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Overview
We discuss what we’re going to discuss on the podcast, but we don’t talk about our backgrounds. And poof – we get similar backgrounds. It’s been kind of fall like – thought I hear it’s going to get much hotter.
Have you seen the Gran Turismo movie? Stephen has and loved it. If you’re a gamer, you should go see it.
And we both loved the Blue Beetle movie. Fun superhero times.
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Transcript
Stephen: Nice choice of background.
Alan: Absolutely. Grapevines, think alike. It’s really, just to totally derail the list of what I had just said. We should talk about, I just wrote a post on Facebook that was about, whatever the secret weather scientists that are controlling the whole shooting match, they must live here in Cleveland area, northeast Ohio, because while all the rest of the North American continent and maybe the world is having name it, droughts and floods and typhoons and hurricanes and tornado alley and whatever else, we’ve had amazingly beautiful weather for most of the summer.
Yeah I remember times when we like sealed the house up for a month at a time with the AC and instead, We, we’ve had the AC on to sleep in our bedroom maybe I don’t know, half a dozen, 10 times in the course of the summer we’ve been out walking in the metro parks. We just, and in the winter it just wasn’t that severe.
I’ve had years where I piled so much snow up against our fence that I was worried that I’m gonna be able to get my car between the fence and the house. And instead, for whatever reason, we’ve just got this eye of the hurricane, beautiful temperate with just enough rain to keep things growing and. I don’t know.
We’re really doing well compared to how Canada’s burning and
Stephen: wow. You say that now. And today is beautiful. I’ve walked out several times, walked the dog, and I’m just like, man, this is like my perfect day. It’s just on the edge of getting to be autumn. I can tell it’s darker in the morning.
It gets darker quicker at night, exactly. It’s but they’re saying it’s gonna hit nineties over the weekend, so
Alan: we’re gonna get Indian summer or whatever early, and usually that’s October where you get that last burst of warmth before you really Winter clamps now and stuff. I’m okay with having fall be like, how about a couple months instead of just one week where you go from, Shorts to jacket weather.
How
Stephen: about just this is Ohio, so very often, you could wake up with snow in the morning and then you gotta time it to get that 23 minutes of fall and then it’s or spring or something, and then boom, it’s 90 and it’s, summer, I mean it.
Alan: Exactly. I’ll tell you, again, always looking for the geek aspect.
One of the wonderful things about, and we’ve talked about this a little bit before, weather forecasting is amazing nowadays. You really can watch in real time radar things about what’s coming in. You can judge if the route you’re going to take is gonna be covered by the rain cloud or can you skirt it.
And especially what I’ve loved is. I’m becoming like the world champion with getting my lawn mow just before the rain hits, I see the rain is supposed to hit at one or two in the afternoon, and I don’t plan it this way. I’m not like the king of procrastinators, but it’s nice to know that I can start and I’m not gonna get caught and just, curse the sky and stuff like that.
Any number of times I’ve got the thing done and then like immediately after the rain it washes away some of the grass clippings, it revives the lawn. I’ve, if there’s a thing about, just in time inventory for how one does lawn maintenance, I’ve really half a dozen times this summer, done it just in time or got out there and trim bushes or whatever else it might be.
So I don’t need to be perfectly predictable. It just has been really handy to be able to get like down to the couple hour range instead of day by day what it’s gonna be.
Stephen: My mower spent the first part of the summer down two different causes. I got it back and literally before I made one pass, I.
I got it caught and it ripped part of the wires out and it was a mess. And it was down for a while again. But I love, I have talked about this before. I grew up with a Cub cadet, little riding mower, okay. Because you have
Alan: property, you had acres and I only have a postage stamp,
Stephen: You know what I mean? It would take hours like all Saturday because we got so many trees and bushes and rocks and hills and, it’s go around and those things aren’t the tightest turns, the you gotta go and back up and move and all sorts of stuff. Man, I’ll say again. I love my zero turn.
It, it cuts so much down in time and extra mowing and good for you. That’s
Alan: honestly for a big property. When you, we were just at we went to a funeral service this morning, as I mentioned. That’s why we had to delay a little bit and their grounds are immaculate. But you can see the part of the reason they are is because they’ve got the new mowers that really do the zero turn thing and they just seem to be precise in their handling.
And they I don’t know, however they are doing, applying the right stuff to their lawn and the herbicide and so that it’s just almost like putting green perfect stuff. And I know that when Nick and Kelly talk about what they do for their farm, they really get they send in soil samples to the American Farm Bureau or whoever does that kind of analysis and.
They are not super computerized, but I know that a lot of the big farms really, they have it, that it goes along and it’s got like a, a monitor that’s checking the ground and it spritz and it gets exactly the weed that it wants to kill. It’s not wholesale, tear it all up. It’s cool how they’ve made it so that you can really maximize the yield and manage, all of the, every process, the seeding, the weeding the reaping, all that kind of stuff really seems to be another cool thing that they’ve been able to computerize or at least so much assist human beings.
They do a whole bunch of cool stuff with there are big enough place but individual so that the developers of like new hybrids for corn, for all the different kinds of vegetables they get haha, seeded with those prototypes. That’s cool. And it’s cool to be like there’s real practical work in genetics that’s being done to say this corn is sweeter than ever harder than ever.
It grows in nice straight rows. It’s not snaggle tooth Indian corn and every year. And I just love the fact not to be weird, hey, for all those who really don’t believe, haha, and the whole thing of evolution every day in every way, genetics and our understanding of how that stuff works, makes it that we increase our crop yields.
We make it so that we can include iodine in golden rice and save a billion people doing it. We put iodine in the salt, we put fluoride in the water. I’m going all over. But just that fact that they really have the science of hybridization and. I know that there was, let’s say 20, 25 years ago, they started talking about Ono Franken food and how they were doing genetic manipulation to get this stuff.
And in some cases there were one or two really highly publicized things where we really don’t know what we’re doing and we don’t always know the laws of unintended consequences. So we had the neo OIDs that were like an insecticide that was being used, but it was also oh, no. Killing all the monarch butterflies or killing valuable species
Stephen: as well.
Or even D T Clear back in the seventies. Oh,
Alan: exactly. Go back to virtual Carson. Her Silent Spring is an incredibly important book because it showed how, we, this is really good, d T is helping us in this way, but. All the eagle eggshells are too fragile and we’re killing the eagles.
You go back to Agent Orange, which they use as the big Def Foley in the Vietnam War, where you find out that people get permanent effects from having breathed that in that they didn’t just clear a path for the war to continue. It damaged people permanently. So there’s science that has to be done about not only developing it, but make sure that you test it in every environment and stuff like that.
Having said that you don’t have one bad case and then say No, we’re abandoning it entirely. Science is about continual research and experimentation and fining
Stephen: getting back on path and readjusting. Yeah. Get back on the path and people that say you said that your theory was this and it’s not so science must be wrong.
No, that’s how theories work. That’s what they’re for. We think it’s go do this. Exactly. It didn’t, it did this instead. Here’s our new data. Here’s our new theory, that’s how it works. And along with that, what really what makes me wanna hit people with baseball bats is when they say stuff like, yeah, wells or This technology is just ruining our country and it’s ruining this and I hate this and it’s, and blah, blah blah and blah, blah.
It’s okay we’ll get rid of it. And then man, prices are too high in the supermarket. That’s ’cause we got rid of all the tech and science that took care of the low prices. So folks, you can’t have both. You can’t have this abundant food supply with minimal people farming it and low prices all at the same time without something.
Alan: There’s a way back, like maybe at the start of social media
Stephen: There was a social media didn’t used to exist.
Alan: No. There, there was a time when we actually went out and made friends.
Stephen: It was called a campfire.
Alan: Someone put out a book called Free Perfect. In Now. It was pretty much, you can have two or three.
