Overview

I always struggle with coming up with the overview because we bounce around sometimes. Most of the time.

We have a bit of a discussion on education and how the focus should be on education and not dress code.

We discuss the Flash movie – which we both liked. There’s some good reasons to enjoy the movie and too many people didn’t give it the love it deserved.

Then we talk about Kevin J Anderson and Rush, along with some other music.

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Transcript

Stephen: We are visiting Egypt today.

Alan: Exactly. We’re gonna go see some ancient wonders of the world. I think this is the only one left standing right. You know there’s the seven ancient and the seven modern and I think that the pyramids are the only ones left standing. Oh really? Colossus of Rose is gone. Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

Yeah, the temple of Maus. All of them. I think that they’re all swept away by history and this guy was just too big to demolish, too big to have a storm, take him out, whatever else it might be.

Stephen: So yeah just give people a chance. They’ll destroy it and ruin it. They probably wanna parking lot or something.

Alan: I wonder, there’s been wars fought right near here. I hope that there’s they had some rules of engagement with that said, how about if we not climb on it? How about if we not fire on it? How about if, don’t do anything. I just, it’s funny, we, I never intended to talk about these things, but they, all these things spark connections.

Someone just got arrested for. Yes, hugging or writing his girlfriend’s name, his fiance’s name into the coliseum. And like we’ve talked about this probably a year and a half ago where I’ve been at Nashville Parks, beautiful old petroglyphs, amazing sequoias and redwood type trees. And someone got out there spray can, or their pen knife or whatever the freaking, and that kinda crazy ego that kind of disregard for this is everyone’s, this has survived a thousand years.

It’s not been waiting for you to mar it. How, what ego, what incredible jag do people have? It’s the same thing as you get where you put Trump on everything. You know what I mean? You gotta put your splash, your name on various different things right

Stephen: off. Let’s record it and post it on social media. Cause I’ll be such a hero. See, freaking moron. I’ll tell you

Alan: th this is a common theme now, I don’t know that we need, one of the things you can count on with vandals, with a assholes nowadays is they’re not too bright. They film themselves, they create their own evidence, right?

They around to look for surveillance cameras, they supply their own, right? Yeah. It’s unbelievable. We did. They just I, so North Carolina has been trying to put a rule in place in their charter schools about a dress code only for girls, not boys. Because as girls are the ones that need to be taught how to dress, not boys.

It, I can’t even think of a way to compress down the stupidity of a dress code and a sex specific dress code down into how much I want to mock it and. Agreed. I said that it made it all the way to the Supreme Court what state is our country in now?

Overview

We start off talking about an interesting author – Cory Doctorow. Cory embodies the modern world and has been a big part of the EFF – Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also releases his books on his website digitally if you want to check them out.

We talk about Humble Bundle and what a great idea this is. Of course, it can be too great if you’re spending just a couple bucks and getting tons of bundles each month.

We get into a discussion of blockchain, NFT’s and other new technologies and where that could lead us. And what is the best to buy? We depend on Consumer Reports to help answer that question.

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Transcript

Stephen: All right. All right. Good morning, Alan. I see you, you went back in time.

Alan: Exactly. I have all kinds of things that I’ve downloaded and sometimes just click on the first one that looks interesting, as we’ve had the Dr. WHO theme and the Star Wars theme. Yeah. And the a awards theme and whatever else.

I shouldn’t say Harry Potter. Everybody else says Harry Potter. I don’t know why I say Hogwarts, because that’s the. Brand name, they’ve decided on world of Hogwarts and stuff. So branding takes in me,

Stephen: ok. Let’s see. You made a list of topics like usual.

It’s we could talk two or three. So let’s make a list of seven and then we’ll make seven brand new ones next week every time.

Alan: Honestly, if we just went back and picked up the breadcrumbs that we’ve littered behind us about things we wanted to talk about, now, some of them would be stale cause it’d be like, Hey, what about that Wonder Woman movie?

You know what I mean?

Stephen: And so you did mention co corey au books, and I think that’s super interesting. Did you just recently run into him

Alan: or? So he’s another one of those guys that I read a couple of him, honestly, like 10 years ago, and I hope I’m not, sometimes people say I’m looking for a person with 10 years experience.

It’s like that technology did not exist 10 years ago. But anyway, I think that he’s been writing that long and I really enjoyed him back then. But you know how it is. I kinda find a new author and then I often follow up on them. So when I learned about Mark Greeney with the lemme see how to say this.

