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Overview
Have you seen the spiderman movie – Across the spiderverse. Spoilers – it’s great and we loved it. Seeing so many variations of spider-man on the screen is fantastic.
And poor Al can’t play Diablo IV. Why not? Diablo has been around for quite a long time and it’s a shame for some people not to be able to play it.
And what art have you looked at recently?
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Transcript
Stephen: All right. So it finally feels like spring outside.
Alan: We’ve been getting some rain at least. It’s funny, I, we are friends with Nick and Kelly who own a farm out in Norwalk, and they’ve had 20 days of no rain.
Yeah. When they really are needing it for everything to grow, germinate, et cetera. So when we were driving back from Chicago, it was like six hours in the rain. It was, especially with construction, nerve wracking sometimes. And yet that’s what I kept thinking is Nick and Kelly are like out dancing in it,
Stephen: yeah. I felt the same way. It’s not that I want to go mow lawn, but man, just from Sunday to today, it went from brown and dead to rejuvenated. So it’s guess I gotta
Alan: mow. Exactly. We also, we’ve been making sure that we water our trees, by kind of tree it, it matters.
But we had a couple things in the backyard that actually were putting out roots along the ground, seeking more water instead of straight down. So one of the things that I read long ago was for anything that puts down a tap root, you want to encourage that. So you set a trickle right at the base of the tree, and then it goes down and it follows the water down.
So you get, don’t get something that’s gonna fall over with a big root bowl because all the roots are not it’ll go deep. And so our apple tree, front yard tree, we made a point of watering goes well so that they get kinda please don’t fall on my
Stephen: house. Yeah. I was looking at that.
We, so we have a small bit of a pine forest, a lot of pine trees, but there was one oak tree that was ancient and massive. It’s a good a hundred feet tall. At least. Wow. It was almost. 12 to 15 feet around and Wow. A couple years ago it like cracked and split in half and part of it is still up, still green, still doing well, but I’m looking at it going, yeah, if that falls, it’s not only gonna wipe out half our forest, it’s gonna wipe out my cabin.
So I’m just, I hope I’m not sleeping in it at the time,
Alan: right. And that, we have big enough wind storms and stuff like that, I don’t know, every 10 years I’ve seen it where. Throughout Lakewood things have gone down, where trees fell, sometimes they fell on power lines and took out power for a lot of people.
But they, unfortunately, Lakewood is a very green community. Lots of people have nice trees in all around their house and if that falls the wrong direction, it like takes the garage out. It yeah, it really like bashes into the roof and stuff. And of course I have a couple pictures where it’s like this massive tree thing came down.
Horrible damage, but there’s a cat walking on it cuz it’s got a new bridge, yeah, flooring on this new tree. We visited Chicago this weekend and stayed with friends. Northwestern, we were right in the area where Northwestern University is the north shore of Chicago.
And when I went looking on all my various different travel sites, hotel prices were through the roof and I really wasn’t looking forward to paying 500 bucks a night. I kinda laughed online, you can get like a new Mac money for that. You can get a new computer. I don’t wanna pay that for just one night.
So I. Complained about that online and friends of ours were w wonderfully kind and generous to let us stay with them. Of course we spent been spending time with them. We found out that they have, speaking of that big tree, a beautiful tall ash tree in their yard goes way up probably 60 feet, if not a hundred.
But what do ash trees get? Emerald Ash, Boers and the city of Chicago and its environs have done incredible fights against looking for them, not letting ’em get in and stuff like that. But it’s almost impossible to stop a plague like that. You know what I mean? So they have to be continually monitoring this guy and.
Not only could your tree go down, but in the act of getting rid of it, what would you do? You gotta get a real like tree removal service to come in and section it and lift it out over things. You can’t just drag it across your property, it’ll leave a glacier type gulley. You know what I, so that’s, unfortunately, it’s gotta be on their list and on their mind.
Sometime in the next, I don’t know, five, 10 years, it is also, it’s not dead. It’s still green, it’s still going okay. But they’ve seen evidence that it has guys. And then I don’t know how quickly that advances where they, plant their larva and then their larva or what kind of bores into the tree and stuff.
It’s just, it’s a cry and shame. I’m enough of a druid that when we had to take down trees to put in our new garage and driveway, it really hurts. Yeah. These guys are the result of how many decades of growth and to just get out there and bring it down in 20 minutes, it’s just wrong somehow. I agree.
Even more so for a sentinel like you’re talking about, that guy was here when the pilgrims landed your oak trees. It’s, you
Stephen: know, exactly. And the problem is, I’m looking at it, I’m like, if somebody would come in to take it down, first of all, it’s gonna have to definitely be a pro company because it is still a good, even the after splitting off a good eight feet around wow.
The part that’s still standing. Yeah. Yeah. And they go have to wipe out other trees to take it down or do something even more expensive where they go from the top and, make it into wood chips and go down and all. But it’s still gonna take out some of the trees just to get the equipment in there.
Absolutely. So I’m like, this is a big, it’s gonna be a mess at some point in the future.
Alan: Exactly. And that, when we’ve done all kinds of hiking, all, all over the place and sometimes what you end up on is like an old logging trail and you can really see to get in to, to take these trees down, they had to carve a path to them because it was a forest just Oh, washing.
You know what you’re saying? Just to get the equipment in to be able to do anything and to get them. It is no wonder that they did all the river rafting, not rafting, the log rolling and stuff like that, because the easiest way to get them out of there was to somehow to get ’em to a river that you could float them on and then take ’em downstream to wherever the mill was that was gonna chop ’em up, section ’em, turn ’em into whatever.
When we’ve seen how smart they were with that kind of stuff, if you’re moving a thousand pound thing, you can do things with it’s round. We can roll it for some part of the way. You know what I mean? All those things you learn in school about simple machines, about, wheels and incline planes and pulleys and stuff like that.
They, I’ve seen it where they had still had things left up from a series of compound pulleys, that you could have a guy like lift a tree, not like this but by the multiplier effect. How smart, how cool was that? I just, Matthew very mathy
Stephen: and some of the new equipment.
Is just crazy. They’ve got those ones now, like I said, that chew down from the top. Exactly. That’s so they didn’t used to have, they’ve and they’ve got ones that go and shear it off. If it’s a nice straight tree, all the limbs are gone.
Alan: We’ve seen those in operation, where it really is. They just put this down and then what’s left is a Popsicle stick. Yeah. It’s like they’ve taken all the bits off and not just destroyed it. They collect them while they’re doing it, so they get. I guess you every get, every part of the buffalo kind of a thing.
There’s good things to be done with each part of the tree and they’ve learned how to separate them out so that it’s a multi-stage process, not, we just want the trunk and discard everything else. That kind of thing.