You know what I mean? That it you, that all the ways in which we refine and that you can’t, it, it is especially irritating to me when people are like, They gave a miracle, but they didn’t like that miracle. They didn’t like exactly that miracle. So they’re willing to say, abandon it instead of can we tweak the miracle?
Can we first acknowledge that we just cured a disease that was incurable? Before that we increased crop? Increased crop yield, not by 1%, but like by 50% that the Malthusian nightmare of us having a bigger population than the carrying capacity of the planet. We’ll never have enough food. That’s been put off again and again by the fact that we’ve done such wonderful science with.
That things are they yield more or they resist the drought or other conditions more. They resist bugs and stuff like that, so things that have built in herbicide and indeed we keep finding out that there might be some downsides to that. Roundup isn’t miracle stuff. It really does have some effects, but the whole point is you keep, you don’t abandon.
You learn more and then you better and over the course of time. So the fact, like you said, if science has been wrong once, You know what? It’s probably gonna be wrong a thousand more times, but it’s gonna be right 10,000 more times. And our life nowadays would not exist without all that we learn and continue to improve
Stephen: upon it.
It science isn’t, it’s not mistakes, it’s not things, it’s because we’re still learning and things change. And it’s a very vibrant world out there. You want a mistake. Sticky notes are a mistake. They’re the exact opposite of what the guy wanted.
Alan: I wanna say a fortuitous accident or whatever.
Stephen: Yes. There you go. That sounds like a bad band. Exactly. I uhit, that sounds like a band I’ve been in. You mentioned the farming and we talked the mowing, so it makes me laugh. We’re talking tech farming, mowing, because there are some really great video game simulators of both farming and mowing that you can play.
I’ve played both and it, they’re really good simulators to try and, get you into it. Yeah, I’ve never done that.
Alan: I’ve done city building. Yeah. I’ve played sim city in the various different, various, yeah. But I’ve never done managing a farm or managing an amusement park somehow. I don’t know.
Those simulations don’t appeal to me as much as the full fantasy thing of I’m going underground to kill creatures and collect treasure. You know what mean? That kind of thing. So there,
Stephen: there’s different farming ones. So I, just racing games, which is interesting ’cause I wanna talk about the Grand Remo movie, but like racing games, you’ve got your cart racers, which are just loads of fun, simple, easy for anyone to play, right?
Then you have the arcade racers, which have more physics in ’em, but they’re really about, let’s see how fast and crazy we can go. Then you got like the sim racers, which are down to the detail physics. Extreme. This is the
Alan: real dashboard. This is
Stephen: the realest. Exactly. Exactly. And that’s what you get with some of these sims also you’ve got these farming sims, which is our cute little people, and you plant something and boom, it grows.
You got these other ones that are, you have to get the right tractor with the right size size spreader to put down the seeds, and you gotta get the right seeds with the right, like you said, soil moisture. You gotta send the soil into the get analyze. They have that in some of these games, that type of thing.
Exactly. So you have the wide range for everybody.
Alan: Yeah. You know what, we haven’t, I don’t think, talked about this before. When you look at the progress in PCs, so much of it has not been based on I need a faster spreadsheet so that I can do my investments better. It’s been based on, I want my games to be more realistic.
I want my, that pushes it to be better. Like I, from what I I think, I don’t think I read this in the book. Maybe it was an article in Wired Magazine or something like that, that five years worth of betterment on the I B M PC and clones was based on making flight simulator Microsoft Flight Simulator work better.
Yeah. And that, it wasn’t about Lotus 1, 2 3 and then Excel. It wasn’t databases and the big real world important things. It was people that really were like, wow, we’re so close. If we can just get the physics engine to do this more correctly, if we decrease the lag time, if we can make, like we said, that dashboard really look.
White, just perfect and respond in real time like we wanted to and that kind of thing. I think that it, and I should say this, it’s not only games. From what I understand, porn had a lot to do with how we got better and better compressor, decompressors, all the codes that we make use of, right?
It was so that you could deliver good looking content no matter what connection you had, whether it was dial up and then, the old days of cable and. Early wifi, all that kind of stuff. It was So you’d get away from pixelated stuff to, wow, that really looks good. That looks
Stephen: intoxicatingly good.
The title of this episode’s gonna be about porn. But that’s funny you say that. ’cause people they ask all the time, and I’ve tried to explain this to people in today’s world, I’m like, there is not a computer out on the shelf that can’t do what you wanna do. It’s that simple. They are so powerful and I, and when people say I want the most powerful, I want, I’m like, I can appreciate that you buy good power now.
You don’t have to replace it in two years. They want, I want, I’m like, then go to the store and tell ’em you want a gaming rig? I don’t wanna play games. I don’t care if you don’t wanna play games. Those are the most powerful computers
Alan: they’ve optimized all that you care about in terms of video quality and stuff like that.
Yeah, that’s right. I know, funny, we get once in a while kinda oh, recording my day. But one of the joy of being alive in the course of these last let’s say 30 years has been when I got outta school in 83, so it’s 40 years ago. I missed Plato terribly ’cause it could do so many things before the rest of the world could.
But to be alive during those 40 years and to find out how Apple and I b m and Microsoft and Oracle and all different kinds of companies and technologies have just continually made the world a better place. That it was, you had big iron for the mainframes to be able to run big insurance companies and banks and things that needed it.
But you started to have, wow, this athletic shoe store can have a PC running its system. It’s no longer just a till, just a cash register and stuff like that. And all the ways in which once you had those individual things, then you started to do networking and you found out that you really could have, let’s see, what is it?
Mrs. Fields, cookies. One of the secrets to its success was that it had good communications between the stores and they could manage like in near real time what they were gonna do to order for the next day, that they noticed patterns in Tuesday versus Thursday kind of things. And just every time that we have increased the technology, People talk about it all as being about, oh no, I’m, I’m overloaded.
I don’t like computers. But in so many ways it has done things with, you name it, personnel management, inventory management, the quality of products. Instead of having people looking at an assembly line and removing things, you have a little sensor that looks for the charts, the little, potato chips that are too brown or green or whatever else it might be.
And has a, I think I saw this on one of those, connections type programs where it shows you how are crayons really made, how are potato chips really made? It has this monitor and it has a little puff. Of air and it doesn’t look it goes and it blows it off the conveyor belt. And so like the quality control goes up and up just because somebody invented a monitor.
That little camera that was able to see that is miscolored or misshapen or whatever else it might be. So all the automation, and it might have been, oh no, we lost the job. But not to be weird. How good a job was it that you were the potato chip quality
Stephen: control person? You know what I mean? So much.
Alan: There’s creative work to be done.
There’s. More human work to be done. If a machine can do your job for you, it’s not that you’re useless, it’s that you’ve been doing so much less than what you’re worth. And now we finally found a way to offload that onto something that never, tires, never loses. It’s attention.
Stephen: You know what I mean?
Yeah. All this, and you’ve heard my, you’ve heard my talk and I always push back on that. I’m like I don’t accept the argument, oh, we’re losing jobs folks. This isn’t like suddenly something in tech has taken over jobs and those jobs go away. It is not new. It is literally hundreds of years old. I, and I ask people this to, to make my point.
I get stupid. I’m like, so did you pay your tithing This. A month to pay for the knighthood to protect your town? No, because technology in warfare got rid of knights and we don’t complain about that. Do you pick up your phone and say, Hey, operator, connect me to Alan? No. We got rid of operators because tech improved it.
And you don’t complain about that. Did you stop at the blacksmith on your horse on the way over here today? No you didn’t because we got rid of blacksmiths with cars. Tech replaced it. You’re not complaining about that. I’m it’s like I don’t, I tell people, I’m not even going to listen to the argument that, oh, we’re losing jobs because of tech.
It’s always happened. It always will. And numbers show. It always creates more jobs than there were before The tech.
Alan: That’s right. As the, it’s grown from 2 billion to 7 billion people. It’s not like 5 billion people are sitting around idle. It’s that the kinds of things they do and can do have, hopefully I increased and improved in so many different ways.
