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The podcast script features a dynamic conversation between two self-proclaimed geeks discussing a wide array of topics. It begins with an intro about their unpredictable discussions on various interests, followed by personal anecdotes including their planned Baltic Sea cruise with stops in multiple countries. They share their experiences with outdoor activities, dealing with melanoma, and thoughts on climate change. The conversation moves to tech failures like the CrowdStrike incident and the importance of robust software security. They also touch on movies, pop culture, and conventions, notably their excitement for the upcoming ‘Wolverine and Deadpool’ movie, and meeting Weird Al Yankovic. Finally, they reflect on their camping experiences, emphasizing modern conveniences and outdoor survival skills.
[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: Good morning, Alan.
Alan: Or afternoon now. Thing I often turn on my night shift on my display so that I behold. As I get a little bit less than stark relief. See, look at that. Now I look [00:01:00] like ruddy instead of bleached. You should change what
Stephen: country you’re from then.
Alan: I’m going for more of the Mediterranean version of Lithuanian.
Yeah that’ll,
Stephen: you got a month, you got a month and a half or whatever, then you’ll be able to look like that for real.
Alan: That’s true. I really that’s. Going on the cruise ship and stuff like that will be up north, but there’s still some sun up there. I got to make sure that I bring along SPF 50 and my Tilly hat and that kind of stuff.
Stephen: Oh, especially on the water.
Alan: Yeah, you get it all reflected up at you as well. And I don’t know. I’ve been. I haven’t been on a couple of cruises in the Caribbean and walking around Cozumel and stuff like that. I was really careful because I have had melanoma and I need to not ever get it again. And there’s all kinds of opportunities when you get closer to the equator to really get baked.
Luckily, in this case, we’re going north, far north compared to that. But anyway, so that’s getting all exciting. Just to digress because we hadn’t they really have the cruise business figured out nowadays. It’s going to be 10 different ports of call all around the Baltic Sea. And, like [00:02:00] Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Germany, Denmark, let’s see, Sweden, Finland, Norway, because we booked Oslo, and they have cool excursions in each of the various different cities, a choice of them.
And most of what Connie and I are looking for is, Take us on a hike, take us on a walk and show us cool architecture and cool history and stuff like that. And we seem to be able to line up exactly those things that we want, reasonable amount of time, reasonable price, and they have a little, what you call it, a fitness rating, like that it’s easy, medium, hard, and we’re willing to do the hard stuff.
But if it really is wow, climb a thousand steps to get to the top of the Ulmer Munster or something like that at church, we need to think about. There’s a canoeing or kayaking one and Colleen and I are not like everyday kayakers and so that’s all I need is to go on this thing and blister my hands and then be, a weed for the rest of the trip because I can’t hold a fork.
You know what I mean? And what is a. A cruise without eating more than [00:03:00] you should.
Stephen: That’s right. Yeah kayaking probably wouldn’t be my first choice if you’ve not done it before, just because there is a lot of physicality from it, especially if you tip or go over. It’s very difficult to get flipped back.
Alan: Yeah, I’ve been canoeing, but not kayaking. And so I haven’t had to do the, twist your paddle to get back out of the water. Canoeing was. I really enjoyed it, but it’s just something that Colleen and I haven’t done it. There’s, I think, rivers, creeks, and stuff like that around here that, depending on season, have that.
We just haven’t put it into our repertoire. We haven’t done cross country skiing either, even though every time winter rolls around, I’m talking about it in July, we’re like, this is the year we go. And then we just wait for the right snowfall, and then where can we rent the skis? And then, Somehow it’s, Oh, it’s cold out there.
Let’s just stay in here. Yeah.
Stephen: If you don’t actually plan things and put them down on the calendar saying, Oh, we should do that sometime never happens.
Alan: We did just start this. We have a [00:04:00] five year calendar. We really, we know we’re going to be around, let’s say 25 more years, and both of us being in our sixties and life expectancy being nowadays in the eighties, going into the nineties, depending on male, female, um, we figured we got 25 years at least left, but especially five years of being spry.
You know what I mean? We’re still uninjured And so what you just said, it’s not going to happen if we just talk about it. Let’s plan it. And so I made a big spreadsheet that is a, month by month of each of the next different years. And already we’re already looking at next year with we have our traditional stuff of, we’re going to go to Halloween.
We’re going to go on maybe the American cross puzzle tournament. And it’s one of those things is. Some things happen and they collide. And so there’s a number of times when we couldn’t go to the ACPT because we were going on the Prague Rock cruise, just starting to lay out when those things happen and what choices have to be made and not trying to also never be home, especially Colleen is really affected by not being in own bed, own shower, that kind of thing.
So we don’t want to be on super extended trips or a bunch of them back to [00:05:00] back. And really it shouldn’t be about all the limitations. It’s more what are we going to do in five years? We’ve talked about going down to Iguazu Falls. How do we start planning for that? What’s the aircraft that go down there and what time of year is best?
Ask around, read the books. Same with, we have a whole bunch of national parks that we want to go to. And when’s the best time to do those? I just, before we got on today, saw Banff and Jasper are getting evacuated because of wildfire. And so I, I really love those places and I really don’t want them to be destroyed.
Good. I’m hoping, however, just like Yellowstone had a really bad fire, and then the next couple of years, you had all the plants that don’t like germinate, unless they have the heat of the fire to pop the pods and stuff like that, and so devastation match stick type scenery, but also an explosion of wildflowers and things that couldn’t get through the canopy before and stuff.
And so I’m curious. I don’t want to be like, a disaster fan. I’m not about that. I want to see what nature does to [00:06:00] fix things, to reassert itself. And
Stephen: we’ve talked about this a little bit. I’m not looking to have big fires or tornadoes or hurricanes and destroy things. And, Oh, this is now a flood of stuff, but earth is always changing.
Places are always changing. There’s places that used to have rivers that are now dry. Suddenly get rivers again, and you have a forest here one time and next. There is some big thing. Now it’s a big field. And, again, I’m not trying to say we should just bear our heads and forget about it.
But things always do change,
Alan: It’s the fact that we know climate change is accelerating that kind of change and especially change where if the earth has come to depend on this river flooding and making that’s how you get the crops and this monsoon happening. And now that’s different seasons.
And these. Weather systems are well, now the bugs are having a longer time to and they come up into different climate. There’s all kinds of really disastrous, disruptive things that can happen like that. And you’re exactly right. We’ve had the earth itself [00:07:00] changes. And in fact, I just read about a cool book, I think, called Becoming Earth, that it’s not, if you will, a reply to climate change, but what it tries to do is, the earth is a living thing, and this is the ways in which it has changed not only from prehistory, but while we’ve been around all those worms that are working the soil and stuff like that, they really do turn rocky soil into more arable soil, they loosen things and they eat rock and, put out dirt. I’m teasing, but there’s a lot of forces that do exactly that. The relentless evaporation and ice crack and all these kinds of things. And they have enough photographs and maps that they can say, here’s the coastline like, that has changed over the course of time.
