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Alien Earth, ReO2 Lens Restorer, & Crime Scene Cleaner

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By Mo
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About This Episode

We tune in for the new horror sci-fi TV series that expands on the Alien franchise, check out a high-tech gadget to help contact lens wearers see clearer for longer, and play a twisted video game where it’s your job to clean up crime scenes for mob bosses!

(May contain some explicit language.)

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Show Notes

TRANSCRIPT

Speaker Transcript
Jon Welcome back to Gen X Grown Up Podcast. Listener to this episode 195 of the Gen X Grown Up Podcast. I am John. Joining me as always for the show, of course, is George. Hey, George, how you doing?
George Hey, how’s it going, guys?
Jon You know, it’s not a show without Mo. Hey, Mo.
Mo Hey, how’s it going?
Jon In this episode, we tune in for the new horror sci-fi TV series that expands on the Alien franchise. Check out a high-tech gadget to help contact lens wearers see clearer for longer and play a twisted video game where it’s your job to clean up crime scenes for mob bosses.
Jon and Those stories and many more coming your way in this episode. Before that, though, We always like to kick off the show talking about one of our fourth listeners. The three of us are here. We may listen. If anybody else takes the time to listen and write in, you are our fourth listener.
Jon And the fourth listener for this episode is Rick P. The subject line of his email is Back to the Future. I’m sure referring to our backtrack from a few months ago.
Mo Oh, cool. Mm-hmm.
Jon Here’s what Rick has to say. Hi, guys. I enjoyed the Back to the Future episode and have been meaning to rewatch it for the 40th anniversary. Finally got around to it. And even though I have watched the movie more times than I can count, I noticed something for the first time yesterday.
Jon The movie theater in 1985 is a porn theater showing triple X movies.
Mo he
Jon And there’s an adult bookstore on the square as well.
George Mm-hmm.
Jon Now I don’t, everybody’s nodding by the way. You can’t hear them, Rick. We’re all nodding. Yep. He said ah says, I don’t know how I ever missed this. And I’m curious why the filmmakers made this choice as the town seems like a small town that would not have these things.
Jon My recollection from the eighties is that, My recollection from the 80s is that porn theaters were in larger cities, but not smaller towns. Am I just being naive about that? My 1985 porn was available on VHS.
Jon ah but Thanks for letting us know, Rick, on VHS. And I would think the adult shop would put the theater out of business. Also, considering we had the Satanic Panic, the PMRC recording, and the PMRC policing records, how did a movie as big as Back to the Future get away with a porn theater and no one else ever said anything?
Jon I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks.
George He he he.
Jon Rick P. So, porn theater back the future.
Mo Right.
Jon Thoughts?
George I mean, it was it was intentional. So they were trying to show how the idyllic 1955 life had degraded by the 80s, which was the bastion of sin in the eyes of small-town America at that point.
Mo yeah
Jon Mm-hmm.
Mo right
Jon Yep.
George And I know that ah the writers, director, everybody involved, they wanted elements in that town to show that things were slowly going downhill.
George That’s why you have the bum…
Mo Right.
George that’s laying on the bench and ah you know, the papers blowing around because trash is not picked up like it would have been in the fifties.
Jon Right. Mm-hmm.
Mo There’s a lot of litter too. Mm
Jon Right. Mm-hmm.
George Uh, you don’t have the, the gas station is all grungy and falling apart because there’s not guys running out to oil your car and wash your windshield and everything else like they do in the fifties.
Mo hmm.
Jon Right, those attendants?
George So,
Jon sir. Yeah.
George Yeah. I mean, all of that was designed to show how middle America was on the decline in the eighties because of big corporations and lax values and everything else.
Jon Mm-hmm.
George So.
Jon yeah And he was happy to see it. Like he came back. He’s like, yes, we’re back in the grunge filled 80s.
George he
Mo Yeah.
George Right. Yeah.
Jon It’s not the idyllic 50s anymore.
Mo Yeah, and it really didn’t change because, you know, some things we sit noticed before, like change, you know, the name of the malls and other things from when he came left and came back. But that theater and stuff was still there. So i don’t think that changed at all.
Mo So nothing he did affected that.
Jon Right. Yeah. Yeah.
George Right. Yeah.
Jon Hooray. The porn theater is back.
Mo Yes.
Jon Thank goodness.
George Mm-hmm.
Jon Yeah.
Mo It takes more than time travel to get rid of porn.
Jon Yeah.
Jon it’s resilient like cockroach. Yeah. You can’t get rid of it. So yeah. Thanks for writing in Rick. Yeah. I remember, I think probably, I know, I know I didn’t see that the first watch through, um but I remember later years when you’re watching and looking for all the cool things that changed.
Jon Yeah. That’s one of those that ah not an accident and it is probably an exaggeration. I think it was used as an exaggeration of how things are going down in this little small town.
Mo Yeah. It’s a very obvious thing that, know.
Jon So it’s really easy thing to show. Yeah.
Mo Yeah.
Jon Really easy to show on screen.
George Yeah.
Jon Yeah. All right. Well, Rick, thank you for listening and writing in. We appreciate that you did. We love it every time the fourth listener takes time to drop us a line. If you’d like your email featured here on the show, it’s dropped dead easy. Just fire off an email to a podcast at genxgrownup.com.
Jon We’ll read every single one and most of them, just like Rick’s, will eventually make the show. All right. that good business in the rearview mirror, iss time to jump into the body of episode 195 right after this. Stick around.
Jon All right, gents, let’s get cooking. Talking about media here at the top of the show, as is the norm. Now, of course, this could be anything in the world realm of media you’re enjoying. It could be comics or music or film or books or television, whatever. And George, what you have on the list, I’m eager to talk about what you’ve been watching.
George ah Well, yeah, I’ve watched the very first two episodes of Alien Earth.
Mo e
George That’s about all I want to say about that.
Mo Yeah, I get where you’re coming from.
Jon because Because you don’t want to spoil it or because you don’t like it?
George It’s…
Jon Or…
George I don’t… Hmm. Hmm.
Mo I have my thoughts, but George. Yeah.
George Yeah, it’s ah so…
Jon Yeah, yeah.
George First episode is a little over an hour. ah Second episode is a little bit more traditional in the 40, 45 minute range or so.
Mo e
Mo yeah
Jon yeah yeah
George um First episode, they throw a lot at you as far as characters and situations. It does denote that it takes place two years before the Nostromo incident.
George If you’ve, if you’re familiar with the alien timeline, but,
Jon Right. Okay.
Mo Yeah.
Jon Yep.
George But that’s also very confusing because, you know, the whole Nostromo thing, it’s like nobody’s ever heard of xenomorphs when we’re talking about alien.
Mo It’s very confusing.
George But two years prior to Nostromo ever encountering one, one is on Earth. And I’m not giving anything away. It’s a name of the goddamn TV show.
Mo Yeah, I mean, it’s the name of the show.
George So if you haven’t figured that out yet.
Jon Right, right. It’s on the poster. There’s a xenomorph.
George Yeah.
Jon It’s alien, right?
George um The central story so far seems to center around a brother and sister duo. um And around the idea that the um that the main corporation that we’re used to, Weyland-Yutani, is not the only corporation involved on Earth.
Jon Mm-hmm.
George There’s apparently five ah corporations.
Mo Yeah. ah Three, four, four.
Jon Mm-hmm.
Mo They talk about four specifics.
George no they No, there’s five.
Jon and And Prodigy’s the new fifth one, I think.
Mo Oh, there’s five.
Jon i think you’re right.
Mo Okay.
George Prodigy is the new fifth one, yeah.
Jon Yep.
Mo Oh, gotcha.
Jon Yeah.
Mo Gotcha. Okay. You’re right. Yep.
George Yeah.
Mo Yep.
George So, and that’s the new trillionaire genius kid, whatever.
Jon Yeah.
Mo Barefoot kid.
George Um, all these, uh, corporations own the countries that we know today.
Jon Mm-hmm.
Mo Yeah.
George So, uh, Weyland-Yutani is apparently North and South America, I think they said at one point, and there’re all the other ones, they say Prodigy has this island and that’s where the first couple episodes take a lot of their story from.
Mo Yeah, whoever. Yeah.
George But, Um, they, they throw so many characters and so many concept at you. It looks like at first, like it’s almost going to be a Blade Runner story because the very first thing that they show you is this little text message about the different types of robotic creatures involved in the storyline.
Mo she says
Jon Mm-hmm. Right.
George And whichever one turns out to be the most efficient is the one that’s going to rule the galaxy for millennia to come universe.
Mo Universe.
George Yeah.
Mo Yeah.
Jon Sure.
George Of course, the Xenomorphs don’t give a shit about what robots we’ve created.
Mo Yeah, exactly I don’t think that’s the issue.
Jon yeah It’s like, we’ll eat any company you give us.
George Yeah.
Jon That’s fine.
George Exactly. So I’m just not sure what this show wants to be yet. I’m not sure where it wants to go.
Jon Hmm.
Mo Mm-hmm.
George i had a hard time deciding to watch episode two after episode one. I waited like a day and a half before I said, okay, fine, I’ll give episode two a shot because I was really kind of put off by episode one.
Jon Interesting.
Mo Mm-hmm.
George i I don’t know what I expected, but that wasn’t it.
Mo Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jon Mm hmm.
Mo Mm-hmm.
Jon Yeah, it’s funny. I’m exactly in that that chasm between episodes one and two like you were.
George Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Jon i just haven’t gotten to two yet. Not so much. I don’t think I fall in the same category as you like I’m disillusioned or guess it’s hard to say disillusioned when you didn’t know what to expect, but, and you know, you’re not sure you’re like it yet.
Jon I was more of a like I’m I’m I decided to wait and digest, as you said, so much stuff that they throw at you that I found all to be interesting and almost feel like I ought to rewatch the first one.
Jon So I understand well enough to go to the second one.
Mo I can see that.
Jon But you what I did really. And like I liked the look of stuff on a spaceship. especially now the stuff on the planet, whatever it’s, it’s earth.
Mo Mm hmm.
George Sure. Yeah.
Mo Mm hmm.
Jon It looks like earth, you know, it’s a futuristic earth. That’s all cool.
Mo Yeah.
Jon But I tell you some of the shots on the ship with the crew that are just basically space truckers, just like on the Nostromo, those shots and the attitudes between people when they were kind of hanging out at the big table that gave me the alien fields.
Mo Yeah.