Colleen and I were just talking about this, we’re both in our sixties now and we’re retired, and it used to be that when you were retired, you were like, used up, you, your knuckles were all wrecked because you had done something for so long that you developed your arthritis and your you had muscle things.
You were a, a tough job really wore on you. And nowadays, by us being both like kind of white collar people, We are able to still do the walking that we want to do the hiking. We’re still we still have all of our senses that we’re not, our eyes are burnt out or that, I can’t breathe well because, oh no, I was breathing in some terrible, black lung disease level stuff, right?
So it, all those things are, because we applied the technology to how do we keep people safer, not just crush them and get more productivity out of them, but maybe make it a more humane atmosphere. Make it a more a safer thing. So all the, one of the things that weirds me out as a technology a technologist, is to see the people that are, have been like stripping out OSHA requirements and monitoring and things that keep people safe.
It’s wow, that’s, that is the dark side of tech. We don’t need Simon Lagree. We don’t need people that are just gonna do this until you drop dead. We need the fact that technology really does improve people’s lives and in ways that are. If you have it and you don’t use it, it’s as bad as if you don’t have it at all.
And that’s a crappy world. There’s a famous Mark Twain quote right about the people who don’t read are as bad as the people who can’t read or as bad off as the people who can’t read. Why would you have this and not make use of this wonderful thing? Because you really care about ringing every last scent out of a situation.
Instead of saying, what’s the right ratio here? What’s the right risk versus reward?
Stephen: And human versus machine. I guarantee if some of these people complaining, if their husband, spouse kid or parent had a medical emergency, had a heart attack, had a stroke, had was in a car wreck, that they would be very grateful for all the tech that is going to save that person’s life right now.
I guarantee that they wouldn’t complain about, but they want, I just, we’ve talked about it before. People are irritating.
Alan: I know. I just saw this wonderful meme of someone saying All technology is a, is from the devil, and you can’t change my mind. And the reply to that of course was, you’re literally writing this on the internet, right?
You know what I mean? And just that level of, so I, and the way I phrased it was, so here’s two statements, one of which is totally false and one of which is totally true. Then indeed it isn’t from the devil. And indeed nothing’s gonna change your mind if you’ve already, like in the face of all of this wonder, you’re gonna retreat to the dark ages the craziness that says progress is somehow flawed or evil
Stephen: instead of a joy.
And the major point you’re gonna use, what you say is hilarious.
Alan: Let’s see. So let’s segue that into grand charisma. Oh my. It’s interesting that we have this thing nowadays of some things start off as books, then movies, then video games, then plays. Grand Charisma was a very successful video game series, right?
Yes.
Stephen: So what do you know about the movie
Alan: O Only so I saw previews in the movie theater, about a young man who by being trained on a simulator, since we talked about that earlier Yes. Is now so good that one of the leading racing teams said, bring that kid in. Yes. Is that
Stephen: the premise? Okay. I asked that because it’s.
The video game that it comes from, and we’ve had a lot of video game movies. Mario just came out and was very successful. We’ve had other less successful video games in the past, video game movies and a racing movie. Need For Speed came out several years ago and eh it could have been better, let’s just say.
Okay. I’m just making that point because this is not like a story version of the video game. That’s not what this is at all. Okay. So it, and I absolutely loved this movie. I am probably going to go see it again and the minute it comes out, I’m buying it and told the teachers at Biomed that are the coaches at the eSports team, I said, you really should see the movie and get the kids to see it, even though there’s some swearing in it.
Get permission. These are high schoolers. Oh no. Yeah. All
Alan: this good stuff,
Stephen: but that’ll invalidate it. Yeah, I said, you really should watch this movie because it’s exactly what you just said. It was Nissan had this. This one guy, marketing guy had an id. He’s look, the new generation of drivers is not buying cars because they’re like, what do I care?
I don’t want the money. I don’t wanna spend the money. I’ll get an Uber I’ll walk. They don’t want cars. That’s right. I live in
Alan: an urban area specifically so I don’t have to have a car. Yeah. And a suburb and a drive. Okay. Commute.
Stephen: And he said they Aren’t dreaming of the open road, like past generations.
And that is something we’ve gotta sell to them, which is extremely great marketing. You’re not selling a car, you’re selling that open road dream. It’s marketing the
Alan: Springsteen thing, yes. Born to run. Exactly. So even though that’s got a dark message. But anyway,
Stephen: They, I, he identified grand Remo players saying that this is the most realistic simulator out there on consoles.
Yes, I know Some of these mu people probably have million dollar simulators, where if you’re buckled in, you cannot tell the difference from a real car. And the, but this is like for mortals,
Alan: you can buy this.
Stephen: Woke the management up that, hey, Let me just tell you, some of these kids have put in thousands of hours on these cars. They know these cars and tracks very well. Some of these kids are getting times better than the real drivers that he said, we’re going to take the top drivers. Put him in a real academy and train him how to drive a real car and sponsor the top winner as a real race car driver.
And everybody thought he was crazy. Of course. It wouldn’t be a movie if this guy wasn’t crazy. How many of those have we had throughout the eighties? Because all
Alan: the existing drivers have to poo P. There’s no way. Without the practical experience and the field of the car and all the work I’ve played exactly.
We can possibly be my equal. And then we find out maybe yes.
Stephen: Exactly, but before we get to that point, ’cause that’s what’s gonna happen. It’d be the worst movie in the world if you’re like, it all failed and the kid died. See ya. You know
Alan: exactly. What an interesting experiment ending
Stephen: your day.
Okay. So what really got me excited about the movie, ’cause I’ve talked about the eSports a lot and I’m doing work with kids and I’m actually working with going to be working with the local eSports team a little bit. I’m not saying I’m gonna coach or anything, but I’m really excited about that because I think this is an area for kids that they can see that hope in the future.
That we have a lot of kids that say what do I can’t get a job without some training. I can’t get the training without getting a job. And, there’s a lot of depression in that with that. Video games is something they all understand. They’ve all done, and they can see some hope with it.
They can see, they can make video games, they can do this so that this movie explores those to a small degree. I really liked that. And the director was the same guy that did district nine if you’re interested. Okay. And I really liked how he delved into. The culture and the viewpoints of video games from different people.
It wasn’t just, all is good and all that. The kid’s dad didn’t get it and this cracked me up. He’s holding a soccer ball and he tells his kid, he’s what do you messing with those stupid kids games for? Come out and kick the ball around. This is a real career. What, wait a say? Soccer has not been a,
Alan: in a million people that make it up through the ranks
Stephen: of soccer.
That’s the attitude. And how long? Has soccer even been a career choice? It’s not like it’s been thousands of years.
Alan: It’s, that’s right. It’s recent, especially here in the United States, it’s like still trying to become a real legitimate sport.
Stephen: But this was in, in England they’re much more into football there footy.
Exactly. Okay. So I just, I love that they did that and they had multiple people with multiple viewpoints and the things that they went through to get this kid. But man, this kid had a rig set up in his room that was like, I’d I wanna drive that. Obviously they go through all the trials and tribulations and the ups and downs and the painful stuff, and he actually does race, and he is still a racer to this day.
He has raced I think it said 111 different races at the time of the movie. Better yet, and this. Max absolutely made my, the movie for me was the real race car kid guy, he’s older now. He was his own stunt double for the movie. That’s pretty cool that just sold me on it. Totally. My interest
Alan: was not high for this because honestly, I’m not a big video game player.
I tend to be like computer game player. But having said that, that really is, that’s the cool story. Yes.
I’m trying to think when I, a while back, a long time ago, actually now, at one point I was being asked to work on simulation stuff because I had done some stuff that related to it, let’s put it that way. And the people that were mostly doing it were not yet flight simulator, if you will, for Microsoft or the 49 95 console.
It was the cost of failure is high for piloting a plane for doing things in the army, that you can’t wreck the unit and you can’t wreck yourself. And so they had simulations that really were how do you do house to house combat in the Army and that everybody went in and that VR type stuff, where we’re seeing now finally that maybe we’re gonna have Google glasses or Apple goggles or whatever else it might be.
