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Overview
There are some changes coming. Al is getting a recovery of house – since Colleen doesn’t need her home office, they’ve gotten rid of most of the office furniture. Which means – puzzles! More specifically, freeing up the table to put together puzzles. Which means he also has room for game nights again.
Ad we discuss the newest MCU show – Secret Invasion. This one hasn’t wowed people and we have some thoughts on what wasn’t great.
Recommendations
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/178613/star-trek-five-year-mission
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Transcription
Stephen: Set the settings every single time. Okay, so let’s reset the settings. Every single time we do something. It’s,
Alan: it really is odd. I would’ve thought that once people knew that multiple people were using multiple streaming things, that they would automatically do the polite thing of saving existing settings going into with theirs and then restoring how it was when they leave, they don’t, they want to act as if they’re the only one that you use.
’cause that’s kind
Stephen: of what you do. And even worse, I’ve gotta go into my Windows settings and check those. I’ve gotta go into my Zoom settings and check those. I have to check to make sure I don’t have zencaster open anywhere. ’cause that’ll steal it all, so it’s a, it’s just it’s a nightmare Sometimes
Alan: I’m realizing that my choice of shirt today might be better contrasted with a library or something like that.
There we go. Okay. Someone’s getting lost in the ocean Tarn.
Stephen: Wouldn’t want you to get lost. How’s Alan, what’s been going on?
Alan: Let’s see. So this is funny. One of the things I had just been working on, which is a very much RG topic, is we kale’s retired. We’ve been transforming the house because we had kinda let her business take over the first floor of our house.
She had a big desk and filing cabinets and a return to the side and cables and everything. And now that, all that stuff, not only has she sent some things back to work shredded a whole bunch of stuff, we actually had a shredding service that comes and does it right in your driveway so that they prove to you it really is destroyed.
Here it is being fed into the big, the machine. Then we got the daughter of her best friend to take all the office furniture. She really needed a nice setup and this stuff is like high quality stuff. Steelcase, getting it outta the house, as you might imagine, was. Wow, this is like heavy white dwarf star material and gotta flip it on the side to get, it does, it’s wider than the front door.
So without, I hope that we didn’t scar it too much there’s on the rug. But then once you get to the return of the door, there’s like wood and maybe a nail jutting up and I just don’t want it to be, it’s been kept in great condition for eight years and then on the way out of the house is where, so we tried to do all that we could.
I’m reminded of the joy of going up and down stairs with something heavy where you’re on the bottom and you carry all the weight or you’re on the top and you’re lifting it at ankle height and I’m just, I still think I’m okay shape pretty strong, but when you don’t do that all the time that you do an abrupt thing, it’s like here’s the formula for throwing your back out.
Me and Jason, nobody seemed to have problems and Sarah was very mu good at taking the third side spotting and so forth. She’s a strong lady, so she was right in on it. Having said all that, now we have the first floor of the house back, so we brought our dining room table back into play and we’re gonna, put the leaves in.
We really have a table. What does that mean, getting to the relentless ski group part of it? We have a table we can do jigsaw puzzles on now. We have so much not done that for eight years, and I find that a very. Meditative thing. I know it’s not like a big accomplishment, it’s only solving a puzzle and it doesn’t change the world, but for keeping you mentally sharp, for being able to do color matching and pattern matching and just, it’s the joy of going from chaos to order.
It’s a cool thing, right? It’s something, and I think many people, families or couples do, is you just sit around the table chattering and you get your own, there’s a, I actually, one of the very first posts I ever wrote for Mensa was about how people do jigsaw puzzles and there’s some people that they have to make the entire frame before they can do any of the interior because you gotta set the stage.
And there’s some people like I’ll do the face and they grab the Statue of Liberty pieces that are hopefully the face, even though you can’t necessarily distinguish it right by the green. And that people get really defensive about no, the Paonia are mine. You can’t have any of the flower pieces.
And some people, the counters of the world, they’ll like, Take a piece and pocket it so they can be the one to put the last piece in. Who does that? So we are really looking for, and Colleen and I have I just posted something to Facebook and I have lots of cool friends. It’s so we now have room for this thing to happen.
And I started to investigate and I don’t know, I don’t wanna go buy a jigsaw puzzle for 15 bucks. It seems like it’s one of those perfect things for a swap thing, when you have a tool that you only use once a year, but if the neighborhood had access to that tool, everybody would edge their lawns or everybody would have the paint thing that instead of dipping a roller in it continually supplies paint through the wall.
Yeah. People have given me all kinds of great ideas for go to the local library and either they have some to check out or there’s a swap meet, go to Facebook marketplace and there’s tons of puzzles available for $5 or even less if you do a set of them. I checked into various different manufacturers, I get.
Mailings from all these places and bits and pieces and White Mountain and all kinds of places. Ravensburger have really nice puzzles. But they are, and not only 15 bucks, but you can actually go a premium brand where they’re beautiful wood and they actually have, some of the little pieces are, oh, that’s the butterfly, that’s a DACH one.
The thing. And yet I’m, I don’t know. I like just the idea of doing a puzzle without it having to be. Maybe after I do some flimsy puzzles, I’ll be like, oh, don’t get this brand anymore. They’re really made outta like wet cardboard instead of something. Like snaps into place. You want that.
So like I said, I had a dozen, dozens of friends just saying we can swap. Or here’s a place that I know you can go to. There’s a buy nothing group. There’s a free cycle group. Jigsaw puzzles just seem like a natural that we can get into this hobby without it being, and there’s another a thousand dollars expense.
Stephen: It doesn’t have to be they’re 20, 30 bucks. Yeah.
Alan: And our own set of puzzles that we can go to the swap meet and at, I don’t know, we tend to not redo puzzles. We get the joy of doing it. We don’t then Some people do it and they put the, they glue it to a board or something like that.
It into a permanent picture. And I don’t know. I don’t do that. I don’t need to display that accomplishment. Almost always. If I want that print, I kind of wanna print without all the little cutouts of all the pieces interfering with the flow of the picture.
Stephen: You know what I mean? So I do have one puzzle that we did several years ago that we did de kage up and hang on the wall, but it was a bunch of Star Wars Marvel comic covers.
So it was a collection and it looks pretty cool. And then I ended up somewhere down the road and I have no idea, I couldn’t trace the history of all of this, but I had, when the. Special edition of Star Wars came out. I ended up with a new Hope puzzle for the special edition. Okay. I don’t even remember where it came from.
Probably some eBay auction that I got, back in the day. And then this is, a little but when my first wife’s. Grandmother was dying. We were over visiting her and I happened to look over, I’m like, oh my gosh, you’ve got the Empire Strikes Back puzzle. It goes with my other one.
And I was like, that’s pretty cool. And I thought I was just excited to see it. And she goes, go ahead and take it. Yeah. And she’s go ahead and take it. And I’m like, oh, I couldn’t take your puzzle. She goes, I’m dying. I don’t need it. And I’m like, Oh, okay. You know that really weird feeling. It’s I understand the logic of it, but it makes me feel weird.
But I’ve
Alan: got that like a little scavenger or something, but no, she’s giving it in generosity. Yes. Yeah.