Mo Yes.
Jon But as you said, there’s way more to this.
George Right.
Jon It’s alien earth. It’s not alien spaceship anymore. There’s more stuff happening.
Mo Mm-hmm.
Jon That stuff I’m still digesting. Like, I think I probably, um i liked it more than you did from what I’m hearing and you’re being careful not to spoil anything. I really liked the concept of the the hybrid people, you know, the child’s brain and the body of this robot or whatever.
Jon ah But that’s all i’m want to say about that is really interesting, the concept. But there is a lot. There is a lot. Yeah.
Mo Yeah, and I think I understand where George is going to because I saw the first episode and I’m like, where is this going? That was my friend. i I look at my head.
George Yeah.
Mo I’m like, where is this show going?
Jon Right, right.
Mo Like, I wasn’t sure what am i looking forward to this next episode? So it wasn’t something like, like, normally if it’s a really good show. I’ll watch both. you’re going to watch one. that Oh, I got to watch second one right away.
Jon Oh, sure.
George Yeah.
Jon Yeah.
Mo This one, I was like, yeah, let’s go to bed. Yeah. yeah Because I was like, let we’ll watch it.
George yeah
Mo We watched it the next day. I did watch the second one. We watched it together, and my wife. And we were like, at the end of the second one, too, I’m still kind of like, huh, what is this about here? Like, what’s going on?
Jon Mm-hmm.
Mo um you know, and again, like the timeline doesn’t make any sense to me as far as fitting into the world.
George No, they they could have done different. Yeah, they could have done this differently, but I think they went way off with the timeline.
Mo Yeah. and And they do introduce additional aliens, creature kind of things in this.
Jon Mm-hmm. Right.
Mo I’m like, sounds you know, it’s there’s some other stuff in there, which is weird. But I’m like, OK, what does this have to do with anything? you know, I said it’s just seemed like a lot of stuff and I don’t understand where what it has do with the central plot, essentially.
Jon Yeah. Like, is this a wax on wax off situation? Is all going sense in a couple of episodes or, or will I still be here to find out?
Mo I’m hoping.
Jon You know, that’s the question.
George Yeah.
Mo Yeah.
Jon Mm-hmm.
George I mean, i was so disillusioned after the first episode. And John, I too love the interior spaceship stuff that they start off with, but that’s only about 30% the first episode.
Mo Yeah. Oh, that was great.
Jon Mm-hmm.
Jon Certainly.
Mo Yeah.
Jon Right.
George Right.
Jon As I say, it it’s about Earth.
George The rest of the episode is, you know, cancer girl who becomes robot girl and weird.
Mo Super robot girl.
George ah Timothy Oliphant, maybe a robot, maybe not guy. ah Just yeah, there’s all kinds of strange stuff in the way that they’re using the couple of notable actors just feels off.
Jon Not sure. Yeah. hmm.
George Anyway, I was so disillusioned that between episodes one and two, I went and watched that Alicia Silverstone Irish dramedy movie. ah TV series. I watched both episodes of that and enjoyed the hell out of it compared to this.
Jon To cleanse your palate? ah
George So that’s saying something from such a big sci-fi fan, but yeah, they’ve got a lot of making up to do.
Jon Yeah.
George I hope they’ve done it because obviously these episodes are already in the can. They’re not filming them week to week with all that budget and production and whatnot.
Jon Yeah. Right, right. Yeah.
George So we’ll see how it goes. I will stick around for episode three because episode two was a little bit
Mo Yeah. Mm-hmm.
George more alien-y, even though it was based primarily 100% in Earth, which was fine with me.
Jon Okay. Okay.
George um they They did enough to make me feel like, you know, there’s disastrous consequences, an alien lurking around every corner, scary stuff and whatnot. So I felt good about episode two.
George ah I’m hoping I start to feel a little bit better every episode as we go. That’s what I hope, because I don’t want this thing to fail because I love the franchise, so…
Mo Yeah, I’m with you.
Jon Yeah.
George Anyway, yeah, yeah, they’ll stick around.
Jon So you are going to stick around. You’re going to stick it out and find out where it goes.
George I mean, it’s alien, you know, I even watched Prometheus, so I’m a glutton, right?
Mo This is couple more, right? Yeah.
Jon Right. Yeah.
Mo Yeah, there you go.
Jon ah we We all fell victim to that. It’s okay.
George Exactly. Anyway, Mo, what about you? ah you What have you been watching?
Mo So actually, this is a book.
Jon Sorry, I’m going to i gotta pause you real quick. Before you jump into yours, your mic sounds much lower to me than George’s. Did you do a mic check? If you did, just keep going.
Mo Yeah, i I did, but I could do another one for it.
Jon ah Okay. It could just be the return. It’s all right if you think it’s fine.
Mo OK.
Jon i want to make sure you did.
George Let me see if mine too high, maybe.
Jon I don’t think so. You sound, I don’t see any spikes. You don’t sound overmodulated.
George okay
Jon Just in comparison, you sounded really low.
Mo Huh. Okay.
Jon But if you had to check, that’s fine.
Mo Yeah.
Jon We’re good. Yep. Go ahead.
George I’m on my normal 90 that you wanted me to be on.
Jon So, Mo, you’re good.
Mo All right.
Jon So, mo what have you been watching?
Mo Yeah.
Jon What have been watching? You’re good. Sorry.
Mo So, um, actually I’m gonna talk about a book. Uh, so, you know a good friend of the show, you know, um, tomorrow ta tomorrow Devers, he pressed on Devers.
Jon Okay.
Jon Tamara Devers.
Mo um Okay. We should get a good friend of the show.
George Like, neither syllable was correct in either name.
Jon it was It was almost right if they were all changed.
George Ha ha ha ha
Mo You know, it, yes, you should have a name. You can only pronounce one way.
George Good friend of the show.
Jon We got a blooper. Hallelujah. Good friend of the show.
Mo You know, I just call her Tam.
Jon What the hell’s her name?
Mo Anyway.
Jon We don’t call her Tam. That’s true.
Mo So Tamara Devers.
Jon Devers.
Mo Okay.
Jon Is it an S on the end?
Mo That’s it.
Jon I think it is Devers. Yeah.
George ah hope she comes back.
Mo Yes.
George No, it’s Amara Sashwan or something weird.
Jon Yeah. and is
Mo Yeah. No, there’s no S.
George like
Mo There’s no Tamara Devers. Okay.
Jon Tamara.
Mo So actually, okay. Yeah.
Jon Tamara Devers.
Mo Yeah. ah So it’s a book. It was written by a good friend of the Tamara Devers, who – and so we got like a preview copy of it.
Jon Oh, yeah.
Mo And the reason we want to talk about is just the fact it’s a child’s book – a children’s book, I should say, called Day We Found Yesterday. And let me tell you, this is like – it’s unfinished, but I can’t wait for to finish it.
Jon Mm-hmm.
Mo you know
Jon Mm-hmm. Yep.
Mo And so something you say – I say about books is that like – oh man, i I couldn’t get past it, which is normally a bad thing. And this one, i actually couldn’t get past certain pages because there’s so much…
Mo to look at on each page that I was glad I was not trying to read this to a child because they’d be telling me like, keep going because I’d be like stopping and look because she just does so many really just fun 80s references.
Jon They’d be bored as hell. Yeah.
Mo And the base is a child story about two kids to hear their grandparents talk about something they lost and they go on adventure in a town trying to figure out what it is. That’s just, know, high level what the story is about. and And they visit different stores of people who knew their parents, grandparents and, you know, find out about their history and stuff like that.
Mo And yeah it’s just so cute, though, because if you look at like when they go into the art store, there’s the midnight oil paints, you know, or, you know, and then you see a sign that says stray with pictures of cats under it, you know, or the paint set called True Colors.
George you
Jon yep
Mo I mean, it’s just every single thing, everything you look at. It’s it’s remember those um Richard Scarry. you ever read those as a kid, the Richard Scarry ones?
Jon Yeah.
Mo And how like they were just so yeah they were so dense with stuff that you would spend half time just looking at a page trying to say, oh, there’s a person doing this, there’s person doing that.
Jon The busy town or whatever it’s called. Yeah. Yeah. Right.
Mo That’s the impression I got with this, was that there was just so much going on each page and so many puns, just so many fun 80s references. I think this is going to be a ah great book when she’s finally finished.
Jon and Put this in context. Tamara’s other work was these ultimate mixtape books, were which were like trivia about 80s music and artists and things like that.
Mo Yes.
Mo Mm-hmm.
Jon And so what she’s done with this, I saw, you know, I saw the yeah the early copy that that you got, Mo. And it’s it’s taking that love of all this 80s music and all these pop artists and all the people, that you know, from 80s music, but pushing it into the artwork.
Jon of this children’s book so that look, I know I’m guilty of forcing my daughter to enjoy 80s music or listen to it at least. So this is like another avenue in to get your kid to understand and know the history of you know pop music from the 80s in our decade.
Jon And it was ah even with the temporary artwork. And there’s some notes in there that say what’s coming already. It’s like, oh, this is fun. Like, I don’t even I don’t even need a kid to read this.
Mo Oh, I know.
Jon Yeah.
Mo Exactly. It’s just like and this one thing is like, you know, there’s a section that says, you know, spray paint and it says cautioned contents under pressure. You know, I mean, it’s just like, again, just doing there more references everywhere.
Jon d Ding ding di ding ding yeah.
Mo I just can’t wait for it to finish it. Like I said, the color pages looked amazing. So I can’t wait. The whole thing is colored.
Jon hmm.
Mo um And I know there’s some tweaks and stuff.
Jon Mm
Mo She’s working on it. But already I could tell you that I think it out almost as is finish the coloring and it would be a great book.
Jon hmm.
Mo ah As soon as it comes out, I’m definitely gonna buy copies for all the grandkids.
Jon Yeah, it’s ah she always she’s very clever and witty. She doesn’t just do who sang this. It’s more of like a clever way to get to the trivia.
Mo Yeah.
Jon And she’s kind of embedded that in this book. And it’s it’s really sweet how and the kids are on this journey, as you said, for their grandparents and they think they fail.
Mo Yeah, very much.
Jon And a spoiler for the children’s book, they get back and go, no, you didn’t fail. You saw the cool stuff we wanted you to see. You helped find our memories, which is really sweet.
Mo Right. Yeah, it was very, very sweet.
Jon Yeah, it’s fun.
Mo So.