They have had versions of that for a long time that were meant to time in the army. Like a combat experience. Or the racing. Or the flying or whatever. Yeah. And so I. What I had done back in way back in college was I had worked with display devices and with like how we can tune things to human beings.
So that always you’re doing a simulation, when I look at the screen way back when it was, wow, I can actually see the raster going, if you just turn sideways and you can see this, it’s because we’re really at the limits of what human beings can do to get that the real world looks like.
It’s that, that the com the screen world looks solid, like the real world does, but even then you start to learn about how people do perceive and we don’t stare and it exactly right. We cade when we change our point of view that we take samples. And so all of that interesting science about what are the sampling rates that you need to do, what are, what’s the frames per second?
What’s the, how do you keep making it so that people, it’ll be good enough. They won’t notice that as you move through a dungeon. You don’t have to have everything be perfectly realized that what’s right within your touching distance, if you will, that has to be that the moss looks right on the wall and as you look down the hall, your natural site like tends to fade because you don’t have eagle eyes all the way at 80 yards, 40 yards, 20 yards, whatever else it might be, and the math behind.
How do you simulate all of that so that the world has continuity, that as you move, as you change your point of view, it still maintains that you don’t get like, Artifacting, right? And effects that take you out of the simulation, if you will. And I loved understanding that you really have to know how eyes work.
You really have to know how people’s ability to concentrate and the ability to multitask, and especially when you get away from just eyes. But you start to do, we are continually in our environment environ getting oral signals, the audio type stuff. And that some of the really good scary games early on were great at simulating.
I hear a noise, but I’m not sure what it is and it, like it was here, but it seems to move closer to me. And your natural thing is to get your adrenaline going a little bit because you’re getting ready for fight or flight, something is coming, but you don’t know what. And I just loved learning all about that.
So that’s what led me into doing this. Maybe working on it. But then what I discovered, at least for video games and stuff like that, I didn’t wanna work in a place and actually multiple of my nieces or nephews have gone into, it’s a hit making type thing that instead of when I did stuff for business, like I played my games and I loved them, but in business, there’s, if you will, I’ll use the term continuity again, that business is gonna be in business, and you can supply services to it.
And it like it, you’re not having to take all the risk on yourself as to whether the business is gonna stay in business. Whereas, boy, that was so much the case already then for video games, that they’re working on this game and it’s gonna be a year and a half, two year gig. And if it doesn’t sell well that team just disbands, disperses and you go on and you’re marketing yourself again.
And so it spoke against my sense of at least wanted to have some security and you come away with a better resume. You know what I mean? You know that you’re gonna have the skills that you learned and stuff like that, but, I never wanted to work for a, I guess a hit maker and especially where it wasn’t like you were doing little things all along that still had, how well you were going to do, you were, you released, of course, alpha and beta versions and stuff like that.
But that and maybe also the risk reward ratio. Who’s gonna make all the money? The guy who owns the company, not the hundred people involved in the storyline and the ra anti alias thing and whatever else it might be. The very various different specialties were character definition.
And so that’s why I, as much as I have as a hobby done I can do a new skin for pathways, of eternity. And I was curious as to whether I could do that make, write a good enough game using somebody else’s game engine and stuff. But I, that hasn’t been like my, I. Driving
Stephen: passion
Alan: E enough Exactly.
That I just, yeah. But for some people you can really tell that it was Wow they really put themselves into this, that it’s their sense of humor and it’s their sense of mythic and mythic size and stuff like that. So for that reason, I’m curious because that cool mindset, like Grand Turismo, maybe it’s along the same lines of Ready Player one, if you’re in the generation that grew up with, that’s very much an alternative reality that you’ve lived in all your life.
And it’s very cool to see. Things from different companies interact in the ways that you had to go to who framed Roger Rabbit to see, yes, Warner Brothers interact with Disney, interact with Hannah Barbera or whatever, whoever was involved there. That’s kinda wish fulfillment. If you’re a consumer of all those things and you finally get to see them together, who knew that, Daffy and Donald could be up on the stage at the same time and stuff like that.
So it so you, you’re rating like you wanna see it again? I absolutely,
Stephen: If you’re not I pulled the. The things about the younger generation and the kids and the video games and the attitudes and the perceptions, that was very important to me in the movie. The whole movie was good.
I wouldn’t say the story or the drama was the best I’ve seen in years, nothing like that. But it’s a true story and it’s done very well. Okay. It’s got the marketing guy is, what’s his name that played Legless and Lord of the Rings. The trainer guy is David Har. Okay. Stranger Things. And I, I didn’t recognize any of the kids.
They were all pretty new. So you,
Alan: the director, like you said, was from District nine, right? Is that is it Baz somebody, I’m
Stephen: trying to think of who Neil Bloko
Alan: blanc that’s right. South Africa, right? That, that, yes. That’s movie. And so I, he was one of those guys that, like the first movie that I knew he did was District nine.
It’s like, how’d you get so good, so quick? How is this such a great, mature movie? And I’d never heard of you before, so thank you, Neil. Yeah.
Stephen: Alright. It did again, I think it’s a, Based on everything, when I talk to parents and people about the video games, ’cause I’m not involved with the eSports, I don’t have kids in eSports.
I’m not a coach. I am on the fringe a little bit talking to some of the local, the one local team. But I’m an evangelist, I guess you could say. And I’m trying to turn people’s minds because I do have a class. That coincides with that to show people, hey, you could write, you can make a video game and get into the video game industry.
No college necessary is essentially what it is. And I’m not saying college isn’t good or anything like that, it’s just our world isn’t needing it for some of this stuff anymore. There are multiple paths towards getting Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And I, and people sometimes get very offended. I’ve had some people, like in my face about some of the things I said and I’m like, I’m not saying every, that we should just drop and bomb every college or whatever.
I’m just saying to make people aware that there are alternative paths for the kids. That it’s good for to have an alternative path. Yeah. That’s weird, but weird. But it’s a fun movie too. ’cause I like racing. I wanna go get a PS five with Grand Rema. Now I do have grand trees, but one, but that was 20 years ago, so
Alan: Once in a while when you like. Step out of a franchise, then come back into it. It’s man, this is a whole nother universe. They really it’s on steroids. They improved everything. Oh my God.
Stephen: The problem is I can’t just go get a PSS five with Grand Remo. I’m going to need that steering wheel with the pedals and I’m gonna need that thing to sit in and put it in.
So it’s like a raised You need you have the rig. Exactly. I gotta have the whole rig man have a haptic chair that gives it call. Colin had some friends in high school that they did, they programmed a SIM project using, and they had their own rig and stuff, and that was their final project. Cool. And he also told me after I saw the movie, he has a friend he knows from school that used to fly the flight simulators, like you said.
And he, that’s how he trained and got his pilot’s license when he was old enough. And he flies planes now. How cool is that?
Alan: Yeah, because you already had a hundred air hours. If you will. Providing how much you had been in the
Stephen: simulator, okay. And like you said, the Army has used it for years and cops use it and stuff.
The award ceremony I go to with Brandon Hall, we had this Dubai Police Force come in because of the training simulator they wrote for their people to train in their city, their people, the culture and stuff. And they customized it to fit them, and they won an award for that. So it’s, I’m just wake up people.
It’s not like something you can argue against. It’s already here. It’s already happening. It won’t stop.
Alan: I will throw this semi cautionary tale. I, because I mentioned, Hey, let’s talk about investments a little bit. One of the things I invested in skills with a z that, that is, trying to get eSports leagues and so forth, set up here in the United States, and they’re already very successful in Korea, Japan, wherever else it might be.
They’re having a devil of a time penetrating the US market. Maybe because there’s resistance by the parents, because we what’s the chicken and egg type thing of Yeah. Do they have I don’t know, kinda like being in a boy band. You can have many k-pop bands that are all successful.