Stephen: And that’s as much technology advancements as the cotton gin and, all the computer stuff we talk about, oh yeah, absolutely. The machine stuff is way cool. Some of the, and some of those old farm machines you’re talking about, farmers and stuff. You see some of this stuff. We went to hail farm and they have this thing that separates the corn and the silk and the outer layers and Exactly.
It’s a a hand crank thing and it’s wow, I could have never thought of that.
Alan: We, I think we even talked about this a little bit before, we had that same experience at Biltmore House down in North Carolina, that. It was not only the beautiful mansion, this palatial house, but all a working farm.
And they had those kinds of things where someone had very cleverly done it like it’s gonna plant not one but 30 rows of seeds and it knows just how to dig into the ground, the right amount, kinda move it aside, put the seed in, and then push it back over all while it rolls that this is all right. Things perfectly engineered and.
I just love the ingenuity and the smarts of people that were able to do that. Yeah. How can I get it to do all these motions at one time, if you will. Perfectly coordinated, a little dance with the soil, so I love that.
Stephen: So did you see Spider-Man? We
Alan: did, as a matter of fact last Tuesday night, I think it was and it was great.
Spider-Man comic books, the Herald of Spider-Man has always been, they’ve got a great sense of humor. You don’t need to bring in a script doctor to punch it up, just steal dialogue from the comic books. He’s always been a wisecracker and he’s so smart, and there’s all these good, heroic things that are not just I don’t know. Anti-hero glowering and stuff like that. He’s not out to kill anybody. He really is. And it is with him. That started with great power comes great responsibility and a main theme of the comic books is how heavily that weighs on him.
Trying to do good in a difficult world, especially where you’re not at, they, a big theme of the comic says that he’s not appreciated. If anything, he’s actively attacked by the Jay Jonah Jamesons of the world, and yet he keeps going. He’s got that internal decency that he can’t turn away from somebody else getting hurt.
So villain, going on a spree. It’s a fascinating dynamic and it has been for 60 years, going on 70. And,
Stephen: and to that point though, This is so not focused on our peter at all. In fact, in this first and second movie, the Peter we’ve grown up with is dead. He’s not even no, I guess that’s not true.
It was the ultimate Peter that died, that brought miles into it. So that 40 year old Peter with the baby, which the baby stole the show, in my opinion that’s our Peter that we grew up with. That’s right.
Alan: They were very clever about, they’ve done that in comic books. They’ve done the various different incarnations the Spider-Man 2099 and, replacement Miles, Morales, and even Spider Baby.
When Peter Parker had, she was great. Kids with and the daughter May, Mayday May Parker. You know what I mean? Exactly. Yeah. And they called her that. And then what? Just that they really did, they’re very aware. I love that too, where it’s not whoa, we know about Ironman, but let’s write our own.
I love what they’re very aware of all the crap that Ironman has been through, good and bad, not all crap. And that they bring enough of it in so that it deepens the character. And especially now that we’re talking multiverse, it’s very cool that all of them are aware of there’s this big, menagerie of Spider-Man running around.
Yeah. I think menagerie has become my word of the month or something anyway, that, that they’re, that they are not, there’s some, they’re very good at saying how would they all react to this? Some are very accepting, some are glad to finally have companionable you know what I’m going through, who else in the world knows what Spider-Man goes through?
Some of them get. They go to if you’re the one that’s in the police state in the future, maybe you learned how to be as much a policeman as you are a superhero, and just all the various different incarnations and how they have to interact is very cool. And the Spider-Man villains that are involved Yes.
And stuff like that, very good. And,
Stephen: and you mentioned the great power, great responsibility. Everybody knows that. Which is definitely in effect, and it’s like the common thread of what makes a spider-man in every universe. Even if you look at Miguel as the almost bad guy, 20 99, 1, he’s still doing it from that sense of great power.
This is what I gotta do, this is how I gotta take care of it. Even though it’s not necessarily from the viewpoint of the story the hero way of doing it.
Alan: In some cases are you gonna interact on a. On an individual basis, are you going to set up systems like control systems so that bad things can’t happen in the first place?
It’s a playout of all the various different ways in which people attempt that in the world. Some people do it ally, some people do it altruistically and there’s an avatar for each of those kinds of frames of thought in a Spider-Man, if you will. Yeah. And of course there’s spider creatures, not every Spider-Man is a man. You know what I mean? So it’s just the whole movie felt joyful. Yeah. You know what I mean? That it, that there really, we’ve dealt with serious, Thanos killing half the universe. That’s not a joyful event. We’re gonna soon have secret invasion where it’s gonna be the ultimate paraic movie who has been taken and replaced, kinda like Invasion of the Body.
Snatchers was a big take on the Red Scare and communism and, our people infiltrating our society and stuff like that. So comic books have had these big things for a long time. Once in a while, maybe that Spider-Man has been through some tragedy, but there’s always been that leavening of he’s he’s gonna enjoy himself no matter what.
He has all these safety valves that let off the tension and the things that he’s fighting for his loved ones, for the betterment of his city and stuff like that. There are other themes that can help us get away from, it has to be a certain way, or that the only way to reply to a villain is what to kill him.
You know what I mean? There really are, it’s nice to see all those things played out and in this case, just a romp it’s dead serious when there’s I have always loved. Where they take it to like the nth level. When in the Matrix two, I guess it was when, the agent had suddenly a hundred versions of himself, right?
Agent Smith attacking Neo and just that overwhelm is amusing to me. I try to like just keep track of it all, what’s going on and stuff like that. As there’s a wonderful chase scene in there. I don’t think this is a spoiler where there’s a lot of people after Spider-Man.
Stephen: There’s a lot of Spider-Man after Spider-Man, a
Alan: lot of Spiderman after Spider-Man.
And Is he that agile? Is he that quick spider sensy, et cetera, et cetera. He’s gonna be able to dodge ’em all bounce off of every blow web directed at him. It’s hyper kinetic and that’s a cool thing to see on the big screen with the big stop. We made a point of course of seeing it in theaters, you know what I
Stephen: mean?
So yeah, you definitely gotta see it because once you get it on Blu-ray or streaming, you’re going to be pausing and trying to figure out who all the different Spider-Man are.
Alan: In fact I read a little article where they said, here’s all the ones you might not have heard of yet, but they really are, there’s precedent for them in the comics and stuff like that.
One thing that we noticed that, which was uncharacteristic of any Marvel movie, cause I think it’s a Sony marble, is that yes, it’s, there was no, there was a small into the credit scene, but there wasn’t a reason to hang out all the way through the end of the credits to see the prelude to the next adventure, if you will.
Though it did say Miles Morales will be back. You know what I mean? So nothing, no, no spoilers. It just wow. It. The first Shazam movie, not this second one, which is a little bit darker, but the first one had that same sense of, and the comic books were like that too. Superman was more serious.