Jon The day we found yesterday.
Mo Yesterday.
Jon Yeah, well, I’m sure it’s going to be in Amazon at some point. We’ll throw a link when we have one and we’ll let you know.
Mo Oh, absolutely. And also I’ll throw links to her other books, too, as well on the show notes.
Jon Yeah.
Jon Of course.
Mo So you guys can see those as well.
Jon Oh, yeah. Yeah. Help Tamara out.
Mo So now if there’s a probably a 180 from what I just talked about, I think it’s what you’re about to talk about, John.
Jon Well, it is about kids, so kind of a little bit.
Mo Yeah, just kill kids.
Jon Yeah. So I was looking forward to this new horror movie called Weapons that came out last week. In fact, I think when we talked last time, I was i had my ticket already. I was eager to go and see it.
Mo Yeah.
Jon The premise of this film is small town America at 2.17 a.m. m on in the middle of the night. Every kid in this one classroom, except one, gets up out of their bed, walks out the front door, never comes back.
Jon So it’s a whole classroom of kids missing.
Mo Mm hmm.
Jon And like was a couple of years ago, what was the was the film I was still looking forward to? Long Legs. Remember we talked about how it was overhyped as the next big horror movie and everything.
Mo Oh, yeah, yeah.
George Mm-hmm.
Mo Mm hmm.
Jon I was fearful I was going to come into this film overhyped. And let me just start by going to the end of my review. This is a tremendous movie. Going into it, I saw the Rotten Tomatoes was 98, 99 percent, 100 percent at one point.
Mo OK.
Mo Oh, wow.
Jon It’s still up there in the 90s, even, you know, audiences and everything. This is the same guy. I think his name is Josh Kreger or Kreger or something like that. He’s the guy that did Barbarian, that weird two people go to the same ah are Airbnb and there’s a caverns underneath it.
George Oh, yeah.
Mo Oh, yeah.
George Right.
Mo Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jon Crazy stuff. Same director. he’s something that He’s done several very creative and interesting things in this film. The first and smartest probably is that all the stuff you saw in the trailer happens in the first five minutes of the movie.
Mo Oh, cool.
Jon So if you’re like waiting for these amazing things to happen, you haven’t seen them yet.
George Okay, good.
Jon Now you’ve seen tiny glimpses of action, but you have no context. There’s no like, when are we going to get to that scene? No, no, no. Very, very smart. So the trailers didn’t spoil anything. Great, great choice there.
Jon The next really cool thing he did is that this film is a series of vignettes. It isn’t just a it is a linear film, but it kind of rewinds on itself a little bit. So it starts with, you understand what happened with a little voiceover.
Jon And then you see the teacher and she’s, of course, the the parents want answers. And what did this teacher do to our kids?
Mo Oh.
Jon She has to be i responsible. And you follow her story for a couple of days. And then it cuts to another character you’ve been, you’ve seen in the periphery and you follow him.
Jon And it just rewinds about six, eight hours and you watch him.
Mo ah
Jon You see it overlaps a little and you follow. And maybe you’ll see something crazy happen with somebody. You’re like, what? Well, he’s the next vignette. so you’re going to see what happened from his context and how the crazy thing happened to him. And yes, it was marketed like long legs. Oh, it’s the greatest horror movie to come along in all time.
Jon But rather than really call it a horror, they just left it as open, like this is a creepy movie. And that’s exactly what this movie is. It’s wonderfully creepy. There were times sitting in my chair where I was like, oh, my goodness.
Jon what what you know You’re like that anxiety because you see something about to happen.
Mo Mm-hmm.
Jon And he fools you with what you think is going to happen is something different, like something crazy you think is going to happen and something innocuous does. That’s almost scarier. I’m not going to explain what that means because I don’t give any spoilers, but it’s so subverts your expectations.
Jon It’s such a good mystery and thriller, interesting structure, like not quite, but a la Pulp Fiction that kind of jumps around and you get to put the story together in your head.
Jon Tremendous. I can’t wait to see it again. This guy has a huge, huge fan. set up for being the next great thriller horror author of films. I can’t wait to see what he does next.
Mo Yeah, I really can’t wait to see this movie. So here’s the big question I have, though. It’s like, the I understand the basic plot.
Jon Yeah. Yeah.
Mo All this stuff sounds super interesting, super original.
Jon yeah
Mo Is the ending satisfying?
Jon Yes.
Jon He said with a question mark. oh i don’t want to give anything away. The ending is.
Mo feel cheated. Do you feel… You don’t feel…
Jon no no, no. I know. Yeah. The ending is vindicating.
Mo Okay. Hmm.
Jon It does not button up every question that you have a lot. Inception, it leaves like, well, why was this and how did this get here? But you know what happened? You know where the kids are, you know what caused it.
Mo Okay. Okay.
Jon And someone somewhere gets a comeuppance.
Mo Oh, okay. Okay.
George yeah
Mo Alrighty.
Jon So vindication is what I will say. And probably, I’m not going to say anymore. It’s the ending is if not super satisfying, it’s what you want out of a story like this.
Mo Okay.
Jon I think.
Mo Okay, cool.
Jon Yeah. If it didn’t, I don’t think I’d recommend it. How many great movies have we sat through and you get to the end and,
Mo Oh my God. The end just messed all thing up.
Jon You know, in the end. And you’re like, what? That’s the end? that’s You’re going to tell me anything else right. It doesn’t quite do that. It leaves questions open, but enough for you to think about and enjoy not leaving in the dark.
Jon You know what i mean?
Mo Yeah.
Jon Yeah.
Mo I’m okay with questions.
Jon Okay. I am too. Yeah. So Weapons is in theaters now. you know how streaming is. It’s going to be coming shortly. But if you can see in the theater, especially with other people and hear them gasping and cringing, it’s the kind of movie you want to see in a theater. So be sure you check it out.
Jon Cool.
Mo Good.
Mo I’m going to kick off Tekken Toys today with something we bought. um And it’s a photo scanner. Now, the reason why we bought this is that ah me and my wife were like consolidating houses and all that stuff. And of course, she has boxes and boxes and boxes of pictures.
Mo Her parents were, you could almost do a flip movie of her and her brother’s childhood with the amount of pictures that they took of them.
Jon Physical.
George Hehehehe.
Mo It’s just a ridiculous number. and And so at these days we’re like, you know, now we have all these boxes and we’re like, oh, what do we do with them? And so we said, hey, why don’t we just scan them? And then we get rid of the pictures.
Mo Like we’ll have a digital copy, you know, just to make sure there’s nothing written on the back, that kind of thing.
Jon Right, right.
Mo But, you know, there’s no really point of hold having the actual photo unless we’re going to frame it, know? So,
Jon Okay. And you can always get a new print if you wanted to later, right?
Mo Exactly. Exactly. So we so we looked around.
Jon Yeah.
Mo i mean, I have a flatbed scanner, but oh, my God. i mean, trying to imagine just picture putting in pictures and doing a flatbed scanner just seemed like hell. So we looked and tried to find a relatively inexpensive photo scanner that we found.
Jon Okay. Okay.
Mo And we found one um on Amazon, of course.
Jon Okay.
Mo It’s called Plus Tech is the name of the company. Yeah. And it’s a photo scanner and basically it’s a top feed scanner. So you basically just pop the pic, you just drop literally place the picture on the top.
Mo It rolls through, scans it and has software that basically you can look at all your pictures and when you’re happy with them, you just hit save and it saves them all to a directory for you.
Jon Okay, okay
Mo um
Mo It could do four by six photo in about 10 seconds. you know, like you drop it in, you wait 10 seconds.
Jon yeah.
Mo No, you can’t stack them. You have to put them in. you have to do one at a time feed. So basically, I set up a laptop in the kitchen with this thing hooked up to it.
Jon Okay.
Mo Every time we walk past it, we just drop another picture on it. You know, you just drop another picture.
Jon Ongoing project.
Mo We have a pile.
Jon Yeah.
Mo So we just drop another picture on it, get through it. But I’ve had this thing for about four days. And I’ll tell you, we’ve gone through. We probably scan over probably couple hundred pictures at this point. um and it And it does a really, really good job. It’s 600 DPI images.
Mo ah So far, like I said, it seems like it’s a really, really great deal.
Jon Yeah, you kind of touched on the the edge of the question I was going to ask you, and that was quality of the scan. So it’s all about optics with these things. Now, as things get miniature and optics go up and phones, and I figured it had pretty good.
Mo Yep.
Jon You said 600 DPI.
Mo Yeah, you do 300 or 600.
Jon Have you, okay, yeah. Have you yet brought these, know you’ve been saving them off. Have you brought anything then into your computer to look at it, to see?
Mo Oh, yeah, I did that the first day because I was like, I don’t want to scan 400 pictures and realize this thing sucks.
Jon You have. Okay. Oh, right. To see the quality. Yeah.
Mo So um we did some right off the bat. We did some, we scanned some pictures, we put them in a Dropbox and, you know, my wife pulled them up on her laptop, her personal laptop, which is a much better monitor and screen and all that stuff.
Jon Mm-hmm.
Jon Right.
Mo And ah no, the the quality was great.
Jon ah Color saturation, contrast, all that.
Mo you know, the color saturation was amazing.
Jon Nice. Mm-hmm.
Mo um You know, as she went through, I mean, some of them were faded.
Jon That’s what I was considered. Yeah.
Mo So she’s actually used some of the software, you know, updated them and, you know, cleaned them up and stuff.
Jon Right.
Mo But yeah, so far, this thing working like a champ.
Jon Okay.
George So I have some concerns and questions, mainly because I noticed you haven’t mentioned the price. This thing is not cheap as a one unit device. It says it’s $215. that what you paid for it?
Mo $199, yeah. every ah Every other one I saw was closer to $300 to $400, the ones that do stacking.
Jon Mm, yeah?
George well
Jon Wow.
Jon Wow.
Mo And the ones that do, i in order to get one that does this level of scanning at that speed, that’s about what they go for.
Jon Hmm.
George Now, I did see in the description something that is a little bit different than what you were talking about. You said that this does up to 4×6, but the what it says in the description says 4×6, and
Mo Oh, yeah. So no, I said we’re doing four by sixes. It does four by six in that time.
Jon Oh, okay.
George okay
Mo It doesn’t eight by ten longer.
Jon You haven’t done anything yet.
Mo It takes long.
George So it has a much wider versatility then, which at least makes the price not feel as bad.
