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Overview
There is some reminiscing about past tech and the skills we learned by doing it the old way that have served us well as tech progressed.
The new Werewolf by Night is out along with Andor and She-Hulk. Man some great stuff and way too much to watch. Game of Thrones new series is going strong and is interesting with George RR Martin involved. And the new Quantum Leap is going strong. And let’s add the new Interview with a Vampire and Let the right One in series.
It is fall, so plenty of opportunity to hike and enjoy the fall leaves.
Trivia
The Palmer method is the style of cursive that we’ve learned in school. What was the style taught before this?
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Transcript
Alan: think I changed my backdrop from last time. Sorry. The fall. I love the fall colors. Yeah. Hi. I got my pumpkin shirt on. I you said you were gonna grab a shirt and I was like, man, I’m wearing a boring blue shirt. I need to get something much better .
I honestly, I, it’s nice that it’s getting cooler outside because I have all kinds of ultra comfy there and it’s funny, I don’t get cold.
I’m there, I have not enough surface area for the amount of mass that I carry so you don’t get cold. And yet there’s some things that just feel like, good on ya. They’re cuddly and soft and stuff like that. So I get to break out all the winter
Stephen: wear. Yeah I felt the same way. I’m like, Ooh, it’s almost time to wear sweatshirts and sweaters, which I get to wear for two months out of the year and really?
That’s it. Hey, sorry. You know what? Today is celebration. Tell me. It is a loveless day.
Alan: Ah the first computer programmer, the inventor of, Yeah, very cool.
Stephen: Okay. Bingo. Yeah. She worked with bas analytical computer like 200 years ago or something like that. Under
Alan: 50. Exactly. And I’m not sure if it’s anecdotal or not, but isn’t she the one that came up with debugging?
Yeah. They found a bug in the actual physical computer that was causing something to either short out or at least not work correctly. By her removing the moth , that’s where we actually got the expression for debugging a computer program.
Stephen: And she was the first female programmer, one of the first programmers so lots of celebration in that little simple, geeky day.
Exactly.
Alan: There’s actually a computer language Ada named after her, and it’s older, like more procedural, like cobal as I recall and stuff like that. But yeah, I’ve never used that nonetheless, a giant in the industry when you talk about going back to the analytical engine, going back.
Wow touring and the people that first thought of how you could capture an algorithm, how you could make the ultimate machine, the machine that can do anything if you program it correctly. And it’s funny nowadays this is one of the things we get to do because we’re slightly older, is we’ve been through, I’ve been through tons of generations of how this has all happened.
Yeah. So when I was first in college as a 77, we were still typing things in on cards that you had a card deck that you feed into a hopper put in the hopper and feed into the machine and it mattered. How you got those cards was you went over to a car punch and typed in things and everything had a representation and let’s nowadays we talk about it’s either everything is asking nowadays or at least extended asking, but back then was also sic and even before that, and why is it slipping my mind?
There was a standard. Code for what every character that you could ever think of using in a computer language might be. And so that’s what all those things translated. And as people got good enough like reading card decks that they didn’t have to look at the letter that it translated to.
You of knew from patterns in the dots. And just and during my college career, we moved from that to a teletype writer where you’re actually typing in real time and you storage things on paper tape instead of in card decks. Because the big thing, of course, was it was bulky and hard to carry around.
And if any of them got caught or mard anyway, you and just that dumping the deck you really had to you learn how to do things like I, boy, I hope it doesn’t sound too silly, but there was discipline back then as to, because of that kind of disaster, you would number your. Your code statements and back.
That’s how it used to be like in basic and stuff like that, that everything had a number 10, 20, 30, and you’ll learn to number them 10, 20, 30 40 because if you number them 1, 4, 5 and then had to insert something, there was no such thing as a number 1.5 back then. And all the little discipline that you learned on how to not only do it, but make it flexible for correction and for addition in stuff like that.
Stephen: And I remember the first time I was messing with I think visual basic. Microsoft clear back when and I’m like, Where’s the line numbers? Where do I type the line? I was like I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that, oh, I didn’t need a line number and I didn’t have go-tos.
And then we started using functions and then classes for objects and and all that jazz. So I was like, Yeah it took me a minute to get past that . Yeah I’ll tell you another thing that was interesting was back then, because it’s the infancy, everybody is trying things and so not only did you go to the teletype writer, but then you actually went to the first screen like an actual crt where, and it could like back when you had a problem with screen burn, one of the reasons that they first developed, and instance even before anything having to do with, I’m sorry with wizzy wig.
Alan: You’d step up to a screen and you’d see burnt into the phosphor. The press enter to begin because it had been displayed on the screen for too long. That had actually wore out, if you will. And this wasn’t pixels back then, it was actual characters like a 25 by 80 screen. And this, I know this all, I’m sure that sounds like working on a Model T or the older days of hey, that hard one knowledge of how to get your carburetor to work when there’s no such thing as a carburetor anymore, or an oil pan or a it, but it was seeing the changes, the incredible change. I think I’ve mentioned before, I went to school at University of Illinois in, in Urban a Champagne and they were at the forefront of all different kinds of things. So a couple years ago now, I actually, a great book called Out, came out called The Friendly Orange Glow that was about the Plato system.
And I’m already jumping ahead a couple generations back when it was. Card deck, then tele typewriters, then an actual onscreen editor and like being able to do things like not retype an entire line but actually back up and overwrite characters or delete characters, right? It was a breakthrough.
People don’t, back in the days of typewriters when you messed up, you had to white it out or you had to tell. And then when they actually got a teletype, not a tele typewriter, a electric the IBM came out with where you had the ball that had different fonts on it and you had correction tape that you could put the correction tape in there and hit the same key to white out that individual character, not blotch it up and be obvious about what you’ve done.
But every one of those things was an incredible time saver and not having to retype an entire page because you got two thirds of the way through and then had a typo and blew it cause you couldn’t turn in. Some teachers were real sticklers for. It has to be of quality, and then when I first got to work it in my six years of college, I went to University of Illinois for undergrad and grad school and getting to where we actually had a Wang word processing system where you, it was a virtual thing, was a file not typed onto a paper.
And for term papers, this is of weird like you have to turn into four page term paper. If you’re gonna be avoiding work, you’d. Make a three page term paper and then by adjusting the justification of the words on a page and the font and the spacing and the curing, and actually curing wasn’t even around back then.
There was no such thing as true typography, but you could bloat it up. And actually, our problem, I worked on a number of things by owner, other people’s things, and what you had was like four and a half, five pages that you had to squeeze in four. So you’d do the same kind of thing. You had good thoughts that you wanted to make sure you didn’t leave out.
And the act of typing a five page paper was easy. Making it for deciding what to trim out or deciding that was the last part of the thing. When I did this talk about the friendly orange glow, Plato was an educational computer system. It was a huge breakthrough. It was the first not character based, but actually a screen that you could address every single pixel.
I don’t even know if they used the term pixel back then. Yeah. It was not on the basis of how you ized the image with a CRT or some kind of other pseudo television. It was actually a plasma panel with between two pans of glass, a very fine network of wires and fluorescent gas in between. And the way you’d get a pixel to light up was you’d send the right electronic signal to where the wires intersected.
And then that was enough electricity to make this dot glow. So you had, the first time you had every single pixel was addressable, and you had you were able to do like real pictures, not blocky. And pixelated isn’t even the right turn. know, You’ve seen where computer graphics that then were remarkably primitive and he just learned to deal with it And we, when we used to flick computer games back then, a little cell of Okay, is that a drew it or a witch because you only had 10 by 30 or something to make it right.