Stephen: And I saw the Return of the Jedi one at the Hartville Flea market a while back, and I’m like, so they do have the set
Alan: of the original Yes. And then,
Stephen: okay. And I was like, okay, I gotta come back here and I’ll be, and then they left before, and I’ve been looking for them, all summer when we go out there to sell stuff, so
Alan: Right.
58 15, 12, 15 Bill Cosby store that I told you, you see it once, so you know it exists and then you spend years
Stephen: trying find out. Yes. But I did end up, and I’ll get back to puzzle in a second. I did end up with a great game I’ve been looking for. It is one of those rare games that is super fun, but they don’t make it anymore.
They’ve not reissued it. It’s even hard to find on eBay. Like I have an alert that only comes up once every five or six weeks that somebody put it on eBay and it’s a hundred, $120 regularly for this game. Wow. What is it? Do I have heard of it. Maybe it’s Star Trek five year mission dice cooperative game.
So you have missions and every, and you rolling dice and you put your dice on the complete missions and everybody has to work together ’cause there’s like a pool of dice yeah, exactly. And it’s just really fun. I’ve been looking for it. I found it at the flea market Saturday. Congratulations. And I was looking at it and the guy, I says, how much you want in front of your games?
He goes it depends on what game you want. And I’m like, God damn. I said, okay, the Star Trek one, he says, you like that one, don’t you? I said, oh, I’m like, and he says I’m asking 10 bucks. Oh, please take my money. Take my $10. That
Alan: really is fun when you expect to really get maybe raked over the coals and then it’s a very reasonable price.
It’s oh, okay.
Stephen: Yeah. So sorry. I disrupted the whole puzzle. No speech,
Alan: actually, all of those things like we. We have a table. It’s a game on now. And so we can actually, not only can she and I play Scrabble and so forth, more easy than just doing it on the coffee table that’s got her work stuff on it anyway.
But we can have, oh my god, friends over to play games, friends over to have dinner. We, we really have obviously eight years taken ourselves out of that really basic we’ve been over to friends’ houses for things and then we can’t reciprocate. And so it’s I’ll bake an extra bread or I’ll, what can I do to make it opening up your house to someone is really a wonderful, generous thing. And you usually do swap back and forth just so it’s even whatever that karmic thing is, and we’ve not been able to do it. So we have a whole long list of who we wanna invite and who we owe a dinner to, and those kinds of things.
That’ll be fun, and even totally. You’re coming over soon, if you’re listening, even
Stephen: more exciting, there is, there’s been a crop. Games have picked up a lot in recent years, recent couple decades, and they have these things now that are the table toppers. So you custom fit it onto your dining room table, and it has little sides.
It has cups to hold, dice, it has, the felt top for rolling and putting cards on, these game playing tabletops that fit right on your dining room table. I had
Alan: not seen those. That’s a great idea. I knew that they used to actually make gaming tables for poker you’d have, it’s got a drink holder and a place to put your chips in, little racks and stuff like that.
And it was eight sided. ’cause that’s the, maybe the optimum number of people you want to have. I really have always wanted one of those, but I’ve never had the house that I could dedicate that room to it. Sometimes they’d actually also have it, like on top of it, you can put a little thing where it’s also do you remember this, where they used to have like little puffers for playing pool with an air driven ball?
Trying to think what hit the octagon. It was something like that. I always thought that it was cool to have a pool table. It also had a ping pong top that could go on top of it. Yes, those. So we, it’s a renaissance in house Balts in Baltimore estates to be able to have the room and the table and the ability to invite and that kind of stuff.
And like I said, jigsaw puzzles. It just is, it’s very cool to go back in and, I don’t know, I’ve been doing this for all my life. Spring Bach used to be a big brand name. I don’t think they’re around anymore, but others have risen up to be, they’re some of this recommended Galveston by name. I don’t know much about them, but.
And this is, there’s also very cool psychology, I think involved here. What kind of puzzles do people like doing? Some people really like the Thomas Kincaid heartwarming, like glowing out of a house in wintertime scenes, right? Other people like a Big W wilderness where it’s mountains and then you have there’s a sky time and a mountain time and a forest.
You know what I mean? You have the various different sets of things. Colleen and I have discovered. We often and White Mountain does a lot of these, it’s a tableau of a whole bunch of things that are variations on a theme. Laid out a whole bunch of license plates so that you can actually find. A license plate, the little logos per state and the different color combinations.
It’s donuts, it’s Crayolas. It’s all different kinds of things where there’s a little incre intricacy to it, but because of all the colors that kind of have to match, you get hints again and again as to what kind of goes with what. So we like those. I like abstract art things where it’s like a big spiral going in on itself.
And so it, you really have to. You get some hints as to color matching, but it’s also a lot of pattern matching just for the pieces itself. I really don’t, I’ve never liked you. You’ve seen these, right? Where it’s all black and it’s called, Hey, welcome to hell. Or I remember one from Springbok that was called Little Red Riding Hoods Hood, and it was all red, that kind of thing.
And that, I don’t know, I like the hints. I like that you’re making a pretty picture instead of just an expanse. And it’s only about trying to find, but then I become mechanical about it. You line up where there’s a little the little tongues and the little holes, and you try to just fit ’em in going along.
And I’m not getting any inspiration. My brain isn’t working out the part of it that says, find a light color, find something that, that must be the extension of the bridge that’s going across the river. Find all the bridge pieces, that kind of thing. So we’ll see. You know what I mean? And also I, the It’s one of those things that we don’t usually do marathon sessions once in a while you wanna sit down and like you, it’s middle of winter, hot cup get a mug of coffee for her and hot cocoa for me.
And you don’t just do the puzzle, you like chatter and listen to music and have a nice time while you’re doing this thing that isn’t requiring your full attention. Or it’s, you have it out and it stays out Not to be done, but just to be worked on while you walk past it. Every time you go into the kitchen, you’re like on a piece for a couple pieces.
Exactly that. So I just, I don’t know how to, I am really looking forward to having that activity back in our lives. It’s something that she and I can share that it’s not most of us looking at the screen, it’s very, physical. Doing that kind of thing. And I love the treasure hunt of it. I love going to I don’t know, the library or goodwill or something like that, or the swap meets and you’ll be able to, oh, that’s just the kind of puzzle that I like.
I didn’t know that was even out there. So we’ll see. We’ll see. I, it might be, anyway, I,
Stephen: I. No, I was just gonna say one of the most insidious ones I’ve seen is like a field of flowers that are like all similar. But then the puzzle has the same picture, twisted 45 degrees on the other side. So both sides of the puzzle have the same picture.
Just twisted. Yeah. Yeah.
Alan: They used to have something like that called the puzzler or a muzzle or something. Yeah. Printed and it was meant to be misleading in that way. I’m, I like challenges, I like doing difficult things like that, but some part of it is also I’m done thinking for the day. Let’s work proposal a little bit.
You know what I mean? It
Stephen: doesn’t have to be, here’s what you really need to do. You need to go, wow, Colleen, we’ve got all this space Now, I could move boxes of comics from the storage unit into the living room and put ’em throughout the house here. So I don’t tell her that. I’m sure that’ll go over real well.