Mo was saying. Oh, yeah, absolutely.
George It even says up to A4 size paper, which is pretty good size.
Mo Oh, yeah, you could basically as long as you get the fifth, the width, it’ll do whatever. That’s the thing. And the nice thing is, too, you don’t have to put them in a particular spot.
George Got you.
Mo As long as you stick it along that top rail, it just sucks it down and scans it.
Jon Yeah. Crap, what was my question? Oh, I know. it’s almost one of those things like you ought to be able to rent it, you know, or when you’re done scanning your 200 pictures that you go and gift it to someone else or gift it to your kids or a friend or whatever, because, because when are you going need to do this again?
Mo Yeah, true.
Jon This $200 unitasker device.
Mo Yeah, I definitely feel that this is going to be like at some point down the road, like, you know, my brother’s going call. Hey, can I borrow your, know, your photos?
Jon Yeah. Yeah.
Mo yeah I found a box of photos I need to do. You know, it’s like it’s definitely going one of those things.
Jon Yeah.
Mo mean, because right now, I mean, the only other option one was sending them off to be scanned. You know, that is just ridiculously expensive to have photos digitized.
George Right.
Jon yeah
Mo um And just and they said doing on a flatbed, like pulling them off and putting one in the flatbed.
Jon Oh yeah, it’s a nightmare, certainly.
Mo Oh, that’s just that’s just hell I don’t want to deal with.
Jon Yeah. Yeah.
Mo So I figured, you know, for a couple, it is 200 bucks. Like I said, it was one 99 when I, we got it.
Jon Yeah.
Mo Maybe it went up a couple bucks since since then, but um it to me, $200 for the amount of time it’s going to save us. ah Totally worth it.
Jon and it’s hard to put a value on preserving these family photos. I get that it’s worth the money, but you got to think about, well, wow, but it’s done in a minute.
Mo Oh yeah. Yeah.
Jon And now you’re like, you know, I don’t know a few days, whatever it takes, you get it done. And then you’re like what am going use this for? I don’t know. Nothing.
Mo Yeah.
Jon Yeah.
Mo One day somebody said, hey, got another photo to scan. I’m like, all right, hey, guess what? I got this thing.
Jon Yeah.
Mo Just drop it in. There you go. he done. you know?
Jon Yeah.
George I mean, maybe you take advantage of how fast it is because it does them in like 10 seconds, say.
Jon If you got one photo flatbed,
George Maybe just do a marathon weekend where you and the wife just sit there and feed one after the other, get it done, and then send it back to Amazon so it was like renting it.
Mo and Just feed it and then return it.
Jon Return it. ah It doesn’t work anymore. Doesn’t need it.
George Yeah.
Mo Or don’t need it, know?
Jon ah Amazon rental.
George Yeah.
Jon Yeah, sure.
Mo I know. Just then buy it again if we need it a second time.
Jon ah
Mo and So that’s what I have. So how about John? Sorry. that’s what I have. So how about you, John? What got for us today?
Jon yeah i have i have something that neither of you go to get Yeah, I have something that neither of you are going to give a crap about probably because neither of you wear contact lenses. But anyone in the audience who does – I know.
Mo Okay. Yeah, I don’t care.
Jon Sorry. you guys tune out. and More so than usual. You can tune out while I’m talking. um So I wear contact lenses. And recently i got a new prescription and ah changed brands and whatever. and So here’s the deal with contact lenses.
Jon You get lenses that are supposed to, you change them every, whatever they say, two weeks, four weeks, six weeks, whatever.
Mo Sure.
Jon You’re to be disposed when you do that. But the reality is those things are expensive. And so you want to make them last as long as possible.
Mo sure
Jon So you wear them a little longer and until they’re, you know, they cause you discomfort or itchy or whatever. And what can happen is, look, you’re taking these nice, well-carved, crafted pieces of plastic and putting in your nasty germ-ridden eyes all day.
Jon They get like protein deposits and they get, you know, kind of the… the the The porous nature, the, the, they call the air, air permeability goes away and it makes your eyes dry and itchy and not good. And I even found that these, after when I got past a couple of weeks, these new lenses, they started to get little cloudy because they were getting that, that deposit on them. That’s changing the the shape of the lens. So it’s getting a little cloudy.
Jon So yes, I could just wear my lenses the way you’re supposed to, but i don’t want to do that. ah How can I make my lenses last longer? So I started doing some research and what I landed on is this thing called the ReO2 contact lens cleaner.
Mo Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jon It’s a little box that has a battery and a little screen on it. And effectively what it does is you put your lenses in it. You close the little lid. It has a little, you know, how like when you, um,
Jon like if you’re charging your watch or something, they’re not wireless charging, but they’re like little little brass contacts for battery charging.
Mo yeah yeah yeah
Jon You know, you have to line it up. So it’s got magnets in it. You throw it in this machine. You tell it what you’re doing. but What kind of contact lenses do you have? And it starts cooking these lenses. And don’t mean cooking in terms of heat, but it uses something called electrophoresis.
Jon that passes electrons back and forth. a Yeah, I know. Mo’s looking at me funny. You pass electrons back and forth between the sides of the cups of the contact lenses and eats away at the protein deposits that are on your lenses. It makes them refreshed again.
Jon it it gets rid of any deposits. it It makes them porous so they breathe again. And I was dubious. And like you were suggesting, George, Amazon rental, I’ll try it and see, right, if it doesn’t work.
Mo Hehehehe.
Jon So I ordered it and I got it. And I had some lenses that are kind of nearing the end of their time that they were probably supposed to be in my eyes. And so I did this thing. I charged it up. I put my lenses in it, put solution in there, put the thing and it says, okay, we’re working. It’s going to take, I don’t know, 480 minutes or whatever. So you do it overnight if you’re going to do it.
Jon And I’ll be damned in the morning. You take those things out, you rinse them off and you can look and you can see these things look like brand new. There’s none of that, you know, kind of cloudiness or anything.
Mo yeah
Jon None of the deposits on there. I couldn’t believe it worked like they said it would. I was ready for this to be a scam that didn’t work, but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t take even disposable lenses and makes them like new again.
Jon Not how many times you can do this, if it degrades them or not. i know what they’ve said, but here’s the thing. It costs 80 bucks and you might think, well, 80 bucks to clean your lenses. You know, going to buy contact lenses,
Mo Well, it’s been so many, you
Jon You’re going to spend a couple hundred bucks, you know
George I mean, we spent a couple of hundred bucks to scan our photos. we Might as well spend 80 bucks to clean our eyeballs.
Jon right
Mo Yeah.
Jon To be able to see the photos would be nice, right? if You can. ah Surprisingly, it’s like everything that lines up with magnets. There’s all these magnets in it. It has a little, don’t know, it has a little mirror. You flip up the top. It’s all this stuff on it and a little screen with a couple of buttons.
Jon It’s surprisingly high tech while also be being surprisingly accessible and easy to use and easy to understand. I don’t fully understand how it works, but I got to tell you, I’m on on board with it. It actually works.
Mo So I assume you you have you used what you call it ah treated lenses already. Have you put them back in your eyes?
Jon Yeah, they’re my eyes right now. Yep.
Mo And that you don’t feel any difference or anything in them?
Jon they They felt brand new again. So I didn’t do this every night.
Mo Huh.
Jon I just use my regular storage routine normally. But now if they get a little irritating, I put them in this overnight and the next day they’re damn near new lenses. Hmm.
George I’m just a little bit jealous because I wear eyeglasses and I’m pretty much having to wear them all the time now as my eyes have gotten weaker over the years.
Jon Mm-hmm. Yeah.
George There doesn’t seem to be a good effective cleaning solution other than rub your fingers really hard over your lenses for glasses. And glasses have been around a hell a lot longer than contact lenses.
Jon Yeah, yeah, that’s true.
George So where the hell is my cool little magnetic glasses? one screen device that I could sit my glasses in overnight, let them clean and then wake up next morning, have a clean pair of glasses.
Jon Would that be nice, right? Clean all the gunk out of the corners and everything?
George It’s, I just want the lenses clean because I’m awful at doing that.
Jon No kidding.
George Like I take it to the place where, you know, you buy your eyeglasses and those fuckers, they know what they’re doing. They clean them glasses in like 10 seconds and look like they’re just right off the floor. I try and do it for like a half an hour and they still have smudges in them and everything.
Jon alright
George This is pissing me off.
Jon Are you cleaning it with a grease rag, perhaps? So what do you.
George I mean,
Mo so I was wondering too, like, what are you using to clean these?
George and no I’m using like different.
Mo You blowing your nose and wiping the… yeah
George That’s the thing. You know, like when you first started out, you didn’t have microfiber class claws.
Jon Right.
George Now you do, but there’s 20 different kinds of microfiber c cloths out there.
Jon Shirt tail. Yeah.
George And there’s ones that have like thick thing.
Jon Yeah.
George Anyway, we’re getting off subject. This is the contact thing, but.
Jon sorry but so So, wait hey, I’ll look and see. Maybe there’s a solution for kind for glasses like there is for contacts. Because this thing, it works.
George be nice.
Jon So if you wear contacts, at least take a look at it. If you’ve had that problem like have in in the past, it might be worth taking a look at. I’m happy that I picked it up.
Mo Cool.
Jon All right. George, how about you? Since you couldn’t find a good glasses cleaner, what have you been checking out with?
George Well, so I didn’t find this at all. This was something you actually got for me to take on that trip to New York, where I went to the Long Island Retro Gaming Expo.
Jon Hmm. Oh.
George um
Jon Mm-hmm.
George It’s that wireless lavalier setup. Now, there are a hundred different companies making these kinds of things, and they’re pretty standard.
Jon yeah
George They come with… a receiver or two, depending upon connection type, a couple of loves, usually some type of a clipping system that most oftentimes has some kind of magnet with it.
George So you can, you know, put a piece behind your shirt and the lav on front and stuff like that.
Mo Mm-hmm.
George Anyway, ah you got this for me. we We tested it out in the Longhorn Steakhouse restaurant with our phones just to make sure it would work.
Jon Noisy as hell. Yeah.
George um I took it to the convention. I used it as directed, like they used to say in the old 80s commercials.
Jon Yeah.
George And ah we got back and it was less than stellar sound quality. um
Jon Yeah.
George Now, I made sure, because you told me to, and John’s our tech expert when it comes to podcast and video and all that stuff, I made sure to turn on the noise canceling.