And you had to make it, Okay, let’s give it a distinctive hat or something that would make it recognizable. Being able to do this stuff first stuff with fonts. The first time that I saw on a Plato screen, like an old English font with all the the decoration to it, if you will. And actually, I went the other direction when I was in grad school.
Wrong. The honors program I took multiple honors courses because not only was I getting my degree, but I really was, I had good professors that I could do interesting things with and only for an hour of credit and often foolishly where would I spend all my time? Not in the four hour calculus class where it really mattered to my grade point average, but the one hour display devices or graphics or something like that, that I was just fascinated by.
We’re making these breakthroughs. If you have a certain number of pixels in a cell what the best font for readability. Back then it was, you really had all the time problems with, is that an eight or a three or a, or a b where depending on how you made it out of dots, it really could be distinctive or not.
One and l were, we’re always being mistaken for each other depending on how you ums if still that. Exactly. And so coming up with that you, that’s when I learned about, you knows, fonts are better for long term readability than sands fonts, because those little lines, top and bottom connect things and make your mind flow for one character to next.
And it makes it easier to, How does the brain really work? It doesn’t read a word as individual characters. It sees it as a group and a group that more hangs together. It really looks like the word gy instead of having to make out what’s this word? Say, S y Z, why Cetera, et cetera. I just, I was fascinated early on, and that honestly has served me really well for the rest of my career.
In terms of, you appreciate the fighter and finer graphics, but those things about how does the mind, how do you really see you? The when when it used to be that you had a screen that ized by that meaning it didn’t throw an entire display up, it had a line that moved back across, back and forth across the screen and turned on the individual cells and the refresh rate, which is almost fading from understanding now if you had a 20 or 30 or 60.
Scans per second, you really could see flicker. You could see the actual, like your mind is fast enough, your eyes are, have enough differentiation that you can really, and that’s where you get ice strain from, is you’re continually filling in. It has it, they’re trying to make it look like a three. But when it’s continually flickering on and off, that’s when you get that ambiguity of is that a three or a B?
Am I filling in a line on the left or not? And so all that awareness of how to avoid eye strain and like the brightness of things and that the refresh rates of things really then gives you everything that started to figure into frames per second. And there you’re talking about a whole bigger set of images where you’re doing the it has to look when something moves across the screen.
Automatedly, you don’t want to be aware that it’s jumping from position to position. You wanna see it move smoothly. And Plato was amazing in terms of, it was not based on a computer sitting in front of you all in a box. It was attached to a mainframe and it was time sharing. And yet the round trip that they were able to design so that you hit a key, it goes to the back then not a server, a mainframe digests it sends something back to what to display on screen.
It was near instantaneous so that when you hit the l and l appeared on screen, it wasn’t like L and then wait and see what’s gonna happen. , you could type faster than it could get back to you. You would occasionally see it stutter a little bit. But one of the reasons, again, happens of a lifetime, How did I become a night owl?
Because if you went when everybody else was doing their homework, you got less responsibility, right? If you held out and everybody else went to bed at 10 and you stayed up until one, you had more of the computer for you, your time sharing tiny portion went up. And so it was like, Wow, all I gotta do is outlast everybody and I can get.
Things done in an hour instead of three hours, cuz I’m never waiting on the machine. And that’s been a hallmark of forever. Nowadays they have it all the time that you can’t. Boy, I know I’m jumping all around, but this is all figures into it, right? What the research that the Macintosh had was, Thank you Ada Lovelace, Thank you.
A ala exactly. They had guidelines for user interface guidelines and now we’re breaking some of them. So you’re typing away and they can always handle that. And it displays things and it does animation well. But once in a while it has to do something difficult. Go do a big calculation, a whole, a huge spreadsheet from refresh or something like that.
And Apple had guidelines as to if it’s gonna take any more than a certain number of seconds. One of the worst things you can do is have the computer stop doing anything, talking to the user. It looks like it’s frozen up. People get frantic, they hit buttons that they don’t want to later on. So you put a little hour glass or a spinning beach ball or whatever else it might be up on the screen to help them know that, yes, I’m busy and here’s a, a press thermometer or whatever.
And one of the worst things that’s happened now with Facebook and various other places is they’ve stopped doing that. There’s any number of times where nowadays I’m ahead of all kinds of websites, especially Facebook and I, Is it frozen? Is it is my wifi weird? Am I just impatient? It doesn’t have that Anywhere near the consideration for always have the user feel like they’re in charge.
Always have it be that the computer is the tool, the slave, and that it’s waiting for them, it’s responding for them. You’re never waiting on it. And they’ve given up on that kind of, So I for all the care that was done way back then to continually moving more towards true personal computing, we seem to be taking a step back because we got sloppy, because we decided that we are, we’re, there’s a, they’re building expectations.
If I go to YouTube and I wanna watch a video and you like they’ll think it’s going and fetching the video for you, but they don’t even give a, Hey, this will take two seconds. So they throw something up on screen because somehow the overhead of throwing that up on screen is more than they’re willing to bear.
Or that they don’t want to admit that, Hey, we’re slower than you are. I don’t know. There’s all kinds of, Yeah, psychology and a whole bunch of assumptions in what I just said. Soon as we got to mixed media, rich media, there were delays. Throwing text up on a screen is incredibly easy and efficient compared to music or a full color video or something like that, where there’s a lot more data beating
Stephen: moved.
The answer is always throw more hardware at it. And there is that too. Exactly. And
so you mentioned a couple things. You’re talking about the lag in that, from my understanding, the Atari on the old CRT TVs that. And I saw this we’d play games in the dark cuz it would leave a trail and it would have, and I guess from what I’d been told if you were high while playing Atari games, it was an amazing experience.
I don’t, I was too young. I don’t know. But also the graphics in that, the Commander 64 did something very unique. They had a set of graphic little do dads on each key. So you could create base, use basic code and create graphics to the screen just like texting characters. It was very efficient. And let you draw some amazing things for games and things like that.
Alan: Exactly. I know they’ve tried to, like the logo language was one of the first ones that that kids could make their own games with. And it started to say instead of being individual characters or individual pixels, you started to have those little like icons if you will. And there’s a specific term for it that’s escaping me, but that you would work with each of those things.
The standard rocket ship, a standard Mario or something like that. And then treat that as a unit. And so much of the world of com of progress in computers has been abstraction that when I started coding way back in college, you really like a horizon, a trs, a whole bunch of different things.
You were really doing the odd manure of comparing between things to do math. You were doing things as close to the metal. And again, sorry for folks whose eyes glaze over and don’t care about this. But there was a time when in the old computer movies, you’d see a big patch panel and there was a time when you were really controlling the electronics behind something.
And the more that they’ve gotten it to where now you don’t need to worry. How you display it to the screen, it just does, You don’t need to worry about individual characters or pixels on the screen. You do it as graphic units and coding has become that. You’re not doing only if then else type things that the more that it does it.
Boy, event driven programming was an incredible breakthrough in terms of not procedural, not go to, not falling through in the flow of a program, but being able to do not everything as a sub-routine, but everything is based on, the computer is continually waiting for input from you, an event loop, and you write all the things that say what could the user do?
They could hit something on the keyboard, they could move their mouse around, they could click their mouse, and the ability to digest all of those things. It created object oriented programming that you didn’t treat the screen as a unit. You treated each of those individual things with which you were dealing as controllable units and.
Many of them had similarities and differences. So you had, you wanted to be able to say anything that I do with the keyboard, I know I’ve got the standard set of keys and so I’m continually waiting for something from there. The idea of how to treat things that were similar but not exactly identical to have it does most of it the same, but then you break apart various different cases so you have inheritance of certain characteristics and differentiation between other characteristics.