Alan: True. She already, she occasionally invokes the, maybe we should have a few less a few fewer white boxes, because that’s my instinct for, like, when we were cleaning up the office area, you’d just throw it all away. So things that were on the desk, go into a box, and that way you know that they’re, A little Rolodex or a, a stapler or something like that.
But they have a like function and almost always, before I put things away in a box, I sort them. So I had a whole bunch of magazines accumulated from the last year that actually were sitting on the steps going up, and this is what Freshly came in. These are the ones that are read but are for her to read.
And there’s actually a little bit of order to it. But now I finally there, it’s time for them to go to storage. So of course I alphabetize them because I want it to be 20. It wasn’t 20, it was in this case only two. But in the course of the collection, you don’t wanna have 20 boxes of dogs dinner. You wanna be able to go, if I’m looking for an issue of Entertainment weekly, I can go to the Ebox, where there’s Entertainment Weekly or Games magazine.
What do I say? That’s not everything. Like Time and Newsweek and the week are ephemeral. I read them, but I save. A games magazine because I haven’t always worked all the puzzles in it. So when it comes to the next month, I put the current one away, but I have in my mind that one day I’m gonna return and finish all the darnest.
Stephen: The possibility exists and a possibility. It’s less than zero.
Alan: Exactly. And actually that’s embarrassing. I get to things like, I love Wired magazine, but I probably read one out of three issues in its entirety that the new one always comes along before I finished the previous one.
And so I have a collection of wired and one of these days I’m gonna be, I’m gonna read an article from an old one and be like, man, if I had been informed, I would’ve, been so much more conversant in that chat. G p T is coming that Bitcoin has these various different forks that are not, there’s, they.
The one guy once said to me, and I’ve always talked about this with Wired, say, what are you reading there? And he goes, the next five years of life, as we know it, wired, has always been prescient and really good about explaining here’s why this is coming and how it, why it’s gonna matter, and who’s looking on that kind of stuff.
So a lot of my awareness of the tech world in general, the way technology is shaping the future has come from reading Mondo 2000 reading, wired, reading those magazines that kind of specialize in that. And the hard science ones have always done that. Discovery and Omni and it’s funny, some of the ones I named are ones I really enjoyed and then they stopped being published and it’s man, I really, I’m missing my dose every month.
That used to be such a great magazine.
Stephen: I, there’ve always been magazines I’ve kept there’s magazines that I got rid of, wish I hadn’t, and there’s magazines I’ve got that. I’m like, why am I keeping these, we, we have all that. But every now and then online, I’ll run into an old issue of Run Magazine or Bite or Compute Gazette from the eighties when I was just getting into computers when it was Commodore and you had to type in program, you had to type it in.
Exactly. Yeah. And I’m looking at, looking at the ads, it’s like, you can buy 105 and a quarter inch disks and, and new mouse for modern machines and like now I, I got so many mice lying around now I toss ’em,
Alan: it really was an exciting time.
The Mac’s been around since the eighties and I remember reading like Mac World and Mac user and there were multiple Mac magazines and it wasn’t only just reading for the how to articles about, Hey, you’re gonna do Excel and this is it. It was all the ads Yeah. That you became aware of.
Oh my God. There finally is a database for the Macintosh so that all the things I’ve learned in Mainframe vi I can now do with Mac Lion over with FileMaker or with Fourth Dimension. And I just, I used to have all those kinds of things that I either sent away for or look for the, at, what was the space called?
Einstein remember, I remember that Einstein, right? There was a, a little software shop, and maybe that’s one of the first places where you develop the I’ll go browse around the Einstein store, and then the prices are always super high there, so then I’ll see where I can order it online or from the back of the magazine and stuff.
Going to Macworld. I used to have no lie. I put a suitcase inside another suitcase. Then I would fill the the second suitcase with all the software that I would acquire there because it was all much less expensive. And you got to really talk to the guys that developed it, right? And see whether you thought it was legit or not.
I’m enough of a geek that sometimes you want to, you want talk about whether it’s capable of doing the specific purposes that you wanted to put it or just how do they compare themselves to their rivals. And then out of the four graphics packages you pick the one that seems to be, it already works well, but the guy is dedicated to improving it over the course of time.
Get those things that nobody else does. It has the most file formats that you can both bring in and export so that it’s more compatible with everything you got going on. I used to be not just like a walk up and pay your money, but I was one of those guys who would really quiz the people at the booze because I really wanted, if I’m only gonna buy one instead of four, you have to Right bet.
You have to choose which one you. So
Stephen: Here’s a name for you, and I bet this will bring back some memories. Computer shopper. Remember the big computer shopper
Alan: catalog? Big all ads, right? It was just like two or three articles and everything else, just like Buyer’s Guide to Comic Fandom used to be that Yes.
Columns and were really good columns from let’s see, mark lost his last name. But like Peter, David wrote for them and and, but the rest of it was all the ads, right? And that’s very much how I filled in my collection was I would look to see what was available and even within the same magazine you’d have, of course, based on condition, various different prices.
Especially when I got outta college and had money month after month, I was regularly ordering things from there to fill in the gaps in my Ironman collection and my fighter man and whatever else it might be. ’cause you couldn’t just wait for the one Comic-Con for the year. You were continually going to those places.
Stephen: Or that was still also, going into the nineties, that was the day of the electronic swap meets where it was like a big flea market yard sale of computer
Alan: stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, that was one of the few places, like now when I go to a pinball, Show that is as less pinball as play.
They still have the cool vendor tables that were very much like the computer thing of you’re looking for a specific cable that’s male on this end and female on the other. And it’s not regularly produced, but I know how to make cables. So one guy had everything I might need to attach a Zy device to my, my it, I loved that, that they were knowledgeable and many of them were doing it out of the love of the hobby.
They weren’t looking to, I’m the only one that makes this so I priced it appropriately. The sympathy to screw you over, it just, and I, that thing of walking into a place that has those kinds of vendors, it’s like the doors to Oz to me. Like you wondered whether there were people that really did have every single kind of thing you might need to repair a pinball game with.
And now there’s not just one but five. It’s very cool to discover that people have, I. That, that hobby, that love of that so deep in them that they want to enable everybody else to keep their computers running, to keep their games running.
Stephen: Very cool. It was a totally different time too, because, especially when the 4 86 PCs were around, they, that was the thing, oh you never have to buy another computer.
You can continuously upgrade and swap. It’s at some point you’ve bought another computer ’cause you’ve upgraded everything except maybe the case, you can’t always put CPUs and stuff on old motherboards. You have to get a new motherboard, and interfaces changed. So I remember that time them saying, oh, you’ll never buy another computer.
Just upgrade it. And I’m thinking yeah, but you’re not gonna upgrade one part. You can
Alan: get matched. Exactly. Yeah. I do remember buying memory, o oftentimes things came with a certain amount of memory and over the course of time, the price of memory would come down for that particular configuration.
So I remember, the little memories, they looked like a little. Like the cab you put on the top of a pickup truck, they were that right shape long and they’d have three chips in each little sleeve. And then that total of that would be 16. Was it even 16 meg back then? 16, date yourself by saying, whoa, God, I remember finding a like a hundred meg drive, right?