Shazam was a cartoon come to life more for kids, more for silly joy. It doesn’t all have to make sense, that the characters themselves are like, by, by joking all the time. They make you laugh with them. You know what I mean?
Stephen: And this one definitely isn’t, oh.
It’s a cartoon movie for kids. It’s not Disney. It is not. The storyline is definitely right up there with any other superhero movie, maybe even. Absolutely. Better than most. So a lot of people are saying in which I’m not disagreeing with the story just felt really good and the art, and they had multiple art styles, but they didn’t try and make it look like Disney or Pixar or Dreamworks.
It was so unique. Yeah. There’s a lot of good stuff in this movie.
Alan: Yeah. I really loved that when they tried to portray the world from which each of these, the universes from which each of these Spider-Man came, they often kinda brought along the art style with it. So some were a little bit darker and scratchier and some were more pastoral.
Yeah. You know what I mean? I loved that. And the way that they did the blending of those things, it wasn’t jarring. Wizard of Oz transitions where you go from black and white to color, but it just wasn’t that a little bit more severe a moment ago, but now it’s softening because Spider Gwen is on, or whoever’s a lighter hearted character and stuff like that.
They definitely had all the themes of identity, you know what I mean? I’m sure that there’s now we have every color, every flavor, every sexuality, but that it’s not a a lesson. It’s not like preaching to you about what it should be. It’s just is. It’s, that’s what you get when you have a multiple an infinite universe is there will be a version of every kind everywhere.
And so nobody has it like there’s one true spider-man. Of course. There’s not just there’s not one true kind of human being. You don’t need to preach about that. Arian is an idiot idea. You just show that it’s not, that it can’t be true. You know what I mean?
Stephen: So I Cool. I did love the Indian Spider-Man.
He was pretty funny.
Alan: Exactly. In fact, I’m trying to think of it. It wasn’t the character playing it, I’ve, I heard him either doing other animation or in a show because his voice is distinctive and just TKA Titi. Who was a number? Was that Tka Wadi?
Stephen: It wasn’t him, but it’s Oh, okay.
I was like wait a
Alan: second. You can hear. It’s not only the voice, it’s the cadence, it’s the sense of humor that he’s the guy that’s next to Thor. That’s tka. I could swear. And then you see it in the credits. Cause I think it was kinda a, an uncredited thing going into the movie.
They didn’t have him as one of the ones that was gonna be a major thing. So I like that too, where they, sometimes they bring in people almost like typecasting cuz they’re like, we want someone that sounds just like Willem Defoe. We could get Willem Defoe. How about that? That kinda thing.
I like that. I like where they play to quick identification.
Stephen: Here’s my favorite part about this movie is how popular and successful it pretty much universally is. Of course, God, the minute they announced it, there were people online saying they’re going to boycott it and this is gonna be the worst thing ever.
I’m so tired of that crap. But overall, Everybody’s liking it. It’s done well in the theaters. People are watching it. They’re enjoying it. I think it’s introducing not only some of these Spider-Man to some of the new kids, but some of the adults who may not have ever tried a cartoon movie in the past.
I I looked at Colin. I said, I really hope that the success of this makes the studios finally go, Hey, you can make a really good cartoon movie and you can make a lot of money at it. It doesn’t have to be Disney or Pixar. Wow. That, it’s just, they sometimes those corporates, they seem to not realize this fact, even though DC has had good cartoon movies for years, this one just blew everything away.
Yeah,
Alan: I, I really do. It’s funny. One of the things I’ve often commented about, we’re living in the golden age of superhero movies because they finally got the special effects in the tech to do live action, what has only ever been in comic books. And I really do like that, where you’ll believe a man can fly type stuff, but if you do an animation movie, you really can do anything.
That’s the joy of the comic books, is that you can draw a convincing universe. You don’t have to make a, a scale model of Galactus under feet or something like that. I hope that there will be more quality animation in this way. And it’s funny. Another thing that was going on is that the styles of animation differ like region to region, country to country.
So it was cool to see the anime version, the Middle Eastern version, the European version, theist, and I. I immediately jumped to those kind of recognizable stereotypes. But there’s not only three, there’s 30, there’s 300. You know what I mean? There’s South American. Certain artists have big followings because everybody knows that.
And it was, I hope that we’ll start to see that other countries either bring in Marvel Heroes, DC Heroes, whatever, or whoever they have, they’ve made a point of expanding that there really are things in those countries. I don’t know enough of what the Russian version of Spider-Man is like.
I’m curious. So if those started to become available and maybe I can’t, maybe they won’t be big enough to make it in theaters, but I’ll do, I’ll watch all that stuff online, right? I’ll just wrap that up. I wanna see what the Alaskan Spider-Man looks like. I wanna see your Inuit, that kinda thing, right? Yeah.
Stephen: And I’m excited for the Flash movie coming out, and I’m hoping that now they finally got, The guys in charge that can make a cohesive DC universe without changing it after every movie and ruining the whole thing. But DC has done really well with their comic or their cartoon movies.
I would have no problem going to see a whole slew of DC Universe movies that are animated like this on the big screen I’d do it 10 years, 12 years worth no problem.
Alan: I agree. Batman Justice League, there’s a couple that really are the, they’re better. They’re the animation ones like the Mouth Fantasm.
Mask of the Fanm or the Fantasm Oh yeah. That as, as good as anything they ever did. Live action. You know what I mean? And especially the voiceovers, knowing that it’s been that, Luke Skywalker, that is, they brought in and one guy he just passed.
That was very much the Oh yeah. Batman. I’m,
Stephen: was it Conroy? That sounds right. The Batman, Colin said that’s his favorite.
Alan: Batman. That’s right. Yeah. It I. I haven’t watched enough animation lately because it just, I don’t know. I watched the festivals of animation when they come to town, but I’m way behind on my studio BLEs, if that’s even how you say it. Ghibli, gibble. I kinda say exotic. So it’s glee, but it’s, there’s, there are, whenever we go to our Oscar short nominations and you see them, they’re from all around the world and I really am. There’s a cool, they are doing it in the Middle East.
They are doing it in Japan. They are doing it in South Africa. I like seeing how culture and sense of place informs those various different things because sometimes it will be, I don’t know, you see a, what’s a stereotypical. I don’t know, like a country that’s been under the heel of oppression for a hundred years.
They have a survival metaphor in everything they do instead of a joyful life metaphor. And others are, they’re very much in touch with nature. And so it, I like to have those injections of those kinds of things so that I can come to understand their culture and I absolutely enjoy it with them.
You know what I mean? That kinda thing. And
Stephen: it’s interesting you mentioned the Studio Ji stuff. Because Sunday Colin and I spent Sunday as Father’s Day, cuz he’s gonna be gone next week, and they were showing Kiki’s delivery service at cinema. They’re doing the whole run of all those Studio Ghibli movies.