Jon Yeah.
George We don’t know. Maybe that’s the thing that made the sounds really weird or something. Maybe I should have left that off. I don’t know. um But
Jon It seems counterintuitive, but yeah, you did. Yeah. Like you should.
George it it it didn’t work well. ah These, I think you said, i want to say you spent under $100.
Mo good.
George Yeah.
Jon Oh, I think they’re like $25. They’re very inexpensive.
George yeah
Mo Oh, okay.
Jon And we keep trying to find good ones and we keep nudging the price. 19, 20, 25, 30. Yeah.
George Well, but that’s why I put this on the list for today. Not because I wanted to talk about these, because I really don’t think we should recommend these. I wouldn’t put the link to these.
Mo you can Actually, they’re not even available. I checked.
Jon Oh, good.
George They’re not…
Jon Well, at George, they will be. We return yours. They’ll be available again.
George Right? Exactly. Yeah. um I just want to ask the question, and this is not just for us in particular, but maybe for our listeners out there who might also do other endeavors like what we do with podcasts and YouTube and whatnot to varying degrees.
Jon Mm-hmm, yeah. Yeah.
George When does it become worth it to just spend the real money on the name brand equipment and quit fucking around with the $20 and $60 items and just spend the $200 for the DJI that every video thing out there shows works best
Jon yeah
George Flawlessly. When do we, when do you hit that thing? So it’s, this was more of a discussion for us that I thought our listeners might benefit from.
Jon Yeah, you’re you’re, as I said, we’ve been trying to find budget priced, know, oh, this this would be easy. Just pick these up. This will be easy. And invariably, either they wear out and one stops working or they don’t sound good or overmodulated.
Jon And it’s it’s crazy that it’s almost like nobody online cares about audio quality. They just go, yep, I can hear my voice. Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That’s not what I said. i said, does it sound good?
Jon Right?
Mo Mm-hmm.
Jon And you always assume like, oh, name brand is just expensive for the name. And then the others are, or they’re just knockoffs with the same technology. But more and more, we’re finding with these wireless things,
Jon They’re clearly, the money’s going somewhere beyond just just paying the corporate guy for the cool name. They just, they are subpar, these little $20 and $30 ones.
George Mm-hmm.
Jon And i when is the time? The time is now. We’ve tried so many of them, but it’s so frustrating when so many other things you can get the budget version and it’s 85 to 90% as good. It’s not that that same way with these wireless mics, is it?
Mo You know, I mean, my dad was very big on there’s some things in life you just got spend money on.
Jon Yep.
Mo You know, and one of his things was like, he says, dress shoes. He says, spend money on good dress shoes because crappy dress shoes will screw up your feet. You know, he has like he said, to certain things. This sounds like one of those things that is just maybe maybe the sound technology, maybe the components are just expensive to give the high quality sound that we need.
George I mean, this it’s the exact same thing my father used to say about Camel cigarettes. You know, you got to get the name brand Camel cigarettes.
Mo that’s right yeah You can’t get that bargain basement cancer. that
Jon I lost my train of thought. I do a comment. What was it? Oh yeah. And the other thing that we’re doing that maybe is a a wrong shortcut is we would like to, for convenience, record the audio with the phone, like recording the video.
Jon Maybe that’s another shortcut we’re taking where we should just simply record the audio with something good, like a hardwired zoom or something, you know, that that we could use and then just sync up the audio later.
Mo Yeah.
Jon But it’s so tempting to go, let’s just find a mic that works with this and all the audio and videos in a single file. But maybe it’s time to think, oh, let’s treat them as two separate things.
George Well, maybe, but I think truthfully, i think the reason why it seems like that’s the easier way to go is because we’ve been shown that it we can go that way with the DJI models.
Jon Yeah, maybe so.
George But to Mo’s point, the components, maybe they’re just higher quality.
Mo yeah
George Maybe the condenser mics inside the DJI’s
Jon Yeah.
George are a better microphone than what’s inside the ones that we’ve tried in the past. The electronic components don’t wear out like you talked about in some of the other ones. I’m not saying that DJI or Rode, I think was the other one that was real big in the wireless live space.
Jon Road quality, yeah. Yeah.
George I’m not saying that they’re perfect. I’m sure that people have problems with them.
Jon Mm-hmm.
George um But every independent video I’ve ever watched, on those products seems to be pretty sound quality high.
Jon no Yeah.
George And I don’t see any videos on these 25 and $60 units that we keep trying.
Jon Yeah. That are able to make the same claims. Yeah.
George Yeah. Like just nobody’s reviewing them.
Jon Yeah.
George And maybe the reason why they’re not reviewing them is because they try them and they suck and they send them back.
Jon Mm-hmm.
Mo Yeah, it’s not worth the time anymore.
Jon and No point, right? Just send it back.
George Yeah.
Jon That’s the information we needed though, right?
George So
Jon well We’ve done the research for you. We’ve tried probably six eight six pairs of these and they just continue to be not good.
George Yeah.
Jon They’re convenient. They’re cute. They’re nice container. They don’t have the audio quality that we’d like to have. Yep. Yep. No doubt. Yeah. I right. We’re going to pull the trigger. We’re going to start shopping for something better. It’s time.
Jon We’re professional internet people. We’re going to do that, right?
George we Yeah. One of us is. Yeah.
Mo We have people
Jon right at least At least one of us is.
George All right, guys, time to get to the fun stuff with games. Although I’m gonna start off this round with something that’s maybe not quite as fun as I had hoped it would be.
Jon Mm-hmm.
Mo um
Jon Oh, okay.
George I was playing a first person shooter. Now, granted, I know I’m not the target audience. I am not a first person shooter type of guy.
Jon Okay.
George That’s my kids. I’m too old. I don’t have the fast twitch reflex ability that they do. But ah we received a key to this game through some of our media contact places, right?
Jon Mm-hmm.
George So I got a press release for this game. ah They offered up a key. I put it in our list. It sat there forever. John didn’t feel like fooling around with it. Mo didn’t feel like fooling around with it.
Jon yeah
George So I said, all right, let me… play this game, and then I’ll talk about it on the podcast.
Mo Thank you.
Jon Nice.
George It’s called Alpha Response.
Jon Okay.
George Now, ah the game right now has just been released. I’m trying to see what the date was. It was recent. um Oh, not that. ah Well, Early Access was October 8th, but they just came out of Early Access, I think, or something like that.
George Anyway, um it’s 20 bucks.
Jon Okay.
Jon All right.
George Been around for a little while.
Jon Affordable.
George They’ve got some good development. It has some positive reactions. Very positive. 106 on recent reviews. 804 reviews overall. That’s not a huge amount, but it’s still, it’s, you know, not very poor or mid-range or mixed or whatever Steam assigns it for those.
Jon Okay.
George I tell you right off the bat, the first thing that surprised me about it, it’s a first-person shooter with no controller support.
Mo What?
George Yeah.
Jon Okay.
George Yeah.
Jon There are people that are keyboard mouse purists, but usually you get an option.
George So
Mo But usually you have an option.
Jon Yeah.
Mo Yeah, exactly.
Jon Mm-hmm.
George yeah, so I, um, I fired the game up. It loaded really easily and quickly. Wasn’t any problem with that. I turned on my Xbox one pro three V two, whatever the hell it is.
Jon Mm-hmm.
George Um, turned it on and nothing was happening. And I went, huh, that’s, that’s odd.
Jon Couldn’t use it.
George So let me go to controls and see what I’m doing wrong. I went to controls and there is only a list for keyboard control mapping, nothing else.
Jon Keyboard mouse. Hmm. Oh, that’s too bad.
George So I feel like that’s a miss, in my opinion.
Mo That’s odd.
Jon Okay.
Mo Yeah, for sure.
George um I did the tutorial. Now, the tutorial itself was easily laid out. It was simple to execute.
George They had a little helper guy that kind of talked through a radio because that’s in the game’s motif. And he, you know, kind of walked you through, okay, pick up these grenades, throw them in these buckets.
George Here’s how you load a gun. Here’s how you move back and forth. Here’s how you jump over something, crawl under some of that kind of stuff.
Jon Mm-hmm. Sure. Mm-hmm. sure
George ah So I feel like the game would be easily playable for anybody who enjoys FPS type of games. The only reason why I discounted a little bit, it’s not the price, 20 bucks for a game is nothing, there’s nothing wrong with that at all.
George um But no controller support. I just feel like that’s, yeah, that’s just off when it comes to an FPS.
Mo That’s weird.
George So…
Jon yeah what’s the Yeah. What’s the theme of the game? Is it zombies? Is it military? Is it…
George Now, you’re policemen, so you’re responding to different criminal incidents from what I can tell.
Jon Oh, the alpha response. I see.
George Yeah.
Jon Okay. Gotcha. So first responder kind of thing to whatever crime situation.
George Yeah. Exactly.
Jon Okay. So it’s more grounded in reality a little bit.
George Yeah.
Jon All right.
George Yeah. Yeah. There’s no zombies running around. You’re not running through Mordor with a big sword or anything like that.
Jon Okay.
George Yeah.
Jon right.
Mo Do you think if it had a controller, you would have had more fun with it?
George I think I would have taken to it a little bit faster just because, you know, i if I played first-person shooters, that was mostly during the Xbox 360 era for me.
Mo Right.
George So I got more used to that. um i Like I said, I don’t think I had any major problems. There are a lot of keys, though, to keep track of on your keyboard in this game. Every individual action has a different key.
Jon Sure. Yeah.
George It’s not like… Some first-person shooters get around the keyboard stuff because there’s like one action button, right?
Mo Right.
Jon Yep.
George There’s the WASD that we’re all used to, but then like the E key, you know, interacts with all the elements inside the world.
Mo Right. Right.
Jon Yep.
George Not so with this game. There’s different things for grenades and different things for switching your guns up and whatnot.
Jon Just to
George Now, younger people who may in the future hear this for uh, historical purposes or whatnot are probably laughing their asses off.
Jon make sure. Yeah.
George Like you can’t handle 20 keys. No, I’m old. I’m sorry. I can’t, but I think the game is worth checking out. Um, I would play it for whatever time period you have, and then make sure you pay attention to your refund time limit just to be safe.
Mo Okay.
Jon to make sure yeah
George Cause 20 bucks is not terribly expensive, but it’s also not insta buy super cheap.
Jon Was this on Steam, George? Where’d you activate it?
George Yeah, on Steam.