How will we ever fill this just amazing modern space? And now of course we’re talking eight terabytes
Stephen: On a thumb drive, right?
Alan: On a thumb drive on a little thing that, you know. So it was very cool to know enough about that to be able to say, okay, I’ve read about Let’s see from the backs of magazines, who are the like cheap Asian knockoffs, and that’s a, sorry way to say it, but it, back then, that’s what it all was.
Yeah. Tried to find something reputable. You stuck with major dealers for certain components and other things like, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter if I try a mouse for 20 bucks and it doesn’t work perfectly, it sure matters if I try buying memory that doesn’t work. And again, to geek it up, remember trying to find memory errors that you’d actually, the diagnostic that would say it’s gonna be in, it didn’t even have it slot specific.
It was like, it’s in this row. And so you’d swap things out and play that little puzzle game of, okay, I know it’s one of these three, what’s the least number of swaps I have to do to identify exactly which one of these three and. It really now I gotta replace this. I really, there’s no way to fix this.
In order to get the, and it used to be that you had two or four banks of memory, and if anything was wrong in a
Stephen: bank, you didn’t get that Meg or something. And you had to match your memory. You had to have two memory that were the same size of memory to put speed. Yeah. That
Alan: it would go to the lowest, the slowest speed of anything that was in that row was then what it would do.
And some things were self diagnosing, but others were just, it wouldn’t work. And you’d have to figure out why. I remember having to read, they had little, it wasn’t just, Hey, this is four megabytes. It had some arcane coating on there and each manufacturer had different things, so you had to go read the manual.
How do I know exactly what this is supposed to be? And sometimes you could just lay them out and say, this is not like the others. Somehow they screwed up my order and they sent me something that doesn’t match the rest. Anyway, that, again, to gee it up, but it used to be exciting to figure that out, but it was, I just want it to work right.
You know what I mean? Like, how do I want this, I wanna slap all
Stephen: this in place. And or if you actually tried to use multiple hard drives, you’d have to move that little jumper on the back. Is it a master or not? And
Alan: absolutely. You know what I mean? That, and max had, you know, scuzzy drives where it had a number from like zero to seven.
And you had to have, you should have them in order along the chain. ’cause it, it did that little serial, it wasn’t it was supposed to be that it was all one. Lemme say this, it didn’t matter what number it was, it didn’t really matter that it was a number in order, but if you wanted to be able to do it, human friendly. Of course, you’d have to go from zero to seven along the chain, and once in a while it would be, now the cable length matters, you know that everything should be maybe right four to six inches or less, because then the total thing couldn’t be like more than 25 and you’re up. But 24.
And you’re like, I can see that this is fading away once in a while to really geek it up. Back when I was working on gambit on my genetic algorithm based trading systems, and this was late 19 hundreds, early two thousands, really late 19 hundreds, I had to have a whole bunch of data on, that I could tap into, and it wasn’t online.
So I had multiple cd it wasn’t even DVDs yet. CD players like four in the same housing, but you could address each of the disks. I had multiple stacks of that because I had. Bought date data from Tele rate Reuters, various different financial data suppliers. And I had to have it all available to me.
’cause that’s the kind of things you’re doing is looking for patterns in past data and then doing testing to show that it isn’t it’s predictive without giving you false positives and you can’t make it perfect. So you’re just doing tons of access to a large amount of data and they my getting it working.
Was a triumph that I really had this much. When I would talk to people about how I have it set up. And I’d say I got all these various different things and it’s ’cause the addressable, but it actually is one big drive to it. And like they would be taking notes tell me about that because I wanna do that too.
And it’s I was and then once in a while it would not work and you’d check everything to make sure that the housing was correct, not that you had bumped the table and something had worked its way out and just how often I’m living in this virtual world. But physically everything really mattered.
That nothing overheated, nothing came unattached. I actually had a big a Mac Pro back when it was a tower case and everything overheat because one of the fans stopped working and I’m up here in Skynet in the attic and we were gone for a weekend and that was enough to fry things on my system. I couldn’t believe it.
I was like, I. Shouldn’t there be like redundant fans? Shouldn’t there be the range, like it didn’t get to 120 degrees up here. It’s not like I’m out in Death Valley and yet computers put out a lot of heat and unless you circulate the heat away from them, they will find themselves. Yeah.
Yeah. So that was, I had wake up calls about, hey, you know how they say every everybody either has lost data or is going to, I got really religious about backups because I just, I was able to retrieve all kinds of stuff off the drives, off that machine, but not in that machine. I had to get another machine and then I got one of those cool.
You can attach any drive to it of various different kinds, whether it was the PC and Mac, and then run various different softwares on it, you know that it’s not, Operating, you fried the directory. The directory was gone, but the data was still there. And I did some pretty tense times of it’s not, oh no, I’ve done all this work of ripping CDs or digitizing CDs, and I don’t wanna redo all the work.
It was data that I could not recreate without redoing it worth. Hundreds of thousands of dollars. ’cause that’s what my time is worth. You know what I mean? So I was really, hope this works. ’cause you know what’s gonna short it out now my tears, because it’s not working on the first and second and the third try.
And I’m like, make sure that I have lots of circulation up here and always have fans blowing on my stuff. You’ll learn painfully sometimes. Yeah, absolutely. I, if you had a meltdown like that or anything, but I, that was my worst experience. Oh yeah. You,
Stephen: You come in and you start working, you’re like, what’s that clicking noise?
Oh man. It’s a hard drive clicking,
Alan: that, that little it I did some work for a friend of mine, Kevin. And he had an office in Hudson that I used to go to. And they had a server room. They had all kinds of stuff in the server room and OneDrive started to have problems. One of the people working there closed the door to the server room because it was making noise and they didn’t want to hear it.
And that accelerated, exacerbated what was going wrong. And I had to do all kinds of, again, data recovery and things were more sophisticated then that I was able to actually retrieve a whole bunch of stuff. But I like. I didn’t realize that people were so naive about computers that you can’t have ’em running in the 150 degree boiler room.
This isn’t gonna work down in a Birmingham steel mill. And that’s what you created by closing the door, right? Putting out tons of
Stephen: heat. Oh I just heard some lawsuit news article, and I don’t remember this very specific details, but it was basically some genetics company that had some samples under very cold temperatures and had to be regulated.
And they were doing tests and they were working on some drugs or something, it was, but it was like these samples had been in this storage for 14 years or something, and they planned for another decade and a half or whatever. Units started to go bad and it gave them a, an alarm and it was beeping and they knew that they were ordering one.
The maintenance guy came in that night and it’s oh, this is not working. I’ll help him out. And he unplugged it and he unplugged. It ruined decades of research.
Alan: I remember that story exactly that I know that there’s also people have pursued the idea, if I go into cryo suspension, then they’ll cure my brain cancer in a hundred years.
In a hundred years. And I’ve heard of a couple of those places that they lost. They guarantee, absolutely guarantee we got quadruple redundancy. And yet things can happen where they get an earthquake and there’s no power and your UPSs aren’t gonna hold out. And no matter what you do to run a generator and all that kind of stuff.