And that now, and here’s where it got silted downstream more than we had expected. So talks about the earth does it, but mankind, when they try to be smarter than the earth often really blows it. And so it’s just, It’s a really cool thing to see all the things that happen as natural processes, but also all the laws of unintended consequences, where if we try to [00:08:00] interfere, we introduce too many wolves for the population of deer, and then there’s a wolf die off and most of the times that we try to do that and speaking of Yellowstone, they’ve reintroduced wolves and they showed how the reintroduction of wolves has Absolutely revived many ecosystems because it keeps the prey, if you will, from overeating and over expanding and like even I think there’s even like a, a cool Ken Burns special or something like that, that they’ve changed the course of the Yellowstone River because the animals that were doing this to keep the plant life different and, beavers and deer and whatever else it might be that when you see all the ways in which these things interact.
It really lets you know, hey, don’t just go poking your finger in there. Take a time to study and learn maybe how these things do interact. And then tiny tweaks, minor repairs, not let’s get rid of all the, hey, my, my cattle are in danger from wolves. No evidence that actually that [00:09:00] happens, but they cleared the West.
They killed too many buffalo that we’ve had right there on our own soil. All those examples of the word will never run out of passenger pigeons, and then we extincted them. You know what I mean? Yeah,
Stephen: I shake my head because a lot of the people in my area, it’s a very country side, space far apart neighbor, lots of cows and farms and stuff where I live.
And. We don’t have city sewage. We don’t have city. We don’t have walkways. We don’t have, all those citified things and we’re drinking water. And these people are like dumping chemicals on their lawns. I’m like, how stupid are you people? Do you understand?
Alan: And sadly, it often seems that the people that should suffer from it, the ones that did the dumping.
No, they’re smart enough to put it downstream. They’re smart enough to make it so that, honestly, you can drive along 71 heading south and see where there’s a little cliff and [00:10:00] people just dump their trash over it. Visible from the expressway. But apparently, if they don’t see it, it’s magically fine.
Yeah. They’re jumping is like heavy metal. Thunder, it’s all kinds of stuff that’s leaching into the
Stephen: groundwater and all the things you just said. So my father was from that generation when we moved into this place there was a small pond in the one spot, real tiny little pond.
But we were like, oh, that’s cool. And then come to find out that it’s full of. Garbage and trash that’s what they did. They said, I’ll just go dump it in the pond and everything got dumped in the pond. So a little water. Nobody sees it. Don’t worry. The water will magically cover it up.
Yeah. So I remember the funny thing is, I remember my father complaining oh, yeah, no, I’ve got to spend all this time pulling their trash out and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then he did the same thing. So I’ve been spending my time cleaning his trash pile up.
Alan: Yeah. Yeah. We’ll see, about those kinds of trips and stuff like that, but a nice, a geeky way [00:11:00] of looking at this.
I love looking at different timeframes like that. There’s a cool not for profit corporation called the long now that was started like by one of the guys who founded wired and other science and science fictiony type people. And that they really like, if you want to understand like how we are here and how the earth is as it is, and big movements like that, you can’t look at the next quarter.
You can’t look at the next year, 10 years, you have to take a 10, 000 year view. So they built a clock. That will do that. It takes along. And then, as as it escalates, it’s made out of inert materials. It’s buried in a a small mountain in the desert somewhere. I think it’s Texas, maybe Arizona, New Mexico, so that it’ll continue to keep time for the next 10, 000 years.
And we should be. When’s the last time somebody visited that? And that’s before we had jetpacks and hovercrafts, and so I like that long view and I don’t know a little bit of, I often talk about some of the part of what I’m doing for investing is not only.[00:12:00]
Seeking how did I do today? How did I do this quarter or this year or whatever it really is? What’s the future you want to create? And so you invest in better cyber. Security, better medicine, better breakthroughs in medicine, you can’t force it to happen, but you can scatter some seeds so that the odds of something important happening in terms of cancer and diabetes and, like better ear all of it.
And so it’s nice in my lifetime to actually, we’ve seen some of the things happen. They just made a big announcement that the latest HIV treatment. Seems to be like a vaccine that really stops it from happening. It’s really a clever insidious virus that shuts down parts of your body’s immune system and and mutates enough so that what worked a while back now doesn’t, and they’ve had better and better drugs, but they were like a shot a week, a shot a day, even a pill a day, and now they found something that they think is going to be like what you get from whooping cough.
You get a shot and in, you don’t get anything for [00:13:00] 20 years, really help your body get better about fighting things like that off. We need that.
Stephen: And that’s. Cool. That’d be awesome and great if we could trust scientists and science and vaccines, but those are all phony and fake and untrustworthy. So it’s everyone will die
Alan: nowadays.
And I just here. I just read about this. One of the things that AI is really bad at is sarcasm.
Stephen: It’s not good at emotions at all. Trust me. I’ve been playing with it
Alan: when we just had the CrowdStrike failure and that’ll lead to one of the things.
Stephen: Yeah. I want to hear about this. Cause I hadn’t heard about it, honestly.
Alan: So it, CrowdStrike is one of those software utilities, if you will, that lots and lots of people make use of it, it’s called like endpoint protection, it’s the thing that makes sure that your machine, your server and so forth, don’t get and malware viruses and various other ransomware, things like that.
In order to do those kinds of things, and you might remember, because we’ve had disasters like this before, if what you let into your system to do the [00:14:00] protection, it has to be in the bones, in the deep operating system level of things. And then even while it’s only trying to do good, if it just somehow interferes with different versions of windows, different it’s like at a driver level and it still does.
operating system things and doesn’t necessarily have a restriction to a certain memory area, or, and so you can get a kernel panic, or in this case, it was a memory exception. The software itself that CrowdStrike has, it tries to make sure that in case there’s a, an attack, it notifies somebody, try to make use of a location in memory that didn’t have what it expected data.
It was garbage. And that’s, chokes on. I don’t know what to do now, and so it throws up the blue screen of death. Windows, for all of what Windows has become and DOS before it, it still has to, when it really can’t continue, it says, I’m going to have to restart. I’m going to have to gather data so that we know what happened so that we can fight it.
And CrowdStrike got [00:15:00] pushed. The software update got pushed classically on a Friday so that your people aren’t at work, your best people aren’t necessarily on the weekend, et cetera, et cetera. And so out of just human nature, they violated a whole bunch of hard earned lessons over the course of software development and test versus production and all that kind of stuff.
And they broke the rules. Airlines, entire airlines that broke utilities that we have people that depend on windows things and near real time. And especially if they’re often attacked by desperados, then you really have to have something like CrowdStrike or Cloudflare, there’s probably four different big players and in brief.
The reason they’ve gotten really good is because they don’t just try to have their own lab that monitors for the latest zero day exploit and all that kind of stuff. They continually collect information from the net and quickly respond when they see, the little statistical chart that says, Oh, look at this is swelling upwards.
What’s going on [00:16:00] there? And then they share information or they have enough of a network themself. That captures that kind of stuff. That also means they’re everywhere. They’re in everything. And so the things that it’s a Y2K thing where we talked about this error that we know is in the chips is going to rear its head that it’s in so many different places that it really broke things dramatically and they found it quickly and fixed it quickly, but it just takes a whole bunch of time to push out.
