It’s just I want it to work and I wanna move on. I don’t, I’m not, I don’t say that’s why I don’t use Linux a whole lot because I know every time I need a program or wanna do something, I’ve got to follow a whole list of make this, compile this or look for something.
And then the version that works with my processor and my version of Lenox, and I’m not saying that’s bad, it’s just, I don’t care to do that anymore. And when I ran my cable down to what’s going to be my new office, whenever the computer works, I was crawling through the attic and sections of the attic that have not been accessed literally for decades.
And I’m going, what the hell is this? This has been up here since I was born. This is I don’t think we need this after 50 years of not using it, let’s get rid of some stuff up here. addicts are scary to run the
Alan: ethernet cables through it’s funny, especially being in tech and not only in computers, but in music in various other places.
There’s regularly. Hey, it’s the 40th anniversary. It’s the 50th anniversary of this thing. And then when I look at, oh, here’s the moue rig that Keith Emerson toured with this huge wall of yeah. Passports and all that kind of stuff. It’s I don’t know that I have nostalgia for that. It’s amazing.
He got it to work. It’s amazing that survived transit and tear up and break down every single that’s end of the other way, tear it on and break. And yes, we know what
Stephen: you mean. We got it. We’re with you
Alan: But like I’m happy in so many ways to have it be that it’s very modularized and commoditized and, and things just work.
It’s kinda like software code when you write good sub you stop having to worry about, do I have something that’s gonna make sure that this field is always first cap and alpha Nu American and the things that kind of cure things so that you can make assumptions later on in your code.
And I don’t want those to stop working so I. We, we, when we started to have okay, I introduced the Roku box and then I started to get, remember my HDCP errors. Because it finding something that wasn’t talking directly to it, and then it’s oh, this must not be authorized. No, I haven’t downloaded software movies from other than area United States, north America.
I’m not like piloting things from or something like that. And yet it’s funny when he just opened the hood up a little bit and speaking of cars and computers and everything else, I don’t want to always go into troubleshooting. I’m just like, Ugh, I wanna watch rings of power. I just wanna sit down and enjoy the new game of Thrones thing.
Throw things up
Stephen: on my screen in an, from an opaque
Alan: TV that doesn’t have ability to
Stephen: troubleshoot this. That’s an example though, where the more expensive cable is the better one that you need because it has the air correction stuff in it that they’re looking for.
Alan: Yeah. And actually, because I, my Samsung smart TV is one generation behind where it does all of what the newest version of HDCB should do.
So what I did was I got an ethernet splitter. I have an Enet cable going both the TV and to the Roku box. And then HDMI from the Roku box to it so that it doesn’t try even to detect it. It doesn’t it’s one interpolated step away from being able to check it directly. So it goes away. It doesn’t try to check it.
I didn’t fix the HDCP or it someone had mentioned online that this makes it, that it’s not even gonna do that check. So that seems to be working. And then I also have I have an HDM, I splitter that I wanted to be able to doesn’t Hopefully these little and splitter is not some are smart they’re live and they actually do they don’t just mirror this signal.
They actually have two separate. So as in networks, there’s seven layers. It’s not only the physical transport, it’s all the logical layers. And what you want is like a li I guess a better term is a switch. You want a live switch that treats each port as an independent connection, both physically and logically so that you don’t have any echo, any mirror, any loss, right?
What was I on again? And so that’s always a thing of, you have to, when you go online, the, all the companies sometimes they’re not in the best of English that they’re coming from. China, Korea, various places where it’s been translated and it really might be that the word switch and router and splitter are all the same kind of, and so then you have to really go looking everywhere into the comments and everything.
Did you use this in exactly my situation. And did it work? Yes. Says X, Y, Z. And I’m hoping that they’re compet enough to know what I’m talking right about. So it’s worth a little bit of I guess doing the troubleshooting to know that it will work once I buy it, I don’t wanna buy it and return it because this was Thena flu one.
And then it’s, you know what I mean? I’ve been able to get through everything. Good. More cables, more
Stephen: weirdness these cables I may use ’em someday. Let me add ’em to my jumble of cables that I’ve got cables going back to the seventies, I just might use. And I looking in the attic we haven’t used that since I was born I go through my cables every now and then I’m like, do I really need five of these line conditioners anymore?
No, I don’t. Yeah. Cause I haven’t used them you end up with that big cumbersome bundle of Christmas tree, light version of cables. You’re like, I know I’ve got an ethernet in here
Alan: somewhere. Exactly. What I worry about is that any number, those things usually come with their own cable.
Some do, and some don’t, but often what comes with it is not state of the art greatness. It’s whatever is generic that will at least get their device working. And then when some standard changes, then that cable might not be sufficient. This was happening. Absolutely. When I was troubleshooting things with my dads Early digital H D M I, but not much more than that.
Sony TV and Sony is kinda like the Microsoft of the TV world. They have their own standards for a lot of different stuff instead of following what it should be. And without going into a ton of detail, I continually had to be, this should work. And yet it’s not, where do I have to go to in settings to say, do a pass through instead of a check died.
I can, I like, I don’t wanna mean to mix terms, something. It seems to be that it wants proxy and security to be able to check that others. It just says whatever’s coming over that cable. I’m gonna try to run it on the TV. And I really had to like experiment and watch, okay, can I get my Roku box to work with this guy?
And it was my older one because I kept my new one here and brought that one over there is what I’m gonna be there for a week out of a month. And then, oh what power source goes with this Roku box? Because the power source doesn’t have. Roku written on it. They’re all generic. And honestly, I had to try three because you plug it in and then, oh, this is getting hot.
That can’t be the right one. , I 10 go hot and burst into flames out of both ports or whatever, right? Yeah. Yeah. The good news problem with all the old stuff is that then unless you put you’re smart enough to put a little sticky note or something on it
Stephen: years since I’ve used aluminum foil to help connect anything that used to a helpful problem solve at times,
Alan: I just this little for the SSD that you can put into a separate container and then have it as an external hard drive, it actually had a little thermal strip and I’m like, wow. I’m not used to anything requiring that nowadays.
Almost all of them are. Spec, they don’t put out a lot of heat or they have enough ventilation that it’s not a fan, but that it actually handled it itself. And so then I’m like I don’t, I got nervous over have anything that could put out enough heat that it might actually kill the component if you don’t do it.