That it was a whole new way of thinking of how are these things like, and unlike, and how do I deal with them differently? But for the most common things are gonna do, make those super efficient, make those, the class boy class libraries came to be so that people, instead of everybody having to code their.
How do I display something on screen? How do I display something in color, on screen and use various different clues, color lookup tables and being able to have that be a shared experience across multiple computers that they actually started to say there, there’s a good reason to not have everybody solve this themselves in hardware or in software so that you get that shared user experience that Max and Windows became known for.
There’s always the menu bar and the doc and and every one of those things has been added over the course of time. And so I jump forward many years. know, When I first got outta college, I of course worked in COBAL and Assembler and what I, a big part of what I did, I worked for Arthur Anderson and then Pete Margaret, two of the big eight consulting firms, and now I think it’s Big Five, right?
The Pete Marwick had a particular group called the Catalyst Group that took old code, that the big companies like banks and insurance companies and utilities, they had to be some of the first to computerized. If you’re gonna handle Pacific Gas and electric billing for gas and water and electric and whatever else they handled for millions of people, that wasn’t gonna be a clerk sitting there with a set of books doing it.
They had the computerized everybody knows about this, right? The way you first did it. You have to keep adding things to it. And so code becomes increasingly convoluted. You might start off being only a gas utility, and then when you add electric, a little bit of what I talked about a lot of it’s the same as gas.
You still have mains going underneath streets and how it gets to the house, but then the units that you bill it in and the pressure that you track and whatever else you track different things. Some similarities, some differences. And every different coder had their hand in this code.
So it had all kinds of cruft, all kinds of stuff that they had to fix to update it for different the year 2000 problem. We’re running out of enough room to have a date that includes 2000. Catalyst Group took that old garbage spaghetti code that had been so over maintained that it was everybody’s attitude was, Oh my God, don’t touch it.
We don’t know how it works anymore, but if you change it, things are gonna change 30 yards over here at another part of code, right? That are gonna give us unexpected results. And Noma, back then it was all about testing and regression testing and making sure that the things that you added worked.
But that also all the things that currently existed didn’t, no, nothing stopped working because of unexpected results. Brilliant people, John Delco, Jerry Hawkins, I helped a little, had done very cool things with how to transform that code into all. Perform based instead of fall through cobal and and make it so that the people that maintained that code really could understand what was going on and that the people could be not your 20 year people that had been working on it for 20 years, and that’s why they understood it.
But that you really could hand someone a relative newbie, Here’s how the, this system works, how we do insurance. And they’d be able to say, Okay, this is the paragraph where it first takes in user information. Then here’s how we main, all the different insurance products and stuff. And so it kind of code, working on code was a very cool thing to, and it took a big sell sometimes to be able to say to places, we know that this is one of your strategic assets.
You can’t not have your your overnight run. Make sure that all of your. Insurance agents can see on the screen the next day, whatever they added yesterday, now it’s in the system. And now they can bring up that customer record they can bring and they can do billing and stuff like that. And it was fascinating to work on that kind of stuff because a lot of what I had worked on had led into it understanding of, I don’t know.
Another thing that was cool about the early days was that there wasn’t only one language. Nowadays, it really seems that a lot of things are written in c or c plus or sharp swift. Back then people were experimenting and so you had basic, and you had of course Cobal and Ada, and then you had Pascal, and then you had Pass Pascal.
That was one of the first things to be able to get and artificial intelligence languages that were trying to do the first thing with neural networks and stuff like that. So by my U of I was really good. And instead of being a trade school where you learned. How to do jcl for mainframe jobs and how to do basic for PC jobs and pretty much all those things.
They taught you. What is a database? How does a database work? How does a telecommunications monitor work? What is going on with tcp i p and early parts of the internet? And by making it that all languages had certain characteristics. Again, similarities and differences. Everybody has a decision structure.
Everybody has a repeat structure. You had typing of various different things, whether they were character or numeric and how to be able to look for problems. Boy how many? All the troubleshooting back then was yes, someone put something in the wrong slot, but your early, you’re catching of errors in the entry screen wasn’t sufficient to stop someone from indeed putting in I dunno it assumes things about a name.
And then you have someone that has a longer than usual name because they’re from Greece or India. And I, I stereotype, but you know what I’m trying to say, I don’t. And. and it was very, so much I got another brilliant guy I worked with, Randy Meum that we, Pete Mark had prop things called like structured retrofit, which was the code thing in path, which told you about the complexity, the relative complexity of your code.
And as you got those metrics down, it was more understandable. We did a thing called data view where it looked at all the data structures across your cobal portfolio and where they were going to have problems. You had let, so you have an employee number and of course some people call it employee number and some people call it m id and some people had an underscore in between and then across code, you could change that, not knowing that it wasn’t named used.
The same way every. That would cause constantly errors because you just didn’t have what was called data name rationalization. Making it sure that everywhere that you used ssn social security number as a key into a person’s identity that it was always ssn, not so sec numb or so sec No. Or whatever else it might be.
And
Randy brilliantly. And again, it’s of funny, I don’t know that I was ever the big writer of these, but I was often the one that helped design and fix what, like all the corner cases, all the things this thing had to account for. I was able to help a lot of this with doing the testing and being able to do wow, okay, we’re almost done.
Okay, we’re 90% done, but now the other 10% is gonna take the next 90% of the time. Cuz now it’s the tricky crap, right? It’s, so when. When we looked at the first things where they’re gonna, they run out of their employee ID was five characters long and Oh no, they’re about to have a hundred thousand employees.
What are you gonna do? And so how do you expand that field in every bit of code in everywhere in their portfolio so that it’s not going to break? Kinda like the year 2000 problem. And we regularly dealt with those things and how to make it more maintainable, how to make it more, just not perilous because of all the creativity.
And it wasn’t, people were foolish. They were continually working under constraints of, I gotta worry about every single Back then, of course she is it wasn’t terabytes or gigabytes or megabytes, it was every single bite or bit, right? You had to worry about how much memory you had. So you did amazing,
Stephen: smart things.
That’s the young people, young programmers now don’t realize it wasn’t because they were bad programmers or stupid or whatever the constraints were with the system, the hardware that it, you only had this much room. So if you used 10 for a name, you only had 40 left for everything else. So you had to say, names are only eight.
So we had 42 for everything else. And it really I’ve worked with a system that it was an order system that only allowed five items in a cart and they wanted to tie that into a web based system. And I. Okay. I
Alan: expect problems because the old constraint doesn’t apply anymore.
Exactly. We’ve broken through that. It’s, I keep thinking this is I always have ideas for little talks I should give because there’s some things that are worth an hour of interesting stuff. When Randy and I worked on the dating rationalization stuff, we continually found where people had overloaded fields.
In other words, and this is my favorite example of, so we’re going through and there’s a mf that we see a field that has MFS in it. So Wow. That must be male female. This is even before worrying about that, there’s non non nonspecific gendering, if you will. But we back then found i in that field.
It’s like back then it was not like, what’s this indeterminate They what does it turned out that they needed to be able to mark the interns they had working for them for the summer and they had no other field to do it, and they couldn’t expand the record to add another field. So they put the eyes in for intern, because I guess interns are.
Stephen: Sexual, something
Alan: like that. They’re indeterminate. It doesn’t matter what sex they are. Cuz they didn’t have to report on them to the government for what the various different, quote is not the right word. They started to carry statistics as to were you having enough people in all the right positions so that you weren’t super prejudiced.