That update to systems that are already down and or compromise. And so you’re worried about why it’s down with the bad guys jumping in. So they had to do all kinds of additional testing to make sure that in the time that it was down, people didn’t advantageously jump in and root it and stuff like that.
So it, it was just a reminder, that we, as much as we try to idiot proof things and have things in the 99. 9 percent level of security, that’s All you need is that 0. 01 on a thing that affects hundreds of millions of servers [00:17:00] and that kind of stuff. You can really grind things to a halt. So they had, many airlines, thousands of flights canceled.
There’s enough in the news. We’re not going into the details of it, but it also struck quickly. Like people weren’t like, They’re in mid journey, and then they, there’s no gate information that take your ticket. If you depend nowadays on your phone, instead of a paper thing, we laughed about this.
I got people that know a lot about software that always print things off because they don’t want to have the wifi down. They don’t want to have the system down. They, they can’t not have proof that I’m on this plane and I’m on this seat. I don’t think it actually hit the airplanes, but airplanes themselves have.
All kinds of software that runs things nowadays. You know what I mean? That what do they call it? Wired. They, there isn’t anything like a, you push a pedal and it physically tells the engine what to do. It’s all, it talks to a chip that says, then apply this much based on the amount of pressure you’re giving, give it this much chip fuel, or whatever else it might be.
And I don’t know, a nice, humbling. [00:18:00] So incredibly disruptive way of being reminded that we built a wonderful civilization. Out of toothpicks. One by one. And that sometimes a bad woodpecker can really do some damage,
Stephen: As well as I do. I’m sure behind the scenes. You had a scenario of the effect.
Look, all you smarties that are building this it needs done by Friday. Oh, we can’t get it done by Friday because we have to test, we have to do this. No, doesn’t matter. Cut all that. Just get it done by Friday. We told the board we’d have it done because we need an uptick for this quarter. Get it done and get it out.
That’s right. Why did it go bad? My
Alan: quarterly bonus is online. Yeah, you guys are supposed to know what you’re
Stephen: doing. Why did it go bad and have a problem? That’s your fault. Yeah, that’s where the scenario happened. You got all the tech guys going, we told you yeah, it’s your fault. It’s broke.
But we said we needed another two weeks and to do it on a Tuesday, not Friday. You’ve been in that scenario. I’ve been in that scenario.
Alan: I, from what I understand, it really was more of a CrowdStrike thing than a Microsoft [00:19:00] thing. But another thing that’s important to say is. CrowdStrike was in everybody because it’s very successful and good at what it does.
And so it’s not time to abandon CrowdStrike and not speaking as an investor, but as a, like a software guy who wants the world to run better when you’ve got best of breed technology and it exhibits a flaw once every 10 years. You don’t just say, get rid of it and go with the lesser one. You say what CropStrike, what have you done from your post partum post mortem discussions to guarantee that this thing will never happen again, or things enough like it, that you can anticipate that because there’s also always black swan events.
And like we just said, it can be a one in a million shot, but if the cost of failure is high, what do you do to guarantee against, guarantee might not be the right word to plan. A lot of security folks, Bruce Schneier, a guy who I admire for a long time. I think he’s not as well known now, but he really was at the start of the internet.
If you will. They had all kinds of principles about you don’t let things dramatically break. Things have to degrade elegantly so [00:20:00] that, if you think of it being like the layers of the onion, like they often talk about, it’s not that you can thrust something in and get to the heart of the onion.
You have to make them peel each layer of the onion and have it be enough of a difficult problem, enough of a slowdown as to how they’re penetrating so that they can’t get in drastically quickly and not lead you with the, okay, something’s wrong, something’s really wrong. What do I do? That you can head them off before they really get All the way in and that kind of stuff.
Stephen: So you remember a TV show? It’s a little older by now called scorpion based on this guy who’s like a super genius IQ and he formed the team and real in real life. It’s based on a real incursions.
Alan: Exactly.
Stephen: So the very first episode was exactly that there was some update and it like destroyed the software for all these planes.
The airlines and there was 1 plane in the air. They were trying to get down, but they had to get the old software back onto it. So could function and land. So they had [00:21:00] to physically break into this server farm where the backups were and. Rip the hard drive out before they, they erased that backup.
Cause you know, that’s what you do with those big software things is you only keep those backups for 24 hours and it’s only on that one hard drive. That’s just, anyway, but the funny part was they had no way of getting that old software onto the plane. Except for getting a Ferrari Testarossa and having the plane come low and they were going as fast as the plane.
They dropped a cord down and they jacked in through an old phone line, essentially, to send the software up going at 700 miles an hour. That’s the only way to do it. It made for a great TV show.
Alan: That’s good TV. Just exactly that. I try to think what the. The series, maybe the losers, maybe it was one of the many fast and furious is don’t say drop a tank out of an airplane.
Oh,
Stephen: yeah. Yeah. I love it. [00:22:00] Like a fucking media. I love when people go, Oh, I don’t the fast and the furious because it’s not realistic enough. And I’m like, Have you ever seen a movie or a TV show there? The, even the history channel and the national geographic documentaries have been known to elaborate a little bit.
They’re fantasy. Every one of them’s a written story. They’re all fantasy. Even the reality shows, those are more fantasy than some of the doctor, like really fast and the furious is not meant to be a car documentary on taking care of your car. It’s a fast high speed. Action movie. Action movies do stupid shit.
So you see explosions. That’s the whole point. People that say, Oh, I don’t like it because it’s not realistic. It’s not supposed to be at all. But the 1 time I did go okay, come on. They shot a Toyota on a rocket into space. And they were in space using the gas pedal and the steering wheel to drive around.[00:23:00]
That one broke me. I’m
Alan: almost certain that’s adopted long ago in the National Enquirer, that one of the headlines was, car found running in no car found orbiting the earth and the engine is still running.
Stephen: Yeah a gas powered engine that needs oxygen. It’s going good.
Alan: There have been any number of movies where you don’t just.
Give them a little artistic license. You have to totally suspend your disbelief to make it an entertaining movie. And even then once in a while they get to some point it’s Oh man, I was with you up until now, but now this is ridiculous. You know what I mean? Because you, at least if you have some kind of rules about Time travelers or whatever, you have to be at least consistent within the rules.
You said, you can’t be pulling MacGuffins, you can’t be taking a mulligan and saying let’s try this. If that didn’t work, it’s terrible to see people that didn’t have the pride to try to say this is like reality and one step different as opposed to we just threw all the rules. We know all physics [00:24:00] out, yeah, about that
Stephen: when they take a car, And they’re in Dubai and jump out the window of a high rise right into the next building.
Okay. It’s a stunt. I’m not going to sit there going they would never do that. I don’t care. But when you take, when you shoot a Toyota up in the space and you’re driving it, even the kindergartner knows that would break kindergartner that’s my kind of rule. As long as kindergartners still enjoy it.
I’m good. I’m as much of a kindergartner as anybody, but when kindergartners can’t get along with it, yeah, we’re done. Kindergartners watch purple dinosaurs for God’s sake.
Alan: When they did the kind of stunts, it’s little Billy’s not going to get you get a chance to recreate the car in space thing, whereas you might put on a cape and jump off the roof.