So similar, not only a decade worth of data, but like people, you know what I. Idea that they would ever recover is not yet proven. You know what I mean? You really have to overcome the crystallization problem. And but having said that’s the business that they were in could be defeated just by that, by, Hey, we defrosted them.
We didn’t mean to, they’re gone,
Stephen: oh, hey, so I got so we talked about movies and stuff, and we briefly talked about secret invasion, so I wanna get back to that from last week. But real quick, I went and saw the Mission Impossible movie over the weekend, and I, I loved it. It was great.
I love those movies, I saw some reports saying, oh, it’s a failure and stuff. I’m like, my theater was packed. It was packed all weekend long. I’m like, I ignore that crap anymore because but the most exciting thing was there was some guy that was either very drunk or very high, and the cops came in, in the middle of the movie and drug him out.
Struggling. And that escorted him out. Yeah. It was more than an escort. He was Oh, okay. He was in the right, because he was, yeah, he was very
Alan: loud and I paid my ticket and everybody else gets to share my drunkenness, yeah. Okay. So good that, that’s very satisfying. When finally, once in a while.
And what, better yet, they won’t get off their goddamn phone and they won’t shut up and they won’t, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, better
Stephen: yet every couple minutes for the whole movie and Usher would walk through and we saw the cop walk through a couple more times, so Yeah, I was like, that’s cool.
So secret invasion
Alan: I’m not
Stephen: impressed. Okay so let’s go into that. W what is not impressed? What, where’s your thoughts on it? Me and Colin have talked a lot about the series,
Alan: right? Big thoughts first. I really like the ingenuity of continuity that you have to go with what has gone before and make once in a while, those retro conning where you make things that weren’t talked about in the past, but you add to it.
So it doesn’t just say, oh, that was always a dream. That was always just crap. So much. The secret invasion is those people that you thought were those people all those years, they weren’t right. That you can’t trust anything. And very unsettling thought to me, and I think that they’re doing it cavalierly, like there’s been a couple reveals that, and again, totally not spoilers, but it’s no, there’s no way that a scroll without having full knowledge and experience and they’re showing the scroll technology where they’re able to actually absorb the memories of the past.
Yeah. But I just, I wanna have some confidence that you really can’t. Imitate someone. So exactly that. It’s not just casual. Hey, I could have a conversation for an hour at dinner and have them never suspect me, but can they do their job? They, when they I don’t like that they’re undoing so much.
And I didn’t like the comic book series that went into this either. I thought this was one of Brian Michael Bendis’s. Biggest Failures was him just throwing out that as a minute that we suspected something like that was going on. Wouldn’t they have come up with the scroll detectors? Wouldn’t they have come up with some way of being able to say, we can’t let ourselves be infiltrated like this.
There’s gotta be a blood test, retina thing. From the thing movie where it’s like, we can test, we can make sure that we, whatever the random X factor is that’s in here, you can look for it. This is weird. I don’t think Nick Fury’s a great leading character.
I think that he’s irascible and too random and doesn’t. He acts as if he has a master plan, but I think that he doesn’t, and he’s making things up and that he’s all front, that I think he’s just, I’m looking forward to saying that he’s really gonna pull out some thing at the end.
It’s I knew all along and it was all just a trap that I laid for you and stuff. But while we’re getting there, I’m just not impressed. But he’s not likable. He’s not, maybe he’s semi competent, but he he’s not a hero. I don’t find him being heroic. I don’t find, I just, there’s maybe I’m in the wrong mood about things.
But I’m just, there’s so many aspects that I enjoy about heroic things about heroes versus villains and about I guess I’m just not enjoying it. Other things I’m so enthusiastic about. Yeah. A good battle sequence or what, how nice to have some romance in the middle of all of the peril that they put themselves through.
And I think that this is just lazy or. What do you think? I, no, I’m
Stephen: agreeing with all that one. My favorites, Colin and I have been talking about it and he’s it’s just not holding my interest. And I’m like, can you really tell me what the plot is and what the, what we’re trying to accomplish with the series?
It’s it’s not clear at all what the story is. The story is so muddled. I, you can’t figure out what exactly is going on and why, and then you don’t care. I think they’re
Alan: trying to do a whole bunch of parallels with how, where we are now with maybe it’s some Cold War stuff where you really, you know what the, yeah.
What Germany and Russia suffer from is that your neighbors informed on you. They really weren’t anywhere near your friends and allies. And what would society do if they found out that everybody was like that? You couldn’t trust anybody. So maybe there are some things about terrorism now because that’s some, so much of the tactics, how does a small force attack a larger force is by doing those things that make wreak havoc in society, but in an asymmetric way instead of.
Boots on the ground, troops against feel, that kind of thing. I didn’t mean to cut you off, I’m sorry. No. That’s,
Stephen: It’s, yeah, that’s just my biggest thing is what is the actual story? What are we trying to accomplish? It’s not been clear, it’s not been straightforward. And I think that’s ruining it quite a bit.
People don’t care and it, in each episode, it’s not really, there’s no tension. There’s no excitement. I’m not saying everything has to be a, an avengers battle, but
Alan: This doesn’t cliffhanger or something, but I just, maybe that’s it. I’m not seeing, I. Like the progression towards, oh, there’s gonna be a whole bunch of stuff going.
Exactly. Only an episode, eight out of 12 or whatever. And I’m like, I’m just watching it out of Marvel habit. Yeah. Say compared to like She Hulk, which was refreshing. A lot of people didn’t like it, but it sure held my interest. I thought it was great about the characters that they brought in and that they really are legal as well as, extra legal things going on.
And Daredevil and the Defenders, they had a clear villain and why they would need to have them team up. There’s been at least motivation. I just re-watched the Ironman movie ’cause I maybe in a fit of angst over the latest thing not being that good. Let’s go back to, have they always been like this?
No. The first Iron
Stephen: Man movie is fantastic. Is fantastic. Albert Downey Jr. Inhabits the character so much
Alan: of what he does and why they do it and all the supporting characters, happy Hogan and Pepper Potts and all that kind of stuff. It’s really well done and well paced, and you like can’t wait to see the final big battle and look, when’s the next movie?
I can’t wait to see the next one. I’m. Secret invasion. I’m not gonna be, oh, we’re season two,
Stephen: we’ve got a soka, but that’s Star Wars and that looks really good. Okay. I’m hoping Loki season two is really good, but
Alan: Yeah. And that’s interesting to compare and contrast. Loki did a whole bunch of unsettling stuff the minute they brought Thet v a and the whole multiverse thing in, and that’s my biggest complaint with the multiverse in comic books and maybe now in movies and TV shows, is that it made people lazy.
Nobody died. Really? It wasn’t ever oh my God, he’s dead. That’s such a tragedy. It’s we’ll just get the replacement from Earth 6 1 5 instead of 6 1 6. Sorry that he has a third eye, but we’ll get over that. You know what I mean? It’s I think that there really are cool plots for looking at divergent futures and different dimensions and that kind of stuff, and some writers, Ellis Ennis, I’m trying to think who else has worked in that way.