And that was actually the first one I’ve watched all the way through. Okay. I really enjoyed it. But they’re definitely not the intense storyline. It very mu or at least this one it was a very simple Loki storyline. It was kid-like, it was. Fanciful. Which is I think a lot what they try and go for.
And it was just pleasantly fun. So we do have a couple of the other ones cuz the kids all like those, so we do have a couple of them and HBO or Max has all of them. So I really should watch them just to be up on that part of the culture.
Alan: I did you see a very, what I, what made me laugh out loud was, HBO has hbo O Max has just shortened its name to Max your move Peacock.
Yeah. It’s Really, sometimes it’s individuals studios a studio. I think it’s one guy that’s been behind a lot of that. It’s his vision, whoever did Iron Giant and things like that in the Wallace and Grommet case, right? It’s very much, right. Two guys, art Man that they, that’s their vision for doing that.
And I, I think animation might still be one of those places where in order to get a movie production, you really have to have a hundred people involved and the director is really the guy doing it. But because in animation you really can do it all yourself. Sometimes it’s a little bit more idiosyncratic and goofy, but it’s still, it’s that guy. And if I had, can identify with the the sense of humor that comes outta some people’s minds is not conventional. It’s not punchline haha a stuff. It’s whimsy or it’s hi, I hadn’t thought about it that way. I love that gets a chance to make it down to the screen and that other people become aware that there really are those kinds of things out there as well.
There’s not one formula for how to make a successful movie,
Stephen: And these Studio Ji stuff is so popular with the younger kids. They are devoted to that stuff and Mia Zami has said he’s only gonna do one more. So it’s a very finite collection and it’s so popular that there are multiple.
Cities that have a store devoted to just the merchandise for them, merchandise from them. That’s kinda cool. It’s big and popular enough for that. Now, obviously Ravennas not gonna get that store, Columbus might have one in Cincinnati,
Alan: I’ll tell you, I’d go to Comic-Cons often and there’s whole sections of cosplay because I haven’t seen the video games and the movies that they’re basing on, I don’t necessarily get ’em, but I know they’re popular cuz there’s 20 people wearing that same particular right.
Little white outfit with the little crooked cap. But it’s I need to look into that cuz I want to know. It must be good or to be right popular. I hope that’s true. You know what I mean? That it’s not just I’m sure that they have Teletubbies dress up as well, and I don’t know if that’s so much good as universal.
Everybody plops their kids down in front of Sesame Street or Mr. Rogers or Electric Company and now you know, Teletubbies and the other what is it, the Wiggles. Yeah. Different things, that you’re, they’re just, that’s of the time what you do to get your kid to learn how to spell, spell or something like that,
Stephen: so you, you mentioned video games. I, and so you mentioned Diablo and I’ve got something I saw on news announcement with Microsoft cuz they just did their big Microsoft reveal stuff this week. So there’s some video game news. So what’s up with Diablo four after, what, 20 some
Alan: years?
Diablo has been through multiple incarnations and I have played each of one, two, and three. I still play three pretty regularly. It really is a well-balanced depthy. It’s got everything that I want in a game. So I was really ready for Stu
Stephen: for four. Let me interrupt real quick. I have a friend.
Yeah. He has an Xbox. And a pc, and he doesn’t really three. He refuses to play it on the Xbox. He doesn’t like the control. He wants his keyboard and mouse. Okay. He will still play two to this day. He’ll sit down and play a whole weekend of two. Yeah. So this is worth
Alan: that discussion of one of, one of the things the studios have learned to do is that those things have quality gameplay, so that what they’ve done to keep two alive is they’ve added dungeons or layers.
They’ve increased the graphics quality. You can buy like a, a two enhanced version and stuff like that. They add different character types or different weaponry and stuff like that. So you really can, long ago I had the, D Diablo two battle chess, which I thought was the ultimate thing you could get.
But then as systems get better as you get better graphics cards, better monitors, that kind of stuff, they’ve enhanced that. Three went through a number of those. And also they had not just individuals, they had a whole nother chapter with one more. Demon that escaped from hell and they still have to bring him down and he corrupted an angel and things like that.
So unfortunately, the more that I kept learning about Diablo four, I kept hearing it won’t be available for the Mac. And it’s that’s okay. I, there’s all kinds of things I play under parallels on my windows. Emulation, it needs such, it’s magnificent because it really has high text specs.
It needs specific graphic cards or the equivalent, which are high-end stuff. And so in particular, it needs direct X 12, the most current version of the let’s call it the graphics, a p i, that they make use of to do all kinds of stuff for n not just to make it work, but to do the cool stuff, the shading and the fog and the, get rid of motion blower and all those things that nowadays if you do that, you’d be laughed out of the room because they’ve solved it and you have to stay solved, if you will. My nothing for the Mac. Emulates enough. All of those features that you can play it yet except. Very particularly, like for instance, parallels will not do it cuz it doesn’t have direct 12 compatibility yet.
And of course they’ve issued a thing saying we’re working on it, but and of course they wouldn’t do that because of only Diablo four. They wait for a certain mass of stuff that requires it so that they can then not have people retreat from them. There’s multiple other emulations wine and whoever’s doing that nowadays.
And they work for some of it, but not all. So I actually read through a whole bunch of stuff. The closest you can get is it’ll install and it’ll show certain things, but then it breaks at a certain point. Now who, and with really low quality, like low frame rate and stuff like that. What’s the
Stephen: company that owns Blizzard or owns Diablo.
Is that Blizzard? It is Blizzard, exactly. Okay. See that fits right in with the news I just saw this morning because, and this explains probably why it’s that way. Microsoft has been trying to buy Blizzard, right? And make Blizzard exclusively Microsoft and Xbox, right? So that probably explains why they.
Made everything so it works with Windows and Xbox. Cuz Xbox now is really just a Windows PC in a nice black box that’s right because I can install most of the games right here on my windows and play and go cloud, pick it up on my Xbox and play back and forth by the sa. It’s the same game. There’s hardly any games that get released nowadays, so I would bet that they were trying to push that and keep people that.
But the F T C just blocked the takeover. That’s
Alan: right. That’s, I was gonna say, the spanner in the works is they just legally said, this is too much of market monopolization and stuff like that, cutting into competition and stuff like that. And so maybe now they will have to, and I have confidence that there’s enough emulation and porting going on that somebody will do this that, if that’s not gonna be blizzard itself.
They’ll hire it out to, x, y, z studio. That’s really great. If we those things to the Mac, we’ll see
Stephen: If Blizzard isn’t owned by Microsoft, I could see them saying, now we wanna get it on Mac. Because the Sony Spider-Man is on Windows now, you can get it on steam. Interesting. Okay. The very first one that was on PS four.