And then you really have to like, okay, please differentiate between fact and fiction. That’ll get you killed.
Stephen: See that that only works. As long as you have an umbrella with you or
Alan: if you have the big fans that blow up, now that they [00:25:00] actually have the places that you could go pseudo skydiving.
But I got a feeling that a whole bunch of people tried that and It went into the fan, so
Stephen: here’s the question with those fans, so you’ve got a lot of surface area and mass. Weighing more, does it pull you down at the spin faster or does more air catch you and push you up? I was wondering that 1 day.
Alan: I think it is a matter of surface area, right? The more that you can catch the force, but then it gives you more lift and because, like, when you really do see people that know how to parachute and do bunny suit types, right? The way that they increase their descent is they give themselves an angle and they tuck in so that they’re more like an arrow than they are like a frisbee, that kind of thing.
That stuff really works because at least I’ve seen it at the Banff Mountain Film Festival when someone did indeed jump off the Matterhorn in what they call like a squirrel suit. Yeah, webbing in between and they really could navigate because they understood how Flight works, how air and lift and all that kind of [00:26:00] stuff.
And I, I don’t know that I’ll ever have the confidence to say, I’ll be able to like land safely, you might get a whole bunch of soaring in mountain passes and everything. And then what do you do to bring yourself to find a lake and even then once you’re like, tumble like a ragdoll. I they seem to survive it.
Stephen: They really are amazing people. Yeah. You get one little miscalculation and you slam into the side of the mountain doing 60 miles an hour. I
Alan: guess they have often, I think all they stop is they have a little shoot that they can pop. And it gives them just enough. Slow down and let, but then they can come out of it, absorb all that momentum and run to bring themselves to a stop.
I think that’s how that works as opposed to skitching across the ground, tearing himself up on the front. You know what I mean?
Stephen: Yeah. For me, the way it works is, Oh, cool. Watch that other guy do it. That’s how it works for me.
Alan: So I, one of the things I just, I love learning about that. Someone really said, if [00:27:00] we should be able to do this, what’s the material that I’m going to need?
That’s it got enough, like ripstop nylon strength that it won’t be, Hey, I made a squirrel suit. And then you put your arms out and the minute it hits real wind and you’re shredded and you’re dead. You know what I mean? So they really have to know enough about what’s the goggles that I need that are not going to crack from the impact.
Then I’m blind. There, there has to be all these tolerances, though, if you jump out of that, What’s the highest you can jump on something like 30, 000 feet that you’re actually out of the atmosphere and you’re going to go into the atmosphere and people have done this, but there’s up there. So then you worry about, am I going to freeze up there?
But then when I start to go into the atmosphere, you’re getting all that friction. And so they really have had to like like doing deep sea diving,
Stephen: yeah.
Alan: Pressure per square inches. Questioningly high. And so what do I do to build a bath escape? And unfortunately we’ve lost some. We’ve learned what not to do.
Yeah. And I think the thing about that is it’s not, Hey, we built a thing that’s really going to work, but all you need [00:28:00] is one point of failure, right? One, rivet that pops or something like that. And then you’re done. There’s the failure goes quickly and you get crushed into a little cube inside metal.
That’s
Stephen: interesting that you mentioned all that because I’m re listening to the audio book for the Martian whether they’re saving Mark Watney and they were just trying to send a probe and they weren’t everything we just talked about. They weren’t given enough time to inspect it. And there was one bolt that had a small bit of inconsistency to it.
And on the takeoff, such forces sheared the bolt, everything exploded and they lost the whole probe. That’s the same thing we were just talking about right there. All of
Alan: it. I could add the O ring that took out, the, one of the. Oh, not Apollo. Sorry. I’m not, I’m missing whatever that was that we had, that the planes that could land.
You know what I mean? , something catastrophic happened like that, where it was just a small. Like too far between inspections and [00:29:00] right. I know we’ve seen again. It was a documentary and this is a weird thing. So they had a during World War 2, they were getting a lot of metal fatigue.
And they kept on analyzing the planes that made it to see how do they work. And then finally, someone said we should be also studying all the planes that went down and see what happened. You can tell from the contortions of metal or from the heat or whatever else it might be. And that kind of revolutionized how they designed planes, because instead of only pursuing perfection, they said all these things can happen.
How do we avoid that? 90 and then 95 and 99 and every standard deviation of, that kind of thing. And those forces, it’s really hard to recreate stuff in a wind tunnel or in various different places, that level of heat and stress and torque. And all of it, so we have such cool material science that you can say if you build it out of titanium, it has a, sheer strength and a crush strength of this and this, and then they, but they still have to say what’s really going to happen to it if it has to not go on a straight shot, but turn and the act of [00:30:00] turning would tear it apart.
Then you can’t use that. thing that doesn’t have enough malleability and ductility that it stretches while remaining itself while it’s intact, it can’t be too crystalline, I think, and whatever the various measures of metal are.
Stephen: If Wakanda weren’t Such dickheads about it.
We’d have much more vibranium to use but, at least we have duct tape. You’re good as long as you have duct tape. Cause that’s what you could do. If your wing is like coming off, you just climb out there and you duct tape it on and you’ll be good. The rest of the flight.
Alan: I see that in a movie.
You don’t want to just do a whole bunch of rings. You got a crop. That’ll fix it. I know we jumped around a lot. What would we tell us? You went on a cool weekend. Yeah,
Stephen: I’ve got so, talking about your crews and stuff and some of the stuff you guys are doing, I’ve got so many things planned in a different realm Casey and I are doing our soaps and we’re expanding our line and I’m doing the books and I’ve got some books coming out.
So I’m going to all these paranormal cryptid type. Events and stuff. It fits [00:31:00] both of us together. So we’re at the kids.
Alan: It’s not entirely out of what we often talk about, oh, yeah, definitely. There’s how to do it.
Stephen: Oh, yeah. Yeah. We’ve had a lot of failures. I’ve got some lotion here that we can’t sell.
It’s still It’s mostly good, that I use the ones that are usable, but didn’t pass inspection, but yeah. So Kecksburg was pretty cool. It’s the UFO history from 1965, December 9th. There was a big flap that UFO went down in the Kecksburg area. And 55, almost 60 years ago now.
So I betray ignorance. Textbook is still
Alan: Ohio or it’s
Stephen: no PA, but it passed over Youngstown on its way. So there was an object that people saw and it came down and crashed in the woods. There are people that said, Oh, we went down to the woods to check it out and they described it, several people.
This is what we [00:32:00] saw is what it looked like. And then the army came in, kept everybody out and said, Oh, it was just a meteor, nothing to worry about.
Alan: Okay,
Stephen: so
Alan: it was something though, there’s that you’re not supposed to know about yet. Like a stealth something or other. Okay.
Stephen: Yeah. It very well. There’s a lot of speculation, but people said it was like an acorn shape.
I’m like maybe they, K Kennedy said, we’re going to go to the moon, so maybe they were testing rockets and stuff. And it was like the nose cone shuttle part or something, that’s an, yeah, 1965 people weren’t as familiar because some people were like the government said, Oh, you need to say out because of radiation, like what the hell is radiation?