The I like to read maybe a little bit of science fiction, then a little bit of fantasy, then a little bit of men’s adventure. I sprinkle amongst various different things. And if they’re river novels, that’s a I don’t know what the German term is,

Overview

Have you seen the spiderman movie – Across the spiderverse. Spoilers – it’s great and we loved it. Seeing so many variations of spider-man on the screen is fantastic.

And poor Al can’t play Diablo IV. Why not? Diablo has been around for quite a long time and it’s a shame for some people not to be able to play it.

And what art have you looked at recently?

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Transcript

Stephen: All right. So it finally feels like spring outside.

Alan: We’ve been getting some rain at least. It’s funny, I, we are friends with Nick and Kelly who own a farm out in Norwalk, and they’ve had 20 days of no rain.

Yeah. When they really are needing it for everything to grow, germinate, et cetera. So when we were driving back from Chicago, it was like six hours in the rain. It was, especially with construction, nerve wracking sometimes. And yet that’s what I kept thinking is Nick and Kelly are like out dancing in it,

Stephen: yeah. I felt the same way. It’s not that I want to go mow lawn, but man, just from Sunday to today, it went from brown and dead to rejuvenated. So it’s guess I gotta

Alan: mow. Exactly. We also, we’ve been making sure that we water our trees, by kind of tree it, it matters.

But we had a couple things in the backyard that actually were putting out roots along the ground, seeking more water instead of straight down. So one of the things that I read long ago was for anything that puts down a tap root, you want to encourage that. So you set a trickle right at the base of the tree, and then it goes down and it follows the water down.

So you get, don’t get something that’s gonna fall over with a big root bowl because all the roots are not it’ll go deep. And so our apple tree, front yard tree, we made a point of watering goes well so that they get kinda please don’t fall on my

Stephen: house. Yeah. I was looking at that.

We, so we have a small bit of a pine forest, a lot of pine trees, but there was one oak tree that was ancient and massive. It’s a good a hundred feet tall. At least. Wow. It was almost. 12 to 15 feet around and Wow. A couple years ago it like cracked and split in half and part of it is still up, still green, still doing well, but I’m looking at it going, yeah, if that falls, it’s not only gonna wipe out half our forest, it’s gonna wipe out my cabin.

So I’m just, I hope I’m not sleeping in it at the time,

Alan: right. And that, we have big enough wind storms and stuff like that, I don’t know, every 10 years I’ve seen it where. Throughout Lakewood things have gone down, where trees fell, sometimes they fell on power lines and took out power for a lot of people.

But they, unfortunately, Lakewood is a very green community. Lots of people have nice trees in all around their house and if that falls the wrong direction, it like takes the garage out. It yeah, it really like bashes into the roof and stuff. And of course I have a couple pictures where it’s like this massive tree thing came down.

Horrible damage, but there’s a cat walking on it cuz it’s got a new bridge, yeah,

Overview

Alan’s wife is retiring – YAY! And they are choosing to celebrate at a local place called B.A. Sweeties. This is one of the biggest candy warehouses anywhere. They have a giant sucker as their company sign.

So the two diabetics are going to the candy store – but we’ll be playing putt-putt golf. 😉

We talk about a lesser known graphic novel series – The Department of Truth. This is a great story that deals with conspiracy theories and some supernatural and cryptids.

And Apple’s annual conference with announcements has happened (though not when we recorded this). The Apple VR Vision pro goggles look real cool.

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Transcript

Stephen: Yes. Good morning, Alan.

Alan: Good morning. Let me turn off that phone call coming in. There we go.

Stephen: Hey, when’s Colleen’s retirement? Was it Friday? Her last

Alan: day? No it’s at the end of this month. Okay. So 30th is big, and we’re gonna have a big party for her. We’re gonna go to ba sweeties, which is the biggest candy warehouse

Stephen: in the area.

Here’s what you need. Exactly. We’ll be talking about diabetic stuff in July.

Alan: I’m allowed to go, say, go pick out whatever you want, everyone while I go over here.

Stephen: But we’ve said this before and this is something that is, people need to understand that. They go and oh, you’re diabetic.

Here’s some sugar free stuff. But what we’re finding is the sugar free stuff may not spike your blood sugar in the same way, but sometimes it does. But a lot of those have some addiction to ’em that they make you wanna eat more, and they also do bad things to your bowels at times.