I’m, they’ve seemingly solved that problem. But not for this one is because it’s the terabyte size instead of the a hundred gig size or whatever. And that the more density you have, the more heat you put out and the more you have to dissipate that it’s death for components. I’ll see, I did indeed position and the little heat guy on there and stuff like that, but then it makes it like snug.
And then you’re like, what? Hope I did this. Because I would’ve thought you’d wanna have circulating air as a way of dissipating the heat, but this guy who knows. Yeah. I, I. Here’s hoping I could made a hundred mistake, Okay. I gotta ask. So you sent a list of a couple things.
Stephen: You, the two things that I was unclear what the topics were was you said Philadelphia and our little fiasco was Saunder so wasn’t sure what those
Alan: were and exactly. I’ll just go into this briefly. We have had fun where Colleen has business meetings all around, like Ohio, Pennsylvania, occasionally down, Kentucky, Indiana, et cetera.
Sometimes when you have that business meeting on a Friday or a Monday, we get, we say why don’t we make a getaway weekend out of it? We’ll go down. You’re driving there anyway. She gets her mileage paid for, if there’s no manipulation here, we’re not cheating anybody, but as long as we’re doing it, then we look for where’s the nice hotel and you know what’s the good breakfast place, whatever else it might be.
She had a meeting in Philadelphia that had taken months and months to line up. And so finally, when it got scheduled, we said it’s a long drive. I will show for you. We’ll stay you, you need to be downtown. And often when we go out of town, we’ll be like let’s stay outside at a $50 room and drive in and save some money.
In this case, it was right. Downtown client is two blocks away from a Saunder hotel that we found Saunder seems pretty cool. They’re a company, a hotel company that seems to make Bo boutique hotels out of older buildings. They retrofit them, they add wifi and soundproofing and modernize and better bathtubs and beds and all, and they’re all like nice and white and modern art on the walls.
They look really cool. And I’m not used to boutique hotels because boutique means many dollars. But this seemed to be the co the good combination of it’s right near the client. We’re gonna be only there for a couple days. We’ve never tried a Saunder before. Let’s go for it. It does sound cool.
Stephen: I, that that’s, it fits right along with stores and stuff. You got stores now that are very niche focus on one thing, rather than stores that are everything to everybody that’s kinda the same thing. Exactly. Get these
Alan: little, like we have liked extended stays American in the past because we not only like having a hotel room, if you have just a fridge and a stove, you can also really enjoy I have a place to put my soy pop and cool instead go down the hall to get ice.
And if we wanna just grab a quick meal, instead of going out, we’ve noticed when we go out every single night and have I don’t know, more food than we usually have, but richer food than we usually have. It puts us off our feed. Yeah. So it’s okay to have I like cereal in the morning or I like we go to a subway instead of something fancy.
That enables that to happen. It also seemed to be like extended state America because they have those facilities that there’s extended state people there. And then that kind of gets rid of the transient nature of a hotel. And people actually have a little bit more pride of being there. They’re just kept nicer and there’s less, Hey, let’s go to this hotel and have a rave, a party at more.
The people are like, Hey, I’m working here, keep it down. You know what I mean? So we like all those factors having said how long it took to get this meeting set up, then someone big said, Nope, can’t do it. So all of a sudden we don’t have the excuse of why we have to go to Philadelphia. So prepaid for SA to save a little bit of money, to keep costs down.
And I call ’em up and say, Hey, those dates that now don’t work for us. I see on your site, you have features for managed reservations. And but my, the dates are grayed out. Can you help me. Oh, no, sir. You’ve got the prepaid no flex rate and you’re gonna be like a no show. There’s no fixing this.
It’s honestly, I’m not trying to take my money out of your system. I’m not trying to get a refund. I’m please work with me here. I’ve just discovered you guys. We liked what we’ve seen already enough that we’re not only staying with you in Philadelphia. We’re staying up in Toronto for the comedy festival.
Sorry. Sure. That’s not our policy. Like I said, I’m not trying to cheat you, but please. And said, this is no threat, but it’s just fact you can really make like a raving happy customer out of me by working with me on this. Or you can get a detractors and someone who will never stay with you again and that by losing my Goodwill.
Really? Isn’t a good thing. No, sure. That’s not. Our policy says CA and is there someone else there I can talk to? Nope, no. No manager to send me up to that might think that it’s not just you with your script, but it’s, and maybe you’re empowered and you can do things, but you won’t. So I, we are still going to Philadelphia, despite the business meeting, having been moved away we’re gonna have a nice getaway weekend.
We’ll stay in our Saunder. We didn’t cancel and then lose the money. And yet now I have this terrible sour taste. And so to step back from it and get philosophical. I and I, of course there, I wrote about this a little bit on Facebook, because part of what you do is to talk about it so they can see that there really might be some ramifications.
It’s the prisoner’s dilemma. It’s not that you’ve just done me wrong once. Now you have me telling this story forever. That can’t be good. All my friends that think I’m relatively decent and cany, I’m not trying to cheat anybody. I didn’t make a reservation than trying to get out. I’m not asking for more services than what I paid for.
It’s just that there’s no. Room here for compromise. No, there isn’t. So we’re gonna do the best that we can. And I really was happy to have discovered this cool summer thing of wow, I can stay right in the heart of the city in a place that we’ve stayed in. Some places that are like, wow, it’s a vintage hotel, traditional beautiful.
But what that usually means is tiny, terrible rooms and falling
Stephen: apart and
Alan: fixtures that don’t quite work. I don’t want muck coming out, my bathtub spigot and stuff like that. Honestly, we’ve never had that bad of an experience, but you know how it is. There’s a difference, especially wifi for having a connectivity in the place, soundproofing in the place.
It really matters that we still have those things. I want a good bed and a good lock and a good shower. And I’m willing to pay appropriately for those things, but I don’t really care about, I don’t know all the other, I don’t I’m not a $500 room guy. I’m also, I’m not a $25 room anymore because we did our share of price lining early in our travels.
And we were very lucky that we never had, oh, that’s something bad in the tub. You know what I mean? That’s, what’s that stain on the ceiling. We didn’t really have hardly any occurrences of that. But now we’re also just, as you get older, as you have a little bit more money you can buy your way and out of your own intolerance for it, you just don’t stay at no motel motels anymore.