They didn’t even know what that was at the time.
Alan: I hear you. Alas, Babylon is all about that. People wearing their. Radioactive substance. You can, while it starts to blister them and kill them.
Stephen: There’s just some people, most of the people are dead now. So you can’t even get the people that were there, but the reports that have been [00:33:00] gathered, there’s some conflicting reports, but people say, Oh yeah, there was something, the government’s nope, there wasn’t anything, so it’s huh, that really makes you believe some of the conspiracy theories, I’ll tell you that much, but for this little town, it’s a big festival.
What people attend couple hundred. No, it was like 1200 people. Fantastic. Yeah. And on Sunday, they have different people come in and speak and a friend of ours, Stan Gordon, who’s been researching this since then he has a UFO and Bigfoot reports out the wazoo from the last 50 years. And he’s he does talks about he talks about Kecksburg and stuff.
People were coming to the festival to do reports. We knew you were gonna be here. Let me tell you what we saw last week. And, so it’s interesting. It’s fun. But I had a good time. I can’t and. I’m probably gonna be doing a little bit more camping just because I enjoy camping and camping is a lot cheaper than a hotel, that type of thing.
So I ordered a lamping
Alan: where you have you set up a nice tent. [00:34:00] That is like a living room or is it more?
Stephen: It is not. The camping I used to do when I was in Boy Scouts where everything was in our backpack and, we walked, it’s not quite that level. I have an air mattress but a lot of the places you stay don’t have electricity.
You can walk to a bathroom and a shower house, but you don’t have electricity. So I got a nice little portable generator. That’s not gas powered. It’s solar powered charges up and it’ll run like I could run. I want to do a thing at my author booth with a little TV set up and actually be working on things and have people watch as you work type thing.
And it’ll be worth a charge from, you can
Alan: just have it running while you’re okay.
Stephen: I got that. I got stupid. It’s weird, but we talk about tech things they didn’t have when I was a kid. So there are sleeping bags now that. You can have different layers. You can unzip or zip depending on how hot or cold it is.
They’re waterproof and stuff. But then I got stupid little thing, like [00:35:00] these big bags with a pump so I could put all the blankets in and pump the air out so they don’t take up so much room in the car.
Alan: Exactly. Yeah.
Stephen: The tent I have several, I have a small two man. I have a four man.
This is supposed to be like a six man, but with one queen blow up mattress, that’s it. It’s pretty much a one or two person tent, it’s fun. I doubt if I’ll be doing that all during the winter. I’m not that let’s go camp in the winter. Now I’m beyond that. You’re
Alan: supposed to be good until like negative 20 or something.
Yeah,
Stephen: I’ve done it. I can do it. I just really choose not to.
Alan: I hear you. That’s honestly the biggest reason that Colleen and I don’t do a lot of camping is because we so much like the bed and the shower and the lock on the door. You know what I mean? My biggest thing is probably, I seem to be one of those guys that bugs like, and so unless I get the really good mesh and keep things out and have strunella and all that kind of stuff, I wake up with bug bites with cause you’re not defending yourself when you’re
Stephen: sleeping.
And [00:36:00] so Try some extra vitamin B tablets before you go out, because it’s, that’s supposed to be something that pushes them away. They can smell it in the blood and they don’t want to chew on you. Interesting.
Alan: One of the things I just got from prime day were little like bracelets and I’m looking forward to trying them out because.
When Colleen and I love going for our big walks and we’re off in the warmest thing in the forest, you know what I mean? And so I’m really looking, I don’t want to deflect them off of me onto her. I just want them to leave both of us alone. There’s all kinds of things for you to do in the forest besides jump me.
You know what I mean? Okay. Yeah.
Stephen: So I’ll just let you know every now and then, cause think these types of things are fun. I miss doing them with my kids. I’m getting back into it with the books, with the soaps even talking to the one friend of mine. We’re going to do a combined talk about families and do it basically getting into Bigfoot hunting as a family, how to do it, what to do the right way, not just let’s walk out into the [00:37:00] woods when we have no clue how to do anything in the woods and then we’ll die, let’s not do that.
Alan: I’ll tell you, as much as I, I like going into nature and roughing it to a certain extent, but I am very accepting of the ways in which we advance so that, hey, I have a good enough filter that is no longer taking some water and putting some iodine in it and hoping that it kills things off. I got a filter that will actually keep Giardia and various other sub micro things out.
So I’m not what a nice hike I had. And then I had to run for three days. You know what I mean? And same with You want to start a fire. I did in Cub Scouts, learn how to do the, the windlessly twirling and stuff like that. It’s not only a matter of even having a box of matches, it’s having it in a waterproof pouch, or having one of those things that’s like a, an auto starter with a little flint and electric and just, they’ve made it so that, you A lot of things that you really had to be skilled at, they’ve taken it so that you can still have a fire, which is really necessary in a lot of cases for camping without me to [00:38:00] be that you’re worried about.
Oh, man, the wood is all wet. We’re screwed. We can’t do it today. So Everything about materials like Patagonia has those things where it wicks away moisture and it keeps you warm and all you have is a little porthole and you could really go off a plane in the Andes and survive. Yeah. Because of how they’ve done better boots.
All of hiking is all cool tech vibram. Yeah, I just love how they have figured all that out and it’s not, you got to pay like moonshot prices. Yeah. A lot of it is really within the realm of ordinary people. Oh yeah. Nowadays, especially for 10 years. You know what I mean? I have a good pair of boots. They have to be worn for a couple of years.
They’re really worn in and fitted to your feet, but they’re not worn out. They still have all the grip and everything else, the strength that they need for ankle support and stuff. That’s. A wonderful thing.
Stephen: I may be a nerd and a techie, but I’ve got a lot of woods experience, a lot of camping skills and stuff.
We used to have [00:39:00] challenges where we would have to build a fire and this isn’t. This is a contest. It’s fairly ideal conditions, but you get two matches and no paper, no gas, no accelerant, nothing like that, two matches and what, and you have a pocket knife and you have the woods so we could build fires with that.
And then it was like, of course, Oh, you had to use both your matches. Huh? I only had to use one, but we got, we had to at times if you wanted to eat, you had to get a fire lit and it’s raining and we know we knew how to do it. We could get a fire lit in the rain. It was not easy and it took time, but you could do it.
So I’ve been more backpacking, camping than most people. Most of these rugged, manly men with big trucks and crap that would probably get scared to death. Some of the times I went camping in mountains and crap like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Alan: Nothing. This is something that I really, I really would not know what to eat in the out of doors.
I know that, [00:40:00] Hey, these look like berries, maybe blackberries that I’ve seen at home, but I know there’s some that they look like that, but only birds can eat them because they will be like, if you get diarrhea or anything, it’s going to dehydrate you and you can die of those kinds of.
Oh yeah. Yourself to death. And same with my grandmother used to know enough about the woods to go out and gather mushrooms. And have them regularly for parts of meals and stuff like that. To me, mushrooms are like I did it right 99 times. And then the one time that I found the toadstool, the death mushroom, I can’t afford to make that mistake.