Yeah. But here’s the part of this that to me, speaks out that. Video games are such an important part of the world, our and America and our exports, that the FTC got involved with this whole thing. They wouldn’t have cared. Back in the nineties, video games were not true as big, not big a deal. The whole Genesis, Nintendo thing was that way.
But now it’s big, so big and affects our country so much that the FTC has to step in.
Alan: I hear you. Dollars talk when you get things that the release is for, that is like a billion dollar weekend, not a hundred million dollar weekend like movies are, or I guess they’ve gone billion, I’ve lost track of the number of zeros where they were like, that’s unprecedented.
That they actually, like it, I think it’s regularly, like things that break a hundred million in the first weekend is a hit. And so that’s I went to that number. I think that after they crossed a billion threshold over the course of the movie, then that’s that mega hit. And, we can name them.
I think that like six out of 10 of those now, like superhero movies pushed back the Titanic and the, and then modern dollars, they’re gone with the wins and whoever else has been saving Private Ryan and whatever else it might be. But having said that, Video games regularly. I think that they do a billion dollars like right away.
They really are bigger than any movie release nowadays. That and because you can not only go to buy it in the store, you download it there’s multiple ways to get it and all around the world and Right. There’s a, one of the one of the things the Worldwide Developer Conference talked about, the MAC is always adding games as well.
There’s things that, particularly, especially with the M one and the M two chip and their their graphics layers and stuff like that. They’re very competitive, but they have to compete for studio attention to get in to be, make sure you make a Mac version or Make for the Mac first. Then we’ll port it over from there.
And some places have done that, mist and that whole series of mist and riven and they all came out for the Mac first.
Stephen: But yeah, we’ll let you guys have the stuff from the eighties. That’s fine.
Alan: In the eighties, that was the best things out there, oh God, yes. Every CD game at the time was like, Wow.
I’ve never seen anything with this depth and this student. So I like the fact that they leapfrog each other because competition makes for better. You know what I mean? That, that it’s not just one guy controlling, here’s the standard. So it, I think that we’re gonna end up seeing for the Mac they’re really good at.
Doing all the internationalization. I’m not sure if Microsoft in particular, which studios are great at that, but Mac things often when they come out, they’re not good for three languages. They’re good for 40. And so that’s another thing that makes it for that big opening weekend is that indeed it covers 70% of the world’s language base.
Yeah. You know what I mean? And that’s kinda
Stephen: cool. And video games really is, A pretty global industry because most of these biggest studios don’t have one studio in one country. You get the guys in America working with the guys in France because they do the sound and you get the coun, the guys over in India or Japan doing the in between animation or the, all the scenes with the trees and the bushes and ri that’s right.
It’s, it really is a global economy unlike any of the other industries. Even movies. But movies even like I, I read something like six of the 10 biggest movie studios, American Movie studios are owned by Chinese companies.
Alan: At least they’ve got investments in them if they haven’t taken entirely over.
Yeah, sure. So that the fact that it really is I think, I hope that there’s any number of places that even if they buy them and leave them alone because they bought them because they are successful. They have a formula for success. Why interfere? You know what I mean? It’s I know that there was big.
One of the things that happens sometimes is that somebody buys a whole bunch of stuff and then they run into financial difficulties. Wasn’t that like Carol Co or, it’s a couple sad tales from the eighties and nineties that that things that then they collapsed and they took all that intellectual property off to Louisville with them.
And so some of those things didn’t get reissued for a long time because they hadn’t figured out who really owns it and who’s gonna get the various different residuals from it and stuff like that.
Stephen: Right. So to go with this over the weekend I was set up, I had a booth set up at the Art on Maine in Ravena, and you wanna talk about art?
Anyway, so this is a segue between the two. But I was talking a lot about my video game storytelling workshop because I’m offering it at a couple places this fall. And I was talking to a lady yesterday in Aurora about it, and she’s pretty excited about it because it fits with the teens and it’s new and different.
Yeah. And over the weekend talking to a lot of the parents at the Art on Maine, they’re just, a lot of parents still view video games as it has been for 40 years as Oh, it’s a kid’s thing. Like comics
Alan: used to be like comic books used to be Richie Rich,
Stephen: not, yeah. And I’m telling them, look, video games are not, that kids can get varsity letters and get scholarships to go to college by playing video games.
That schools are adding eSports teams faster than they’re adding people to the peewee football. And parents are like, really? But the thing that even astounded me was I’m offering this class that’s like a Minecraft looking board and, and all that, and I’m targeting middle schoolers, but you know how many late teens and 20 ish year old young people were stopping?
They’re like when you doing this, I wanna do this. I wanna be involved. Yeah. And I’m like, okay, I need to change my thinking a bit because even though it looks like it’s something for kids the younger crowd under 30 is super interested. They’ve lived video games their whole lives.
Everything
Alan: they do, they want to create them. They want that to be like I’m pleased to say I have two nephews who are both in the industry. One is a, our words why legacy, and I’ll tell you, it’s very interesting. Conversations with them for me are very frustrating because I want to geek it up with them.
But they often have NDAs, nondisclosure agreements that they can’t talk a lot about what they’re doing. I, I. I sometimes get a little bit of a preview about one was working on the latest Hogwarts game. I think I might have mentioned the, actually the credits. Woo. The vault is name up and up in on the credits.
Another one, like great artist, but the game that he’s been working on, the guy who owns the studio that does it is mercurial that he’s not the guy that says, I’m gonna get this out cause I wanna make a ton of money. That instead he’s sitting on its release and what does that feel like to have created something so beautiful and so powerful and then not know, yeah, it’s gotta come out eventually, but don’t you drive to completion and then start your next project.
You don’t wanna be in limbo. And so it’s, even their experiences are slightly different. But just being in the field, there’s tons, like not only your workshop, but there’s whole college curriculum nowadays that take you through. If you’re gonna be in this field, you really have to understand story and coding and animation.
All of it. All of it, the kinds of art and the distribution and the money. You gotta know the
Stephen: money part. You got Yes. You need to have a familiar familiarity, but the job functions have definitely dispersed into very niche things
Alan: back in, in the very siloed things.
Exactly. Yeah. I’m a shader, you know what I mean? What do I do? I’m a
Stephen: shaker, right? It was one guy that created each Atari game, one or two guys did all the coding, all the graphics, all the sound. Now there’s
Alan: a team of 110 that do each of the individual
Stephen: things. And that’s what I’m, trying to get across to parents that if your kid knows how to tell a good story and knows how to tell a story for a video game and works on that, and it’s not just writing out a story.
There’s a lot of parts to it. What people say, what’s the world like? There’s a lot of various things that people don’t understand, but. These people are getting hired to do these story elements in games and they don’t know how to code, they can’t write music, they can’t draw more than a stick figure music.
Exactly right. It is a job all on its own now that people are getting, they’re going to want in the next 10 to 20 years, the best people doing those jobs. And that’s really true. That’s the kids that are in fifth grade right now.