You just,
Stephen: And that’s so weird cuz that type of policy is you might have said, say old fashioned. We grew up with that. That’s what we would’ve dealt with decades ago. You’re just stuck. We’ve got you over the barrel too bad. But nowadays there’s so much knowledge and things, easy flexibility and all, and that it that’s what the millennials are used to.
We can pick on the millennials, cushy life and all that, but that’s what the world we’ve given them. So to have a company that says we can’t do a single thing, that’s I don’t see that being a company that everyone raves about and talks about, like you
Alan: said, and just that the fact that and again, I had people that were saying you, you signed the contract the deal.
And it’s I’m not trying to, of anything. I’m trying to go, whatever that next step is of. Is there anything that you can work with me on I’m making no demands, I’m asking for immersing and you know what, I don’t, there’s a great quote that goes distrust those in whom the instinct of punishes powerful.
And I had a number of friends that were kinda like that. You made a mistake. You now, you. It’s but it’s worth asking it’s again. I’m happy to tell the story of, I, I asked and they didn’t or asked and they did, and then I’m like, I’ll be all really happy if they did. I’ll be really like, look how cool they were that they me over the barrel, like you just said.
And I don’t know the fact that there are so many options nowadays, it’s a ridiculous stance to say unless they were the only game in town, but downtown Philadelphia, all I gotta do is go on the map and there’s 20 other hotels around etcetera, et cetera. It’s it’s in defiance of capitalism.
They’re not acting as if they really do have like competition for my dollar and for my future dollar and stuff like that. I just it offends me philosophically to have someone take such a hard stance when a little bit of flexibility it’s about, it’s like, When we started to have sentencing that had mandatory sentencing.
And you were finding out that if you did any kind of this crime, you got 20 years, it’s what happened to mitigating circumstances? This person didn’t do this knowingly. They were a mule that something was slipped into their backpack. Nope. They had the drugs they’re going away. And the more you read about these various different stories and a number of people said you don’t want to have a be that it’s, everybody has a sob story and that people start getting away with things you can’t open the door to scammers either, but there’s gotta be some room, not only at the extremes, another one of these weird places where, why we become absolute that you either always do it or never do it instead.
It’s worth taking that two minute of thought to say, okay, this guy’s 63 years old. Doesn’t seem like a young kid. That’s looking to get more for his scooter. Rental should have this guy, he sounds. Like he’s in a bind instead of trying to get away with anything. The more that I described, my circumstances that I thought would be, I don’t know, at least worth listening to persuasive.
So then it’s wow, I that’s so weird to have someone just of say sucks to be
Stephen: you. Just weird. Cuz when I go to a casino and they tell me what casino do I go to? Not the one that’s gotten the rigged games and the worst odds. There’s 10 casinos. I’ll go to the one that says we’ll be happy to have you able to make headway in blackjack or various other games because we haven’t so stacked the odds that there’s no way of winning.
Alan: It’s only going broke slowly. You know what I mean? Even that little and we can segue into the Sandman in a minute. That little bit of hope is it makes all the difference. And when you find that you’re hopeless, you get all these fuck that guy. I won’t go to someone that there’s also sayings along the lines of when you see how people treat.
Subordinates keep track of that because that’s how they’ll treat you when they think that you are in a position of less power, like a waitress, when you see a date that treats a waitress badly or something like that. And having said that, and that’s what I think of if that’s Saunder’s corporate policy, if that’s the script that she has, I don’t wanna I have to take on all the risk another way in which society has gotten weird in the way that companies used to work with you on anything where there’s risk reward tradeoffs, and nowadays companies specialize in, how do I set everything up so that I reap all the reward by the public take on all the risk, by making my partner take on all the risk. Any contract where you can’t just say how about if we swap them, I get what you were gonna get and you get what I’m gonna get. Oh, I’d never do that. Then how do you think this contract is fair?
Stephen: You wouldn’t even take the other side of the deal.
Yeah. I mean that, that’s a big thing in the author world is looking at the contracts and what some of these companies promise and what they do in the cost and all that. And absolutely. And the thing is authors in the past big authors take Stephen King, their contract basically says we have all rights to everything that you write and we can’t promise you that you’ll make money at all.
And that’s essentially what it is. But now there, that authors. Power and control that they’re like they, the authors look at a contract and say no, take out all the foreign rights. I’m not giving that to you. And I’m only giving you paperback publishing rights and no not TV, and that you don’t have the right to speak for me on that or anything.
And no, you don’t have first call to any other series, just this series because they have that power, same thing with the hotels really there, you could, it’s so easy to find one and control. So that makes no sense. I went here a good example of customer service. I went to taco bell the other morning, stupid I, a couple years ago, I realized that some taco bells serve breakfast and I’m like, oh, I wanna get taco bell for breakfast someday, but I’ve never really been in that position.
I’m not gonna go out just to do it. So Sunday morning I was in a position I’m like, oh, there’s a taco bell breakfast. I’ll go get some. And I was in line forever and there’s only two people in front of me. And I’m just like, what did these people order? And I’m just like listening, no big deal.
And I get up there and the guy’s I’m sorry for the wait. I’m like, yeah, no big deal. And he goes, there’s only two of us here were swamped just trying to do everything. And he gave me oh, many places. Yeah. He gave me two coupons for free tacos and I’m like, sweet. And I was happy. I wasn’t even upset, but they did it proactively.
So yeah I wasn’t yelling at ’em. I imagine they probably got some people coming up that morning. I waited for one and a half minutes and I should have already been having my come on folks. You gotta chill out a little bit.
Alan: this? It’s funny. This is one of the last things that I mentioned in the long list of, Hey, let’s catch on two weeks worth of ity.
It’s just an overall comment on society that Colleen and I keep. Doesn’t have to be this hard. Everything seems to have gotten just a little bit less harder, a little bit less competent, a little less joyful. And it’s the whole combination of it. Was it the great resignation that everybody decided they didn’t want to do whatever job they were doing.
And I want people to better themselves. Fantastic. But then the company has to commit to get your new people trained or whoever is staying around, don’t work ’em to death and make it that they’re exhausted or angry make it so that we’re still all in this kind of together. And so in that way of when I go to subway and there’s one person working and they’re running themselves ragged, and I almost always now go like late lunch instead of lunch, because it’s weird to see someone just getting frazzled, getting wow, I just have too much to do.