Gr ALD did really cool things about the what if type stuff, and that what if wasn’t, Only a speculation. It was a window into another dimension or another timeline or something like that. X-men way back, the days of future past and things like that did great work with wow, the world really went to hell.
How do we prevent that future? And then the whole, butterfly theory of what tweaks do we make here to stop it. But then you don’t know what the, all the effects of that tweak might be. And so there, there still seemed to be gravity and ma it mattered that what choices you made? I just read bear with me the, I wanna think of the exact word.
A whole dimension that was based on the, it’s like the redo dimension, the way that somebody was. Getting ahead was trying various different things and then when that didn’t work, he just retreated back to the last branch point and tried something different
Stephen: Video.
Alan: Pollination of that idea from one to the other. But it sure takes away the you made a choice and now you gotta live with it. That instead someone has, and I was always actually I’ve made a mention of this before, one of the cooler Kang plot lines of ever now that Kang has become the next big bag in the Marvel universe was there was a series of Avengers where he had bat, had battles with them and then KEG was defeated and went off to the future.
He healed up, gathered more troops, did some more research and made better weapons. And then he came back and not like the same number of years that it has taken him, he came back like five minutes after the battle. So everybody is exhausted and battered and here’s Kang all fresh and perky and menacing again.
And that thing that, that wearing you down war of attrition that a speedster can do or a time traveler can do, that’s actually a very, it’s difficult to dismiss that every time that you have a speedster. It’s like, why didn’t he just. Go and kill everyone before they can do anything about it. You
Stephen: know what I mean? That’s one of the things I always liked about Alpha Flight. You had North Star and Aurora who were the speedsters. They could go fast, but neither of them had super strength or anything like that. They were just pretty normal. But north Star would go speeding around somebody and just punch ’em a thousand times in a second.
At normal strength. Exactly.
Alan: I, there was a Spider-Man plot where it was Mr. Brownstone. I think Kevin Smith might’ve written this, where we’ve had teleporters in the past, like the vanish way early in the X-Men, where, you can go around the world, you can break, go into a bank vault, whatever else it might be.
Brownstone was like a limited power teleporter where he couldn’t even teleport his own mass. But what could he do? Teleport a bolt into your brain, teleports some heroin into your bloodstream. He just was, by appearing to be a normal guy, he could be very effective as an assassin because he could do just the thing to damage your heart, to damage your brain, to like wreck a machine.
And I thought that was interesting innovation on Kevin Smith’s part, that people can be really dangerous without having to be galactus level. You know what I mean? You don’t have to control gravity. You have to control the little bit of gravity where someone is next to a cliff and oops, a little extra gravity and they went over.
You know what I mean? I guess secret invasion. That’s why I’m not happy with that. But Loki, the way that they dealt with multiverse type stuff was still interesting. Oh my God. An alligator. Loki, maybe it’s a crocodile. I didn’t look closely enough. I, as a joke goes, it depends on whether I’ll see him later or see him in a while.
But anyway and. The W Visions thing, from what I understand, there’s now a series about Agatha Harkness. Yes. That was her kind of secret enemy, but not, there’s a whole bunch of cool stuff going on there with her actually tapping into comic books where a throwaway line in an early Fantastic four was she always appeared as like a white-haired elder woman.
And someone that saw beyond appearances said, what are you talking about? You’re like 20 years old. So that whole thing of who is she really? And how, what is, how does she appear? Does she always have a glamor on, and does she do that to set off, oh how harmless this old woman is with her pet calf, and all that kind of stuff.
Where in actuality she’s like a vital sorcerer, that is doing that to fool people. Just but there’s a kid villain and who thinks the kid’s gonna be able to punch her lights out, but they, et cetera. I’m looking forward to Loki. I wish that they did more eternals. I thought that there was interesting stuff set up.
So like we talk about, I don’t really care about the sequel to secret Eva. Maybe I will, but I know there’s some things that I was left hanging and I’m like, I want more adventures of, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah I don’t know. This whole fourth phase has not pulled me in and I know that’s, Not necessarily ’cause everything sucks.
We went through some really good stuff up to end game, right? They built it up. They, we got introduced to great characters. So now it’s let’s do that again with completely different characters. And so they were always battling that uphill battle with that. I totally get that.
And not everything has sucked, but Black Widow Shane Chi, the Eternals, I’m like, these don’t fit in with anything. And they were okay.
Alan: I, what’s interesting is I like that someone, maybe I’m one of the, the many comic book review and commentary sites, they said, It seems so small scale compared to what they had done building up to the Avengers End game.
And what I liked was, I love that they’re experimenting. You really have a big world out there of those comic books have been able, if they’ve never been the best seller, they still sold a hundred thousand copies. So there is a market for and maybe it is a little bit of diversity. There’s a market for lady superheroes, there’s a market for Asian superheroes, there’s a market for vampires.
You know what I mean? You get more well as Blade. I like the fact that they’re trying those things and I thought that some of I really like morphous. I really like moon night that you can still tell. A great story without it having to be the galactic level menace of the week, that it really can be fighting crime in Hell’s Kitchen.
And that the conflict with the Cape in is itself incredibly dramatic and important. It just isn’t fighting against that. The next, I want to conquer the universe. I will agreed, kill half the world, half the Gulf, half the universe, that kind of thing.
Stephen: Agreed. Agreed. I think, part of it could be my mood.
I might be a little beyond another decade, a superhero movie. They’ll definitely give you that. I don’t know, it’s just those three movies particularly, I watched them what. Yeah, they were okay. They didn’t pull me in oh man, that was so cool, right? Calling movie
Alan: was really good. The second Shazam movie was very derivative and I just didn’t get much out of it.
And I really, I’m such an easy sell on a comic book movie. I just, so many of these things I’ve waited all my life to see them done well, right in real life. And so then once in a while, they just don’t get what the character’s about. And I always think that’s sad. Did you not get someone who understands the archetype?
Anyway, and so while it’s just oh, they didn’t have the budget to do this well, and it seems amazing to me because every comic book movie seems to have a hundred million dollar budget. And yet you can tell where, or they didn’t pick the best story, if I was gonna pick a story to introduce that character to the world, is that exactly the moon night sequence that I would’ve chosen, or exactly the She Hulk.
And sometimes they, as choose amongst various different things and they conglomerate them together. And once in a while there’s a really good showrunner and script writer that does that. And once in a while it’s man you’re just I, yeah, you’re not, yeah, I don’t agree with your taste.
I don’t agree with the choices as to what you think are the highlights of the She Hulk rub. John Burn. You could have stuck all the way through with John Byrne and then Dan Slot. There’s certain authors that really. Captured the essence of a character and others like they did a good six or 12 issue run, but it didn’t, wasn’t world quality
Stephen: type.
And my, my one argument and I know this isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but recently the number 10 of Fast and the Furious came out and then whatever the new Mission Impossible number eight or whatever it is, and both of them are the finals for the series and they’re both won the first part of two part movies.
Both of them are like that. And honestly, I went into Fast X, I’m like, I. It is what it is. It’s a heist race car movie with over the top testosterone. It’s why I see it. I enjoy it. I thought 10 was better than nine. Nine just I was like, oh my God. This one’s not my favorite. But number 10, I liked better.