There were cases where, wow, look at who’s in the structure of organization and funny how there really is a glassy ceiling and we can prove it because there are no ladies in positions of power and they’re just as competent. They have just the degrees and just the years of experience. And yet, and so when we found that it was like, how how do you account for not only where the constraints of the system are there, but that they’ve had to be really clever about working.
Additions like that and that we had to do data cleansing. And how are you gonna fix that? Are you really gonna say you can’t have any more interns? No. Are you gonna add a field for intern? No, I guess you’re just gonna have to document the heck out of it to say, by the way, anybody who ever has, not only male, female, but I, it means this.
And we, we had to probably talk to 10 people at the firm before someone happened to remember, Oh yeah, that’s what we did. We put interns in there. But otherwise we really were baffled as to what this could be. . And I could tell you how many other exam like way, way back, just getting something. A lot of places early on wanted to automate their mailings.
An insurance company wants to send things out to the places as billing. The government for one, was one of the first ones to say we can’t. Avenue versus Ave versus Avan versus av. They did rationalize down the state names. I grew up where I was still writing ill for Illinois, and when they finally did that whole thing of every state gets two characters, and indeed some of them will be a little bit odd because Maine should be ma no somebody else got there first with Ma.
And and I’m trying, there’s a better example of that. Like Minnesota should be mi no. And Mississippi should be mi No, Minnesota got there first. There’s a whole bunch of things like why in the world did Illinois, Indiana, the eyes make sense? Idaho, you get into the s and there’s all kinds of things that don’t make sense because somebody else bumped it forward.
And it wasn’t always who was first alphabetically. It’s more Okay, Mississippi could be MS, because there’s no other MS that people will mistake it for. You know what I mean? Minnesota S is too far along, so probably we should make Minnesota the I or the N, but Maine should be because the vowels don’t matter as much as the consonants.
You know what I mean? And main, I think main turns out to be me because everything else got used up. MI is Michigan, and it was, okay, so if we’re gonna do this with the least number of errors, how if we do it based on state size, there’s much more mail going to Minnesota than there is Maine. And so I guess they win in the battle. You know what I mean? It was, it’s just and so all the stuff that we did, Figuring out when you didn’t just type it in. And it was always like, And when do I occasionally bump into that? I’m out on a Canadian website cuz we’re up in Toronto and I’m going to get like a Presto card. Here’s my Presto card.
This is the guy that you use for traveling on all their public transportation. So I want to, I wanna not only have one, I want to be on the system so that it will let me know automatically when I’m going below zero so that I can make sure I use it well. I’m, I’ll just go on and, Oh, what’s a province?
I don’t live here and I can’t put in Ohio. I can put in Ontario, o and there’s still places where, and I would’ve thought, it’s funny, some places like Canada, they’ve had to become accommodating with, they don’t just have their 12 provinces, they actually have 62 things they need to worry about because the United States figures into so much of their business and not as the country code, but as a state code that they’ve actually made it.
That they corrupt that field voluntarily for the right efficiency of business. You know what I mean? And hundreds of examples like that, that if you do any kind of thing internationally, occasionally I go to Amazon, not here, but Amazon UK because there’s a particular puzzle that I’m trying to find. And I know that the vendor is over there, but then you have to deal with, Oh and I know that I’m doing all the talking this episode, but you, I but you must have seen these things.
So I’m gonna put in post postal code. Postal codes are not five plus four, like the United States, everywhere in Canada, there are six characters and it alternates between a character and a number, right? And in, in Germany they’re different. And in, in UK it’s different all over the world that are different.
And so something as basic as I need the code that’s gonna get me, enable me to mail this to someone and street address is a small part. The first thing is the big equivalent of our zip code. And. That’s one of those things I’m pretty sure some companies have made their living off of solving the problem that nobody else wanted to solve.
And so the first people that made the module that said, for every one of the 212 countries in the world at number of bones in the body anyway, it, we figured out how to do every single mailing code. And same with Ohio is weird in terms of, it has 88 counties, if I remember right.
Every single one of them has a different tax rate. And if you’re doing tax work in Ohio or paying taxes in Ohio, you need to be able to understand that if you did a lick of work down in Licking County, you have to pay them for the fact that you weren’t really a resident or still working and someone figured out, We don’t want everybody figuring this out rife with errors.
We’re gonna make the module that everybody has has to buy into because it’s a solve problem. Now that we solved and we get to reap the benefits of the fact that we took care of every knit, every single eye iota of problem, and we fixed it. And I think that there’s all kinds of companies that do that.
You know what I mean? That they find a hard problem and they’re the ones to solve it. And that’s part of what the patent process is. But it’s just that thing. So many people don’t wanna do the work. They just want it to work. And
Stephen: they’re willing to pay. Don’t think about tracking all those things.
If I’m selling the books exactly at an author table down in somewhere, I want, that’s what I pay the accountant for. They Exactly. You take care of that. And I’m
Alan: sure it’s not only Ohio, every state has their weirdness about that. You know what I mean? That they have different things for countries Exactly.
Count you by county or city by city or, and all those kinds of things and the minute, when I first started long ago to do trading with the GABA system, my AI based system, one of the first things I had to learn was it’s not only, of course here in the United States that you have.
Pork bellies and orange juice, it’s all over the world. And boy, currency is tough. Currency is not only have to know what the currencies are, but what their refresh rates are, what their various levels are, and how quickly that changes over the course. And so there’s whole, there’s places that do currency arbitrage that they don’t try to make any money.
They try to say what, what is gaining against the others? It’s kinda like doing any other day trading, futurist future forecasting type thing. If I think that the pound is going lower and lower against the dollar, I don’t need to own dollars and pounds for longer than it takes to say, Yep, it went down just like I expected.
I owned it for a day and I made my 0 cents. But because I bet $10,000 on it, I made, I don’t wanna drop zero, It’s 40 bucks, 400 bucks and all those kinds of things. International currency. And there’s all kinds of difficult problems like that. And when you start going on to multiple exchanges to get.
Efficiencies in where commodities are. There’s different things going on in Canada than there are, and in Brazil and and where the different exchanges were life in London and Australia and not only Chicago Board of Trade and the it was very interesting that every time that I looked into that, it was just, how do I control the chaos?
I can’t account every single thing that I might want to deal with because it’s time
Stephen: to Brighton program Alan.
Alan: See, you know what’s interesting sometimes the reason that the problem gets solved is not because someone like was bright and took it on as a challenge. It was more the market maker said, We can’t have problems selling our.
We have to make it that the whole world knows this is how zinc works and we’ll set up the markets with the appropriate exchange race and everything so that it’s very fungible and tradeable and easy and other places don’t do that. They start a new market and they kinda like the chaos because there’s opportunities based on information and whether you’re the fastest to get it or have the most of it, to be able to say what are the patterns that are emerging and stuff like that.
So you, that’s something I learned on those markets is there’s things that have been traded for a long time, T bonds and t-bills that everybody in the world knows about because it’s not only the United States people, it’s all over the world that those are used as reserve currency is not the right thing.
A whole a share a holder of value. You know what I mean? If you’re looking for what do you know is not gonna have any so much chaos that it’s ever going to have a black swan event, have something happen that hasn’t happened over the last a hundred years. It’s. Buyt Bills, buy shares the things that the United States government puts out as paper that you buy it for this and will give you this at a later date.
And that slightly fluctuates, but in a very known way on the market. It’s not that the market, the bottom is gonna drop out of it or something like that. Where’s that really might happen with the rubal or, you know what I mean? Different term and Anyway, Boy, Amaya. Here
Stephen: I got I wanna go back it.