We can’t do that here, except for certain standouts, like the NSYNC or the so skills is down 80% on my investment. It’s one of those that just hasn’t been able to do it. Breakthrough generator revenue, et
Stephen: cetera, et cetera. They might just be one of those that’s a little ahead of their time, because it’s becoming a juggernaut that’s not stopping and it is growing.
I mentioned before the Ohio High School Athletic Association this year approved high school students in Ohio getting varsity letters for eSports. And there are over 200 high schools and there are like 200 universities and colleges that are across the country that now have eSports and they’re recruiting.
Yeah. That’s what
Alan: it’s gonna take is, like you said, skills is the, like their proof of concept, if you will. Yeah. But when somebody like. Ticketmaster says, Hey, we’re now selling tickets to, these various different eSport events, and all you have to do is have this kind of rig so you can follow, they already have Twitch and various other simulate not simulations streaming for those kinds of
Stephen: things.
Oh, streaming’s huge though. Internationally it’s huge. When I say huge, it’s 4 billion people streaming, so it’s just un that’s half the world watching streaming eSports games or video games of some sort. And I went to the fair recently and the newspaper was there and I said, Hey do you guys cover local sports teams in the high school?
Yeah. Which ones? They said all of them. No, you don’t. What don’t we cover? I said, eSports are like, what’s that? So I’m, pushing
Alan: the agenda. You make that connection. You could be the guy that says, Hey, wake up. This really is something worth getting first in getting, okay.
Yeah. So anyway is a field truly established not until it has its first scandals, so far viewing and stuff like that. And it’s wow, let’s watch some of these guys. They’re really skilled, they’re really wonderful, and they’re witty as hell. They have pew d Pew is who I’m thinking of.
Yeah. That, wow, he’s really good and he’s funny. And then, oh, here come the anti-Semitic remarks or whatever. It’s oh, why did you have to be a jerk? Yeah. Why did if you just because. Because that is what happens too, that there’s no guarantee if you’re a great basketball player, that people should be going to you for life advice.
You could be basketball, but not a good human being. We’ve seen that way too many times. Players a good human being and whatever else it might be. So that’s just humanity. That’s just par for the course. Yeah.
Stephen: So continuing movies. You finally saw Blue Beetle which I’ve seen. What’d you think? So I
Alan: really liked it because I thought that it was innocent, like instead agreed that Shazam the first one. Not so much the second one as well, but it really is like what would happen if you were a a young man bound for adventure in, in the corporate world, and instead you inherit the scarab. And I have this thing kinda like you inherit it, but it takes over you.
And just so much the interesting realistic stuff about superhero origin stories. Some people would be like, Hey, I found this ring and now I’m mighty and everything is fine. And in some other cases it would really screw up your life. Your family would be scared of you. You’d have to what all what all the time that you’re spending.
To learn how to use it. You’re gonna make a mistake after mistake and maybe kill yourself, kill others, whatever powers that be, that want your scarab, that they don’t want you to have it, they’ll be after you. And it included all those interesting elements of a more realistic superhero story that you don’t immediately go and fight crime and be, yeah. It really is wonderful about Latino, not Latino. I guess is what a, what an idiot Midwestern white guy am. Is Mexican also included in Latino culture? I think so. ’cause it’s very much Mexican and that sense of family and that, that wonderful like immigrants that have done well for themselves.
And it really it very well portrays that the love of the family and the solidarity of that. While this kid’s going through them, they don’t get so scared that they abandon them. They’re more like, We’re gonna tease you about it. We’re gonna help you
Stephen: out. Yes. The family was
Alan: wonderful. Yeah. So I, and also, I love movies where there’s some recognizable faces like George Lopez is, but it’s not a star vehicle.
It’s not like we found the perfect kid to play him and hey, some Brad Pitt is playing a 19 year old kid. No they really did all kinds of just, realistic, the way that people can put themselves into the hero’s guys is because I could be that guy. He’s not amazingly good looking. He’s not I don’t know.
I, he was like a cute young man. And so there is like the romance that’s involved in when you’re like 19 years old, you’re like, pretty much a walking pile of hormones. You know what I mean? So what do you do? Are you gonna use this thing? So Hey, now I can get dates. It was just amusing as to. How and there really was madness.
There were good villains in what was going on. Susan Sarandon, the Oh, it was wonderful. Associated, she was very good as the villains and just, it’s funny, you don’t have to be a cackling, melo maniac to be a really good villainist that’s just concerned with, I want my way, I wanna make money and I’ll do anything, whatever it takes to get it.
I feel that I’ve been in the shadow of men for much of my life and that’s pissed me off for 40 out of my year, out of my working years. I’m not taking that anymore. I
Stephen: just, it was, yeah. It was more her ex-husband or whatever. The one particular man that she
Alan: Exactly. Yeah. And a very cool thing about, they paid homage to a lot of DC history.
They talked about Ted Gordon, the original Beatle. Yes. They showed the suits kinda like a bargain basement, Batman, if you will. But it wasn’t some part of what they seem to always do is they feel that they have to throw in other heroes to kinda have the walk-ons. Oh, here’s Wonder Woman. ’cause we just had to have her in there somewhere.
It was its own little universe and they made reference to it’s in the world, but it wasn’t just trying to make it so that those guest appearances were what was gonna sell the movie and sell more tickets and stuff like that. I just I’m really up on this movie. It’s really a good introduction to the world of superhero movies, having already heard like a little bit of backlash about how people, I’m getting tired of that.
It’s like of what? There’s a hundred different plots, a hundred different ways in which a superhero movie can be this way. There’s now, and we’ve talked about this now, there’s hero horror. Now there’s, yeah. Hero romance. Now there, there’s all kinds of different things. So I wish that there weren’t, I’ve never liked that sweeping statement type thing.
’cause it doesn’t speak well to the person making the statement. You know what I mean? Exactly. Agree. Really, that’s all you get out of this, is that they’re all alike. They’re not all alike.
Stephen: I hate it. I hate that. All they wanna know in track is how bad it did on the weekend opening weekend and how much it fell the second weekend and how people That’s right.
Are avoiding it. I was in the theater and it was fairly packed and people were laughing out loud and enjoying the movie. So it’s like you a great sense
Alan: of humor, yeah. It really has just what other things seems to be that they let a whole bunch of tension build and they throw some humor in there to dispel the
Stephen: tension.
They threw George Lopez in a scene and boom. It’s funny. Exactly.
Alan: It really was what life is like. How do you get through tough times? You really like whistle past the graveyard. You say things just are like, oh my God, I can’t believe this is terrible, so I’m gonna make a joke out of it because I dunno what else to call.
Exactly.
Stephen: You know what I mean? So yeah, I think, and this is my personal opinion, I think. What Marvel did and built up to Infinity War and Endgame was just this overarching story that took forever and built up for so long in people that it was this huge event and that was a pretty huge movie with so many people.
So many things happening. And it’s hard to not say how great end game really was, especially since we’ve never, but the problem is now people are like essentially saying this is an end game. You’re not going to have another end game. Enjoy it for what it is. And I agree was a great movie.
I’ve told people that. I’m like, stop reading the internet. Go watch the damn movie.
Alan: It’s really, how many times have I read, Whose Marvel’s next Big bad. And it’s you could do a hundred great superhero stories that don’t have to culminate in a battle for the universe. It doesn’t not have to Beron and Kang and Dr.
Doom. And, there really are big bads in the Marvel universe. Yes. But there’s all kinds of, Daredevil has made a career of not fighting all those crazy ultra powerful ones. He like takes care of his little corner of Hell’s
Stephen: Kitchen. Yes. And and that was my exact comment for Guardians of the Galaxy.
Three people were down on that movie and I’m like, what is wrong with you people? I’m like, this movie is all about these people are whisking everything to save one of their own. It’s, he’s our family. He deserves us to battle with every bit of our heart. There is, that is a. Such a huge story.
