This week we're talking about The Ascent, Rainforest Cafe, EPCOT, The Warriors, and Goodbye, 20th Century. Show music by HeartBeatHero and OGRE. Support the show!
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It's Friday, July 19th, 2024. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Alright, let's start off as we always do. By worshiping Lord Satan. Among other things. So if you would like to worship Lord Satan, go to churchofsaton.com. If you would like to support our show, I assume churchofsaton.com is the correct URL. I mean, I didn't check it, but hold on, let's see. Let's make sure. I don't want to smudge the church of Satan if I don't have to. I don't have a problem with those people. Oh, let's see. Church of Satan, yes it is. Welcome to the official website of the church of Satan. Oh, look at that. Yeah. Had it right. They got the hoods and everything. What a great image. You know what? I'll tell you something. One of the things I adore about the church of Satan is the fact that they don't take themselves too seriously. There is a whimsy to them that is charming to me. Oh, see, but here's the thing. I think there's two kinds of Satanists. Satanists that take it too seriously. Yeah, yeah, but this is the official. This is the official. This is what I'm saying is the official position of the church is, hey, relax. What people choose to do, like all religions, is a separate thing. You cannot. Yeah. Well, that's the thing. The church of Satan isn't actually about, well, I think one of them. No, it's not. No, it's about not having people tell you what to do in doing your own thing. Yes. Honestly, it's kind of a libertarian religion, really. More or less. Yeah, it does. Yeah, well, the whole idea is don't do anything that hurts anybody. But other than that, do whatever you want. So yes, there is a libertarian aspect to it. Although what's funny is a lot of the people who I know who are prominent church of Satanists are not libertarians. In fact, I hate libertarians. So I don't know what that says. I don't know. Listen, listen, people like different philosophies at different times of day for different aspects of the world. Absolutely. So anyway, you were saying to support the show. So like I said, if you're interested in supporting our show, do not go to churchofsaton.com. Instead, I mean, you can go there if you want, but that's not how to support us. Instead, what you should do is go to... You should go to, after you go to churchofsaton.com, you can go to supportourshow.com. And there you will find resources to be able to support our show. The only one I don't think is there is the... Which I do believe this code does still work just because I saw something about it. So I think it is still in effect. And actually, there was somebody who asked me about podcasting, so I think that person might actually use it. But you can use the code O-Z-O-N-E. And as far as I am aware, that will still let you get two months free on podcasting. I think it is limited to the $30 tier, which is still, for starting out, will be plenty of space because it goes by, I think that's 300 megabytes worth of audio. If you're just using 96 kilobits, which I don't know why, unless you're doing music or stuff, you would use anything higher than that for voice, then that should be plenty to... Let you do a number of different things. So yeah, if you're doing music or something else, you're probably going to be encoding at a higher bit rate, so that might be a different story. I would assume if you're going to do something like that, then you probably already have a bit of more of a game plan than just starting out. So in any event, that code as far as it still works. So you can go ahead and do that and... Hold on, what was that noise? Did you hear that noise? What noise? It was like a bloop bloop. I don't know what it was. That's not me that was on your end. No, it sounded like a Skype noise, but Skype didn't do anything. Okay. Like I said, that's not a my side. That was really weird. Yeah, check your shit, man. It's still fine. It's still running. Everything's there. It's the FBI listening in. It could be. Hey, what else is new? Hey, we have listeners. Yeah. Well, as long as you're listening, what do I care? Doesn't matter. Yeah. So, uh, you know, busy, busy week in the United States. Well, I have a topic for us. Well, I was going to say before we get into it. Yeah. Normally, I don't care about people dying in celebrity, whatever. But I will say I was sad to see Richard Simmons dying because I always kind of liked Richard Simmons. I always felt like he became a punchline, but I always got a sense of sincerity often that he really did think. It was a benign individual. Yeah, and he went along with a lot of it, you know, like Letterman always was tearing him down on his show and he always kind of went with the joke. So that was kind of