So you mentioned things we’ve learned. I think some of the things we learned, having to do it so manually helped us along. And I think not having that practice is not as good. Not saying that programmers nowadays aren’t learning or doing good, but I remember when I took electronic music, one of, we had a room el for electronic music, and it wasn’t synthesizers and computers, it was real tapes and early synthesizer where you had to plug stuff in the board exactly like an telephone operator, which that’s something that used to exist for all the young people
But we had to do a mix of from various songs and we had to include a loop in there. So we had to find something and loop it. So I literally had to get a song recorded on reel to reel, find it, and then literally put it on the little thing and cut it with a razor, and then find the end and cut it and tape it and have it loop.
Most people were doing. A quick one one and a half second loop, which on R to Rio is still 10 foot of tape or something that it can have no, not me. I did the big Led Zeppelin and we literally had it looped all the way around the room with music stands. It was just so huge to loop it.
So that’s our goal, But knowing how that, how to do that, when you move to the all digital electronic stuff, you can picture it better. And I think it’s a good discipline to have learned. And have,
Alan: I agree. In fact people talk about this all the time, that there’s terms in our vocabulary.
When you have a dial in it, there’s no dial anymore , there’s no and that there’s things that have held over from how it was first done. But it does help to understand that’s, even before I went to college, we had Modems that where you put the phone, the actual phone into a s snapper, a thing that had a where at a cradle that both that things went into and it talked with the crackle, if you will, that we can’t understand except the computer can.
So it was already, we had an idea of this is beyond the limits of human processing. So we can go faster, but we have to devise a way that it’s shared everywhere. And then, and same thing, we had paper tape that you’d punch out. And actually by the way, those little dots were perfect confetti for football games.
So we used to kick save all those and bring ’em to the games. But then we also discovered that was the first evidence of microplastics, if you will. They were so small that you, even if you went home and shook ’em outta your clothes and took a shower, a week later you’d be like, and something would fall outta your hair.
Where, how was that, where did it go? That I didn’t, So it used to get, Everywhere in the steam. Yeah. And you could try to brew it try to sweep it away and it just, it got into every crevice and after a while they banned because it was that first thing of we, this is our environment isn’t equipped to handle how many people are going to eat this on their hot dog, Breathe this in, get it in their hair, get it into the stands forever.
And I don’t know, plastic is inert so it’s even more of a problem. But back then paper, who knows how long it took for that to really degrade, biodegrade and finally become one with the environment. All that extra cellulose, if that’s the . Okay. You also mentioned fonts and typography.
Stephen: So I was at HA farm this past weekend. My niece works there. That’s Full dress that she designed herself they were doing their fall festival. But they have these cool signs up, so I’ve got a trivia for you. Okay. They do not teach it as much anymore, but we learned cursive how to write cursive, which was adapted from the Palmer Method.
That was the style of cursive writing that we learned that was prevalent. But there was a style before that, that in the eight mid early 18 hundreds, that was much more looping and rounded, that they started schools and eventually got simplified to the Palmer Method. Do you know what that’s
Alan: called? I don’t.
I’ve heard of the Palmer Method. Now if that was the one that you were gonna ask me, I was like, I’m ready
Stephen: to jump on this.
Alan: No. So I don’t know Grande Yeah. There know
Stephen: it was another man and it was Spencerian Penman. See, he came up with this style that was very flamboyant and rounded and had schools that taught people how to Right that way and everything. And yeah, Hail farm, cool little place. If you’ve never been there, I hadn’t
Alan: been there.
I really love that. The recreation of a working farm and especially now for fall, Where did they have a corn maze there? Did they have Sidder and okay.
Stephen: But they were doing apple butter in the pot over the fire, and you could stir it. And they had I was laughing because I mean it’s it’s a nonprofit and they do charge to get in and they take donations and I know the WD Burton Foundation is what helped start it and things like that.
But there it still struggles. It’s not like they’re making money handler fist and those buildings take repair and all that. So they had food trucks, they had a hot dog, they had donuts and stuff. And I’m like, Is that authentic? I didn’t, I would say exactly. Farmers. Exactly. I remember when the food wagon used to pull up drawn by four horses and they would have, Yeah.
Parked out the one building, there was a coke cooler there that they had pop and stuff in that you could buy and stuff. I’m like, Wow. Do they have horses in the back running the mill to get that going? That’s very funny. But it’s still a nice little visit. It’s low key, relax. You can still get a horse ride with the draft horses and see
Alan: that’s why I love fault like this.
We almost always make it to a corn maze. We make it to curtland or hail farms or Maple side. Yep. There’s something very I don’t know, the sense in the air, the sense of maple is very cool. The sense of burning leaves is very, even though it’s carcinogenic. But anyway, it’s, there’s a great quote along the lines of Fall is a second spring with every leaf a blossom.
And I really love that. My favorite part of the pallet, if you will, are all of the oranges and reds and yellows. And that’s so everywhere that I drive nowadays it’s do I have to go to Costco for any reason? Cause there’s some pretty treats along the way. You,
Stephen: that kind of thing. I’m sorry it took two and a half hours.
Alan: we have a wonderful drive. My niece is getting married this weekend and they’re gonna be doing it in Toa, Illinois, little town south of Joliet. It near Star Rock State Park, which is absolutely beautiful. And one of those things when I found out that’s where they were doing it, I couldn’t believes like, I’m gonna be able to be in starved rock in fall.
I couldn’t it’s so pretty driving there. And then while you’re there, it’s. They got the right combination of trees. They got Star Rock is big valleys where the river has cut and waterfalls have cut to where it the valleys have been because the water kept receding. So there’s all kinds of blind canyons, box canyon and stuff, and everyone from the top or from the bottom, it’s just glorious hiking.
And we’re probably only gonna be able to fit Sunday as a day of hiking in there. But it’s So how soon do we have to be at the ceremony? ? I just, Yeah. Sorry. I didn’t made it roll out. Didn’t mean it relate, but it’s I love this time of year. Yeah. And we actively follow. Another cool thing that’s happened is they have the leaf tracking, they’re aware of what parts of that country have gotten the right temperatures, the right water, so that it really is, they can of judge peak leaf. And there’s a whole contour map as you can see. Ooh. Starts an upstate New York and then moves down. And now it’s within driving distance, reasonable driving distance.
So are we gonna go to Kinzua Bridge? Which is an old railroad trestle that across a valley and a tornado took it out. So at each end, you can walk out onto the end of this bridge, at least one end, and they actually have a glass bottom, a glass thing, so you can actually step out and really be in the middle of mid air.
But the whole valley is like a bowl of tricks. It’s just an incredible explosion of beautiful colors for probably a month. I’m sure there’s peak leaf going on there, but every time that I’ve been there, and in the Canus Highway in New Hampshire, and even just here in Cuyahoga Valley, the different kinds of trees, the oaks and maple and birch’s, whatever does it I just love it.
I love those bursts of color. And so we look for are we driving to Halloween for Chicago? You bet we are. And that’s six hours. Even along a major expressway, there’s enough and a lot of it is prairie, but there’s cops of trees that are just startling.
Stephen: Wonderful. So the other great thing about Fall, and this is different from another thing, different from when we were younger, is all the new shows that start coming out.
Absolutely. Man, we are so inundated with shows. It’s like you, I wanna go outside, I wanna hike, I wanna be in the woods. I love the cool weather, right? But man, I’ve got 55 hours of shows this week sitting there waiting for me.
Alan: So I’ve started to do things Colleen and I watch a certain amount together.