We have it in so many good books and movies in the past. That’s, and they did it very well in Guardians of the Galaxy three. I was, they didn’t even
Alan: better than Fast and Furious.
Stephen: See. Fast and Furious kinda when you’re taking a Toyota in space and using the gas pedal to go forward in the steering wheel to move you lose point.
I’m paying you the point. I know. You’re, I know you’re, but I will go see the next one too, by the way. But that, but see also, that’s the point also, actually, I can enjoy Fast and the Furious and I can still enjoy Blue Beetle and Guardians for what they are. They don’t have to all be end game.
You know that, that’s, yes, exactly.
Alan: Yeah. No I just that, I really, I liked it. And if you’re someone who like, I. Whether you like superhero movies or not, you’ll like this movie. ’cause it really is agreed, a young man bound for adventure. It’s the hero’s journey. It’s, yeah, finding out who you want to be growing up and that you’re gonna, there’s gonna be some sacrifices necessary and all that kind of stuff.
And there will be love and hate and I don’t know, I just, I was entertained the maybe I don’t know, 10 minutes out of it could have been a little faster. But even that things don’t have to be continual assault on my senses in order to keep my attention. Exactly. And when you live in a short attention span world, once in a while you get out a movie and you’re exhausted, I need to go like in my own room and listen to my own music.
’cause that was too much. This actually does have dynamics to it. Yeah. You, it has lull and buildup and then climaxes and stuff like that.
Stephen: And I agree. It’s a perfect, it’s a perfect stepping stone movie to get. You know in, if you haven’t watched, oh, there’s too many superhero movies, go watch this one, because you don’t have to know 20 years of history or anything.
It’s very self-contained. And it’s funny you say also about that, about everything doesn’t have to hit you all the time. I just watched the Equalizer, the first one with Denzel Washington. Okay. And I made the comment to some of my author friends and said, go watch this movie for the story, because they spend the first hour just leading up to what the conflict’s gonna be.
I said, if this was a book, every one of our editors would tell us you gotta trim most of this off and just start here at the conflict. But it did it in a way that there were snippets here and there, and it kept your interest without being just, boom, here’s the dead body. So I, I was very impressed with the story for the equalizer, which, what you just said.
Some
Alan: people, can you go back and rewatch it because three is now out and you wanted to refresh
Stephen: your ideas? I haven’t seen any of ’em. That was my first bullet. The.
Alan: Got it. Okay. Yeah, because I occasionally do that. When John Wick four comes out, it’s I wouldn’t re mind rewatching some of 1, 2, 3 and
Stephen: yeah, you can’t really pick on me a whole lot about Fast and The Furious.
If you enjoy John Wick. I’m excited. I totally agree. Everybody has their guilty pleasure. Oh, I love John Wick also. In fact, the comic bookstore just got a nice John Wick figure that I was looking at. I’m like, that is a nice looking little figure. I
Alan: A precursor, if you will, to the John Wick movies.
There was a movie called Shoot Him Up with Clive Owen, Paul Giamatti, where I think it was directed by John Wu. Yes. And the reason that matters is because I think it might be the most bullets on screen ever. Ever. There was never a time when people weren’t just shooting and Otto, a pistol on unending supply of ammunition somehow.
You know what I mean? They didn’t bother with all the, I have to change
Stephen: cartridges and stuff. That just wastes movie time. We’ll just, skip that. It was
Alan: such a celebration. The balletic violence of shooting bullets spraying everywhere. Yeah, you haven’t seen that one. It’s really good because.
You just start laughing at sure, why not? Let’s have a guy go down through, there’s those staircases. Oh yeah. And he just sends and he’s just killing a hundred people without getting nicked. Of course. It just, there’s, it’s incredible. Yeah.
Stephen: Yeah. You gotta love those sometimes too.
Alan: It’s I I, and it’s funny because we had a week off. I just had a cool thing happen that I think I might have talked about online. Netflix is ending. 9 29, coming up in less than a month. They’re stopping their, and to be clear, their D V D service streaming is doing so well that of course they’re continuing that and they’re competing with all the other streaming services.
And I think that D V D still makes money, but it’s not making enough money to not be a distraction to the core purpose of Netflix, et cetera. And in fact, Reed Hastings even said, I. He knows it’s going to transfer from one to the other, and the way that the company’s gonna do well to survive and thrive is gonna be timing that.
And apparently he really has. So when they first got into streaming and people were talking about you’re cannibalizing your own D V D service, but he wanted to be in there early to establish the brand name further, and especially to make all the mistakes and get past it and learn so that he’d be the first one, and then the dominant force, if you will, in online content.
So having said that, the reason that D V D ending is cool is they, I got a letter having been a long time subscriber that says, when we end this service, whatever the top 10 movies are in your queue, we’re gonna send them to you, right? We’re gonna spend, we get rid of our inventory and how cool and decent is that?
And it could be, of course, that they’ve been watched many times and that depending on people’s. Hygiene habits and the quality of their player and stuff like that. It might be that I get the dreaded skipping
Stephen: or crafters. Yeah. You never, if you’re getting one of those ones that help promote technology through porn, who knows what you’ll have with that dvd.
Exactly.
Alan: I’m gonna have to get my Netflix squeegee out and make sure I clean each. But having said that and then also anything that you head out, we won’t ask for you to return them. Yeah. I’ve been getting one disc a month and just perpetually, always getting one takes three days to get the next one.
And I always watching, working my way through various different series. Over the course of time, I watched all the Netflix and all the, all various different things through this. So what an interesting exercise. I have 500 movies in my Netflix queue, I really am omnivorous. And over the course of time you really were like, I wanna watch all the Hitchcocks, all the Woody Allens, all the Cohen brothers.
So you add ’em all and you work your way out, but things keep getting added and as new things come out, they bump down things. I, every one of those I added, I really wanted to watch. But now. That the time is coming that you won’t be able to do that, right? So what are the 18 movies, if you will? The most you can get out of a month is, I went from one to eight and I’m getting this 10 free, and how am I gonna arrange my cue so that the movies that I’m going to have at home are gonna be the ones that, not just that I wanna watch, but then I want to have, there’s a whole different thing about re-watch ability of a movie instead of having seen it once.
I love the Star Wars movies, for instance, and yet a couple of them I’ve noticed when I see it again, it’s just not as effective as the first time you see it. The surprises aren’t there. They’re. I don’t know, they’re not as effective. Whereas for me, comedies are one of those things that I kinda laugh in the same spot.
Right? Even though I know the joke is coming ’cause it’s so well crafted because the people are so good at it, et cetera, et cetera. And so Colleen and I went through the list and said, wow, I would love to have Groundhog Day at home because i’s one of those infinitely re watchable movies. I love how well done it is, how smart it is, how it honors the audience’s smarts to say, what’s the next thing you would try if you really were trapped in a loop?
Would you go through joy, would you go through despair? All of that. I, dirty Rotten Scoundrels has scenes in that movie that every time I watch it, I like start. I pretty laugh. I start laughing ’cause I know this wonderful thing is gonna happen. And Also, which things are gonna be available probably via streaming.
’cause that way I don’t have to worry about having them. They’ll always have certain Monty Python things and Monty Python and the Holy Grail is never gonna go away from somewhere. The B C will carry it. Or Netflix. Or Amazon. Or library. The library, exactly. Out of that 500, I kinda bumped and I got my, I already got my first eight to home and it’s like the faulty tower series, which I think is probably the best sitcom ever made.
And then so what’s in, that’s my top eight, what’s in my next 10? What do you mean My top 40? I’ve not been able to get the next 10 perfectly solidified. And I wanna, it’s not just me, it’s Colleen as well. I wanna make sure, but what an interesting exercise to say. Okay. A desert island disc.
Have you ever heard about this? If you’re gonna have these 10 things to listen to when you don’t know what you’re ever gonna get off this island, what would wear on you the best? And they don’t even necessarily have to be your absolute favorites of all time. It’s the ones that have that wearability.