I wish I, I really should now that Google has a thing where you can point it at anything. You know what I mean? It doesn’t have a little death’s head come up so you can eat that safely. But I regularly, I don’t regularly do that. I’m like, let’s see, I think I can eat. Acorns or things like that, but you have to cook them a certain way or you have to be that they’re mature enough because the immature or like the root itself is good, but the greens are not and I would really need to be confident more than I [00:41:00] am to like and really glean a meal out of things.
Yeah,
Stephen: I don’t think I really have the skills and knowledge. There’s a few things that are obvious. We used, I used to know a lot of that. I could name plants and, Oh, this could be done and eaten there, this, whatever, but what can you hear? God,
Alan: I know there’s some things that are supposed to be good to tell.
Help you if you get a cut, it can be a pseudo salve. And not let it go further towards infection and stuff. But what am I gonna do? I’m gonna put poison ivy on it instead. And oh my god, now I’m, I got an itching wound. I’m gonna make myself crazy. So I’m, I really don’t have confidence about those kinds of things.
Stephen: Yeah, that it takes some work to. Remember and understand and know the differences, it drives me a little crazy. Occasionally I was not the biggest botanist, but it’ll drive me crazy when people are like, oh, that’s a pine tree. I’m like not really. It’s a fur. Oh, what’s the difference?
They’re not exactly the same, but I don’t want to argue.
Alan: I have a friend, Cynthia, that is she knows all the herbal cures [00:42:00] for things. And so I admire that level of knowledge, but I think that there’s also, I don’t know how much science there is behind it, that some of those things are the placebo effect.
If you think that St. John’s wort is going to help you, then it will, but I wouldn’t know, do I use the buds, the pods, the, do I make a tea out of it, all that kind of stuff.
Stephen: There is some. Reality to some of that does have certain properties that, if you make a little moist poultice out of it, that it activates, whatever it does heal things.
In fact, I just saw a story that they found orangutans that were making medical medicinal poultices to help wounds that they had and put in a mouth. Yeah.
Alan: I might’ve pooh poohed it more than I meant to. I don’t think that it doesn’t work. I think that I’d have to know enough about.
Exactly. Like part of how you have the whole world as your pharmacopeia is that you really know it’s not only that it does it, what’s the dose, what’s the age of the plant, what part of the plant, that [00:43:00] kind of thing. I’d hate to. It would have been okay, except you. You took too much, and it doesn’t just make you, it’s not a painkiller, it’s a you killer.
You know what I mean? It’ll make you go to sleep forever. A really
Stephen: good one for wounds that a lot of people don’t know is honey. Honey kills bacteria and helps wounds heal faster.
Alan: I, I hardly ever carry honey, but that’d be worth like in my backpack, I have all kinds of things like that.
I have moleskin in case I get a hot spot and I have all my bug spray and stuff, but there’s all kinds of things that I wouldn’t mind having. I got a snake bite kit. I’ve never gotten myself close enough to a snake, but there’s also so much a possibility of, you don’t know, you’re just going through some brush and you step in the wrong place and someone gets you.
And I think that I would be able to react quickly enough Or someone would help me so that whatever little poison or rot agent it has in it and stuff like that. I know the thing is to get the venom out, right? That they’re venomous. This is not venomous, [00:44:00] but a key is. To act quickly. . Yeah.
And we’re lucky Atory system.
Stephen: We’re lucky here in Ohio, we don’t have any super venomous snakes that’ll kill you in like minutes. No water
Alan: moccasins, no cobras, that sort.
Stephen: Yeah. So yeah. There’s a good, but you’re a big guy, so you have less chance that you’re gonna die. You may your leg might run off
Alan: But I know what you’re saying. It really is a matter of the more meat you have. Yeah. Good get diluted by the better chance. I have of surviving. Yeah.
Stephen: Yes Sorry, Colleen. I’ll eat you when you’re dead though. So we’re okay Actually
Alan: have I so i’m not sure you know I really do a little bit lose track of what kinds of things we’ve shared Colleen and I went on a hike one time where I got hypothermia you told me you got lost. Exactly. We got lost. We went on a thing that like so many of the features of the trail looked like what we were looking for. But then we ended up at a sign that was miles away from where we thought we were, and I’m a big [00:45:00] guy. I sweat. And I had, of course, cotton is rotten and should best be forgotten.
I didn’t have the right wicking clothing. I really was not me for a couple hours and Colleen was really good at, okay, big guy, we can use you as a beast of burden carry this, but I’ll make the decisions as to where we’re going next. What were you using to find our way? And we got out safe and there’s nothing like going through forest as it’s getting darker and darker.
And then you see Lights through the trees. Cause there’s a camping store there. It’s Oh man, we’re safe. It’s heaven. Even if we got to go down this tougher slope, running from tree to tree and bonking into them to stop your momentum and stuff, we will get down. There’s no, it was an experience.
It’s fun to talk about it. Now, while it was going on, it was like, this is really serious. Night is falling. I have one of those like silver. Things in my backpack that you can put that kind of absorbs that is reflects all your heat back on you. So if we had huddled together and sleep in the forest, we could.
And then it’s you’re just getting darker and you keep hearing, like seeing little glowing eyes and [00:46:00] little things around. I think there’s any wolves here. Not enough to make a pack, right? Et cetera, et cetera. It was an adventure, but it was foolish of us to have gotten to that point of, we thought we were okay.
And then. What a revelation it was. Oh,
Stephen: we’re not. It looks a little different right now. Oh, the Deadpool is this week. So question before we do that, did you watch Acolyte from Star Wars yet?
Alan: I have not yet. I’ve been working my way through other things and not Acolyte yet. And I honestly, as usual, and you talked about this last week, the purists versus the fans versus there’s so many people that are.
Like somehow not pleased with it, but you said it was, I’ve
Stephen: enjoyed it. Yeah. Yeah. We got two more episodes to finish it. I think it’s all done now, but yeah, I had one of my friends say, Oh, I didn’t watch it past episode three. I’m like, why not? It’s been great. It’s ah, I can’t stand watching anything when it’s done just because of an [00:47:00] agenda.
What I was a little Oh, it’s a black woman as the main character. That’s I was like a little taken aback by the attitude.
Alan: Honestly. And, I’ve had similar conversations, and to me that’s one of the easiest things to like, how in the world can you say that everybody else in the show has their blue and green and they have tentacles and they have wings and they have four eyes.
And your problem is. That it’s a black woman. Yeah. How in the world are you at all a fan or at all? Don’t you understand that it is
Stephen: Lando Calrissian was black. I guess that’s okay. Cause it’s a guy. Mon Mothma and Princess Leia were leaders of the rebellion and they were women. I guess that’s okay.
But now that we’re seeing more of it, now it’s an agenda. Oh, that story. They didn’t care about the story. They just did it to have, I don’t think so.
Alan: You haven’t seen Star Wars from the start and seen that The Spielbergs and the Lukases and everybody else that’s been involved in these kinds of things.
They’ve [00:48:00] been inclusive and That heroism isn’t a matter of, do you have a beer? You know what I mean? It’s just that they
Stephen: Oh, Colin pointed out, he pointed out, he says, the thinking of the superior white British male, that was the empire. So if you’re not on board with the diversity thing, you’re obviously not on the rebels side.