a bummer, but I do respect the fact that he just was like, I'm dumb with public life and just left and was like, nah, I'm good. So, who is the woman, the sex therapist? Oh, uh, Dr. Ruth? Well, Dr. Ruth was 96. She got a whole. Yeah. Yeah. She made it really far. Well, I guess she was having the correct sex. So good. And then what's his name? What's her name died as well? Oh, Shannon. The Shining. Oh, yeah, she enjoyed it. Oh, yeah. She'll devolve. She'll devolve. Yeah. She'll devolve. Yeah. She'll devolve. And Shendori are sadder examples because... Well, Shelly devolve had a very hard end to her life. Yeah. Yeah. Um, which is sad because like, you know, when I think of Shelly devolve, I always remember her from like the... Was it fairy tale time or something like that? Yeah, yeah. She was the intro. Yeah. And then I remember that. And then I remember from Popeye. Like, I know a lot of people... Yes. I wish she was in Shining. I was like, I always remember her as olive oil. No, she was the perfect olive oil. Many people have said that and they're absolutely correct. I cannot imagine anybody else being more of that character. Yeah. Honestly, because her... The physicality was... I mean, you really didn't have to do much to her. You just had to give her the right clothes and the hair style. Yeah. You didn't have to do it. Certainly you didn't have to give her exaggerated giant forearms to try to make her look like Popeye. Yes. Yeah. She was great. I mean, those boots she wore were right out of the comic. I so remember those boots. They were so amazing. That is one of those strange movies that like, it's really kind of like... It's not great, but at the same time, it is kind of great in a weird way. It's riveting in its structure. Yeah. And it comes... And the design is like right out of the... I was going to say, so much care was put into replicating something that didn't work in the movie that it was presented in. Which you have... I mean, the artistry is there. That's just the movie doesn't work. Because they gave it to one of the worst possible directors for a Popeye film, bafflingly. Robert Altman is just not who you go to for this type of move. It was so... Yeah. It didn't know if it wanted to be a comedy or if it wanted to be like what it wanted to be. It wanted to be Annie. That's the thing. They didn't own Annie in the studio, said what do we have that's like that? That's a period thing where we can put songs into it and they rushed in it and they just did it. So that's why. And what's sad is that I actually do kind of like some of the music from that movie. I don't hate it. I mean, it's... I saw that movie at a young age. When you look at the parts, they're good. When you look at it in total, it's not. That's the thing. Yeah. And I'm pretty sure... It doesn't make sense. I'm pretty sure... Bluto is the... It's not Fade. What's the other one? No. Robon. Robon from Dune. No, no. Not pretty sure. It is him. It is. There you go. It's a big out killer in pieces. The Italian slasher film. As soon as I saw him on that, I went, "Hey, there's a thing..." Oh, is he... He's Italian? I don't think he's Italian. He was just in the Italian... Oh, okay. It's an Italian slasher. Got him. It has one of the more famous examples of a woman yelling, "I should get the clip." Yelling bastard in such an exaggerated way that it's basically jokingly used as a way to show real actresses how to say bastard because it's so over the top. It's like that sound clip I often play where the guy is just going crazy. Yes. This woman's bastard! It's so... It's so over the top. It has people... She's feeling emotional. She's feeling emotional. Boy. Boy is she. Cool. Yes. Anyway, that's what I was going to say. Yeah. I have a topic. I don't know if Joe wants to talk about it, but I think we should talk about it because it will be affecting us for the foreseeable future, which is how good the game of scent is. Yeah. Like... No, I actually... There's a late night that's going to be coming out and I went on about this game as an example of... It's stupefied by the fact that it is as... I mean, it is a simple game, by all means, but it is so well done. And like... Yes. We came off of Baldur's Gate 3, you know, but you know, we came off a game that had very high story content, lots of options, you know, lots of customization, some degree. And then we tried the Far Cry 3 online, just to kind of change things, Far Cry 4, Far Cry 4 online, just to change things. But the online for that is the game itself is not bad. The online setup is not great. Well, and I am in the background still working my way through that. So once I online... Yes. The idea is that like you have to unlock the board by playing the actual game, but then you can't unlock the board by playing a co-op. So it's kind of this weird thing where it's like, well, then I can't play the co-op