Alan: Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. There really is that the world has absolutely shifted so that, that is available and who’s doing it?
Not the old guard learning how to do a new thing. It’s the new kids who have incredible ideas, creativity, stamina, that, that if you grew up in that environment, you have an idea of exactly what it should look like in a handheld, what it should look like, on a, how the control should look on a controller.
I, I have enough feet. My, have five of them in the various different platforms, but it’s different than. I use my phone as an extension of how mostly I’m online in my desktop world. Other people, it’s absolutely their phone and that’s what they think of first. You know what I mean? So it’s, it’ll be interesting to see that perspective already it’s happening in finance, it’s happening in all different kinds of ways about what’s it like to have boy, Wired magazine, various others regularly have very good articles about the state of the art, if you will, of what’s going on.
And, the deep story games, like you’re talking about, very different than bid jeweled or things that are like, I played this game whenever I have five extra minutes, I’m standing, riding the bus, or I’m just waiting in line at the grocery store or something like that. And that kind of casual gaming can still make a amazing, impossible money.
You know what I mean? You sell it for a buck on the Apple store, but you sell a billion copies and you’re doing okay.
Stephen: And most of them have ads in there, or they do things like I saw one, it was a sticky platformer where you were a blob and you just hit the button. It like had a pointer and you’d hit the button and it would jump very in that direction.
Yeah. Little angry birds type of physics, and it would stick to whatever it hit. But if you jumped at the wrong time, you’d be in a, something moving that wouldn’t match up, like a Congo bongo, remember swinging the vines, you
Alan: know? Exactly. That’s right. You have to get the timing down.
Stephen: That’s right.
Yeah. It would allow you to go back a step, but you would have to watch this little ad first, and then you could revert back a step. Okay. So the game was free, it was fun, challenging. Oh, and I can reverse. But I have to watch an ad and people are like, sure, I’ll take 30 seconds. And that’s how they made their money.
That’s the price
Alan: of it. Exactly. And as it’s amazing. I like, there’s micropayment stuff in place all over the place. And if you just wanna be like your character, you want ’em to have a little different hat because that’s your hat and Right. People pay a buck for that. Or even like cents.
But that, and I’ve heard sometimes objections by parents because the kid bought an entire wardrobe, spent $300 or whatever like that. And that’s taking it too far. I guess you, that appears on your phone bill. It’s Billy,
Stephen: what’s going on? And
Alan: yet that you’d think that they can do that and that everybody will buy one or two or three things only.
The ones with no self-control whatsoever would keep lose track of, good Lord, I’ve got a pile of stuff. I can’t wear it all at the same time.
Stephen: Something just happens. Know, so what my gamer herself is still trying to adjust to, there’s a few games I have in that vein like there’s a Def Leppard jewel game where you gotta, things fall and you match ’em and they break apart and things more fall, whatever.
And you can buy coins that let you buy outfits and special things to blow stuff up when you’re playing. And you know that I’m like, eh, I might buy a beginner pack for $3. Oh, okay. Just to give yourself a little power up. Yeah. But then I look and it’s like they offer packages of these coins and other stuff for a hundred dollars, and I’m like, that’s crazy.
But at the same time, you can get the super deluxe version of the new Star Wars game for $120. Yeah. And it comes with new outfits and I’m like I want another dungeon to go through. You
Alan: know? We are so much parallel there. I hardly ever do, Diablo has had that kind of stuff that you can buy sets of wings or a companion animal or whatever, a companion slots, that kind of stuff. And I just, What I’m there to do is play the game not to look good doing it, you know what I mean? Once in a while, but maybe the Guild or the whatever I’ll join is I like orange, let’s join the orange group. Or I’ll like the name of them, they’re the avers or whatever else it might be.
But I really, maybe that’s why I’ve never gotten that much into the Minecraft and the various different build a world type games is because I don’t have that thing of I’m gonna set up my house just like I want it with all the bright colors, paintings and that kinda stuff. Sims. Exactly. So I like the action of it.
I like the puzzle solving of it. That’s the part that appeals
Stephen: to me. But. We were talking about, this younger crowd and they’re the ones interested in my workshop. They’re also the ones targeted for all this customization because they will just drive to a game that allows them to one, collect 3 million.
Cute little furry animals with different colors and powers and That’s right. Customize everything about their character. They will literally spend hours customizing their avatar and then sharing that and stuff with people. And that’s as much of the game for them as absolutely what we are used to and grow up with.
So we’re definitely not the target for that stuff. That’s right.
Alan: I’m, I haven’t read about this and I was really expecting to read about it soon. The world of NFTs became available, your non-functional tokens where, you have a unique instance of something that there’s a lot of them out there like that, but yours is specifically different, so it’s artwork or whatever else it might be.
And I was expecting that to inhabit video games where they will sell, wow. You can get, nobody else has exactly that chest plate with exactly those jewels. And that’s not $3, that’s $30 because we guarantee it is unique in all the world, or like I said, the hat or whatever else it might be. And it doesn’t even have to have.
Capability. It’s not like that’s a mightier sword or a better armor, but it looks that no one else can copy your look. And there’s a whole bunch of that going on about personal branding and, everybody encourages that. When you get rock stars don’t necessarily rap stars, et cetera, don’t necessarily make music anymore.
They make a lifestyle. And I wanna wear this because I don’t know, Doja cat does or something like that, right? And so I have never been that kind of follower either, where I don’t wear a hat because, Garth Brooks wore that hat. I just, it’s I’m goofy about clothing.
I don’t really, I’ve never tried. And maybe that’s, I don’t think it’s that I have an ego, I have a need to not follow what is too slavishly followed. I have a, at least a sense of individuality, but lots of people, that is not the case. I laugh about this all the time, long ago. There was a interviewing fans of Madonna before one of her concerts, and this was back in her material girl phase where she had a particular look of Right.
The hair kinda blood on one side and all kinds of bangles on the arm. And one of the girls all said, almost in unison, we love Madonna because she lets us be ourselves. They all look exactly like Madonna. And so that’s what I don’t wanna look is I’m a clone, I’m a slavish devotee, I’m an Indian.
I just don’t do that. So that’s why that wouldn’t necessarily appeal to me, whereas. I got, if they had a way of having a lot of orange in the picture, who knows why that would tip me over. You know what I mean? That it’d be, or maybe the particular combination of here’s the bal is family logo and here’s a German and a Lithuanian thing.
And I would represent for all of my supposed different cultures on my thing, so that in the game you’d be able to, but,
Stephen: a flag lapel. I saw a YouTube interview with one of the heads of Ubisoft and they were talking about how they are using generative AI in their development studio to help create unique stories and characters and dialogue And there’s different opinions.