Alan: But like the devil gummy bears that I’ve read about on Amazon, right?

Yes. Where they have ery or whatever it is, right?

Stephen: Yes. Too much of that. And yeah, you’re, it’s like eating too bad Mexican. But. The other thing is that like the erythritol and stuff, they’ve linked some of that stuff to cancer okay, great. You’re not spiking your blood sugar, you’re going to get cancer and die.

Anyway. So me I personally have found, and I’ve told people this, I’m like, if you give me a plate with some mashed potatoes on it and a Snickers bar, it’s healthier for me to eat the Snickers bar because it does not spike my blood sugar as much as the potato. So yes,

Overview

We talk a bit about health, but focus on Parkinsons disease and ehlers-danlos syndrome – issues Alan and Stephen don’t deal with. We touch of issues that affect us more as we get older.

Stephen attended a writers retreat with J. Thorn and got a new series started (spoiler alert: in a couple episodes we talk about it more).

Like a lot of people, A.I. is on our minds and we discuss our use of ChatGPT.

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Trivia

Who is the director of Nightmare on Elm Street?

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Transcript

Stephen: good morning, Alan. Good

Alan: morning. Sorry, I know you it took me a while just to get out of all the other stuff that I had looking, that I was looking at this morning and get to where I could give this my full

Stephen: attention. All right, good.

Alan: Okay, so what’s our background here? That looks like

Stephen: it is Galaxy’s Edge from, it’s a concept drawing, I believe.

Okay. Down in Disney.

Alan: See below, right there. I think this is the actual Machu Picchu, but close enough that I can see where people get their inspiration from, so yeah. Okay,

Stephen: nice.

Alan: So it works. Clean up my shirt. There we go.

Stephen: Empty. Oh my. I’m arguing. I’m just explaining why I’m right.

Alan: Why I’m Right.

Exactly. I think I need to get that as a tattoo, not as a shirt, because it might be a permanent thing for me. Exactly.

Stephen: Yeah. Yeah. I agree. So I always used to wear it just to pick on the rest of my family. There you go. And they were very much So there goes Steven again, I’m just telling you,

Alan: yeah. There he goes with those facts and knowledge again, how rude of him Yeah. To actually know what he’s talking about.

Stephen: That’s, yeah. Some people really don’t like that, but whatever. Hey, I got a trivia before we get talking about everything else. Yes. This should be an easy one for a Jeopardy champion.

Okay. Here’s hoping, who was the director of Nightmare before Christmas? Tim Burton, right? Nope. He was the producer.

Alan: Wow. I so much associate that with him. Yeah.

Stephen: So it was a man named Henry Sellick.

Alan: Wow. Has he done anything else that I recognized from the stop action

Stephen: world and stuff like that? It’s I’m not sure.

I didn’t look it all up. I heard it on something on I think 1 0 5 0.7 over the weekend. They do five random facts. Got it. Okay. I heard it and had to look it up and it, he was Burton was just the director. The producer. The

Alan: producer, yeah. So it was cause always, almost always, when you see it listed, it often says Tim Burton’s nightmare before Christmas.

And so that’s often not the producer or the owner, if you will. It’s the director. So that’s kind. Why,

Stephen: why, yeah.

Overview

Stephen attended the Pittsburgh festival of books and had some great things to tell – including meeting some wonderful independent comic creators. One with it’s own TV show also.

This leads to a nice discussion on supporting creators and how to do it so it helps them. A game creators also.

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Transcript

Stephen: good morning, Alan.

Alan: Okay. Good morning, Steven. Never got the cool thanks Shirt on today. That’s nice,

Stephen: nice.

Alan: Keith. It’s actually, I don’t know if there’s a good comic strip. Let’s see, that has a feature called Life’s Little Victories. Have you ever, I’m talking about a guy named Yeah, I haven’t heard that one.

Okay. It’s it’s still underground. It has a couple books out, but I don’t know that it’s featured in that many. Newspapers, almost all those alternate newspapers and that we met, why can’t I think of his last name? We were at the eighth, the alternative press expo, I think out in San Francisco and had a chance to, it was like the booth right next to Bob, the Angry Flower.

Once you go alternate you that’s where life in Hell started off. You know what I mean? Was Matt Brittany. Such fame with the Simpsons and stuff like that. So I’ve always loved. The alternative newspapers, cuz that’s where you get the cool music and the cool comedy and stuff.