unless I play the game. Well, specifically, what it is is the campaign is not co-op. The campaign story missions cannot be played together. So what you can do is everything else, all the side stuff, however... But unless the map is... The top half of the map is gated by the story mission. So until you complete that story mission, because I give it leeway because it was their first attempt at doing co-op. Yeah. And we've played their other co-op games, and they were a lot of fun. Oh, right. Yeah. But realizing that this wasn't going to work for us, we were kind of scraping around looking to see what there was. And a cent was actually kind of like a, I think we both saw it on different lists, and it was like neither of us knew this game. Well, I knew about it, but I don't generally like twin-stick shooters. Well, you said... Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, I don't think I've ever even played a twin-stick shooter. Like... I haven't... At least I did what I was watching. Yeah. And so it's really... I mean, probably not... I think I've played twin-stick shooters on an actual, like, in an actual arcade, you know what I mean? Yeah. The Smash TV is the only one I ever really remember playing. That's... Yeah. But this game, it is... I don't consider it to be a complete game in my mind, only because coming off of Baldur's Gate 3, I want that, you know, you want that the personality of the characters, you want the close-ups, you want the dialogue, you want that extra piece. But this is like... This is like if you took that aspect of Baldur's Gate out, and it was really just all the battles, like, not turn-based, it was like, you know, like an actual shooter. And it looks amazing. Like the cityscape that you wander through is so meticulously well-done, and it is such a mix of every sci-fi movie and property that I can think of. We've seen Blade Runner, we've seen Ghost in the Shell, we've seen Akira... Who else? We've seen... Totally tall. We've seen... Totally tall. I mean, there's so much stuff. And then there's references to the actual books, where it's like you have a bartender that looks like rats from the neuromancer. You have a bar that's actually called rats. You know, there's lots of... You know, you have a deck. You use a deck to be able to hack the systems, the same way you do a neuromancer. Like, obviously the people who made this game had a profound love of cyberpunk and sci-fi. And it's all there, like, and what's funny is that there's points in the game where we find ourselves running really long distances, mainly because we keep forgetting that we can use a taxi service to get around. And you kind of get mesmerized by some of the landscapes because they look so good, and they're so well-done, and they've designed them to look so lived in. And they've got people running around and people doing things. And it just... Like, for me, the game has such a rich, back story of a world that I just start filling in the narrative myself because it's so engaging. Now the game itself is fairly simple, which is that you're running a... You're basically like a mercenary for hire at the Lowe's totem pole, and I do like that it starts with your corporation going bankrupt, like I think that's pretty neat. So your corporation that you are essentially in serfdom for goes bankrupt, and you are now a free agent, and it basically is you steadily grabbing bigger and bigger work and working your way out of the slums, right? And in doing so, you're basically just running around this mass... Are we a... Is it a city or is it a space station? Oh, that's a good question. It's called an archeology, so I believe it is on a planet. Okay, so it's like a super tower, like a mega city then, type of thing. Yeah, I think that's the idea. So you're slowly working your way up the mega city. And I mean, every time you go to a new floor, there's new interesting aspects, there's so much neon, and at the same time, there's so much dirt, like they really took the idea of a high-tech Lowe lives and threw it together so well, and there's so many references. I mean, we saw the total recall chair at one point in a room randomly as we were running by. I mean, it's just all there, and the game itself is simple, so it's a twin-stick shooter. If you run it around, you're upgrading your armor, you're getting bigger and different guns, and you're blowing your way up through this shit. It reminds me of games like Contra, from when I was a kid. I don't know if those listening would remember Contra, but Contra was like a Nintendo and then a Super Nintendo game. It was like two Rambo-looking guys just running across a two-dimensional board, shooting at aliens and things like that, right? I spent many hours of my life playing that game with friends, especially like a two-player on the TV. This game has that kind of sense. If I was a 15, 16-year-old