And there’s no fixing this until the manager hires another person. And can they, if margins are slim or COVID is still under whatever. And it’s not just service obvious things like that. It’s. Things that used to work Amazon wise. Now it’s sorry, there’s a delay. And it’ll take a while and we can’t even give you a date.
I’m like, wow. It used to be that you were information rich. And one of what one thing you try to do is set expectations. So I’m ordering things for mom’s supplies at the facility that she at on, in Brookdale. And we gotta make sure I ordered like the 12th or the 15th because almost was at work. And then it stopped working.
So it’s do I have to find another supplier? Do I have to order on the 10th instead of the 15th? Because it doesn’t matter. What’s going between Amazon and me. I can’t. And my mom not have her little bedding and stuff like that, that she needs. And. The number of examples that we could start.
Naing all the ways in which things have gotten I’ve talked about, Hey, I used to be able to order with some reasonable expectation, use things through Amazon. And it seemed that everybody decided to say, you know what? I don’t really care what condition it is. I’m gonna call it like new to get you to buy it.
And I’m hoping that the hassle of returning is gonna be just enough, right? And name, name all the other ways. Every time I go to
Stephen: It’s almost, and this is a completely accurate statement. I understand that. But we’ve gotten so used to conveniences and certain things that now that things are going back to what they were like decades before people can’t handle it and is an outrage.
And but the part of the problem is what what we’re talking about. It seems like most people are treating every single day and everywhere they go, like it’s black Friday sale and they have to kill somebody to get that savings of 50 cents. That I wanna get what’s mine and screw you.
And that seems like the attitude overall.
Alan: I’ll tell you boy, another that one, my I’m the Saint of proportion. If I had to say, what would I be the Saint of? Am I the Saint of of travel of happy footwear? No, there just seems to be such a weirdness nowadays in a lot of people where they will argue to death over that $5 sandwich, like they will about a $500 hotel stay, right?
And it’s not the same. Some things are worth, you have to pick your battles. You have to decide what land you’re willing to die on what battles you’ll be willing to die on. The way that people go from zero to 60, over virtually anything nowadays is really weird. Cause when they don’t leave themselves room to really react when something is really serious, And like you said, it put in the
hospital is different than you’re not getting the right condiment on your sandwich. What’s wrong with you. Then you don’t see the vast difference
Stephen: there. It puts it out of proportion. So when you know, they are trying to get to the hospital and they can’t get the right parking spot, they’re blowing up and reacting.
So the reaction of everybody around them to is to push back and argue. So it doesn’t cause you’ve gotten used to that. So it’s it just come on folks.
Alan: I’m Mr. Close today, you Kurt VA getting a great quote damnit, you’ve got to be kind what a great little oxymoron type thing, but it really is like a radical thing nowadays to just, as you were saying, when you were taco ball, just say, Hey, no worries, buddy.
Yeah. I I’m not the third guy to yell at. You. I’m happy with whatever’s gonna happen here. I didn’t mind waiting in line a moment. My sense of moment is different than people who want immediate satisfaction in everything that they do. It’s they’re pre perfect and now all the time, and they haven’t read the thing about, we can get two outta three, Yeah. Come on. It’s stop and think a minute, folks, you wanna yell at this poor guy, who’s making minimum wage to give you a pseudo Mexican breakfast. that’s gonna kill you. And you wanna argue about it’s a buck 50, come on. Another thing I’ve noticed is, and some people have this.
They wanna be able to pick up a guitar and be a rock star. Like it should just be in them somehow. And it’s not just about the guitar. It’s we have scooters now in Lakewood the ones that you can put your credit card in or whatever
Stephen: those
Alan: are cool. And people are like, they look at the app for 10 seconds.
And if it’s not obvious what they have to do, they’re like, fuck this. And they walk away. It’s I can’t believe that your entire life consists of in 10 seconds, if you don’t get it, if you’re not the master of that app, that scooper, that restaurant, whatever you just move on. So many things in life, it’s worth a little investment to not only learn how to do it first, but then learn how to do it well and learn how to teach, learn enough so you can teach it to somebody else.
It’s not everyone. And it, and, but whenever I see those examples, it’s like, those are the one marshmallow people wri large. You know what I mean? The people that have no self control, no delayed gratification, they can’t be the ones we’re gonna let run the world. not, everything has to be that way. It has to be that there’s some things that are worth waiting for worth getting right.
Instead of just half-assed correct all
Stephen: those things. So here’s my perfect storm example of what I’ve seen that makes me shake my head. Newer video games, the big titles, because. These titles are oh, you there you froze something. Okay. These titles are so huge. It takes several teams and hundreds of people several years to put all this together.
So you’re getting this immersive open world that reacts and people in it. And it does things. It’s all this stuff. And people are like waiting for it forever and ever. And people will even say this game sucks. Don’t get it based on the first trailer two years before it even comes out, then you get these companies forcing their people to work overtime in crunch mode, find all the bugs and fix the bugs and improve the graphics and add more playability and smooth it out and make all these great changes.
They’re building a world, they’re building a little Uber, and then when they drop it, there’s three gigabyte of updates already because when they went the master and it came out live, they’ve fixed so many more things and done all this. Then you get the people that get it and play it for 30 minutes. Say this game sucks.
I’d never buy it. Nobody should get it. They give it a zero rating, then nobody wants to buy it. And so the company doesn’t make enough money off of it. And then the gamers start bitching the planning because we’re not getting the big games we want that. Do everything we want. Folks, you can’t say everything sucks.
You can’t stop buying the games and then say you want games. And it’s that whole ecosystem of video games is mind numbingly stupid. Sometimes it’s like elder scrolls, Bethesda. They don’t do that. They usually go look, it’s not done yet. We’ll let you know when it will be. And people are like, great. It’s it that idea of playability and that you can get always updates and new additions and that kind of stuff. I really like the games. As I mentioned, I continue to play the upload certain things that like it isn’t just this thing frozen in time and I got good at it. And now I just play monkey pushing the PT button instead they add new things.
Alan: Hey, there’s a new season. There’s a new character class, there’s new items to find a whole new part of the world to explore that locked door that you couldn’t get in, you opened the door and now there’s a whole nother part of the castle. So I like that. There’s I guess, a relationship going on there that you’ll often see wow, they listened to what people were saying, and yes, this should work differently.