Okay. In video games, we’ve all played ’em, those games where the NPCs you go past them 20 times and they say the same line every time you go past them. Absolutely. And nowadays we have the power and ability to change that line, but somebody still has to write it. And those are called parts randomized
Alan: it, or at least maybe you can customize it.
Yes, exactly. Ok.
Stephen: So they’re using AI in the development studio to create those. And I know some people, especially cuz of the storytelling aspect they’re saying, but that was the McDonald’s server beginner. Job for young storytellers to get into the industry, right? So if we have ai gimme
Alan: a hundred phrases that this guy might say and that Exactly.
Something, it’ll seem unique.
Stephen: Okay. Exactly. Okay. So there, there’s some pushback to that, the studios also like, look, if games are going to cost so much money and we have to recoup that, this helps us save money on some of the, we still keep the big stuff for people, but yeah.
Some of this lower hanging fruit first that, but I can also see just integrating that type of thing into these games with 5G and fast networks and the powerful computers. Absolutely. You’re chatting with a generative AI that’s in the cloud. That’s
Alan: right. That’s, and it really does, it gives you a different experience each time, which makes it more interesting.
Exactly. Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. And but the thing is, here’s the other thing. You know what? It does kill. The really cool books that tell you where everything’s at and the pictures that you can’t do that if everything random, that’s
Alan: true. Now it’ll change as you go. Yes. Instead of being, here’s the path
Stephen: through and no more, walkthroughs from I gn.
Right.
Alan: Or my guess is however they have that storyboard laid out. There’s gotta be like things where there’s a whole bunch of things that can happen, but it has to come down to a joint point. Yeah. And then spread out again. So that would still be useful to do a walkthrough, is you’re gonna end up doing a whole bunch of stuff, but in the overall, you are gonna end up at Castle Black and then you have to start choosing what room or whatever.
Yeah. It’s another thing, I’ll say this, I just found this, I talk about how I don’t know that I need to be unique and with all those things that are available, but I’ve also, in my big white guy world, you always have a face that kinda looks like yours and a haircut and whatever else it might be.
And one of the things that I’ve loved is as they’ve added all the various different emojis and avatars and all that kind of stuff, then now, Every color every sexual, every everything can be represented. And if it isn’t that they’ve pre-made them, so they’re canned versions, they have the kind of denate thing nowadays where you can say, okay, give me, I have lost most of my hair, but is it white or is it gray?
And is it this high or is it this hot? And that you can make a pretty good avatar of yourself that looks just like you, so that when you show up online, you’re like, with your, and it looks just like you. Whatever the 10 points of making it look like, you, it’s enough so that you’re not jarringly different.
Whereas there must have been people, kids playing games for like, why I really wanna, look like me and they don’t even have me. So that, I like the fact that they’ve expanded it. As we just talked about. One of the keys for doing it internationally is you have to have people that can look like a South American, a middle easterner, an Australian, there’s different colors to the skin, there’s different kinds of hair there, there’s different how your eyes are there.
It. I love the fact that they become more inclusive instead of, Nope, Laura Croft looks like this period. You know what I mean? Absolutely. Only girls with a brown ponytail can play Laura Croft, that
Stephen: kinda thing. And even going back into the some of the eighties, but into the nineties, there was some customization you could sometimes do, and I don’t spend a lot of time on that.
I’ve never really cared a lot, but, and I don’t do this for inclusion or diversity or to solidarity. I don’t do it for any, I almost always went in and chose something other than a white guy. I would be a girl, I would be a troll. I would be green, I would be any color, I would just mix it up and do something completely different because, I wanted to be something other than me for a while.
That’s
Alan: right. Part of role playing games is take on a different role. Yeah. I know hundreds of episodes ago we must have talked about, one of the joys that I got was, I’m a big guy and so everybody figures I’m gonna be what? The Malay fighter, the big tank of a guy. And it was so fun to go in and be the wiry thief who his.
Superpower is stealth in speed, not I can take a lot of punishment and just blast my way through. And same with, the cleric or the magic user. And then I would indeed choose those characters based on the aspect so that when I look at that person on screen, it’s that looks much more like a Bowman than they do a big guy wielding a bow.
You know what I mean? And often I would almost alternate between Playing women, female, male, and female, because it was just, it’s funny too, the only way in which I I really often give myself a different character name and it’s kinda like a challenge to myself of, can I think of a character name that is of that kind of character, but is what, I haven’t used it before.
So I, I’ve been playing a a Bowman often in Diablo because I really like some of the things you can do where you set up like centuries that automatically fire arrows. And it’s not just you shooting, it’s three different things. You can slaughter things. So I’ve had daran, I’ve had, Rambo, I’ve, I just, all these various different things that have to do with shot objects, kinda thing, shaft, that kind of stuff. And I haven’t run out yet. And indeed, for the ladies it was Let’s see. It doesn’t matter. It’s, I really was always trying to do that kind of thing just as a goof for myself.
When I used to play civilization. Instead of taking the canned names of cities, I worked my way through my family. So it’d be, first City is Alan, then it’s Bruce, and then it’s Chris and I, that kinda thing. Colleen actually more than Chris, often than Chris. But it was, when you get around to the third generation, it’s I guess there’s only so many ex people in my family.
We don’t have an Xavier an a Xerxes. It just another way of I don’t know. When I’m in the game, I’m still customizing it a little bit so that I can giggle about the whole world, is my family kind of a thing. You know what I mean? So I,
Stephen: I, I remember clear back to Ultima three on the Commodore.
Okay. 83, 84. You can choose like human wizard or troll barbarian and you know that. And there was one choice that we just loved. It was fuzzy other. What the heck is a fuzzy other? What do they do? What do they, and Right. We, I chose that. So I always had to have a fuzzy other in my party for Ultima three.
That’s very good. Yeah. Don’t know what it was, but whatever. So I mentioned art on Maine which was a fun activity over the weekend. I had a, I did a book signing with our local pop-up bookstore. Cool. And that, so that was fun. And I’m hoping got some people interested in signing up for workshops and things like that, but Exactly.
It was interesting cuz you also mentioned an art display. You guys had gone to ande.
Alan: Exactly. We went to Chicago for the weekend was the wedding of Jenna and Alice. We’ve known Jenna since she was, some Mensa kids grow up in Mensa and so we played games with her and went to programs with her for a long time.
We actually went, this is funny, it all ties together. We went to the Spider-Man movie in, when it was released at midnight in Reno. So we’d be some of the first people in the world to see it, just cause I’m in another city, I’m not gonna not see my Spider-Man movie. And that kind of thing, like staying up till midnight and sometimes adults aren’t totally cornball, that they’re okay.
So we were okay enough to be invited to the wedding. We it where they were 5,900 Sheridan they were in 59, 40. Was Kitty corner across the street from where my grandfather had retired in his condo on Lake Michigan. So that was this weird
Stephen: deja vu of yeah, I played right on that beach.