Jon Was it Steam? Because I always thought, and maybe it’s not available here. i always thought Steam had like a like an integrated integrated controller to keyboard mapper or adapter.
Mo Yeah.
Jon But I think when that happens, it pops up and says, would you like to use this? And if that didn’t happen for you, it may just not be available for this game. I don’t know.
George Yeah, nothing like that popped up. I do remember that from back in the day.
Jon Yeah. Mm-hmm.
George Truthfully, I don’t remember that ever working well for me.
Jon Yeah, that’s fair.
George Um, so I didn’t even bother trying to explore it.
Jon Yeah.
Mo Yeah.
George I just played with the mouse and keyboard.
Jon Okay.
George So, yep.
Jon Gotcha. i’ Just curious. Okay. Good to know.
George All right. Uh, so in my game, I was a policeman who was trying to go to a crime. Moe, in your game, you seem to be coming to the crime after the fact.
Mo Oh yeah, big time. It’s called it’s called Crime Scene Cleaner. ah The game actually came out.
Jon I just have to respect an amazing segue. I just got to pause.
Mo That’s true. Let’s take a moment.
Jon It’s really, you know, when you go through the effort, you got to get recognition.
Mo Let’s take a moment here.
Jon Beautiful, George.
George Thank you.
Jon Okay. Sorry. Please continue, Moe, with Crime Zine Cleaner.
Mo Well, now I’m trying to think how to segue into your section after this. But anyway, that I know, really.
Jon Well, just don’t screw it up.
George Yeah, good luck with that one.
Jon really gives The bar is set high.
Mo So, yeah. So it’s called Crime Scene Cleaner. And the premise is exactly what it is. It’s a first-person perspective game. And you are trying to raise money to help your sick kid. And the only job that you know how to do is you basically clean up after crime scenes after criminals. So they commit these atrocious crimes.
Mo And you go there and clean them up. That’s the premise. um It’s, it is surprise.
George You get paid on how much blood you get out of the carpet, don’t you?
Mo You’re it’s, it’s, it’s surprisingly fun. um it’s I kid you not. ah There’s something like I like games that when you’re done, you get that satisfying feeling that, oh, I did this, right?
Mo You know, it is like ah this is this or this looks great now, you know?
Jon I’ve mastered it. Figured it out. I’m smart.
Mo So when you go into an apartment that has bodies every everywhere, blood splattered, Things broken, furniture misplaced. ah I mean, it’s ridiculous.
Jon ah
Mo And when you leave there, it looks like nothing ever happened.
Mo ah Which is the job that you’re trying to do.
Jon Just call the wolf.
Mo Yeah, exactly. It is very much along of those lines. um The game is, like I said, there’s no fighting, there’s no weapons or anything like that. you have you You have a mop, you have sponges, you have buckets, you have power washers, pressure washers.
Mo ah
George you have a, do you have a saws all?
Jon Wood chippers, hopefully.
George That’s what I’m wondering.
Mo No, you – well, actually, you just take the bodies to the back of your truck.
Jon Oh, yes. meter
Mo You just chuck it in there, and they just fall into body bags.
Jon Oh, okay.
Mo But you have garbage bags. i mean But like said, when you’re done with this – when you leave these scenes, if you did your job, there is not a trace that anything happened, which is what your goal is.
Jon Mm-hmm.
Jon Mm-hmm.
Mo And you get you know more points for up point percent completions and all that stuff.
Jon Makes sense.
Mo um there’s ah There’s a skill tree. So you could do things like, you know, and i again, it’s like like, oh, now you have access to additional cleaners you can add to your buckets that.
George Now you have extra strength alcohol.
Mo yeah yeah got ki have You have extra shank things that now cleans harder stains and does this and does that.
Jon ah
Jon ah I’m a level three brain mopper.
Mo yeah Essentially, yes. um But, you know I don’t, I found, I played through this and let me tell you, I just, I, it was hard for me not to just keep playing it. Cause again, you get that and how it works.
Jon That’s high praise.
Mo They start small, then they get bigger and bigger, but yeah, it is a super fun game.
George So just a quick comment. Mo, this reminds me of your enthusiasm over that ship breaker game that you used to play a lot.
Mo Yep. It’s very, it to me makes me feel very good too.
Jon Yeah.
George You’re the only human being on the planet. I think I know that when it comes to gaming, you want to do the most mundane tasks available.
Jon Meticulous. Yeah.
Mo Yeah, I’m next review the ah gas station simulator.
George i know.
Jon I think I would like the power washer to a game, you know?
George Right. Right. I’m going to start requesting those keys from the press engine stuff because honestly, I i just delete them most of the time, but apparently those are, that’s right up your alley.
Mo let me tell you.
Jon That’s,
George So going to start getting those.
Jon that’s his lane. Yeah.
Mo can tell you, on Steam, it’s overwhelmingly positive reviews like from everybody.
Jon wow
George Yeah, because you’re the only one that reviewed it and you love the game.
Mo and No, I’m talking like thousands and thousands of people have played this game.
Jon ah
Mo It’s super good. And then
Jon Wow. All kinds of level three brain moppers out there.
George That feels like bot review.
Mo And then you get… um so then and you know I think there’s 12 scenarios you have to go through. um And then when finish those 12, they recently came out with an update, which is why I think it went on sale.
Jon Oh.
Mo It’s normally $25 game I got for like $19.
Mo You have all the same scenarios, except it’s called Nightmare Levels. And they basically add a very weird supernatural twist to when you go there the second time.
Jon Oh, jeez.
Mo So you go to the same scenes, but now they’re like… it’s a cult thing that happened there that you’re, that you’re trying to deal with.
Jon so
Mo And, or, I mean, it’s, it’s, weird and one of them was really creepy.
Jon yeah you’re ah ge
Mo It was like, ah what was that movie with the animatronics that came to life and kill people? um Like the, the, what like the, the, the ones that sing.
Jon Yep.
George like westworld
Jon the The one in the Chucky Cheesy place you’re talking about.
Mo No, no. the The Chuck E. Cheese just won.
Jon what are Yeah, the one that Game the Kids are playing.
George what, Five Night and Freddy’s?
Jon That’s the one, Freddy’s.
Mo That’s the one.
Jon Five Nights at Freddy’s.
Mo That’s the one.
Jon You got it, George.
Mo They have a scenario that’s like that, where the first time you go through it, it was an Italian restaurant and you didn’t take care of it.
Jon Ah.
Mo The second time, it’s like you see like the animatronic animal there. You turn around, you do something, you turn back and it’s gone.
Mo You’re like, this is kind of creepy. ah So you’re trying to do your job.
George Yeah, because the dismembered bodies in front of me weren’t creepy enough.
Mo Yeah.
Jon That was fine.
Mo No, no, no. Now you got this creepy animatronic thing that’s like flying over the place and then your door slam behind you.
Jon Well.
Mo Anyway, it’s is is a super, super fun game. um And so I if if you give it a shot, I think that if you gave it a shot, you would actually enjoy it.
Jon Hmm. Okay.
Jon Yeah. It’s I, it kind of sounds like i might.
George Nah.
Jon Yeah. Georgia. No, Georgia.
George I’m okay.
Jon No.
Mo so I’m going to do a ah crappy segue here.
Jon Okay.
Mo So, John, what do you got?
Jon but That’s not even trying.
Mo I’m not even going to try. I’m put zero effort into this.
Jon Not even trying. Yeah. So I was playing a brand new demo of a game that just, I think, comes out in a couple of weeks. But it’s a long demo. I live streamed it the other I’m going give you the link to the live stream most.
Mo Mm hmm.
Jon i’m go to take a look at this. And the reason I was interested in it is because it’s based on an old Sega arcade game franchise from the mid-90s, Shinobi. Shinobi.
Mo Oh, yeah.
Jon Yeah, so you might remember Shinobi, which you had, ah you were trying to rescue all these people in these compounds. You had little throwing stars, and you could leap and attack people. And you had ninja magic you could use that would kind of kill everybody.
George Mm-hmm.
Jon Smart bomb, you know, carry on screen. And then there were several sequels, too. There was a Shinobi 2, and there were Shadow Dancer and some other stuff. So this modern game, It’s called Shinobi Art of Vengeance. I found out about it from George’s bit-by-bit news articles the other day when he said, hey, this thing is out. I’m like, oh, Shinobi, I’m in.
Jon First thing, I went and downloaded it. And it’s about an hour long demo, like I said, and they do not. now I think they even say on the screen that the demo is somewhat exaggerated in pacing. So you get to see more stuff and more abilities really quickly in the game.
Jon And I tell you, George, if but too many buttons is a problem for you, this game, you got to watch out. It might have too many buttons for you on the controller.
George Oh, okay.
Jon There’s a lot of cool stuff you can do.
George okay
Jon So, yeah, it’s like a standard Shinobi. And first, the art style great. I think I counted when I was looking out in the live stream, it has that parallax scrolling, many different things moving at different rates as you walk horizontally.
Mo All right, i find and yeah.
Jon Right. And I was counting all the moving layers like the panes of glass. I think it counted about 19 different layers from super foreground blurry, like a twig that passes by the camera all the way back to three or four in the foreground to you.
Mo you
Jon And anyway, You navigate this world, all these bad guys, of course, you’re you’re running this dojo and the evil guy going to come and attack the dojo. And you keep gaining. There’s the upgrade skill trees. You gain new abilities and new ninja magic. And a lot of them require hold down this trigger and hit this button to do that or hold down these two things.
Jon All these different ways. And it has all these chaining of combos where you attack, attack, attack with a combo. And then if you roll, you can continue the combo and start a new one. If you do it right, you feel like a major martial arts badass. You’re really crushing it.
Jon And if you screw it up, you just get popped to the nose and you’re not doing great. But it feels very satisfying.
George I think ah the title of the game was what was most intriguing to me after I saw the trailer to it, Shinobi Art of Vengeance, because they heavily rely on the artistic value of the game, right?
Jon Yeah.
Jon It’s beautiful. Mm-hmm.
George It’s that you were talking about those, all those layers that you would see in the scene.
Jon Mm-hmm.
George And I think that that’s going to be a driving force of the playthrough. Now you played the demo for an hour.
Jon Right.
George Was that accurate in my, what I thought was going to happen to that play into it a lot?
Jon So the um the art style is tremendous. The art itself doesn’t have anything to do with the plot necessarily. I think it probably is a play on words. The artwork here is gorgeous.