There should be Neckers, whatever else it might be. And there’s always people that immediately are criticizing. It isn’t exactly what they wanted. And it’s that’s because you don’t understand all the game mechanics, I’m not the designer of this game. And I can see that what you’re asking for is part pay there.
It’s not all the way there. Oh I would hope that would be one of those things where people would learn patience because if it’s really great, then people would be like, it was worth waiting for. I’m happy to have I money and I can conquer in a weekend. I want a game. That’s gonna take a couple weeks and get my money’s worth, get my re replay abilities worth.
And yet. Maybe not there’s, but the loudest people, the loudest
Stephen: ones are the jerks. Yeah. They’re the ones that say, everything is horrible that I’ve run into these people. And I look at ’em and I blink because I’m broken because they say how they like star wars. I’m like, great. What do you like?
I don’t like the first one because Luke’s acting is so horrible and whining and I can’t stand it. And I don’t like the second one because the special effects aren’t that good in this and that third one sucks cuz of the E walks and the prequels were just horrible and nothing. Okay. You just named every freaking movie and didn’t like a single one.
So what do you like? I don’t get those people now. I’m not saying you have to say, oh, I like star wars. So I like everything star wars, but let’s be intelligent and decent about it. We can discuss what we don’t like about. I hate LOR, if anything should be taken outta star wars, take out the LORs. And my reasoning for that is because the force was mystical.
It was magical. It was a fantasy you put in LORs and now it’s a bad star Trek. Sci-fi show
Alan: biological, et cetera.
Stephen: Okay. And that’s my thing. It leave, it doesn’t need fixed. It doesn’t need to be something else. The fantasy is fine. And I was gonna say that about the games and stuff not, and some companies are discovering this and following this, not every game has to be.
500 million people playing one open world at the same time with a season with new content every six months. Give me a good platformer that I can work through with good graphics and fun gameplay. Good themes. Just me not worrying
Alan: about coordinators. Yes.
Stephen: And there’s a lot of Indies that are making games like that, that are getting big and popular and companies are going, wait a minute.
I thought everybody wanted a first person shooter open world game for everything. No, not everybody want, we’ve had those. I don’t need another first person open world shooter. I’ve got five. I could go play right now, yeah. It’s a little bit of jumping to what I had talked a little bit about.
Alan: Yes. One of the reasons that I love going to maker’s fairs and that I, and I not only me, but my older brother was out there in California for this last week. And we were visiting mom every day and working on the house to get things, something fixed and get ready to sell. He was really good at fixing this sprinkler system.
I, when we had found a leak that had to be like, bring the irrigation plumbers in and so forth. I have this weird thing about whenever I think of myself working on plumbing. What I picture my mind is that I’ve rooted up and I flooded the house. Whereas it’s much more like any other computer system, you check each of the cables and make sure that they’re working like they should.
And that you can only have five on this cable because that’s how much bandwidth you have. And he was able to get a whole bunch of stuff tweaked and working that as my parents got older, they just weren’t as much out in the yard, making sure that the little bone size were doing well and the sprinklers were tweak and stuff like that.
So reason I say that to talk about what we’re doing is whenever you’re a person that has that fix it, mentality that kind of dis play within and find out how it works mentality. It keeps you from having that weird absolutist view of it has to be perfect. Or I don’t like it. It has to be just what I want or I don’t like it always.
You look at. I have this older car and I kept it running with the duct tape and baling wire, as they say, or an older computer like you and I have talked about or anything. Whenever I work with kitchen gadgets and something goes funny, I don’t just wanna throw it away and get a new one. It’s is there a way that I could like, get a new blade for it?
Can I get a new grip for it? It doesn’t, it always occurs to me. If I find out enough about how it works, then I can restore it to its goodness. And in fact I I don’t know why I have a block against this. There’s a very cool Japanese term for when you fix something, not only fix it back to the state, it was, but actually make it better, make it more beautiful when you crack like a beautiful Porsche and bowl, you don’t just do it with glue you it with gold.
So now it’s got this beautiful vein of gold running through it. I knew what that term was. It’s not, it’s looking up Kigami which it isn’t that because that’s origami paper but there’s a beautiful term for that. And I think that’s a cool thing when you see not everything’s been Jerry rigged and used to the end of its life where it’s oh, that’s where
Stephen: like my father always did.
Alan: Cause some people are like that too. They never give up on it. You have to have it in your mind where it’s now it’s not really dependable. And I really should get new because the new features and the new energy ratings and all that kind of stuff, make this a better thing. But there’s something very cool to not live in a disposable society as well.
And really be. Just willing to give it a shot and to say, wow, that you kinda talk to your things buddy. I’m sorry. You’re hurt. I’ll fix you. You know what I mean? Instead of just being, you failed me out, you go,
Stephen: you know what I mean? There something, so yeah, I got a story for that.
Cause I agree. And there reaches a point in some things nowadays aren’t designed that you can upgrade, fix and keep going. So my mother, when she worked drank coffee every morning made a pot of coffee and she had a coffee pot, simple coffee pot, but you could program it. So it would go off at a certain time.
So when she woke up, it was brewing ready to go. And that was nice. That after a while that burnt out, didn’t work anymore, the little electronics, she could still make a pot of. Then she was using it and the handle fell off the pot of coffee. She’s okay. I’ve had the, literally, she had that one coffee pot for 15, almost 20 years.
Something like that. It was old
Alan: coffee. It fits her perfectly. She wants it, but yeah
Stephen: They’re cheap. They’re 25 bucks in the store for a simple pot coffee pot. Nope. My father said, oh, we can still use this. And he got a coat hanger, the old metal coat hangs and wired it to hold the handle on. So it would wobble as you’re trying to pour it and stuff there not worked.
You can keep using it. hold on. Then that weekend he went out and said, Hey, all my wood projects, I’d like to get a table saw. I was looking at this little table, saw it’s 300 bucks. I can cut my stuff. So he went out to get it. He came home with a $750 table saw cuz whoa, it’s bigger and better. She goes, no, I have to use the same coffee pot.
She threw it in the trash and went and bought a new coffee pot. That’s my father’s thinking.
Alan: And we we just bought a new toaster because it was one of those things that the older toaster was 20 years old had served us well, but it’s also, what’s a new toast. Toaster cost 25 bucks. I’m an expensive resource.
Am I spending an hour on this when I’m worth 200 bucks an hour, that about eight toasters? You know what I mean? Sometimes that occurs to me as well. I guess everybody makes their own compromises. They work on what they love working on, or that they have some emotional investment in. But I like that easy chair.