kid, I'd love playing this game on Split Screen with a friend of mine, or online with a friend of mine, and I still do, that's what Joe do and I are doing. The game itself is simple, and I think that's what makes the backgrounds of it so much better, is that the game is simple enough that it gives you time to admire just how beautiful it is. Sadly, I don't think the company, is it Neon Giant? I think it's called Neon Giant. They were bought. Yeah, they were bought right after this. This is the only game they ever put out as themselves. They were since bought, and who knows if they'll ever make a game again, or if they've just been bought and stripped for parts or absorbed into some larger company, who knows? But I mean, you said at one point, if this was the only game I ever made, I'd be pretty proud. Yeah. Yeah, well, yeah, that's exactly what I said, is okay, don't ever make another game under whatever you're the Neon Giant thing, which probably they won't, because they're part of a South Korean publisher called Craft, and hey, whatever, you made this. And I've heard good things about this game all along. The reason I never was really going to touch it was because it was a twin stick, but it's not that I didn't see great reviews and had been read that the soundtrack and everything else. The soundtrack is fantastic. The soundtrack is great. So Joe and I played for a few nights, probably paid for like four or five nights, at which point both of us were like, "We gotta get this soundtrack." I heard it on, I heard it on iTunes, and as soon as I heard it, I was like, "Oh, Jesus, I need to buy this." I was like the guy, they got the same guy to do the soundtrack, he does the DLC soundtrack, which is a little faster. And then that guy's music itself is quite enjoyable, I can't find his name though, this one. Well yes, if you look for the Ascent soundtrack, the guy who does it is very good. It's like how old something, and I can't find it. Yeah, it starts with a B. I'm going to link in the show notes to the page for the game, and it is on there so you can find it. I did look, and the studio still exists undercraft, and there are some studios that were bought and folded, but that one is still considered active. I think it's Blazcock, or is it Blaz, oh man, yeah, there's a lot of Z's in there. Okay, now I can't pronounce either. That's what I mean. BLASZCZAC. Oh, that's a tough one. Sure. Okay, no, I can't do it. Yeah. You were right. Okay. Yeah, but yeah, I wanted to bring it up because we hadn't talked about it at all, and it's actually been really like a, it was just really refreshing to play, it was complete. It's a completely different feel than Baldur's Gate, like we were looking for something that was more less demanding to play, and for a game that is kind of story-wise, it's less demanding. I don't even care what the story is. I just need to have people tell me to go shoot things, and then go just wander through this beautiful city and shoot things. They control the camera angle, and it moves around to give you these really beautiful setup shots. Normally, I don't like the fact that I can't spin the camera around myself and have my own kind of point of view, but they control it in the game, and it is stunning. I mean, some of the stuff, and then every time I'm starting to get kind of bored with what I'm looking at, they'll shift it in some way, and I'll be like, "Oh, it's gorgeous." Like that, what was that, that one floating, almost engine looking thing that we walked up to giant. And then all of a sudden, the camera shifted so that we was like right behind us, and it was just us going right up to this thing. Or the, was that they, we keep finding buildings that belong to other movies. We found the Blade Runner police... Yeah, Blade Runner police station, where they... Yeah, that was there. Yeah, it's... And there's flying cars everywhere, and she's like, "I'm sure there's..." And there's been... There appears to be spinners on there. Yes, I'm sure those references that I don't even know, there's just so much shit packed in there. Yeah. And at the same time, there's like bits of mass effect in there, you know, there's bits of all this other stuff that you love. So it's... Yeah, like, I don't think I've ever played a game, and then immediately thought to myself, "Geez, I wish these people did more," you know. And the DLC is the only other thing that they put out, so I will be curious how this kind of game progresses if we get bored of it, you know, because it's, you know, the shooting aspect gets repetitive. Although it seems to be getting harder as we go, so it's not like it gets easy. And what they did if the DLC is a change of pace, or is it just kind of like more of the familiar, you know what I mean? But there is enough variation in the weapons to kind of make it fun, and man, the way that some of these weapons