Jon Part of it looks like an oil like a painting, but then like the sprites, your character, he looks a little more 16-bit, fewer frames of animation, like by design, he looks a little more crude.
George Hmm.
Mo Oh,
George Right.
Jon so there’s a contrast there. And then of course the vengeance comes in, you know, all these different ways that you can take vengeance for, the people they’ve killed in your dojo at the beginning of the, of this game.
George Right.
Jon And of course they set it up. You’re standing at your house. Your pregnant wife is standing there like, Oh, this can’t go great.
George Hmm.
Mo oh wow.
Jon You know, something terrible is going to happen here. And they gave you a few boss fights. They gave you some secret areas to go into that. I clearly was outclassed for, and I left, I couldn’t do well.
Jon There’s environmental puzzles where, well, how am I going to get through there? I got a leap, roll, dash, jump, and, you know, chain things together.
Mo Oh, geez.
Jon There’s all kinds of different puzzles in it. And the the the the art design probably is the part that that leapt out at me first. But the thing that kept me playing was…
Jon the combinations of attacks and all the different variables variable combos and chaining of combos to really make you have that. Like you can’t mess with me. Like I’m a super ninja that I just learned how to push the three buttons in the same sequence, but I feel really awesome. You know?
Jon So I, I think it comes out.
Mo Cool.
Jon I forget. I didn’t see the original date. I did. It’s August.
Mo ah ninth
Jon I think it’s August 29th. It’s couple weeks. Actually, it’s coming out very shortly.
Mo e
George yeah
Jon Yeah. So take a look at it Take a look at the live stream in the link. I think it’s something a lot of people live stream are like, I’m putting this on my wish list right away. ah If it’s at all the kind of game you like, you like the old Shinobis, it’s probably going to appeal to you in some form or fashion.
Mo So before we leave the game segment, I bought each of you a copy of Crime Scene Cleaner.
Jon Yes.
Mo It’s in your Steam library right now.
George Yeah, I know. I just got the email for it. I was going to talk about it in my looking forward to section next.
Mo so,
Jon Did you?
Mo so ah Okay, so if you play it and you enjoy it next episode, got to come on and say you enjoyed it or didn’t.
Jon Oh.
George Yeah.
Jon I’ll try it. Yeah. I’m on board to try it.
George yeah
Jon It uses
George i almost want to I almost want to return it just out of spite at this point now.
Jon a… Well, here’s the test. Moe doesn’t use a controller, otherwise George is not in.
Mo Yes, it does.
Jon Okay, George.
George Okay.
Jon You’re out of excuses.
Mo It uses a controller.
George I just want to know which thumbstick uses the mop.
Mo it’s It’s actually pretty simple.
George That’s all I want to know.
Mo Very basic control. So anyone can do with it.
Jon There’s a tutorial for cleaning up brains. You’re alright.
George There’s a tutorial.
Mo Yep.
George Yeah.
Mo There’s a tutorial.
Jon Alright. We’ll be right back.
Jon Before we wind up the show, as we come into the last segment here, you know, we always like to take a moment to talk about the things we’re either looking at right now or looking forward to between now and the next time we get together.
Jon And I’m going to start with you, George. I want to know what you have other than Crime Scene Cleaner on the horizon.
George Right. Yeah. Yeah. ah So first up is a ah I think it’s a yeah, it’s going to be a movie. ah John, it’s by one of your favorites, one of the Coen brothers. And it looks to be that it might be a Fargo esque kind of storyline, like very odd and weird and dark comedy kind of thing.
Jon Oh, sure.
Mo Okay.
Jon Oh, how do I not know?
Mo okay
George It’s called Honey Don’t. And the main character’s name is Honey. That’s where the title comes from. ah August the 22nd, the day after this podcast drops. So I think that’ll be an interesting film.
Jon Hmm.
George I know you’ve been wanting to get me into Fargo for years and I just never have gotten the taste of it, but maybe this will draw me into that Coen Brothers style of comedy and drama and whatnot.
Jon Hmm.
Jon Hmm. Sure.
George ah Another one, it’s actually a remake of an old 80s movie that not a lot of people liked called War of the ruse Roses. But let me start that.
George it’s a remake of an eighties movie that not a lot of people watched or liked called war of the roses that starred Michael Douglas, right?
Mo Oh, yeah.
Jon Uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah.
Mo and Kathleen Turner, right?
George i’ Kathleen Turner, right after they’re romancing the stone stuff.
Mo Mm hmm.
George ah This is just simply called the roses.
Jon Right.
George So it looks like it’ll be a decent adaptation from what I saw in the trailer, in the movie theater the other night.
Mo Hmm.
George um but you know, trailers make everything look great. So we’ll just see. I’m always interested when they take an eighties film, that’s kind of off the beaten path and redo it.
Jon Mm-hmm.
George Like I did just see a trailer last night when we went and saw, or this week when we went and saw a movie, ah they’re redoing the running man.
Jon Yeah.
George do you guys know this bullshit?
Mo Oh, yeah, I saw that one.
Jon That looks good.
Mo That looks good.
Jon That looks good.
George It does. And I had no idea running man was a Stephen King story until I saw that in this trailer.
Jon Yeah.
Mo Oh, yeah.
Jon Oh, yeah. Short story.
Mo Yep.
Jon Yeah.
Mo Yeah, but but the original movie, the only only similarity had to the not the short story was the title.
George Anyway,
Jon Yeah.
George Well, in some of the character names, but yeah, basically.
Mo That’s it.
Jon Just.
Mo ah And the character names, yeah, but that’s it, yeah.
Jon Yeah. Right.
George Yeah. ah But the thing I’m looking forward to the most is season four, the final season of Upload. This is an Amazon Prime series where it basically takes place mostly after you die.
Mo Hmm.
Jon Mm hmm.
Mo Yeah.
Jon hmm.
George You die, you get uploaded to this virtual reality, and that’s where you get to live out all of existence. But just like the real world, the afterlife is divided up amongst classes of people based on how much money you have and earned and all like that.
Mo Mm-hmm.
Jon Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
George ah But the series has some really fun… um political takes it’s got some really well done acting um it’s one of it’s not Stephen Amell it’s his brother that is the main character in this along with um Andy Allo who she’s like a famous singer she was attached to Prince before he died ah but anyway last season Amazon Prime starts on August the 25th so that’s what I’m looking forward to Mo how about you
Jon Okay.
Jon Oh, right around the corner. Yep. Good.
Mo Cool. Yeah. Looking for a movie. It’s coming out early September. The Conjuring Last Rites. ah
George yeah
Jon Mm-hmm.
Mo John, I know we’re a big fan of the Conjuring series. And apparently I heard this is the last one that they’re going to do.
Jon Yep.
Jon That’s what they’re saying.
Mo So we’ll see.
Jon Yeah.
Mo We’ll see.
Jon Yeah.
Mo You know, they they said that before, but it has the same actors stuff in it.
Jon Right. We’ll see.
Mo So definitely looking forward to that. um
Jon Yep.
Mo Season three of a show series called Invasion. it
Jon yep
Mo Actually, the the season two ended like two years ago.
George Oh, yeah
Mo Some of these time spans between these things are just ridiculous.
Jon Yeah. Yeah.
Mo I have to read.
Jon We’ve talked about invasion before on the show, but years ago, years ago.
Mo Yeah, years.
Jon Yeah.
Mo going have to go back and rewatch at least season two to figure out what the hell happened on it because i don’t remember anymore.
Jon Yeah. Yeah. ye
Mo So but looking forward to that one starting because i remember i enjoyed it. That’s all I pretty much remember.
Jon yeah
Mo um And they also so ah in a week, of me and Amy going to take a trip up to Maine. for the weekend, a long weekend trip.
George Mm.
Mo um There’s a dark sky area. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with those. There’s areas in the United States that are deemed as dark skies where you can go someplace and there’s no artificial light.
Jon Oh, light pollution.
Mo So you could see stars and no light pollution.
George Ah, yeah.
Mo um And it’s supposed to be, it’s the end of some meteor shower and there’s going to be a new moon. So there’s no moon out. So it should be pretty spectacular. Plus it’s got to be cooler than is in Florida. So looking for it.
Jon You just
George I was going to say, you could probably find a dark sky in the desert, but that wouldn’t feel very good.
Mo So it,
Mo Yeah, that would be as good.
Jon got…
Mo So if so, even if it’s rainy, I don’t care.
Jon Less enjoyable.
Mo It’s going to be good and I’m gonna get a lobster roll.
Jon Mm-hmm.
Mo So I’m pretty happy about that. So that’s what I’m looking forward to.
Jon Okay. Yeah.
Mo So how about you, John?
Jon Yeah, so a couple things. The finalists it took forever to get a release, but the new film new adaptation of the film, The Toxic Avenger, the old Troma production that I remember watching in the 80s.
Mo Oh, yeah. Yeah.
Mo Mm hmm.
Jon ah Peter Dinklage is now The Toxic Avenger.
Mo Yeah, I know. That’s going to awesome.
George Eh…
Jon it’s It’s weird casting, but I’ve seen some images from it, and it’s the kind of crazy splash gore you expect.
Mo I’m looking forward to it.
Jon So it’s it theater. Finally got a release date, August 29th. It’s coming out. So I want to see that just to see what they did with it. Of course, we talked earlier about Alien Earth. I’d only seen the first episode. I’m looking forward to watching more of that, seeing the second, probably rewatching the first and watching the second. Like I said, don’t.
Jon I don’t want to give up on it. I want to find out where it’s going. I hope it’s going where I want it to go. We’ll see. but i want More of that, of course. And then the thing I’m most looking forward to, August 26th, again, just a couple of days from when this drops, the new Gears of War Reloaded.
Mo I didn’t hear him know about this one.
Jon So this is ah entire remaster of the original Gears of War and maybe sequels are baked into. I don’t know. The good news is i didn’t have to research research it really hard. think George is the one that told me about it. I went looking at it up and because of, I had purchased a certain version of Gears of War, I get this for free.
George Yep.
Jon Yeah.
Mo On PC?
Jon So I, Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mo Oh.
George Yeah.
Jon On Steam. So because I had whatever Gears of War, God knows what version. ah
Mo I gotta see if I have that one.
Jon Yeah, I know it might not be Steam. It might actually be the Windows Xbox for Windows or something. Actually, it’s Microsoft’s first party. But at any rate, I purchased it from them. And so they sent me an email that said, go activate it. You can download it August 26th. And
Mo Sweet.