We love our British Bakeoff show, We love Our Castle, our various different nature documentaries. There’s always good new ones. Lis one is Wild Babies and you get to see, oh, let’s watch the Bear Cups grow up. That kinda stuff. But just that a lot of things aren’t to her taste. She doesn’t like the Guns and explosions movies.
And maybe my superhero thing is also just a little bit too much. So I’ve been watching a lot of my She Hawk Lord of the Ring. I still haven’t seen where we’ll find out. And I apologize cause you said it was great that I super use it. Yeah. Where Will
Stephen: by Knife was? It’s black and
Alan: white, right? It’s like an old hammer horror film in terms of the black and whiteness of
Stephen: it.
Ok. Ok. I don’t wanna give too much away. I want you to enjoy the experience. But they make it black and white. It’s got some grain to the film that they added and it’s even got the edges blacked around there. So it looks like an old with the projector bulb and all that it still looked a little too crisp and clear.
Yeah. But it was enough to give you that feel. They even through in the little black dot that appears when you would have to switch canisters to the next film, they just threw their That’s hilarious. I loved it. Yeah. If you don’t know what it is, probably don’t even notice it. But me and Carl and both were like, Oh, that’s so cool.
But it was an hour show and it was a couple characters where with my night and man thing that our great characters, but not enough to be a blockbuster or on the big screen billion dollar movie,
Alan: you put a hundred million dollars into it, you’d be taking too much risk for things that really aren’t be characters, subsidiary characters, not the pantheon of superheroes.
Yes.
Stephen: Okay. But that I think they realize. That this is the right medium for and it was a great show and I said I would, if they had every single month, a one hour TV movie with some minor characters in the mcu, I’d watch every single one. Cuz this was really that good. I like the story and it looked good.
And the characters are great. They didn’t cheese out. They really put everything into it.
Alan: Very good. Very good. Another one of the joys of technology is things that used to be you could tell it was a special effect. They did what they could with film at the time.
And then as we’ve worked our way towards digital everything and even. You can realize your vision on screen and not have a whole bunch of trade offs as to I just, we can’t have a huge battle scene like that because there’s no way we can display the entire cathedral. You know what I mean?
I love that. Where they now have the sweep and the scope as well as the fine detail. Like his fur really moves in move
Stephen: from my understanding. And I haven’t watched the behind the scenes and features as much, but some people were, I was talking to some people about it, they used as much practical effects as they could.
Even man thing about half the time is real and practical and not digital. Interesting. Okay. And they do that because he’s hiding so they can have him behind a bush so they don’t have to do a full size
Alan: creature. Just show the tentacle face or
Stephen: whatever. Okay. Yeah. So they tried to do as much practical as they could and Jack Like Jeff Writer amazing. He looks just like the comic book, so Very cool. Yeah,
Alan: and especially so much Wear Wolf movie is the transformations like that, is it good? Is it like they
Stephen: don’t really show the transformation, they show him already transformed? A little bit. A little bit, but they do it as the old would’ve done it by a shadow on the wall.
Alan: See that’s okay. Alright. Yes, I agree. Because I remember, what was it, Wolfen or something where they actually showed like hands cowing
Stephen: and Yeah. America or Wolf in London or Paris or, Yeah, and like
Alan: the sounds of bones breaking to rearrange themself and stuff where it really is a painful process and that kind of stuff.
So I’m, I was wondering how they had done that and what the state of the art of that is, if you will. Yeah. Instead they went more retro and just said, This happens, and then here’s the new form of him. Okay. Yeah. Go on the form of, man. No, that’s Tric again. Sorry. No, it’s do they go to the even a man who’s pure of heart and says his prayers by night?
Did they ever, Cause that’s more
Stephen: where Yeah. They don’t delve into the background of mythology a lot. Okay. They kinda start right in the middle of a story. All right. And you go from there. So it’s not an origin story at all. It really is, I thought was great. Yeah. I get tired of origin stories yeah. And I’m like, Okay, now we’ve got Wol and now we’ve got moon night. So just do a one hour midnight and where Wolf story, That would be perfect. As
Alan: you know that’s where Moon Night came from was he was stalk the original where Wolf by night. So That’s very
Stephen: cool.
Yeah, I would love that.
Alan: I definitely will be. Watch it. I only haven’t watched it auto too much else to do So one of the other things I’ve been super excited about that I did sit down to watch was the Quantum Leap reboot now. Oh, okay. Quantum Leap is one of my top, like five shows of all time.
I must admit, it’s not for me. I’m, it’s not. I was just like one step beyond where I wasn’t watching as much TV when it was as popular as it was or something like that. So I don’t have that vast affection, but I’m curious because it, so many other people loved it. Yes. I love the presence of hopping around in time and having to be like solving problems, but also inhabiting another form besides your own Yes.
Cetera,
Stephen: et cetera. Ok. The best thing about Quantum Leap was yes, the science is great the anthology story of some different life. Each week they did that really good. There’s some wonderful episodes, but the relationship between Sam and Al is what sold that show more than anything. And I’ll tell you if you go back to the final episode, I was not expecting what they did.
And it’s one of those Heartbreakers that would, they’ll make you tear up a bit. It’s been one of my all time favorite shows. Sam and Al are fantastic and I have been advocating for a while, and this was Colin’s idea. Nathan Fillon and Allen Tuit would make the best salmon al in a reboot. I could, Cause they
Alan: really do have chemistry and
Stephen: playfulness.
It would so perfect. But, so I was a little conscious. I’m like, Okay, let’s see. But this new one is not a reboot, it is a continuation. It is 30 years later. And they mention Sam, they mention the old project, they mention Al because his wife Beth is in there, played by the exact same actress. Oh, my. And his daughter is in there.
Okay. And she gets his hand link. So they’re really tying it together. So I’m like, okay, I’m okay with it being completely different people in this case if they do it well. And so far, man, I’ve really enjoyed it. I’ve had fun with it. They have enough callbacks of the old stuff, enough new things. I’m not as close to the new characters, obviously, after three episodes compared to five season.
But I’m giving it a chance and I’m enjoying it. I think they’re doing a good job in trying to do well, Deborah Pratt is involved. She does the little voiceover just like she did in the old one.
Alan: Oh man. It’s very cool. They bring it forward like that. Yeah. Not slavishly, so where they really have the right elements and yet have changed enough so that it’s newly interesting.
Stephen: Yeah. Okay. So it’s tied and in fact, Colin and I both said guess we gotta go watch the old series again to get back into this one. So I’m doing both watching the old quantum leaps every now and then and still keeping up with the new one. Very cool. Love it. And it’s, I love it enough that I’ve got other shows, like I still haven’t seen the Lord of the Ring stuff.
I haven’t seen sand. But I’ll sit down and watch Quantum Leap because it came out today. Okay. That’s my show, so Definitely.
Alan: Yeah, that sounds great. It’s I’ll so I’ve been watching the Game of Thrones prequel which is, and Georgia a r Martin is much more involved. It’s based on his the Fire and ice book that he wrote that kind of gives the entire history of all the various different families, especially the Arians who are the Mad family that owns the Dragons, and they’re doing nowhere near Quantum Leap leaping around, but they are doing the thing that he did in the book, which is the first Game of Throne series was done in linear time that it really was, you get on the train and then you see you’re hopping around the world and seeing the various different developments amongst the various different families and countries.
But it, it’s all building in real time towards this towards the final battles and stuff like that. This actually. They had the first three were where Dans and I will keep getting names wrong the Tar Princess is, but a little girl and how she’s being pushed aside by ambitious men and so forth.