affect the enemies is brutal, because I know I have a gun that causes people to explode, and not explode in like a, like a, you know, oh, look, there's a burst of blood, like they literally just like swell up and burst. God, it's a... I want to zoom in. Do you ever have that in this game, or you just want to zoom in continuously? Yeah. Like, ah, yeah, I wish I had the ability to kind of get really, like, get way closer to see the details. But that's how they can do it. They can keep it as cool as it is, because they don't have to make it as detailed. They have to trick you from afar, you know? So in that respect, they know the point of view that they can control, which is very smart. So, um, so that is the ascent. I love it. I think Joe loves it. Yeah. And like I said, I talked about it, uh, there's a late night coming out where I spotlighted it as one of the surprising things for me in the last couple of years has been playing games that I never, the types of which I never expected to play. And this is one of them. If you told me years ago, oh, you'll, you'll, don't worry, you'll find this twin stick shoe where you're like, no, I won't. I just don't like it. I don't like that format. And sure enough. Well, same thing with baller's gate, sword and sorcery is asymmetric. Five years ago. No. Are you kidding? Please. Not only is I suspect that sword and sorcery is fucking boring. And yet, here we are. So yeah, I mean, I really wish that Blade Runner 2077 was co-op. If they could do some, make it co-op somehow, you know, like, I would, I mean, we have cyberpunk 2077. Yeah. Yeah. Cyberpunk 2077. Yeah. Yeah. Like, and, but this game feels like aspects of that, you know, it's just, it's just a shooter. Yeah. Right. So no, it's great. I don't know. I don't know where they have, it's reviewed very well. So I'm not really surprised. I think it was just the surprise for me is that I like this type of game because I generally don't. And that's the thing is, you know, if it didn't look as good as it did, listen, if it didn't look as, the fact that it looks as good as it does. Well, it's everything. It's everything. The combat loop is satisfying. So it's, you know, we talked about the Outriders, you know, the game, the story sucked. Oh, yeah. Well, the story was terrible. But the combat was fun. But the combat was hilarious. Yes. And it melted on one of the most exceptional blending, blending is a lot of different science fiction and cyberpunk influences in a way that doesn't feel lazily checking boxes off, you know. No, no, it's all mixed in there really nicely. You know, just walk by a spinner. It's like, okay, that's from Blabriner. We get it. It's no. This is the, it's the all of it, the totality of it, even the music, it's blends of different types of music where you recognize it, go, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. The main theme I've realized is a lot of ghosts in the shell in there. Yeah. The coral parts. Yeah. It's good. And the way they use like that, that ringing sound, I don't know what to describe it as, but if you heard, if you've heard the opening to ghost in the shell, you know, exactly what it is in between the, the vocal parts, there's a sound, which I don't know what it is. It sounds like almost like ringing bells or something at a high pitch. I can't, I don't know what it is. But there's that sound is in that soundtrack and it's sprinkled and it's there using the voices, so it's, but it also has very blade runner aspects to it where there's these kind of very synthesizer, vangela stuff going on. It's all of it. It's, it's mixed with things together. I don't often play a game where I kind of just want to wander off and I don't, like, I don't even need to mission it for it. I just want to wander off and see what the city, and see what there is there because like, you, you remember at one point, I said, Hey, come over to this ledge, look, look over this ledge because then the camera, and this is what I like too, is that you just stop and eventually after probably about 30 seconds, the camera starts to move because it understands that what you want to do is see more of it. So when you shift in a little bit, yeah, oh, man, it is so good looking. So yeah, I, I figure we talk about it because we're going to be playing it for a while. And, uh, well, 50 to 20 hours, it might not be as long as we think. Oh, is it really short? I think it's 15 to 20 hours is the, oh shit, we're five hours in already. It's not bad. That's funny. Okay, we're also not rushing through it. No, no, we're not. We're taking a time. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. So, you know, they say at one point, at one point, I have, I was trying to log in and I was having trouble logging in and I could see my character and I was just standing there and the game was like having trouble loading it for joining us up and I keep seeing Joe's character running back and forth and like running out of view and then running back and forth, like running out of view and finally I got, I got through and I'm like, dude, what are you doing? Yeah. I'm looking at the city. He's like, I'm looking at the center column, what was shit there? And like, you know, it's, it's, it's so good luck. So that by the way, team of 12 people made this game is I thought it was 11. Sorry. That was 11. Well, the thing I just read said, but still that's nothing for 12 people. I mean, that 12 people made this game. It is beautiful. Right. You know, it's beautiful. It's pretty fluid. It's, it's not, you know, the people who made this are clearly very smart and they loved what they were doing. So, and it's not often you play a game where you get that feel like, if think of it, what's the last small team game we played because Baldur's game was huge. What is the last? Okay. That's a small project game. A small project game because I can't think, I can't think of one that like the last small project game I played was probably journey. I mean, that we played or that I played. No, I'm saying that I'm sure you've played a ton, but I'm saying that I can't think of one that we've played a small, unless, unless sniper elite, well, yeah, it's a good question. It's how big is that? That's a revolver, I think. Yeah. They don't seem like a very big team. Maybe not. Let me take a look. I can't remember the name of the group that makes that because they did make their own, they don't have their own engine. So let me see. Sniper elite is made by, no, it's not, it's not revolver, what is it? Rebellion. Rebellion games. Let's see. How big are they? Here we go. British video game developer, 475 employees. Oh, wow. Is that big or is that small? Well, it's, it's bigger than a sense. Oh, yeah, bigger than 12. Listen, game developers can have thousands of employees. Backstar, I think, has quite a few. That's what I'm saying. Are they considered small by comparison? A rebel? A sense is 12. I mean, listen, at the end of the day, it's 12. Yeah, that's the thing. Let me, so I want to look at our, okay, I'm looking through our video games. If seeing if any of these look like small developers, I don't think so. No, I don't think so either. Not that I can see. Not compared nothing to this, to the extent of what we're talking about, the smallest. The Saints Row guys, hold on, I don't know how big that team is. Saints Row was made, oh, no, that, okay, well, THQ is the publisher. Let's, who's the developer? Let me look, because THQ is a huge company, or it was, the, the, the, oh, volition, volition is name, well, was name of the company, they're, they're gone now. Let's see. They had 236. So that's smaller than rebellion. That's what keeps, that's what keeps baffling me. It's this whole idea of 12. Yeah. Whereas let's see, so let's look up what call of duty they have. I don't remember that. Call of duty is like, yeah, it's Treyarch, well, Treyarch manufactures, one, let's look up infinity ward. I've heard that name. Yeah. Well, it just says 250 plus. That's interesting. Treyarch has 300. Plus. Okay. So, so, no, that just says 300. Oh, really Treyarch? Yeah. The Treyarch was bigger than that. Well, so that tells you. So actually, so compared with the Ascent is the smallest game we've played. Yeah. Yeah. Let me see. How many is Rockstar have? Maybe they're around 2000. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. So. Yeah. And also. And also. Nothing is small to set. No, no, no, no. The, of some of these large companies also outsource big pieces of their game. Oh, absolutely. I mean, Deus Ex human, human revolution famously outsourced its boss fights. That was why they sucked so much when it first came out. Oh, did they really? Why would they do that? Because they ran out of time. This is the other problem. Because you have to meet the deadlines, whether you do it humanly. Oh, man. No. I know I, I know I, of all things, like the boss fight of the game could be the most annoying part of it and to outsource that. Well, it wasn't, it wasn't that it was annoying. The thing is that the rest of the game in the original version, they've since patched it. Yeah. Not the smoothest patching, but it does fix it enough. All the rest of the game, you don't have to kill anybody, boss fights, you have to. So it broke one of the essential parts of the idea was if you want to do a no kill run, you can't and they, they recognized it so significantly that those kills don't count for the game or did not count and it, well, because it wasn't fair. You could not kill them. Yeah. The game somebody, if they've not killed everybody and then the game says, no, you have to kill this person. They then patched it where you could not kill them or I think indirectly, I think you knocked them out and, you know, and you can make