Alan: I it’s, I find that. Such a sad projection of their own bigotry and weirdness onto something that could be an escape from all the crap that we’re dealing with on the planet.
Stephen: And it doesn’t matter. I was like, how are you saying that? It’s an agenda that they did the story just to have a black female. I’ve enjoyed the story.
I thought they’ve done some really great things. There’s been some great lightsaber battles and, just oh, my gosh, that was so cool type thing. It felt very Star Wars. How can you say, oh, it’s not worthwhile. It’s just an agenda to get that out. Rick [00:49:00] Rorton had a good quote on this about some of his stuff.
He’s like, all you people attacking me or saying things like, Oh, putting in a gay or queer character, a trans character you just did that because you’re woke and all this. He’s have you actually ever read Norse mythology? Obviously not.
Alan: Obviously not. This is funny.
My own little, I did a talk on Mad Magazine once. And it’s like someone because a current issue of it had a parody of Trump on the cover and a guy literally stood up in my talk and said, you can’t disrespect the president’s so I would hope that everybody who came here to see my talk has read bad magazine and maybe read a lot of years of it as I have, because you don’t know what you’re talking about.
There’s not a single president that Matt hasn’t. Grilled in just the appropriate ways by caricature, by voice mannerism, by good or bad decisions that they’ve made, they’ve always poked fun at power. That’s what mad does. I was there for that [00:50:00] talk. I’m sorry you weren’t there. So it really was, I was shocked that someone was like, and maybe that’s he’s bringing his agenda into it.
Wow, you really don’t have a leg to stand on here. This isn’t even an argument. You’re just wrong. Thank you. So please, I think everybody else is here to hear more. It isn’t about Trump. Here’s where they did Kennedy and Nixon, and we can just, we can go back. Ever since MAD came to be, they made fun.
Stephen: Yeah. So here’s a trivia. Who’s the only guest editor that MAD Magazine had for one magazine? Weird. Al. Weird. Weird. Al, I remember that weird Al Yankee trivia. Question number two. Yes. Guess who I’m going to get to meet next month? Is it that same fellow? Yes, it is.
Alan: Where are you gonna do this
Stephen: at? Steel City Con in Pittsburgh.
He’s coming in and I’ve got the first LP I’m gonna take and get ’em to sign. I’m very excited. Very good.
Alan: That’s, I, I’ve been looking at all the different things that Colleen and I are thinking of doing, whether they’re cons or stuff like that, and [00:51:00] besides the Cleveland Comic Con, I’ve not been, and now it’s a, let’s see, it was a Wizard World, now it’s a Fan Expo, it doesn’t matter, I’ve not been to one outside of Cleveland in a long time, and I used to go to Detroit, and Pittsburgh, and Columbus, and everything else, and so that might be a really good reason to go to the Steel City Con, because I loved it.
I just whenever I’ve been in his presence at the Alcons that they had in Chicago he’s so cool. He’s so smart. He’s so witty. He’s so happy to have the fans there. It was like 110 percent a great experience. And I think he’s still that guy. It’s making me
Stephen: worried though, because Two of my biggest childhood heroes, MacGyver and Weird Al, I’ve met in the past, or about to meet.
Is something bad coming? Am I going to get hit by a meteor or something like that? That’s just making me a little
Alan: nervous, actually. I just had to talk about this over the weekend, didn’t have to, but I, I saw Led Zeppelin the night before Robert Plant’s son died and they canceled the rest of the tour.
I [00:52:00] saw Stevie Ray Vaughan the night that he played and then died in the helicopter or plane crash getting out of the theater in Wisconsin that he had been playing at because he was in the middle of nowhere. So it’s Man, I don’t want to be the Harbinger of Doom. I don’t want to think that every time I go see somebody that I love that the next day’s headline is going to be Buddy Holly Goes Down and all the tragedies that have happened.
And then, of course, people were starting to suggest, why don’t you go see this guy?
Stephen: Here,
Alan: let me tell you who to go see, Al. Exactly that. Let me give
Stephen: you the list of people we could do without, I saw a meme that made me laugh that said the fact that oh geez, I’m in now, Guitar player from Stones Keith Richards.
The fact that Keith Richards has outlived Richard Simmons is making me question this whole fitness thing. I just saw
Alan: that they almost always when they have Jim fix who was like the guy about running and fitness and so forth. And then he died of an early heart attack, right? Maybe not all the way.
Does that work? Oh yeah. So you’re looking [00:53:00] forward to Wolverine Deadpool. I really am. The Deadpool movies, they really are a different breed than all the rest of the Marvel movies. They really are more adult. And because of the language, because of the violence, because they make fun of a lot of the other conventions of comic books, they’re hilarious.
It really is. It’s like reading Mad Magazine. They know just how to poke fun in, not in a savage way, in an affectionate, but really That really is goofy way, that kind of thing. And Wolverine being one of the straight laced business of the characters. It’s I, in the comic book, cause they have a real rivalry because they both have that healing factor and et cetera, et cetera.
From I’ve read a couple things where Ryan Reynolds talks about like working with Hugh Jackman is a really a dream of his because he really saw what a generous performer and producer and everything he was, but that he wasn’t going to tone down the humor either. And so there’s a whole bunch of savage lies and making fun of and stuff like that.
And I’m just so curious. To see what they’ve done and to have two hours worth of great [00:54:00] fight scenes and great snarking. And I don’t know anything about who’s the main villain and I just read something that says Don’t think of it as really being part of the MCU. It’s not meant to be like a halfway to the next Avengers movie type thing.
It might have the usual Easter eggs and references to, and hey, isn’t that an X Men? Probably even more because it’s all the universes. Exactly. But I, they did say don’t count on this to be like the prelude to the next stuff. And so we’ll see now then, as there’s a lot of, Phase four, phase five, it was going to be a certain Kang, and now it’s not, what are they going to do next?
The multiverse has not just expanded, exploded beyond repair that any plot line can work. You could just say, Oh that’s the first 2099 version of Spider Man and things like that. So if anything, I love comic book movies, because they are that suspension of disbelief. They’re just go. Show me what it would be like to be able to get shot a hundred times and laugh and from what I understand, there’s all kinds of [00:55:00] supporting characters from the first two movies.
So teenage mega sonic warhead. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like things that they make me start laughing just out of they went over the top with which ones they chose to use. It is not your classic X Men. It’s like all the misfits.
Stephen: You know what I mean? One of the best things out of that. And I remember when Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds first started their war and I’m reading this going, wow, these guys are like, really at each other.
And then I’m like, wait a second. This really has that quality of we’re best friends that are just, playing with, but the, so the latest one, while they were filming Hugh Jackman did a Twitter X, whatever. And he said, Hey, today is actually friends day. And I think it’s pretty fantastic to be able to be on set and working with one of your best friends and doing a project like this movie with one of your best friends.
And then Ryan replied with, yeah, that’s great and wonderful. Maybe someday I’ll get to do [00:56:00] it.