Jon and The original Gears of War is just so much fun. I have big prop guns from it, that big chainsaw thing.
Mo Oh, yeah.
Jon I love just the mythology around it.
Mo hmm.
Jon And to see it in like modern render with new textures and everything just be lot of fun. So your Emergence Day and Cliff Bleszinski, who wrote that for the Xbox back then, it was a big deal. And I always enjoyed it. So that’s coming out August 26th. I’ll give that a shot before too long.
Jon Okay. Before we wrap it up. I want to take a second to thank a new patron. But first, one of the benefits of being a patron is a chance to ask us a question right here on the show. Do you have a new question for us?
Mo Yeah, I do. It’s from James Jones.
Jon Okay.
Mo And he asked through Patreon, what were your first live concerts, the city and venue they were at and who opened for them?
George yeah
Mo If anyone, if anyone.
Jon That’s, yeah.
Mo So, so I remember my, my first one actually is it was at the Meadowlands in Long Island and was Prince.
Jon yeah Go ahead. Yeah, please do.
Mo actually saw Prince’s Purple Rain Tour in 84, I think it was.
Jon Wow.
Mo Um,
George That was your first concert.
Mo and Well, I’ve been to clubs and seen people.
Jon And then spoiled thereafter. Yeah.
Mo Yeah, I’ve seen I went to clubs mostly because, just you know, actually, yeah, went to clubs mostly saw people perform at clubs and stuff. But as far as concerts, it was actually my first real concert that I went to was in 84.
George ah
Mo I was in high school.
Jon yeah
Mo um Sheila E was the opening act.
George Yeah, makes sense.
Mo So that was pretty awesome. ah Yeah, it was amazing. I said I got so spoiled after that. So I’ve been pretty lucky with concerts. That was my very first one, which was a phenomenal concert. How about you, John?
Jon yeah Yeah, I do.
Mo remember yours?
Jon And it’s kind of weird, but it will make sense, I guess. I grew up very rural in the woods and i i enjoyed music, but mostly I listened to country and western when I was young because my parents did.
Mo Mm-hmm.
Jon And so I wasn’t i wasn’t aware of pop acts and I wasn’t going to concerts and stuff. But when I started to you know, in in my senior year and started coming around to hip hop and rock and everything, I still hadn’t thought about concerts that much. However, every year back then, Walt Disney World had this thing called Grad Night that you would go to.
Mo Oh, yeah, yeah.
Jon And you would go to Disney after they closed and it was open all night.
George oh yeah, yeah. Mm-hmm.
Jon You didn’t leave till like five in the morning. And the deal was they brought in acts. And so that was my first exposure to live music on stage with the original artists that I knew.
Jon And I went two years in a row, and these are all blended in my head. don’t know which year was which, but I can tell you, I saw, for the price of going to grad night, which is probably 30 bucks or something, Samantha Fox, Ready for the World, ELO, just all these different bands.
Jon And there are different places around the Magic Kingdom. You just walked around, oh, they’re on the main stage.
George Oh,
Jon They’re over here in Tomorrowland. They’re, you know… And we would just walk from site to site and see who we wanted to see. And so they’re no opening acts, but it was Disney World, which meant huge production value.
Mo Yeah.
Jon And they could get in anybody they wanted. It was all whoever the who the hot ones were. Oh, who was the new shoes? did that du du du I can’t wait. New shoes was there as well.
George oh yeah.
Jon I saw them. Yeah. So it was it was Disney for me. It was Disney World grad night. And yeah I’ve not have seen a lot of other stuff now, a lot of Weird Al concerts and stuff. but that was my first. What about you, George? you remember?
George Yeah. ah So, I mean, that’s why I was kind of surprised by the answers to y’all’s questions, because you guys are talking about high school. My parents took me to concerts when I was younger than that.
Mo Oh, okay, cool.
Jon Really? Yeah, we never did.
George So, yeah, that i I thought that was just something that everybody did, but apparently not.
Jon Yeah. Cool.
George um So if you go with my first concert ever to be a more direct answer to the question, it was Juice Newton and Eddie Rabbit. Panama City Beach, Florida, on a stage in the middle of the woods across from the Miracle Strip Amusement Park in Shipwreck Island Water Park.
Jon Oh.
Mo That’s cool.
Jon Sure.
Mo Wow.
Jon Why not?
George um
Jon Sounds good.
George It was when Queen of Hearts and I Love a Rainy Night were super popular songs for the two of them at that time.
Mo Mm-hmm.
Jon Awesome. Yeah.
George It was a fun concert. I remember really enjoying it because I liked those two musical acts at the time. My parents listened to country music in the car. That was the only thing I was allowed to listen to, obviously.
Jon Yeah. Right.
George So I really had a good time. But If it’s like you guys, the first time I went to a concert kind of on my own, then those would have been at the Civic Center.
Jon Mm-hmm.
George And I’m really not sure which one was first because there were like four or five that I went to during my early to mid high school years. There was a Huey Lewis concert that I went to as a senior.
Jon Nice.
George So I’m sure that one wasn’t first.
Mo That’s good. That was so fun.
Jon Yeah.
George um There was a Def Leppard concert that I think was when I was a freshman.
Mo Jeez. That’s nice too.
George ah That was really fun. There was a Rod Stewart concert.
Jon yeah Okay. Okay.
George roundabout the same time, but the one that I went to, but didn’t get to see still to this day haunts my dreams, beastie boys and run DMC.
Mo Wait, what do you mean?
Jon had
Mo Went to and didn’t see.
George I went to the concert, walked up the venue. John knows the parking lot at the civic center.
Jon Uh-huh.
George The parking lot is down lower. You go up some stairs and you walk, you know, quarter of a mile to the front door. I’m in the line to get in. I’ve got my ticket in hand and everything. And I go to put my hand in my pocket as I’m sitting there waiting.
George Where the fuck are my car keys?
Jon Yeah. Okay.
George I’m like, and this is, i I would just started driving. So I’m terrified about anything with my car.
Jon Mm-hmm.
George I go back down to the car and I’m looking around. I’m frantic. I’m looking all over the pavement, seeing, you know I had locked my car keys inside the car.
Mo he
George Now, most people would, right?
Jon Go to the concert.
Mo no Yeah, I go to concert and figure it out after.
Jon Smash the window later.
George They’d go to the concert, deal with it, you know, AAA afterwards.
Mo Yeah.
George But I was so panicked, I called on the pay…
Jon um Oh, no.
George I had to run back up to the payphone, called AAA Locksmith, stood it outside and waited.
Jon Hmm.
George The guy said, I’ll be there in 15 minutes. An hour and a half later, that motherfucker shows up, cuts a key, gets me in the car.
Mo Mm-hmm.
Jon Yeah.
Mo That’s terrible, man. ah my My heart feels for you.
George By the time I get done, everybody’s coming out.
Mo ah
George I’m like…
Jon Oh, damn. That hurts.
George Yeah, that one bothered me.
Mo I see that.
Jon yeah and Enjoy, James.
Mo Yeah. So… Well, that’s great. We’ve got some trauma that we’ve relived here. That’s awesome.
George Yeah.
Mo they But it was a great question.
Jon Thanks for that.
Mo Yes. Yeah.
George yeah
Mo Thanks so much for your question. And if you want your question read here on the show, it’s super easy. Just go to genetiskroup.com slash Patreon as little as a dollar a month, and we’ll read your question right here on the show.
Jon Yep.
Jon and That’s right. And I mentioned, I want to thank not a new patron, but it’s another one of those crazy upgrade folks. Jason H. He’s been a patron for a long time. He’s actually wavered in and out of the free tier and the low tier.
Jon You know, we don’t have a tier that’s $2, but he upgraded his to $2 just because he wanted to help us a little bit more. You know, we say ah dollar a month’s all it takes. He’s like, yeah, let’s make it two. You know, it’s little things like that.
Mo That’s awesome.
Jon It’s collective kindness like that, that together works. join up to make sure that we’re able to keep doing what we’re doing. So Jason, thank you for doing that. Unexpected, super appreciated.
Jon ah You know, you’re already part of ah an army of amazing folks that have gone to genxgrownup.com slash Patreon, open up their hearts and wallets and help us out. And you a bigger part of that. So we appreciate you.
Jon That on that awesome note is going to wrap us up for this episode. Don’t worry, though, we back in two weeks with another one. But next week, well, that’s the backtrack. We pick a single nostalgic topic and dig in deep.
Jon George, why don’t you do the honors and let the fourth listener know what’s coming their way next week?
George Yeah, we’re going back to an era when album covers needed nothing more than the artist’s face to entice you to buy them.
Mo Yeah.
Jon That’s right.
Mo but
George An artist who has split off from a group that had already had its main singer split off before he even was the main singer of the group.
Mo yeah
Jon hmm.
George We’re going back to 1985, Phil Collins’ No Jacket Required. we’re going to break down each one of the tracks, talk about them.
Jon dude
George We each are going to get a chance to champion the track, talk a little bit about the history and things that happened around the track the album itself.
Jon Yep.
George and Believe me, this is one of my favorites of all time. I’ve been looking forward to this anniversary for quite a while because I knew we would talk about it here on the podcast, and I’m hoping you guys are going to enjoy this awesome album because Phil Collins, this is right right when he’s in the middle of his best single creative genius era.
Jon Yep.
Jon Prime.
Mo he
Jon Prime Phil Collins.
George Yeah.
Jon Yep. Yeah. Don’t want to miss that one. You’re right. It’s going to be good. Coming your way next week. Until then, I am John George. Thank you so much for being here, pal.
George Yes, sir.
Jon Mo, you know, I appreciate you.
Mo Always fun, man.
Jon Fourth listener at you. We all appreciate most of all, though. We cannot wait to talk to you again next time. Bye-bye.
George See guys.
Mo Take care, buddy.
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About The Author

Mo As someone who barely manages to squeeze in as a GenXer my memories include more of the 70's than those younger GenXers. Reading and movies are my passions with some video gaming thrown in there for good measure!

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Comment (1)

  1. Wow, guys! I’m bawling with excitement over your review of “The Day We Found Yesterday.” You get me. You really get me! 😉 It’s scary to put your work out there, especially before it’s finished. I’m thrilled that you love it and can’t wait for it to release Sept. 25—National One-Hit Wonder Day. If anyone’s interested, check out YesterdayBook.com ahead of time. THANK YOU!

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