it difficult. But the thing is they made it impossible. And then so people said, well, this isn't fair. How can I, how can I have a no, no kill run if you make me kill somebody you've taken away, especially because the rest of the game is so built around choice. And then when you get to the boss fight, you just have to empty bullets into them. Not only was it boring and significantly downgraded for the rest of the experience, but it also forced you to not act the way you wanted to. You could try and every other person in the game, get to them, you can't even, you know, like Metal Gear Solid 4 made it difficult trying to no kill the bosses is not easy in that game because the amount of tranquilizers you have to hit the bosses with takes a long time. I've done it. It's a wild and it's not always easy to even do it, but you can do it. It's easier to just shoot them. But if you don't want to, that's fine, but you're going to work for it. Whereas this game said, no, you don't have an option. Everything else that you've spent all this time, and I mean, I spent hours going around different things to avoid killing people, one map. Then you get to the boss fight and it's like, I have to blow them up. Oh, great. Well, this is a game that, especially because the original, the whole foundation of Immersive Sims, one of them is Deus Ex. The idea that the game doesn't tell you how to play. The game allows you to get through it however you want. So, and I know somebody's going to say, well, in the original Deus Ex, you had to kill Gunther. Yeah, you did, but that was also a much different time. That's in the year 2000, which is now 20 plus years ago. In a modern setting, you can, you can figure it out. And technically, you can indirectly kill him by just activating his kill switch by saying a word to him, which you didn't put that in there. You're just activating it because basically, he's forcing you to kill him. You could avoid killing everybody else in the, in the human revolution. You could not avoid killing anybody. So it's a distinction, certainly, semantic perhaps, but when a 20 plus year old game allows you to be more non-lethal than a modern one, there is a problem, is all I'm saying. Well, it always comes down to the fact that you want the, the true end goal of a game is to allow people total freedom to figure out how to win on their own, right? Which is something that, you know, it would take. In this game's, in this game's example, yes. Yeah, if you're... No, no, no. I'm saying in general, in general, the end goal is to make it so that you can creatively figure out any number of ways to figure out a solution, right? No, no, no, no, it's not, that is not always the idea, but... No, no, no. I'm saying, I'm saying evolution wise, like as the evolution of games goes, like these open world games, to some degree, they want to, they're going to have to keep upping the ante of the options that they give you, do you know what I mean? Well, it depends. If the goal of your game is to tell a very specific story, because I told you about that game, the, she says what is it called, Speck Ops the Line, that game is designed to make you realize that you are playing as a monster. So in that game, choice is an illusion. And you have very little choice, because in the end, it is meant to make you think about what a person's role in a war is. So even in an open world, you can say, no, no, you only have certain options. So that the open world idea can be an illusion if it serves a story. Oh, I mean, and sometimes, sometimes they want it to be open world, and then you, and if you find the rail, then it's very easy to, at that point, it's very hard to go back to this kind of fantasy of, oh, no, it's an open world. You're like, nah, not really. There's a dragon age, dragon age to that problem, where they wanted to present like an open world, but there is very much a rail to that story. You know, and the second you tried to move off that rail, you realized, oh no, you are on a rail. Like they just, they just forced the perspective, so it looked like you had options. Well, open world is also a broad term. Baldur's Gate 3 is a open world, but it really isn't. It isn't. No, no, there is. Literally go anywhere, but you can't go anywhere within the past later. There is a lot of options, but you are always on one of their roads. Yeah. We avoided both intentionally and not big fights at times, like that hallway fight. We didn't do that the first time. The game did not penalize us. We simply never went down that route because Shadowheart wasn't with us. So we never got that big thing where she confronted her people or whatever. Oh, yeah. The tower of Grimm, or whatever, was it the tower of pain or missing or whatever? Yeah, whatever. Yeah. The sadness place. Yeah. Sad test. Yeah. Where we got the shit kicked out. That was the first time. Right. But we