Alan: There was a great time when Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Oh, yeah, each other back and forth with Sarah Silverman in the middle. Yeah, or maybe it was sorry, Jimmy Kimmel, like someone was dating someone and then they brought in all kinds of other That they really are great friends, but they kept interviewing them and they would say savagely ripping up things and stuff like that.
So I, it’s fun when it’s tongue in cheek, but they can make it believable. It’s did they really have a falling out? Is this really terrible?
Stephen: It’s funny you say that because I thought of Matt Damon earlier when we were talking about the Kecksburg thing, we were talking about the hiking, all that, because you probably seen that meme where it adds up how much money we’ve spent as Americans to save Matt Damon from Private Ryan and Martian.
Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So yeah, we need to quit saving Matt Damon. Like What type of actor are you that you always get the part where you’re the one lost that everyone else has to come and get you.
Alan: You lay there [00:57:00] wounded and let everybody else act around you.
Stephen: Though I do love Matt Damon.
I I wouldn’t mind meeting him sometime. I think he’s great.
Alan: I’ll tell you the let’s see what’s the born the born movies. Oh yeah. Some of the most like me, realistic fight scenes, like when you’re fighting in close quarters. And everything is a short choppy blow and you like hit some with a rolled up magazine because it is like a wooden stake and there’s just such like intensity to it and there’s real pain seemingly to what’s going on.
I, that was compared to, Biff Bam Pow and Big Swings and stuff like that. Those have had some of the most savage like assassin level stuff. And I don’t know if that’s truly realistic, but I think again, it’s a movie. It’s a movie.
Stephen: Was praised pretty well for the books that people liked them and I don’t think they ripped them apart too much.
So I think that they did a good job again. They’re making a movie that’s entertaining folks. Come on.
Alan: I’ll tell you, [00:58:00] here’s a series. I’ve often included this on the list. We might want to talk about real quick. I love Charles Strauss. He has a multiple series like the merchant princes, but especially I like the laundry files.
It’s a combination of Lovecraftian horror, elder gods from beyond the stars and they’re trying to continually get into our universe and spy novels where there really is like a secret organization within MI6 British that is in charge of stopping those kinds of supernatural incursions. And they’re just so well written to combine those kinds of things and the characters.
Often have like, why does this happen to me? You know what I mean? They’re not crusaders necessarily. They’re guys just doing the job. Sometimes the people that get pulled into the worst of it aren’t the field agents where they’re regular to take on danger. It’s the people that thought they were just going to be like a CPA and actuary in the office.
And somehow, unfortunately they get, so I just read one called Dead Lies Dreaming. That is, um, it’s new characters compared to all the other books, but enough of the overall. Let’s call it laundry [00:59:00] files world and they found they find a door that at the top of an old mansion that goes to a place back in time.
And as they go layer by layer, it is different things all the way back to Victorian England and you mean Victorian England, Whitechapel? Like where the Ripper might be around and how he weaves all that together to see and they’re, of course, they’re trying to find a copy of the Necronomicon or something much like it that was stored in time back there to keep it from impacting being the gateway to one of the elder gods coming back into our world.
And I love this. It’s not just like good guys and bad guys. There’s like multiple factions that are all vying for it in their own way. And some of them are pure military excursion force. Some of them are mind control people. Some of them are just like, Hey, I could really use the money. But they’re really cunning and how they do the Indiana Jones artifact finding and all that kind of stuff.
And so hats off to, I, I like couldn’t wait to get to the end of the book and I [01:00:00] hated to get to the end of the book because they’ve introduced all these cool new characters and what was going on built tension really well. Hey folks, if you’re not reading Charles Strauss, find the books and read them like one to end because they really do build on each other, but then they take side things where a character that had been introduced as like they have vampires that are based on being infected by a a supernatural force, but also that it like takes over your brain and can kill you and stuff like that.
And the way that they make it, it’s not only bloodlust, but other things that are going on. How does vampirism, how would it really work? If you will, he’s very good at taking those ideas and then promoting them to being the cool thing in the next book. We had an incursion from the fairy realms that after had a couple of comments of People say fairies and they think of like little Tinkerbells in the garden, but there’s all kinds of bad fairies.
They’re going to hit you with a spiked club and stuff like that. And I just, they, every book, not only am I looking forward to the series continuing, but there’s always something [01:01:00] so new that it’s I get to go on a new adventure. It’s not just going to be, I like revisiting my characters and seeing the latest variation on that, but to have it be that he’s so good at.
It’s building this world out and in some cases, retroconning, I love that we’re like, he explained something he thought you knew from before in a way that what was really going on was this other faction was really trying to, worm its way into MI seven, if you will. And I just. And great vocabulary and great.
I just hats off to him as a writer. If you’re looking for a great writer, Charles Strauss. So there, that’s my, my recommendation of the week.
Stephen: So did you happen to go see that Western horizon Costner’s Western? It disappeared from theaters. It really wasn’t doing well.
Alan: Apparently I was trying to schedule it for Colleen and I go like a Wednesday night, so it’s not going to be crowded.
And it lasted like two weeks. It’s, I think we can see it on, the, Paramount or peacock? Or Amazon, but it’s somewhere I was peacock again for the Olympics, so if it’s on there by coincidence,
Stephen: I will watch it. I was like [01:02:00] Colin and I saw it and thought it was great, but I guess not enough people were seeing it and they pulled the August release they were gonna do the second part in August and we’re like, are you think there’s so much money?
Yeah. Yeah. Netflix I guess is looking to buy it four
Alan: parter and just that not only did they pull the release, but they’re not even making.
Stephen: Yeah,
Alan: continue the story,
Stephen: which is sad. I thought it was a great movie and I wanted the other parts, like I said, it’s not it was three and a half hours long.
It’s not something I’m go casually. Say, I’m go watch again. But I was like, very invested and impressed with it. I wanted it to go on,
Alan: I’ll say this. Ever since Waterworld, for whatever reason, Kevin Costner has become a whipping boy for Hollywood. He’s made tons of great movies and TV shows since then.
And somehow they always just seem to be people who are waiting for a chance to jump on him instead of saying a good performance. A good theme to the movie, a premise for the movie. I don’t know that they need to have someone that is The person that they want to hate.
Stephen: It’s the weirdest thing [01:03:00] because go look at Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB.
Look at the number of people who have already given the Deadpool movie a one star and said, this movie sucks. I saw my friend, Jeff Strand, he’s got a one star review on a book from the pre release. Some guys said this looks stupid and you look stupid too. He gave it a one star. I’m like, it’s not even out yet.
And you had to do that.
Alan: And yet that’s gonna get figured into the statistics for it. Yeah. You know what I mean? That’s some people, I guess they just wanna see the world burn. They wanna be the person that’s gonna savage something and not give it a cha. Oh man. Yeah, it’s,
Stephen: I don’t get it.
Alan: Okay.
Stephen: I gotta get going. I got a meeting.
Alan: Thank you for both a little bit and thank you. We’ll week.
Stephen: See you next week. Have a good one.
You have been listening to the Relentless Geekery Podcast. Come back next week and join Alan and Stephen’s conversation on Geek Topics of the [01:04:00] Week.