And yet it’s diagnostic in terms of they really think that there is something about royal blood that should be maintained, but then instead of just staying with that and having it be, Wow, how many years is it gonna take to grow her up and face this, they jump forward 10 years where now she’s not a young lady anymore.
Now she’s not a little girl, she’s a young lady, and then she’s actually a lady that’s like a childbearing agent is having kids. No, they’re with her brother and that’s
Stephen: not a good idea. Put flowers in the attic scenario, that
Alan: kind of stuff. And so it’s very interesting. I think they’re making good choices as to when they jump, they have different actors and actresses playing various different things, and yet they’re of course, physically similar enough so you can see it’s still the same person.
and, but they’re using time in terms of, So this person that got pushed aside, would they be forever scheming to get back into what they think is theirs by would they, and would they have become so like disenchanted or vengeful because of that? Or did they accept I guess it’s not gonna be me, but I care about my country enough that I’m gonna put my weight behind making Sure.
And so one of the things about Game Throne has always been good is many families, many moving pieces. You have to kinda keep track of every single one of those relationships and rivalries and alliances and stuff like that. And how the course of time betters them or worsens them. And especially then when you saw, when you have someone that you has been on your side for the last 20 years, but now something finally broke them and they betray you, come back at you with vengeance.
It’s really more startling cuz it’s not like kids deciding to switch from one side of Red Rover to the other. It’s lives are at stake, countries are at stake and stuff. It’s really well done in all that regard. And that some there’s deaths because that’s what came of throne.
Just know for, oh, don’t fall in love with that character cuz they’re gonna get in the neck next to the episode. But there’s some Patty Considine who plays the king, they’re really showing him like he’s aging in real time as they jump forward 10 and 10 years. So now he’s just a husk of a man, but he’s still got his some presence of mind and some will, and he wants to have continuity.
He wants his family, he wants his country to exist and showing that the ravages of time and it not being pretty, that, that not every sort and Soory Epic is. Men built like Conan and women built like red Sonia and et cetera, that they really do.
There’s great drama to be found in an aging lion when the lion is no longer the necessary king and young lions are coming at him and does he have enough age and cunning to overcome youth and skill , and so I, I just it’s really well done. I think also because George Martin is directly involved and he really has the right stuff for how to write dialogue, how to create these characters and have them have a really good backstory and really good tragedy and triumph.
And maybe the show runners for the original Game of Thrones, they diverged from like third season on, they were different than the books and they still did really good. But some part of it was, I just wish they could have waited for him to finish the series. Because you know that what he was creating was a master
Stephen: work.
He still hasn’t finished it. So it’s still,
Alan: I dunno, will he ever, none of that version is so indelibly exed in people’s heads. Will it even be welcomed if he says here’s what I really would’ve done right? Yeah, but you didn’t but you didn’t, I
Stephen: know. You always get Brandon Sanderson to finish it cuz he finished the Wheel of Time series and Robert
Alan: Jordan has, and as the Doon series he’s a great collaborator.
And
Stephen: his own book that, that was, by the way, that was Kevin J. Anderson for Doune. You’re right. Okay. You’re right. It I really have enjoyed some of those continued series by the ways, because again, the people that are working on them really seem to. Enough knowledge of and reverence for those things, but they have their own ideas.
Alan: And so it’s very cool to see let’s fill in the backstory of every planet in Doune of every you of that. Oh
Stephen: yeah. Yeah. They’ve more than doubled the books on Doune. But it’s also Frank Herbert’s son involved. So it’s not just, Yeah. Not just somebody running off with, Oh, they hired me. I’m gonna do what I want.
It’s really getting somebody involved in that just some of the, there was a Star Trek fan thing that was continuing the missions that actually got Leonard Nemo’s son involved in it. And they actually had the actor that played checkoff on there and a few other actors Okay. Trying to really make it as much as possible.
So
Alan: I’ve seen them do things like that. Where they take the notes of JL Token? Yes. That’s how they created Silmaril and various follow up to that is because they’re working off of. What he had said I might wanna go in this direction, even if he didn’t finish it.
There’s enough of him there that it’s still true
Stephen: to the original vision. There’s a new interview with the Vampire Series on AMC that Christopher Rice is directly involved in. I guess his mother was involved before she passed away, so it’s been a while they’ve been working on this. Yeah. But it and I’m gonna make a quick comment on that too.
The interview of the Vampire, it’s not related to this movie. It’s the Tell. It’s as if the movie never existed it’s its own retelling of the book. Okay. But they make Louie a Black guy, which is not quite how it is in the book. Hold on. And then I, there’s another one called Let the Right One in, which is another Vampire one based on a Swedish movie.
I believe that’s,
Alan: I’ve actually seen the Swedish and the American version. Okay. It’s little kids, right? It’s not, Yes.
Stephen: And that was one of them that me and Reese talked about on our podcast. So there’s a tie, but so the character that’s going to get groomed at the friend, he’s a little black boy.
Okay. And I’m not saying this to be racist, so hold on. Don’t everyone start wanting to hunt me down and shoot me . And last night I always get afraid of saying it that way, but I’m because people get offended before they hear everything. So last night Co and I went and saw the woman King in the theater.
Which is Viola Davis and oh my God, she’s so fantastic. But it’s basically an African tribe that really existed and they have women warriors that are their defenders. And I’m saying all this way because when I was watching interview the Vampire and let write the one in, I didn’t care. Oh my God, they didn’t have a white lou or they didn’t have a black Louie in the book.
That was a white, They should that wasn’t it at all. The character they chose fit very well and did very well. And it is Louisiana, New Orleans. There’s always been a big mix of countries in Orleans from the beginning. So why would we assume ev all the vampires are white ? That’s just ridiculous.
Yeah. So my, my and the woman king is a really good story. They do very
Alan: wells, I think, right? Is that, Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah.
Stephen: And so the push that we’ve had over the last couple years for diversity and inclusion and all that I think these are making a strong case that it’s coming about more because they aren’t advertising interview with the vampire as, Oh, we’ve got a black vampire in here, and, Oh, look at the black.
They’re not doing that. And said,
Alan: It’s not a breakthrough, It’s the way it should always have. It’s just,
Stephen: it doesn’t matter if it’s the white, black or what country they’re from. This is the actor that’s going to do a good job with this character and we’re not going to make a point of that. It’s the only reason we chose a black actor was because people said we had to, No, that’s not it. You know what we were getting past, we’re starting to get past that point where we have to make a point of this is what it is, this is different. And it’s just what it is. It’s how it’s, yeah.
And
Alan: they’re really. I wrote a little Facebook post about when I first saw, I’m trying to think what it was, There was big backlash about something changing. And I was like especially, and it was in the science fiction or fantasy world, and I just was like taking aback because if you’re already including elves and dwarves and ENTs and various different alien races, and yet you’re gonna try to tell me that no, all martians are only white, not blue, or that all wear wolves have the same color fur.
And that it’s a bastardization a sellout if you change it. Please open your minds to the fact that you’re already accepting all this infinite diversity and infinite combinations. And sometimes it can be joly weird where if it really just seems a little bit what you said, the sal the injection, Hey, I don’t know.
You’re in I, I’m, I don’t, I’m trying not to get in trouble. A fiercely white place. And that you have to throw like a black or that is or Asian or Indian person in there to just meet a quota that, that sometimes can be jarring because but, and actually this is a nice segue.
It’s not jarring because there’s always been this kind of stuff. Even though people have been tribal for a long time and most of who you knew were very much people like you, there have always been wanderers and migrants and nomads. And yes, you always became aware of, wow, not all people are black, or not all people are white, or not all people are yellow, or whatever else it might be.