Yeah, that replayability. Occurred to you?
Stephen: Yes. The thing is, a lot of times the movies, I’m like, if I see something and I’m like, wow, that was really good. I’ve already gotten it. But I changed my cue a little bit because my mother loves Harrison Ford and we used to always just get her lots of Harrison Ford movies, but we pretty much started to run out of Harrison Ford movies to get her. So I just went through Netflix and found all the Harrison Ford movies that I didn’t have for her and put those at the top of my queue. So see that’re, they’re not brand new in case, but I can print the covers, I can get blank cases. So that, I’m gonna do that for her for Christmas.
But here’s a pro tip. I took my list, I took like the top of my list. I went to the exchange and I went through their like $2 DVDs, and if I found it on my list, I bought it for two 50 and crossed it off my list. So I’m like, ’cause
Alan: eight bucks, eight disks for 32 bucks. I’m willing to spend four bucks on ’em.
What if I can find ’em for two for one?
Stephen: That’s a good idea. Okay. Yeah, so that, you and a lot of the movies I like, just like you are ones that people don’t keep or don’t buy. So I got a good chance of finding a lot of them. So we have
Alan: noticed that our taste is not the publix’s taste.
Yes. We really do a lot of obscure, like Colleen at one point for a birthday got me Allegro, non tropo. I think I’ve talked about it before. Yeah. It’s a, an Italian version of Fantasia, a classical music done to animation. Boy, it’s wonderful, and yet nobody has heard of it. But when I, when she got it for me, it was like, man, I’ve been looking for this all my life and now I have a copy.
Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to get those particular taste things,
Stephen: Exactly. Okay. And it is dangerous to go to the exchange regardless because they do have movies like for two 50 or five bucks and it’s wow, look at this stack. I got, here’s $42. Just
Alan: I think I, one of the things I mentioned in the discussion online was I’m really not a collector of that for some reason, even though I’m a collector of everything else, because I do have good memory of those movies and I don’t need to re-watch a lot of things. I didn’t do that. But some things like already.
Suggestions that I didn’t have to get because I already have all the Pink Panther movies the original Peter Sellers, inspector Kau, and they’re, we rewatch ’em pretty regularly, especially number two and number three, because they’re just hilariously good throughout. Yes. We have the Mel Brooks Cannon, like from producers up through maybe history of the World or something like that.
And we watch Young Frankenstein. We watch Blazing Saddles. We have certain things that we love watching, and so I already have some box sets that were, I have all the Monty Python TV episodes, if not the movies, and so I, I was already like I’m glad that I already have, I. Gotten those things. I even have like black add on V C R because I I want, it was a thing where like they had a online, a little trivia contest and I was like, I love those things.
I know this. I won it. And then I went over there and he goes here you get the set. It’s oh, it was, and it was after DVDs were already available. But I want to keep a dvd. I have a DVD slash VCR player that I just, I haven’t gotten the new TV that I mentioned a while back. It doesn’t have the three plug thing that goes in, everything is H D M I and I’m gonna lose the ability to play those black add air VCR tape things as well as there’s many things in the library that are not D V D, but are only tape. So I have to. Keep my old technology hand in so that I don’t lose the ability to play certain things on the tv.
Anyway. For me, so that’s really cool though. To get ’em from the mom is a
Stephen: wonderful idea. Yeah I hope so. And for me, what it started going to the exchange was the kids when they were younger not that it’s super expensive, but you got two kids young. My wife wasn’t really working at the time, so it’s yeah, going to the movies, getting them popcorn, getting them something to drink.
It’s not expensive, but still that’s 40 or 50 bucks. I went to the exchange, I bought like seven, eight movies for $20. We stopped at the Dollar store, got dollar candy and a couple pops of their choice, and we went home
Alan: and that movie night at home. Yeah. Throwing up on the wall of
Stephen: your building. So yeah, we do that too.
So that’s where it started. And then it became almost like some o c d habitual thing where it’s like, huh, how many two 50 movies can I get today? You.
Alan: Honestly a deeper level of thought about this as I came to realize that there really were some things that were unavailable. Like when I went to look, I searched for a movie called Evil Roy Slade for a long time until a friend of mine, his father had an extensive video collection. He gave me a copy reason for saying that is there, there’s Having said, I don’t want to be a collector of this ’cause I already have such other collections.
Some part of me is proud to say, as long as I’m around, I can really give somebody all the James bonds. As long as I’m around, I can give. You know what I mean? Like the fact that it hasn’t gone, that it got converted, it got digitized, converted to bits, and then somehow there was a contract dispute and all those movies went away for five years.
Oh yeah. It drives people crazy to see that happen, but as long as I have it physically and a device on which I can play it, they can’t take that away from me. And somehow that’s important to me that there’s like a little bit of the Omega man thing that I’ve talked about. If it really was that the world was going to hell, I’d go hole up in the library and make sure that this hoard of knowledge would not be.
Destroyed and burnt by the mutants because I’m gonna defend that thing and kind of my collections are that, it’s very much my taste, but my taste is pretty good if you’re a relentlessly geeky guy like you when I are. And so when I already have and like when I pass, I think someone’s, occasionally I’ve gone to a place called the data den digital den.
I’m not sure why it’s not coming to me, but I’ll go there and they have all kinds of used CDs, DVDs, video games, that kind of stuff. And it’ll be like somebody with my taste just died and the estate sale got all bought here. So I’m going through and not finding one or two. I’m finding 20, and as long as they’re five bucks each sure.
For a hundred bucks I’ll owe this treasure. Someone’s gonna have a field day when they get into my collection and go man, Al, you have
Stephen: everything, you have all
Alan: the mad magazine paperbacks, you
Stephen: have all, you know what I mean? I thought about that with my son. He’ll be happy, but it’ll be like, okay, how many comics do I have to go through?
How many CDs, how many movies? And there is many Star Wars collectibles. How many the
Alan: Swedish death cleaning that we’re doing is in some cases so that no one else will be burdened by it and that no one else would love it like I would. You know what, I’m trying to sell my comics or trying to go through the paperback collections and stuff like that.
I’m aware that. The world is heading towards bits instead of atoms and all that kind of stuff. And yet, I’m also, having been, Facebook has been wonderful and even previous to that, I was in some of these like BBSs and stuff where there really are people that still care about, I’m gonna read every one of the destroyer paperbacks.
I want them in paperback. I don’t, I, I don’t want the digitized, I don’t want the Project Gutenberg version. I like the old John D. McDonald, Travis McGee books. You know what I mean? You gotta look for those. They’re 50 and 60 years old. Yeah. And yet they’re for their time. They’re just such a great read.
There’s something cool to be able to say. I got a friend that loves Earl Stanley Gardner and he’s got every one of those. Wow. And whoever has done those little labors of love. This, the science fiction from the fifties and sixties when it was like really new. And I hope and that it doesn’t have to be that everybody appreciates it.
It has to be that the people that really would appreciate it, they’re gonna love me a lot because I saved it from just getting thrown into the trash.
Stephen: Why has nobody jumped on making a good destroyer movie? They had that one back in the eighties. With Fred Ward. With Fred
Alan: Ward and let’s see who’s, who.
Joel Gray, the guy that was the Ian. Yeah, exact Chi. And had, and previous cabaret was the master of ceremonies, and that’s where most people know him from. But he was a very effective
Stephen: Ian. And they had what’s his name from Voyager, the captain from Star Trek, Voyager. Okay.