And almost all was, the comic strips they run are not your conventional peanuts type stuff. They’re the, they’re a little edgier. They’re a little otter. The artwork is, I don’t know. They’re just, I like having I have a, I. Sense of humor that has multiple facets and it’s nice to find something.

There’s one called like red meat where the art can be really off-putting almost like horror characters and yet they say very witty things. There’s one And who was it maybe David. Where it’s the same artwork every single strip, and he just comes up with different captions or different dialogue and has been doing it for years.

And it’s weird. I’m fuzzing out. I can’t tell you, but it’s like what? Incredible. I admire the creativity and the craft of someone who does always a new strip each time, far side and Calvin and Hobbs and all the other greats, Dilbert. And yet, Whoever can look at that same frame and find a new thing to say about it it’s amazing.

It’s, anyway, so that’s where this comes from. It’s his think strip.

Stephen: Got it. Yeah. That’s where you’re breaking, I’m sorry, you were breaking up a little. Oh, sorry. Why am I breaking? Ugh, that this whole transmission thing is driving me crazy with. I don’t know. Especially cause

Alan: I’m sorry, because you say that you do others and it never seems to happen and I thought I had a pretty good web connection and yet there’s something about our stuff that is like magically wrong.

Overview

Let’s talk about Vegas. Alan just went with his wife and we discuss what it means to travel to Vegas in today’s world. There are some Vegas oddities, like smoking indoors, something we’ve gotten used to not having.

We also discuss the new Guardians of the Galaxy and Stephen thought it was his favorite Guardians movie.

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Transcript

Alan: morning.

Stephen: Alright. That does not look like Vegas behind you.

Alan: I just, someone just commented, Hey, why does anybody go to Vegas? And I said it’s got glitter it. And someone else mentioned that it’s like Disneyland for adults. And so I figured I would embrace the Disneyland theme

Stephen: for today.

I disagree with that. I think Disneyland is like Disneyland for adults. I would vote to go to Disneyland 10 times over Vegas.

Alan: You know what, it’s sweeping statements. We were just in Vegas for probably our third or fourth time and it’s lost some of its charm. Maybe out of repetition, out of, there’s not much new.

A lot of things are the same as they almost have been, and a lot of things have worsened. Actually everything is more expensive. Everything seems to be more crowded or our tolerance for crowds. Our, the delight in finding bargains has been overcome with everywhere you go, it looks like people are just trying to get a little bit more out of you and in a sneaky way instead of a straight up way.

Colleen has made the comment that it used to be, other places have always done that. There’s always been hidden fees and stuff like that, but Vegas made you so happy that you were like, happy to give them your money. And now it just seems that whether it’s this is sweeping statement again, back when it was run by the mob, they knew how to make it so that you were a willing participant in what whatever was going on.

You knew what the odds were and you decided to take the bet. And now it just seems to be they’ve, for instance I play blackjack. I’m, I count cards. I’m pretty good

Stephen: at it. Do you like Go Bond James Bond? I know his game was Buck, close.

Alan: Exactly. And that’s true. I, of course, I wear my tux after six, what am I, farmer?

You know what I mean? And so it’s, instead of it being that they just say, Hey All the other bets in the casino are bad. Ro roulette only returns a certain amount of money. All the slot machines, all the video pokers, stuff like that, blackjack, they actually do things to just slightly worsen it so that the dealer hits on or doesn’t hit on soft 17 changes.

It just by that whatever 0.2, 0.4% or whatever your payoff is for blackjack instead of two for one it’s, three for two or something like that. And in all those little ways, and because there’s of course not a universal standard depending on where you go and what time of day it is and what table you happen to sit down on, you have to read the little placards that says, here’s what rules pertain at this casino at this time for this game.

And it’s wearying. Instead of just sitting down and saying, let’s play blackjack. I know how to play blackjack. Every hotel. Has a resort fee nowadays.

Overview

We get on the topic of politics. Didn’t really plan it, but there is quite a bit to discuss. Our politicians don’t always seem to be doing what’s in our best interest, and this has affected our culture in many ways.

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Trivia

Hecate is a a minor goddess in the Greek pantheon, and she was of magic and illusion, maybe misdirection. What’s the Roman equivalent of Hecate?

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Transcript

Alan: We’ve got this background from

Stephen: before morning. Now we just

Alan: I need to give us a different background here. Oh,

Stephen: Yeah. I was thinking I need, I got my green screen there. I need to put it up and get some backgrounds again. Yeah. How about

Alan: Big Ben? And, alright, perfect. There we go. Okay. Alright.