I went into Mission Impossible and I just, over the last couple weeks, I watched the last couple again and I enjoy them. Nice action, good plots and fun and all that. I thought 10 was fantastic. I saw it the other night and I’m like, this is probably one of my favorite mission impossible movies now, so
Alan: you can do it.
That’s cool that, that. It really speaks to the amazing feat of having a longstanding series like the James Bonds or Dr. Who, or things that have been around for decades, multiple generations, multiple actors inhabiting the role in multiple, show and stuff like that. Then, and talk about it in eras now, for Dr.
Who it’s like are you that they really do have different sensibilities, complexions as to who they brought in that was the overall director. Showrunner is a better way to put it, of all those kinds of things. And sometimes there are low points, but then sometimes they come roaring back with a different, maybe better doctor or a different right.
Different way to treat the dex or whatever else it might be. So I, that’s another one of those things that it Mission Impossible, I guess is good. I think that out of those, let’s say 10 movies, like Seven out of the 10 are as good as the next a hundred movies that are out currently. Yeah. It’s not like that you start comparing between movies in that series, but you shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that like maybe Star Wars, same thing.
There have been good and not so good Star Wars movies, but in the overall, and they’re better than 90% of the crap that’s out there. Sturgeon’s law, 90% of everything is crap. And I have unfortunately, whatever that 11 o’clock, Hey, I’m gonna do a little social media, maybe play some hearts online. I’m gonna watch some movie.
And I’ve watched some really good unexpected delights. Like we just found deadlock that I mentioned. Really a fun series. Tasmanian, I never watched Tasmanian TV before, but I’ve also. How many not only have I sat through multiple things, but there’s any number of movies that in the first 15 minutes it’s this is not worth my time.
It’s not just my interest. I don’t like the characters. It’s not making sense already. You know what I mean? I just, there’s been all kinds of things like, I don’t know. So if it’s not a hundred million dollars movie they caught, they put $20 million into making this and it’s crap what the hell?
I dunno.
Stephen: So tell me about deadlock, because you mentioned it, but we didn’t really get a chance to talk about what service is it on?
Alan: Let’s see. I think Amazon Prime. Okay. Amazon Prime or Netflix. They are interchangeable because it’s got such a world of stuff out there.
Stephen: Yeah. They both do.
They’re getting lots of global stuff that you wouldn’t see. Exactly. And I saw something the other day on, was it maybe Amazon where it was a show, but they offered it in five languages versions. And I’m like, wow.
Alan: See, I really will enjoy that more because there’s been There’s been any number of things.
For instance, I know that Norway, Sweden, and probably Norway does like great police procedurals, but if it’s been translated, then I can still give it my partial attention while I’m doing other things. Folding laundry or doing my computer thing, right? Subtitles like Squid game, I really have to watch it to see what’s going on and there’s not many things I must admit besides going to a theater that I give my undivided attention and I don’t think it’s, ’cause I’m, Mr doesn’t pay attention.
It just is, most things don’t require your full brain power, who know what’s going on. If they really did that, that this is a cool thing that they’ve done in English as well as, Spanish and Farsi and Swedish and whatever else it might be. Ta So deadlock is said in Tasmania and so it’s got, I love places where the locale is one of the characters, if you will.
It really has. They show. Cool views of it’s an island with some mountains on it. And so there’s automatically to go from place to place, you’re immediately out of town. There’s not big cities on Tasmania, and especially, this is not at least, I’m trying to think of what the capital is.
Hobart maybe sorry for all of our Australian and Tasmanian and new Zealander people, if I’ve totally mixed up because I’m just a stupid westerner. They the, it’s got a small town feel because there really is, this is the person that owns the bar. This is the person that fixes cars, whatever else it might be.
There’s a little bit of intrigue because even in small towns, you get people falling in and out of love, people getting bent outta shape about being jolted or et cetera. There’s the. Let’s call her the sheriff. I think she’s really the police constable, the chief constable with place. But she’s got cool people working for her that each, they’re not hard-boiled New York detectives, this woman’s getting ready to be married and even though she’s very smart, she is too small and pretty to not be dismissed by the bluff, asshole guys on the show.
Of course, then that matters. You know what I mean? That they shouldn’t have dismissed her, how confident she’s gonna prove to be. And it, of course, it’s, they find out that, okay, somebody’s found dead on a beach and okay, so first you have to figure out, it looks not like a no. He drowned tragedy that he’s actually kinda like.
Posed. And so immediately dinging, ding, dinging, everybody has seen tv. That’s a serial killer recreating something. And of course the person sent down from Darwin is they want to fix this little thing in this little town and then go home and they don’t want it to be declared a serial killer. ’cause now it’s a real investigation.
So there’s a certain conflict and dynamic between the big city bluff lady detective, as well as the Lady constable. And it’s funny to have it screaming from today’s headlines. There’s a big conflict in this little town deadlock where oh no, too many lesbians are there now. Like that somehow because the lesbian owns the art gallery and the donut store and oh no, the chief of police that all the guys that want to be their traditional guy, I’m in charge thing.
They’re not. Maybe they’re not quite outnumbered, but they just can’t stand that I. This thing isn’t apparent part of life instead of, keep that to yourself. Don’t ask, don’t tell type stuff. So they play very good with the social conflicts that we’re going through about acceptance of there’s no quality that you can attribute to a lesbian.
That is how you want to insult them. And yet they can’t stop themselves from doing that. And and as you might imagine, some of the guys are the asshole stereotype males that can’t stand that other guys are, they’re just confused. And they’re trying to figure out what, how do I operate in this new world where you you want to go up to somebody in the bar and say, Hey, I’m interested.
And then have them not only say, not you, but not your entire gender, that kind of thing. And that it isn’t that gay and or lesbian are I. Only attracted to their kind. There are bisexual people. There are, so there’s a, and it’s funny, that’s not the main thing of it, but they definitely don’t shy away from in a small town if that was an obvious factor.
So it’s very smart. Like any good procedural and murder ministry about how they keep on putting each week it’s, oh, it must be that guy. It must be that gal. And then of course, you didn’t know all the information and the show was good at not hiding it from you. It follows the investigation. So you’re right with them when they find out, oh, they got an alibi, or, no, they couldn’t do that.
It’s very good about keeping you guessing till the very, very end. And I like that. We’ve often talked about by episode two, if you can say that’s the guy, then it’s like seeing it play out. But it’s not a cool, clever experience. And this one really was good. And in the overall it’s got a great sense of humor, while it’s doing it, it’s not just ever building tension and oh my God, this poor small town is being meed.
It’s like everybody is treating it like a lark that whenever there’s sometimes when there’s a new body discover what was wrong with him this time? They you have to, out of dark humor, cope with the potential of something terrible going on. You don’t want to think your neighbor’s the killer.
You don’t wanna think that. Yeah. Yeah. You wanna think you might be next. So it really does capture a lot of like how human beings cope with, even in the middle of this the football game has to go on football, meaning real football, soccer the village festival. The mayor’s determined to have it go on even though some of the things that are like the bodies keep being discovered in just the wrong places to have a happy festival.