I don’t want a new one. I want that one with the recliner fixed, and whatever else it might be. And sometimes harder growing up is just saying it reach the end of its useful life and you’re gonna have to get a new one. So I’m still sad about I the one jacket that fit me perfectly and that it finally, I blew a seam out here because I like, I dunno, I still miss that thing.
whereas I am I black leather duster that will never wear out because it’s black leather it’s impervious to, and I’m so happy to have that thing in my life. It’ll never go away. As long as I don’t know, touch it on a doorknob and tear it in half or something like that. I don’t think you can.
It’s leather. You know what I mean? This thing is not quite rip stop nylon, but it’s pretty sturdy. About 22 years ago now I bought a whole media setup, had a media center with a nice big TV, a surround sound and it about 10, 12 years ago, it started to die. And it was time to upgrade, get a new one.
Stephen: So I kept using it as long as I can. The speakers started getting dried out and cracking and crap. My daughter accidentally broke the knob for the TV and it, what really got me to get a new TV was we plugged the Xbox in and we couldn’t read some of the text because the TV just wasn’t high enough resolution.
Okay. That be a new one, but the media center. So we’re like, huh? This new TV’s a wide screen. The old one was a flat a square CT. Okay. So we had to take these dividers in and pull this thing out so that okay. That, but now, yeah, so now the top part was a little wobbly and it started to come out a little bit.
It’s We like that because we have connect. So it sits up there just fine, but I don’t like it wobbly and ready to crash. So I went and got some wood glue and put some wood glue it, eased out a little bit. I got a couple nails stuck it in my son’s laughing at me. He goes to the wall. Okay. Yeah. He goes do you realize that’s what Papa would do and looks like something Papa did.
It’s just got these nails in it, glues sticking out of it. It’s okay. Yeah.
Alan: Frankenstein
Stephen: entertainment session. Yeah. It still works. I’m still using it. It’s eh, I’m not concerned, whatever. Okay. So I gotta ask. And you mentioned both of these and man, it is TV season. There are so many shows. I and movies, the streaming movies are coming up and I just can’t keep up with it.
So we’ve got Sandman game of Thrones. You mentioned Dexter. And I know she Hawk just started and Andor is about to start and we’re going in the fall TV season of all the new stuff. Luckily, but for the bad, the DC shows are pretty much done. Flash is like one of the last ones, but it’s a half season last time.
Mean? I say, it’s good than that. I don’t have to worry about watching it all, but it’s bad cuz they’re done. But right. So you’ve been watching all these, what’s your thoughts here?
Alan: So Sandman is fantastic and Colleen never read the comic books because the way that they were presented, especially like the cursive instead of bold print, she really didn’t like it enough so that she just couldn’t read him anymore.
But the stories of course are still fantastic. And they, the Stephen show has been quite faithful to the stories with some just Neil Gaman is directly involved. So it’s not some guy puffing, a Gar said, oh yeah, make that green instead of blue it was instead. Given the years, decades, since it first came out, these are the things that either be corrected things, or he said let’s modernize it a little bit.
Or he just said, Hey, it’s mine. I can do whatever I want. It’s my baby, so high quality throughout great performance is great. Like it’s like nothing else on TV in terms of because it automatically it’s dream. You have to have a certain amount of illogic and yet it has to have internal consistency.
And it does that. It has a heroic protagonist, but not a likable one. And so you have to deal with the idea of they there, these beings, the endless they’re not like. Only anthropomorphized things that are automatically human, like Greek gods. They really are beyond us. They think, and they transact on different levels than us.
And so they often have that of wow, that seems cruel. But what if you had a whole universe and that little bit, what we were just saying is this the 50 cent thing or the $500 thing and the sand man doesn’t deal with every 50 cent thing unless he wants to in a fit of peak. And so very interesting stuff.
The good things that Neil Gaman did at the time in the comic books were like, so what does death look like? Oh yeah, big guy in a robe with a size. No, she’s actually a pretty young lady. And who would you want to have taking you to the realm of death? What do they call ’em the sunless land, right?
Someone that would hold her hand out and say, it’s gonna be.
Stephen: And she’s a she’s got a little attitude with it though, but you’re the second big Sandman fan that’s watched the show and said, yeah, they did. They did it right. They did
Alan: good. I think so. Lots of, again, as you we already talked about this there’s purists, but I wanted to see exactly everything.
What was in the comic? Read the comic, right? Read the comic. Lucy is different. Death is different. There’s all kinds of things that are slightly different. And yet it didn’t boil it for me. It was just like a different version of it. Take it or leave it, but don’t condemn it because it wasn’t what have fallen in love with that, that some of the cool things they talk about, like that personification of death, like what would happen if you really could make your thoughts real.
And if you were a good or a bad guy, what would it be like? What, if they all do the serial killers, get together and swap stories. Is there a convention for them? and and like that at the time, very bold and unsettling the same was never a superhero comic. It was a horror comic.
It was, they captured a lot of that. And of course they, this only had 10 episodes, so there’s still so many stories to be told and so much more. I wanna see. And then when we haven’t watched this yet, they snuck on 11th episode. They just dropped an episode. That’s actually two hours instead of an hour, apparently the big caper Magnum Opus.
Maybe it’s like the doctor who Christmas episode where wow, a big inter loop. I’m just so happy that they really have seemed to have done this. How many other things have you been? Oh, I always wanted to see that. And then they didn’t have the right guy running the show. They didn’t have the right actor and the character, whatever else it might be.
So this is really high quality stuff. Nice. I just only watched the first episode of. Give the game of Thrones prequel. And since we just mentioned Dr. Who Matt Smith is actually one of the main protagonists, he, in of the, one of the families like the tar are they are, they’re like destined to be insane.
And how much, how what’s the world gonna do to say you are our king by divine, right? Yet you’re nuts. Why are you asking us to do this? Oh, you, because you have dragons, you can make all the world bow to you anyway, only the first episode. So I really don’t know all of what’s gonna go into it, except that it’s based on fire and ice, which is George R Martin’s back to him, scripting it, not scripting having written the book.
This is based on that book and all the vignettes that were the prehistory to what happens in game of Thrones. And there’s so many good stories in there that if all they do is just kinda not only keep the same cast of characters, but keep diving in showing various different episodes as to why things came to be, as they were.