This is where we used to go
Alan: to see Teta. You know what I mean? So that was fun. And then while we were there, I also mentioned that we stayed with Michael and Christina and had a wonderful time. We also, because we were gonna be in, found out at the Art Institute, they were having a Salvador Dali exhibit, and I love surrealism.
I love Dali and Magrid all kinds of folks, that they find a way to make impossible things look real enough that it gives you that automatic ambiguity and dissonance. It doesn’t look ugly, it looks beautiful when you see a locomotive coming out of a fireplace, it can’t be right, but it looks just right.
You know what I mean? Yeah. Dali did all kinds of things with dream sequencing type things. The this creature is half lady, half Tiger clocks hanging on trees and stuff like that. And this was a collection called The Image Disappears. They had gathered from a whole bunch of different museums, a bunch of his works, probably 30.
So it wasn’t a huge exhibit, and in fact very popular. So the wrong combination for Colleen and for me, to a certain extent of a lot of people in a small space, taking their time, reading every placard, and you got to see everything, but you continually felt kinda like. Pushed along and in Colleen’s case, elbowed, it, it wasn’t as pleasant experience as it could have been, but to see things, I have had a Doy calendar for a long time, so I’ve seen a whole array of different things and I saw things there at this exhibit that I had never seen before.
So some things that the museums don’t allow to be reproduced or whoever owns it, or the family or whatever else, it might be so fascinating cuz I just I think I told you this long ago when I was looking@doingmy.com things, I had gone out to California for my interview at Topica and the morning, my, my interview was like at one o’clock.
So that morning I actually went to San Francisco’s Modern Art Museum and they had a magret exhibit and it put my mind in such a wonderful, happy Ready to talk, ready to explode with the idea state. But I really think that was part of why I got the job because I was in this wonderful, arty, surreal, nice, happy to see Magret artwork, mood.
And so it really does. I love. The Art Institute of Chicago has all kinds of things that when you see them in various different books and stuff like that, it’s like where is that? Is that in the Louvre? Chicago has two dozen of really famous, this Van Gogh and this Kooning and the sanity in the park, the Pointillistic by painting, by raf.
It’s really in the art institute. Nice. It was we did not have enough time to run around and see all the highlights. Oh no, we’ll have to go back and see more art. What a good thing for your soul. Having said that, before we went into the way they worked it out fine. You don’t just get in the line and interminably wait.
You get virtually in line and then they send you a text saying, okay, please come to the exhibit now and we’ll let you in. So while we were there, we were, it’s in the wing that is much about contemporary and modern art and because he’s considered a modern artist, if you will, between thirties today, right?
We went to the other contemporary and modern art galleries, and my response was much like, it always is fraud, bullshit. No work at all. This guy has no talent. You know what I mean? Colleen and I laugh about, I guess we’re just not smart enough. We’re just not artistically trained enough to understand how this big black, nothing of a painting that’s labeled.
An incomp, the chasm, even that it’s not even like related to. Yeah, I could see how that’s black like a chasm. It’s labeled like tulip. It’s is there a tulip in there that I’m not
Stephen: seeing? Is it just, how does that make you a genius too?
Alan: And so there were far too many of them. Another good, I’ve adopted some things that Colleen has said wisely.
If I wouldn’t wanna see this out my window, I don’t want it hanging on my wall. And there were some things that were so ugly, so discordant, so unbalanced, so minimal where there’s that’s not, no, no work went into this. There’s no talent. I guess I can, if I stare at this long enough, will it evoke?
Sympathy, will it evoke isolation and depression? What are the things I should be getting out of this? And to me, it’s kinda like the people that are big unile, wine people. It’s oh, I can detect subtle notes of lavender and tiger in here. It’s like you’re just such full of bs.
So there were some things, of course, that we both like, but honestly, 70% were kinda like, it’s ridiculous. Ridiculous. Yeah. Sorry. I guess I really am a representational list. I like art where it looks like something I like, where it, if it’s gonna evoke I like geometry where there’s some pattern finding to it.
Rectal, there’s some balance to it. The colors are the placement of the colors was meant to create a flow or whatever else it might be. But there’s all other I don’t know, Jackson Pollock an amazing artist with his drip paintings and yet, Like they could hang that upside down and I would get the same experience.
Is that art? You know what I mean? It’s whatever he had going on. Sweeping statements, artists see the world in a different way and in some cases I’m really sad for them. If what they’re seeing in the world is this level of carnage or ugliness or like that, they’re so unsettled. They’re letting out what’s in them and oh God, I feel so sorry that’s in your head.
This is ugly filled, so I. I haven’t really been in the modern art gallery, or I didn’t kinda go in like right
Stephen: now. So now lemme just say to tie this into our earlier conversation, right? Cause we talked about the art of the animation and stuff, the art in video games. There are a lot of video games now that aren’t just video game looking things that they look very stylistic.
They have a very definite look about them.
Alan: There’s an entire motif that runs through that is what they’re trying to evoke. Exactly. Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. And which is, even leading to that whole argument is, are video games and art, are they cons and can’t, and I, when I look at a banana duct tape to a white wall, I can say my video games are a hell of a lot more artistic than that.
That’s my opinion.
Alan: And it’s funny, so they have a famous magret where it has a painting of a pipe and it says, this is not a pipe. And so it’s, of course it’s not, it’s a painting, but it’s, you would say, what is that? It’s a pipe. So it’s got that little bit of ambiguity, right? So what I wanna do is I wanna get a tattoo that says, this is not a tattoo.
If I’m ever gonna get a tattoo, I’m gonna surreal it up and say, this is, and also I wanna get the tattoo that says, ask me about my poor life choices. Anyway sorry, all tattoo people, I’m really not that crazy about it, but I, if I’m gonna get something, I’m gonna be get, I’m gonna get something that really is absolutely means something to me and I haven’t found that yet that I wanna see that every day in my life.
Or I’ll get something that kinda like comments on, everybody has a tattoo, but I don’t think everybody’s, your hero is Tweety Bird. Some things on there, it’s like really outta all the world. That’s what you wanted was. Dog poo. You got a tattoo
Stephen: right, dog on you. Oh my God. So that gives me an idea for two more t-shirts.
Ok. We could have a t-shirt that says this is not a t-shirt. Exactly. And another one that says, this space intentionally left blank. I,
Alan: I think I’ve actually seen that one. But really that’s enough from IBM manuals. We’ll be able to do whatever we want. Then they won’t come after us for t-shirt copyright or something
Stephen: like that.
Alright. I need to get moving. I got a part out here. Exactly. Okay,
Alan: great. Always a pleasure. We’ll see. I’ll talk to you again next week. Very good. Take care, Stephen. Thanks, bye. Yep. Thank you
Stephen: man. I’ll talk to you later.
Alan: All right, bye-Bye.