Stephen: It’s only been attacked in how many movies.

It’s

Alan: true. Is that, isn’t there a whole series now of London has fallen, Olympus has fallen, I think has fallen. What’s the name of our guy from I ice myself up here. Yeah. In 300 and he’s now a good action adventure hero. Let’s see. It’ll come to us.

Stephen: I wanna say Aaron Eckhart, but he was the president in that first series.

First one of that series. Him.

Alan: Anyway it’ll pop out. Yeah, it’ll pop out. Okay, so speaking Boy, I’m getting I just got done with Sorry. Please go ahead. No,

Stephen: No. Please. What, what’d you get done? I was gonna give you a revelation. I wanna hear what you got though.

Alan: That I just took a covid test.

Nowadays it’s, I don’t first yay, negative second. Anytime nowadays that you get a sore throat or sniffles or anything involving respiratory, whatever. And it really could be, oh no, I didn’t have my humidifier on last night, even though it got forties in. Therefore the heat constantly running. Just that weird little catch in your throat or any kind of thing has you thinking covid, because instead of us being civilized, we’ve let this thing drag on for four going on five years.

It’s an implacable enemy. I know that it’s a difficult one. And yet all the things that we had done to stop similarly implacable ones we abandoned and we are still suffering for that. We got rid of the task force. We got rid of the c d c early response, early detection team. We, it’s, and now we’re declaring that it’s over, even though 250 people are still dying every day. It used to be that we stopped a single life from falling to something like this because we have the technology and we have the will and we it, I can’t stand it. Everything has become so incompetent and so political and acceptable.

Acceptable. Exactly that. And if it is it, I make fun of this online, but I’m not really making fun. Have we joined a death cult? We worship guns, we allow diseases. We have

Stephen: But guns are fine and okay, but we really need to ban those books because they harm children.

Alan: Just that, the, it’s funny.

This really is a theme that seems to get no tractio...

Overview

Alan went to Mensa mind games. He shares the experience and the winners. There is a lot about playing 30 games in 4 days. Besides trying to grasp rules quickly, you need to be able to play well with others. 🙂

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Transcript

Stephen: Wow, that’s a cool background.

Alan: I tried to find something that had like gayish type things and that looks vaguely like meles or game pieces or something like that. I’m not sure where it’s really

Stephen: from. I was gonna say it’s probably some slightly pornographic Japanese anime or something. That’s true.

Alan: Here’s the tentacle portal right over here, so that exactly right. Alright,

Stephen: I’ve got a small game update, but man, you had a big weekend with a big game update. So let’s hear what’s going on. You’re probably eager to talk.

Alan: It was Mensa mind games this last weekend, and it’s the first time that I’ve been in multiple years because of Covid.

Even though they had it last year, for instance, it was, we were still worried if there’s any event that might be a super spreader event, it’s gonna be one where you’re sitting at tables facing each other, you’re touching meles and cards all the time, shared. You’re eating together, that kind of stuff.

And even then we had thought that we wanted to go to it, but it turns out, also my last year was when I was often going out to California, taking care of mom, taking care of the house, that kind of stuff. And it was exactly the wrong weekend. So finally, Colleen, because this was in Columbus, Ohio, which is only two hours Southwest.

Yes. It it was very convenient for us to be able to zoom down there. I it was wonderful. It was the biggest it’s ever been in terms of people, I think it was like 389, almost 400 in the past. I think it got to be like 360. It seems to be based on what kind of hotel they get and what the main room is.

Usually. In this case, the way they expanded is it wasn’t just the main ballroom filled with tables and chairs, but they actually took over all kinds of side rooms. And actually that’s better for some people cause. There’s a certain den that goes with all those people being in one place. And even if you’re concentrating and stuff, there’s some games that are, that make you break out laughing or that you just, you roll a bad, you get a bad rule.

It’s fuck. They had lots of side rooms and in fact, also some are, it’s necessary to have. A different setup. And anybody who’s ever played werewolf, you play that with a series of chairs in a circle looking at each other, and there was a variation on that called Blood on the Clock Tower that was that, and so that was actually a room dedicated to that for the entire weekend.

Cuz you had to funnel 390 people through 12 at a time. You know what I mean? That really a lot of coordination. It was 56 games this year. And the way Mensa mind games works for those who are ...