I think, and it’s the pageantry, it’s all the costumes and a dragon in flight and oh man, an orgy and whatever else it might be. I have high hopes for this, just like I had for game of
Stephen: throne. See, I could not get into the original show and I tried to read the books too. I couldn’t get into the books.
It’s just not my thing. It didn’t click with me. And what we were talking about it over the weekend and somebody said if you get through the first season, it gets good in the second season. I’m like, why do I wanna watch a season? I’ve got so many shows I can go watch. I enjoy.
And same with books. Like the wheel of time. I wanna watch that series because I. Enjoy the books as much. I read it. And I’m like the first one I’m like, this is really just Shaara. It’s the exact same story. And then somebody said, oh keep reading, cuz it gets better. I’m like when halfway through book three least hundred page books.
I’m not gonna read all of this but you’re
Alan: asking me to invest a lot. Yeah.
Stephen: But like with the before it’s good. Yeah. Those are like, but what you said with the Sandman some people want here’s the comic. I wanna see frame for frame. I don’t see the point in that.
I wanna see what works good for a TV show. Now I do like some of the things we’ve watched, the movies, the TV shows they’ll throw a scene in there. That’s taken from a PA panel in the comic book and it’s Ooh, it’s exciting. But if it was framed for frame the comic book, eh, I could read the comic IRA, pictured it in my head.
Exactly. So I want the story they’re telling here and they’ve trained me. I don’t have a problem with multiple worlds of stories And in fact I really do like that when they, the ver enough from the original material that you really have to pay attention to be like, okay, so why did they do that substitution?
Alan: Like for instance, in one of the episodes, there’s a reason that the Sandman was not, there was somebody impersonating Sandman, if you will, while he was trapped. And it’s there, the, because the Sandman in DC comics had multiple identities he was. An old, super villain that like had a gas on, and then he was a Jack Kirby creation that was like multidimensional, almost like Dr.
Strange in the Marvel universe. And they changed that and who Lida hall is and Hector, and they’ve changed it enough. And I’m like, okay, what, why do they do that? And what are they gonna do? So I’m curious instead of being, oh, I shouldn’t have changed that. It’s like, cool. What now there’s a new mystery.
Instead of just running through what I already know is going to happen. I really enjoyed that kind of panto mine. Having said that what’s funny is I also mentioned, but I discovered a new series by mark Ney. Yes. About the gray man. They, the reason I discovered the books is because they just had a movie, the gray man with Mike Gosling and Chris Evans as a villain.
Oh my God. But he’s captain in America. I really like whatever that genre is that says the born book, the orphan X book, and now the gray man book, a guy who used to be an assassin a covert agent. He has a falling out with the agency often because he didn’t do anything wrong, but the agency is corrupt, but not everybody.
So there’s some allies and that whole tangled what did black car call it? The wilderness of mirrors where you really don’t know, who’s telling you the truth and there’s some alliances and some fallings out and all that kind of stuff, but it’s the thriller aspect, the doing the spycraft and all of that.
And the great fight scenes. You know what I mean? If you’re really an amazing assassin. These much like every other Clancy book. And I think that he also marked Ney either co-wrote or ghost wrote a couple of the Jack Ryan books. Oh, there’s like loving let’s say fetishistic descriptions of weaponry and armor.
And that whole world of, if you’re in that world, you care about exactly what bullets you use. And there all kinds of data that it’s am ammo sexual is all I’ve heard it described. It’s . And so it’s cool because not knowing much about guns I do from reading about em anyway, they’re really good.
At least the first one that I read was immediately like, these are really good and oh, it’s a series. I think I’ll go online and see what I can find either new or used and the price is right. And so I think I mentioned this before. One of the ways that I justify total purchases that I I don’t need it, but I want it.
I collect change over the course of my various different shoppings and stuff like that. And I have like orders in the car in case I need to use a meter anymore. Some of this is going away because every meter has an app. Now, a lot of places, you just use your card instead of getting changed, but I still have this habit of over the course of months, you accumulate 50, 70 bucks worth of change.
From all the various different shoppings that I do. You take that to the coin star. You don’t turn it into cash, cuz then they take a cut. You turn it into a gift card or Amazon. So here I am with 70 bucks worth of credit. Huh? Now my, my books cost like 90. I can get my, that whole series of books for 20 bucks money.
So it just amuses me to do most of the time I don’t do it for myself. I’ll be like, oh, I should get something for Colleen. She’d like a nice pretty new parasol. You know what I mean? That’s how we, so it I like that. I like discovering something that, and a lot of times I don’t mind the hunt.
Sometimes it used to be I’ll go to half white books and my two book sellers here in Lakewood and I’ll see if I can find ’em in good Condit. I’ve gotten frustrated with that in terms of, yeah. There’s 10 books in the series and I found 1, 3, 6, 8, right? I haven’t number two. And I don’t wanna read three before I read two.
So how much further am I gonna expand the spiral of my search until I find the, from how missing book number two, Amazon. So I, I have often now just said, I wanna read, ’em send them to me. instead of the treasure hunt used to be so much fun. The going. The smell of a bookstore, that people smell of old paper and yet sometimes I do that as I just like what I want is a stock of book so that when I got to California, I always have a novel to read on
Stephen: the plane. That do well. That brings it right back around to what we were talking about before we kinda got to be the older guys.
I don’t wanna drive around doing the hunt for this book. I wanna get the book and read it. Ah, you kids get off my lawn. I’m cranky now. but it, sometimes I do. And sometimes I don’t. Yeah. And I tell you why there’s ebb and flow to it. There’s I guess some there’s some terms of thought it would be easy.
Alan: And then I went to three or four used bookstores and I didn’t find it. And I don’t wanna go to five and six bookstores now. I’m like I almost certainly can find it in Amazon. I’m just gonna pull the trigger. And ones I did find, then I already had the joy of that. So I kinda get the best of both worlds.
Here’s the treasure hunt. And then here’s the convenience of and the lack of frustration over, I couldn’t find one book in the series way long ago when I was. The only way to do it was that how many doc Savage paperbacks did I hunt down in endless bookstores right into life, had the entire series.
And it really was wonderful to find a book. When you find one that you’ve been looking for forever, number 19 pirates of the Pacific, it’s in there. I found that 50 years ago, probably. And yet, when you finally find some hard to find ones, it’s just you wanna Hey everybody, I found it.