I forget her name. But. But I just actually rewatched that recently. Kate Mulgrew. Kate Moru. Yeah. Yeah. There we go. Okay. I just rewatched it recently and I’m like, okay. It’s not horrible. It’s just very lackluster. For an action, supposed thing, a little spy in here. It, it just was not exciting, it needed more excitement. The Doc
Alan: Savage movie is much like that. It’s a little too corny. Like for as much as the quality of that series was high. There are certain things that just, maybe they didn’t have the special effects or the understanding of what makes archetypal heroic fiction. That’s it. The understanding, they, I they just, they played it for laughs instead of playing it for, wow, this is like a world threatening menace and Doc is the only one that can, et cetera, et cetera. So yeah, I dunno I was amused by it, but I wasn’t, one of those movies like, Hey, if you wanna see why I love these paperbacks, watch this movie and you’ll get it.
I couldn’t in pride say that kind of thing. It was just like you continue to read the books ’cause they’re pretty good.
Stephen: Yes. So there we go. We recommend Blue Beetle and Grand Remo, but not pulp Fiction movies and the Flash Gordon movie. Remember that one from back in the very early eighties?
Alan: I’ll do a quick queen vocal for you. Flash. Oh. But even, I don’t think I really screeched it well enough,
Stephen: but even worse that. Song has the worst line ever written for a movie that be, especially if you use this song, it’s where Dale goes flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the Earth.
That says
Alan: that
Stephen: that’s like the worst line ever. It drives me crazy. I have to skip that song. I can’t listen to it. People just made a
Alan: reference to the Buckaroo Bonsai, in the Eighth Dimension movie. And that really did have the right amount of irony and understanding of, we know it’s corny, but we’re gonna have a lot of fun with it anyway.
And so just that and all, boy, I should have mentioned this one of the movies that I have every single time when I was like, bipping around and would come across Kelly’s heroes, I would watch it to the end, no matter how far it was into the movie. I just, I love this movie. I love all the characters in it.
And once I mentioned that, A whole bunch of people kinda came out of the woodwork and said, that’s my favorite movie too. I love that movie. And everyone was quoting lines to each other. And you know how you bond over that you get Yeah, like that. Everybody has this secret kinda little thing. And what’s interesting, it was a lot of my younger brother’s friends that I don’t think I necessarily introduce them to it, but I hope that maybe there was a time when I planted the seed because I gave ’em a lot of music and other things that mattered.
But the fact that they’ve all discovered it, even without me being involved, it was just so nice to have people appreciating it and appreciating it in the same way that I did, that they got what made it. So good and so funny and so memorable and so re watchable. So Kelly’s Hero is another one.
Everybody that’s a great movie. Exactly.
Stephen: Bucker, bonsai is not, or Buckaroo, bonsai is not on Netflix. I’ve looked before. Yeah.
Alan: We we, now that we have we regularly use the Roku box and it has a search feature that goes across multiple services, whatever ones you have. And sometimes they have things and they go away.
Sometimes they have things, but they cost honestly not two or three or $5 to it, but like 20. Yeah. So whatever licensing agreement they got going on, we, I Troy, a friend of ours, gave Colleen for her retirement, a subscription to the Criterion Channel. Ooh, very interesting. Because they really are well curated.
It really is not just the best popular movies, but The best film noir, the best madcap comedy, the best, Busby, Berkeley musical, whatever else it might be. And so I’ve been browsing that, just waiting for happy discoveries. So I watched a movie called The Last Seduction that I re remembered from probably the nineties.
That was let’s see Mary, not Mary, Elizabeth Musk, Antonio, darn it. I just watched it. Why am I not come? It really is perfect film noir in terms of the sneakiness of it and that the people really are not normally moral. And what, how do you live in a world where you really don’t have compassion for other human beings?
You’ll do whatever it takes to win the game, to get the money to whatever it might be. Sorry, Linda, I just can’t believe, I can’t remember ’cause she’s really yep, that’s the woman that people would. Let themselves get killed because she’s somon, so seductive the last seduction.
Darn it. I’m very sorry that it’s not We’ll look it up.
Stephen: We’ll look it up. Exactly. That’s and another great technology advancement. Yeah.
Alan: It some, it’s funny when it used to be that you’d go to the video store and you’d browse and stuff like that, and sometimes you wouldn’t even know what attracted you to it, but it was an interesting cover.
Or it’s oh, this guy directed this. I didn’t know he had made this movie as well. Let’s see what he did when he wasn’t doing the studio Blockbuster. But it was something more independent. And I discovered so many. How I first discovered the K Brothers was pretty much like Roger Noro, Roger Gene, Cisco at the end of sneak previews going.
So this movie is great. It’s only gonna the theaters for a week because there’s you’ve never heard of these directors before if there’s not really big movie star pull power, but it is for this being their first movie called Blood Simple. It’s perfect. It’s amazingly well crafted and just, I, I.
That started my it was fun when you’re into a band early. It started my affair, love Affair with the Coen brothers from their very first movie. So then whatever they put out, I was gonna watch it and I’ve never been disappointed. Somebody recommended, oh, brother wore art. And that is something that at one point, Colleen and I had that in-house and it went away.
I think Tim might have lent it to somebody else and it went away. But having said, only like when you’re, it isn’t only humor. There’s some things that are just like movies that make you feel good, movies, that if you want a good cry, movies, that if you want a big climactic battle. Highlander is one of my favorite movies where it’s just I wanna see the Kergan such a great villain.
I want to see those sword fights. I want the sense of humor and the sense of menace from it. Infinitely re watchable. There’s, there’ll never be a time that I don’t wanna watch Highlander again. I Highlander’s
Stephen: one of the movies I think would do well with a good remake that they could make a really good version of it today.
I know
Alan: we’ve talked about this before because when they had a sequel and a bunch of me and my friends went to see this sequel, and after the movie we were like at a restaurant just like. Looking at other in stunned horror and then looking back down and going, what? How could they do that? Yeah. It was so bad.
Yeah. It was so bad. Bad. In comparison to how good the first one was. Even the
Stephen: we felt totally betrayed. Even the changed director’s cut didn’t really revolt. It didn’t make up for Exactly.
Alan: They took like a cool mystical concept and tried to make it science fictiony. And they like, again, like how did they not understand what made the first one great.
So that they totally
Stephen: screwed it on the second one. Yeah. How weird. Oh, yep. Yep. But the TV show I always liked. I thought they did a good job on the TV show. I need
Alan: to return to that because I got a point where I watched like the fifth or sixth episode and I was like, they’re already repeating themselves.
I don’t know that I wanna see this thing again and again. I think that over the course of time, yes, they built the mythology, right? They did a lot. The watchers and whoever else it might be. ’cause I read a little bit about it, but I haven’t, that’s one of those things that now there’s Netflix going away.
I’m gonna have to find the library that carries all of those things. The box set of,
Stephen: the series, I know at the Streetsboro flea market, the bookseller guy has the C or V H Ss tape sets, because that was one of the first series besides Star Trek Enterprise that I saw a full collection on vhs.
I got
Alan: syndicated, if you will, into Okay. Oh,
Stephen: I gotta have that,
Alan: cool. Okay. Alright. So look for that. Okay. Alright. I know you had the tight schedule. I’m glad we’re able to fit a session in this week. Very good. Yeah. Yeah. So in brief, you got a whole bunch of cool stuff coming up at the Pittsburgh RG for this weekend.
Hosting talks, you’re gonna be hosting panel discussions Yes. And stuff like that with people that we love, like Bill. So I hope you have a wonderful weekend. We will not be meeting you ’cause we have family things and other things. We’re gonna go like seeking Advent calendars down south.
They cool, they just got all the advent calendars in. I hope you have a really wonderful weekend. You too.
Stephen: Enjoy your long weekend. Not that, that you have un long weekends. I mean your weekend begins Thursday through Wednesday. Wednesday and the next weekend starts Thursday through Wednesday.
So
Alan: the reason that I was able to go to Blue Beetle, ’cause it’s hey, I don’t need to worry about fitting it in after I get back from work. I can actually go do this thing. So Ilene and there are taking advantage of that. Like how about a jigsaw puzzle? Sure. Why not?
Stephen: Nice. Okay. Alright.
Enjoy the long weekend, man. Take care,
Alan: Stephen. Okay, later. Bye.