And I just, I’m gushing about it because it’s so nice to find something that kept Colleen and I both of our interests and we both really liked it. We’re fooled to the end. We’re looking forward to the next episode. So all the things that we just. Talked about how a secret invasion isn’t, boy, by the way, dead law, pronunciation. High recommendation.
Stephen: Nice.
Back with murder she wrote with Jessica Fletcher. It’s you wait for that one character to go, Jessica, we’re on a small island and we get tons of dead bodies ever since you’ve been around. Maybe we need to kick you off this island. Maybe it’s you. Exactly.
Alan: That’s been put forward in comic.
You know that the reason there’s so many crazy bat Gotham City villains is because Batman inspires insanity. Yeah. We’re like he caught the Joker, but I could commit my crimes and not get caught. Or I could be more brutal than Killer Crock. And you mean that it they have regularly, that’s a big part.
Frank Miller had that very much in the dark night returns that they’re showing there’s a real love hate, but like bonded relationship between Batman and the Joker. The Joker calling Batman Darling because he wouldn’t exist without him, et cetera, et cetera.
Stephen: And you got the damage incorporated, which they showed a bit in Spider-Man.
It’s what about the aftermath of all this battle, trillions of dollars and who’s cleaning that up and the tech and that caused problems with Spider-Man and Vulture and stuff. So I’m glad they throw that stuff in a little bit. Makes it, easier rather than just everything’s superpower battle boom.
Alan: In fact, again, because I’m just having to deal with the multiverse, is the, into the Spider Verse movie, the second verse and the second one, both were really good in terms of, they, they did have all the cool variants on what Spiderman might be in various different timelines and generating, and then having some of them meet.
Wasn’t that a choice,
Stephen: yeah, a delight
Alan: to have the various different Spiderman, like Gar, It was just the coolest thing to, like each of these guys has inhabited the role and did a good job, and that they had the lack of ego to not say, I’m not gonna deal with my successor. He took my job that instead they were happy to still be part of the overarching Marvel universe and they knew that the fans would be delighted by those guys interact.
Yep.
Stephen: The story itself is still a good story. And you got Miles’s development. Yeah. Some people could argue that, oh, I didn’t like that they kept miles out of it, or, oh, this, but the fact that some people liked it and some didn’t shows, it’s a good story that it, that not everybody just went.
Alan: I’ll tell you one of the things I, that I’m really excited about, I know we’re keeping track of time. Yep. The authority, one of my favorite planetary in the authority for like the nineties, were such the best comic books going on that really looked at s heroics and galactic let’s say world level conflicts in a way that really lets you, if you were really a superpowered guy, you wouldn’t just wait for a criminal to commit a crime.
You might go take care of things before they happen. Kill the dictator. You know what I mean? And make it so that he stops rampaging in his country cure diseases, et cetera, et cetera. Give new technology to the world that’s gonna make the world better. So each of them dealt with that in their own way.
Much more the authority than that. But as you might imagine, the authority is wow. Here’s some guys they’re just. Heroes, who are they to tell us what to do, even though they are indeed a sum God that absorb energy from the and so the moneyed interests might say, I don’t want you to expose me and the ca the cart that I’ve been running for a long time making scions of dollars I could with my money.
Buy all kinds of maybe ways to kill you, maybe ways to menace you, maybe, that kind of thing. I control
Stephen: more than you realize. Exactly.
Alan: And so that’s being made into a movie and I’m really looking forward to seeing, ’cause there were multiple series again wor Out. No. Yes. I think it was Warren Ellis.
I, it’s funny. They’re really, they really do both great work, but I don’t always remember who did who. So Warren Ellis wrote some stuff and Garth Ennis wrote preacher, but I, and I’m thinking it’s Warren Ellis that did Authority and Planetary. And the fact that he could maintain those series going on for a while.
And they had great artists at Frank quietly. They had One of my favorite Brian Hitch anyway, that we’ll see what they do with those as movies. And they’re big scale, you know what I mean? They’re gonna have to be a lot of money going into it. And authority is not really part of the Trinity that each company.
It’s not Superman, Batman, wonder Woman. It’s not Spider-Man Ironman, they’re a relatively lesser known type thing, but I’m hoping that they give the treatment of Watchmen where the story itself is really good. And if you tell it it’ll talk about like the trials and tribulations of heroes in a way that it’s really cool to humanize them and also have it be not only are they human, but they, and they really have powers, but they might have some flaws and what goes on because of that?
Do they get. Tired. Do they get embittered? Do they get right? Yeah. Are they so sure of themselves that they make mistakes out of hubris? I’m looking forward to seeing what’s done there. So authority let’s see that turn out.
Stephen: So this may be off of your radar, but there’s a new teen teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie coming out.
Alan: I did saw the preview at the last
Stephen: time we Okay. And Colin’s been super excited. So I watched the trailer and talked to him and I’m getting excited for it. And I’m not a big Turtles guy, but it’s c g i it’s computer graphics, but done in a claymation style. It’s done by step. That’s exactly what I was noticing
Alan: too, is that it’s not cartoony and it’s not realistic.
Yeah, it’s
Stephen: some combination. Exactly. Yeah. And Seth Rogan’s in charge of it. Who, okay. Super nerd. And the, just some of the voices like Jackie Chan is splinter and I think the personalities of the kids look real. So I’m excited about that movie coming up. So we’ll see.
Alan: I think teenage Wi Turtles is single-handedly responsible for kids knowing Raphael Michel, Angelo Donatello, and Leonardo like absolutely.
That otherwise they don’t fade into obscurity, but they got a whole nother life besides, oh, they did good art too.
Stephen: Absolutely. Yeah. So of course I, you always wonder about mutant and if one of them was Picasso, like having two eyes on the side of his head, or That’s
Alan: true. They could go with the artist being part of it.
In fact, this is funny, I keep intending to do this. There are people that absolutely know what color I band goes with what character. And I have never internalized
Stephen: that. So Rafael is red, Leo is.
I forget the other two, which who’s who,
Alan: because you know that someday at pub quiz or at some mens and culture quest, they’re gonna ask that and I wanna be able to go bam. I got ’em all. So I’m gonna have to internalize that one of these days.
Stephen: Alright, I do have to get running. I got something coming up in just
Alan: a few yeah.
Always a pleasure. I, it’s funny we’re catching up on top topics that we had before, but there’s cool things coming up that not only are movies coming out and TV shows going on, but we’ll talk about latest book series and all of our geek things. Yes. We can talk about revisiting the big outline, but it almost seems to be running on its own now.
Yeah. That there’s enough current and only I keep intending to tell you about crossword puzzles. I’m not sure if as big a fan as I am, but I am continually astounded. Crossword puzzles have been around for a hundred years and the fact that someone can still do something new, I. In that 15 square medium, come up with a cool new theme arrangement.
It just, it’s a monument to human ingenuity that they can do something to surprise you in something that should have been just rote after a while. No, they’re still so clever. I,
Stephen: we’ll talk about that. Alright man. I’ll talk to you later.
Alan: Take care. Have fun, Steven. Okay. Bye-Bye.