You kinda wanna run in the streets, exactly. That treasure hunt is really cool sometimes where it’s not just a commodity, you get an idea, mad paperback. I was buying all the old mad paperbacks and some of them were really hard to find. So I finally find a three ring mad at a little bookstore in Chicago and I was visiting my uncle.
It’s who knew? There’s no way of predicting. That’s gonna happen to be right. I had such fun when you find a bookstore that instead of. They get books when it doesn’t sell, they tear the cover off. So they get credit and then they throw it away. Some books, they didn’t wanna lose that credit. So they just have them in the shelves, but behind other things, and you could go into a bookstore and you’re expect to see all the fixing they’ve only knew.
And then you see, oh, there’s different books behind here. It’s not all the same in a stack. Oh, chronologically treasure going backwards. I just, I can’t tell you how many times whenever I had from all my lawn mowing all my babysitting, all my allowance, they went in one swell hoop because I went to downtown Chicago to host office news or CROX and burn tunnels or whatever were the places that had that.
And I just, I, if I find it here and I’ve never seen it before I have to buy it through, can I borrow some money, I need to get the giggling ghost or it, when I come back, someone else will have bought
Stephen: it. fucking tear my hair out. That kinda goes back to something else we were talking about how things are just a little bit worse, arguably.
That’s one of those areas, cuz it’s also harder to find some of that stuff cuz people are like, oh I can put this on eBay and I’ll make more money in a mint. And and so it is harder to find some of those, you don’t run across the garage sales with anything good and useful anymore. yeah.
Alan: And it’s funny.
There should be a term for this. I’m sure there’s a nice long German one where it’s that act of? I’ve been to a couple, ComicCons and then pulps and that’s where you’ll find all kinds of old men’s adventure paperback series. So they have the docs and the destroyer and the execution and the everything.
And I walk up and the guys got 30 docs paperbacks and I’m like, there was a time when I would’ve been like shaking like a puppy at how happy I am to have this treasure trope here. And now because I have ’em all because I am no longer in the hunt. I like only my young self was here. If only I had a son and he could experience that joy.
I’ve looked for you forever. My pretty, and here you
Stephen: are my precious,
Alan: right? It’s a really cool thing to whatever that feeling is of not having this feeling that once mattered so much to you, right? You, what I mean, is it own, we, is that there’s something specific to that thing of looking forever for a book of CD.
I found bill Cosby had a double album called 8, 15, 12, 15, where it was eight, 15 was the family show. And 12, 15 was the adult show. And I knew it existed, but I looked for that forever. And I finally found it in New York city Stu and I went to New York for spring break. And what did we do in New York? We go to mad magazine offices.
We go to the statue of Liberty. We go to all and, and we went to super snipe, the biggest comic book store in the world at the time. And right next door to super snipe was this vintage record place. And they had it. And I don’t know, back then vinyl was five bucks. This was like 12, even twice the cost of a single album.
And it was like, I, oh my God. I just was, look over here. It’s right here. Who knows what I would’ve paid once in a while. You’re like that it’s complete my collection. I’m gonna pay 50 bucks for
Stephen: a paperback.
Alan: If you look for something for 10 years and it’s not out there, it’s really this is my strike while the iron is hot
Stephen: moment.
So real quick, cuz we’re running long before we go. Let me tell you about Collins’s newest thing. So he’s gotten into the ninja turtles last year or so he’s been trying to collect figures and the comics and the old TV shows he keeps finding and acquiring them. Ethan’s grandmother, said, Hey, can you boys come over. I’ve got some boxes of old toys. You guys can just take in, have maybe they’re worth money. You can sell it if you want it, you can keep it or whatever. So like sure. We’ll come over
Alan: and take the back of your mind after hearing that you’re going like, oh, what’s in there.
What’s
Stephen: okay. So they went and looked and Colin just about had a heart attack. He acquired. Almost every single teenage mint ninja turtle figure with accessories and everything from the eighties, he said there were like the first five waves. He’s there’s every figure here in almost mint condition.
He was up half the night just going through, ’em finding the pricing and putting him on his display and and he’s just like walking on air cuz he is like pretty probe
Alan: like that. That’s cool. Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Wow. I was like to me and I feel again like the grumpy old man, I was never big in turtles, but I’m looking at these figures going, wow.
He’s are really just cheap, crappy looking pieces of plastic. They’re just not they weren’t high quality. They were mass produced. Yeah. When they were a kid they’re just. They’re just what
you want. I’ve got my first star wars figure right here, I think it looks awesome, but my mother probably is yeah.
Okay. Whatever, how much is that? Yeah, so I just had somebody
Alan: like at a Mixa trivia thing or something like that, they had just the head of it and then the color of the teenage to turtle. And like someone said that’s not a, and they look all alike. How can you tell you don’t know that it’s
Stephen: purple and red and blue and green,
Alan: right?
What’s wrong with you? And, wow. I dunno that I could tell which is which, but I knew that it mattered those were their colors. He just got, they just came out with it. It’s very cool. It’s a pizza box. And when you open it, it has a bib that has the turtles on it and then a pizza recipe book.
Stephen: So it’s in a pizza box.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah, because that was their food of choice.
Stephen: Oh yeah, definitely.
Alan: As usual we really caught up on a lot of stuff. Yes. I’m I we’re both so busy. I’m glad we’re still able to fit this in there’s. It really is the golden age for how much good TV, how many there’s lots of good stuff coming out. So it’s not like we’re struggling to find things to talk about. We’re struggling to like, how can we get through it all.
That’s a problem now.
Stephen: And we’ll have a live episode coming up in October. That’s
Alan: I’m gonna make sure I submit so that we’re in, in, on the roster for Halloween. Gotta figure that out. How we’re that I’m about that
almost all the time. We, whenever I’ve accepting of them I hope that they don’t have such tightness in the number of cracks and rooms that there might be some yeah, I put in for my two talks. I haven’t heard back from Lacey. I haven’t heard back from her yet.
Stephen: I might hit her up it’s still early for that. They may be just collecting everything
Alan: right now. I think it was the reason I haven’t jumped on is I think through maybe end of August is when they’re collecting all the things. They do have some cutoff date and then they start to actually work on what goes in what room and start to put together the OK.
All right, man. Talk, you later was a pleasure. Okay. Bye
bye.