And that it wasn’t always. Hey, stranger danger, he’s different than us, so let’s kill him. It was more, How cool is this? The world is bigger than I thought. He’s he or she is a novelty. They have something to teach us. They have something new to bring. Maybe they have a different language and different food and different, And so there’s a cool book that I’m just starting to get into called The Dawn of Everything,
And it’s that’s not too small a title.
Stephen: it, Like this thing .
Alan: Exactly. It’s a, it’s like 1200 page book. Wow. And what it is really smart, dedicated to research, dedicated to facts, anthropologists and social types and so forth have looked at all of what we think we know about how civilization came to be.
And saying 90% of that is. And it wasn’t always, Hey, we all were nomadic until we became we started having crops. And that’s when we settled down that it was more always a combination of trying things having the environment judge us having other tribes adapting or rejecting based on that, and that it wasn’t, oh, and only the entire world away.
Did you have differences in what kind of crops you had? There was continual intermingling of the kinds of societies and whether it was ma matriarchies or patriarchies, whether it was religious or military, what was everything? And that the world has been big and messy and complex for a long time. And that this weird tribalism, the, this purity that we occasionally have nationalists or any number of fanatics, any number of radicals, that’s the most wrong idea you can have.
As to how the human race really works, that there’s never been a time where there was the Acer descended from the north gods and then all of the s came. No, that never was. And not in the historical record. Not in the genetic record. Not in the, And so it’s and what’s cool about it is a lot of this information has been out there for a long time, but looked at wrongly or actively suppressed because people had a worldview that they wanted to make sure that they thought that this was the way the world thought.
And so I’m just, it’s once in a while very cool to read a book that really is a turn the tables over type thing, where it’s like, Boy, we’ve been wrong about huge things and for a long time and look at the price we’ve
Stephen: paid. We definitely need more of that . That’s so many things are changing.
There’s so many people opposed to any type of changing like the dinosaurs. When I first heard and I was past school age that they were feathered or some of ’em were feathered. I’m like, What? And that they were colors of like red and blue and what But you gotta sometimes relearn real quick.
I should mention also the main character in the new Quantum Leap is Asian. And I apologize, I don’t know which country exactly. And it didn’t even phase me to think, oh my gosh, that type of thing. Plus one of the other shows we’re watching, the main character is Green. I mean you could
Alan: That’s exactly what I was say my little post.
So if you know what I mean, if you can accept She Hawk, right? I mean that where in the world do you start having a problem with all women have to look a certain way. Or all men or all anything, so
Stephen: real quick before we get going, I know it’s starting to run on do you like she the She Hawk show?
Alan: I really do. And the reason that I like it is because it captures a lot of what I thought was a really good run on. She helped by, I think, Dan Slot, right? Where it wasn’t, Hey, we gotta go save the universe again. Hey Arts Villa, and we gotta get a knockdown, drag out fight. It’s whimsical. It really has that combination of, she’s a lawyer, she’s a lady, she’s a hero, and that they don’t mesh nicely.
There’s all kinds of collisions between that. What clothes do you wear when you might have them like just destroyed while you’re trying to fight in them? And the I really, they found a perfect actress where she’s really able to switch between the whimsy and the serious and the disbelieving of like, how am I getting myself in these situations, I can buy into this. And they’re really doing an interesting thing where, and I think you mentioned this they’re bringing along pieces of the Marvel universe that are always, Marvel was known for having crossovers and kinda stumbling into each other’s cuz they all share the same city.
So Daredevil shows up as a lawyer on the other side, and then of course it’s revealed that he, the lawyer is daredevil and she’s smart enough to see that, and he’s smart. So there it’s very much not suspension of disbelief. It’s more like of course they’d know, of course his voice doesn’t sound different enough or hers that even if she grows to be seven feet tall and green, she’s gonna use some of the same phraseology that he just heard in the courtroom and all that kind of stuff.
So it, and of course, dare being a human lie detector, and Daredevil being like a perfect physical specimen might be. Of interest to the She haw, who, one of the things she seems to have inherited with her gamma radiation is a pretty healthy libido. . Yeah.
Stephen: You know what I mean? You got a feel for her a little bit too.
Exactly.
Alan: It’s very cool that they’re, they had the she’s part of her self-help group and she’s fighting for her name being trademarked out from under her, right by another villain. But she’s not gonna fight her with FTA cuff. She’s gonna fight her in crappy legal suits and stuff. And they’re just, they’re exploring.
I, I always say this, I love things. I don’t know what’s gonna happen next and every single episode, kinda like Doro has been, What the hell’s going on now?
Stephen: This is very cool and I like it. It’s more of a comedy, It’s lighthearted, it does show her kicking ass and being strong and all that, but it’s got her little break, the fourth wall comments where she looks at you and makes.
My buddy Reese, who’s coming up to do the talk for Cleveland Mensa. I made the comment how much I enjoy it. The comedy says, he says yeah, but just think if you’re a big she Hog fan and you wanna see this big tough character kicking ass, and what you get is this comedian, how would you feel?
And I’m like, Oh, okay. I guess so. But I also like the fact that Marvel keeps mixing it up so it’s not like you said, the same old. That’s right. And it is based on a comic run where it was more comedic and that, and she has done some big stuff and that, I think these final couple episodes will show some more of the power and all that.
Alan: I think so. And I just, I don’t know. One of the things that the series is really good about is even if you were a Hulk, even if you had super strength and resilience and so forth, life isn’t easy. You know what I mean? It’s not like you can just go Hulk smash and get your way on everything. That life is big and messy and there’s all kinds of moving pieces and.
Maybe that’s what violence is not a solution. Maybe that’s a whole big tentative of the show. So I really am enjoying it and I’m looking forward to more episodes. And like you said, oh no, that’s another 55 hours of Daredevil has an 18 episode run coming up and I’m like, holy crap. We’re getting back to the old TV shows.
Stephen: They just don’t all start in the fall. ,
Alan: Exactly. I am looking forward to that. Cause I think that Cox, right? Charlie Cox, Yeah, Charlie, he plays that character well and I dunno, And Deo also has a great run in terms of how many he has been involved with the Black Widow and with Electra and various different things.
And it’s not only romance, it’s that he has had so many run-ins with kinda like punching above his power level. You know what I mean? Yeah. He went toe to toe with the. and survived because he has his super senses and has his agility and all that kind of stuff. And so I’m really looking forward to they, one of the things that Frank Miller did very well was they stopped having tried to be only against super villains.
That a lot of it was living in Hell’s Kitchen. What are the, across the criminal element you’d have to deal with. And of course, the kingpin being his main villain transferred over from Spiderman long ago. Resident Dino plays that. Oh yes. And I’m looking for lot of heroes are only as good as they’re good villains.
And the reason Superman’s greatest is cause L Luther is so Implacably good. You know
Stephen: what I mean? With all the shows in that you get some really good indepth stories and character without just being, we’ve gotta save the world , exactly.
Alan: Which does at all be serialized. That’s right. That’s
Stephen: right.
Okay. And I do. Before we go real quick, I do hope that they get a cameo or something, at least of Luke Cage, cuz I always loved his comics when I was younger. He is one of my favorites. Yeah. And I love the show and I love the actor that plays him. He’s in a show called Evil right now on cbs, which is pretty darn good.
Okay. So me I hope they can get ’em for just an episode or something. At least a cameo. Exactly. Yeah. All right. All right, man. I’m gonna get my car checked as all as a pleasure, and we’ll see you next week. See you next week.
Bye.