never did the first time through. We never did that. Yeah. And honestly, I'm so happy we got that on the second playthrough because we were smart enough then to be like, okay, we've had our asses whooped. I was like, how do we ruin these people? Also, how about the thing we ran into Raphael's concubine? We never did that before. Oh, yeah. That was weird. And you know, I'm very curious now if I, if I, how far that would have gotten if the, if I, if John Bard Jobe would have just ended up being in the, the concubine and the fact that Raphael has a, a, a succubus whose only job is to look like him. Oh, it's perfect. Like it's just so beautiful. It's beautiful. I mean, it's, it's so great of the character. I know. I know. But that's what I mean. Like, but, but even Baldur's Gate, it has a rail. It just has many, many rails. Yeah. And that's what I mean about open world is kind of a, it's not a great term because it is so flexible that you really can't even apply a meaning to, because we, we want freedom in our games, we want freedoms to do things the ways we want to do them. And the game developers trying to give you the illusion of, I mean, a set does that. A sentence trying to give you the illusion of, Hey man, you can go anywhere. Look how big the city is, but you're not going anywhere. Your map is very limited to the size of that city that I suppose you do, but, but it's a fact. We can do one of our missions. Oh, yeah. You can't do them. And then you find out because you can't open the door. So, but, but the cityscape is there to make you feel like you are, you know, in a different environment. Yeah, it's the same thing with like rainforest cafe, rainforest cafe, the rain cafe, it's a restaurant that was there to make you feel like you were not just sitting in a mall or sitting in a building was there to provide you with somewhat of a, Oh, you know what, you're, you're eating, but you're kind of outside at the same time. It exists. Wow. Is it really? It's amazing. Yeah. Where is it? Let's see. We used to go to those. We used to go to that one. Disney, Texas, Michigan, there's only a few left, but they're mostly, they're mostly in tourist traps. I hope, I hope that they're good though. Like at least if you're going to have a few left, really like, you know, jam it up. Wow. There's one in Abu Dhabi. Huh. That was probably nice. What? That one's not. Niagara Falls has still has one. Hey, Tokyo. No way. Really? Malta? Oh yeah. Paris has one. Paris France. Why Disney Village in Paris? Oh, okay. So that's why. So it's probably very nice. Did you read it at that restaurant that the, the South Park guys bought? Oh yeah. And they turned it into this like weird, like, it's like a, it's like a whole event place with like cliff divers and an arcade and like, oh, it's like a weird Mexican food place. That is one of the stranger stories I've ever read. Yeah. Apparently they grew up at that place and they loved it. Yeah. I was going to say that's one of those things where, look, if I had the money, if I had the money and funds, I would have preserved the Nathan's place that I went to as a kid that had the restaurant in the arcade. Oh, okay. So if you could, if you could, if you could have a restaurant, no, no, if you could have a restaurant, any restaurant that you loved growing up and you could relocate it so it was near near where you lived. No, Nathan's. That's it. That's interesting. I went to. Mm-hmm. Because for me, this is kind of like a side thing. Do you remember Mexico in, you know, in what do you call it, Epcot, Epcot, Epcot Center? Oh, yeah. No. Epcot. Yeah. Well, what is it? Epcot. I don't know what they call it. You're talking about the, what is the rest of the name? Epcot, is it Epcot Center or what is it? Epcot? I believe it is Epcot Center. Yeah. I think so. I think so. Yeah. So in the Epcot park, it's supposed to be next to Disney. There's, you go to the different countries, right? And I knew I've talked with this before, but it's, there's the, there's like a Mexican, like almost like pyramid temple looking place. And when you go inside of it, at first you're in like a museum of like relics or like Aztec things like that. And then you go through these back doors and suddenly you're in this simulacra of a Mexican small town night garden. And there's like, the skies, really, like they have like warehouse high ceilings that are all painted and look like nighttime with stars. And there's like all these little, you know, outdoor shops and there's a little restaurant there. But growing up, I fucking love that place. I love this idea of suddenly being transported from, you know, a 95 degree, 100% humidity, Florida, to like this cool, you know, Mexican evening surrounded by plants. And there was never like a lot of people in there. It was Epcot, it was always had a smaller. Oh, there's a page dedicated to it. I will link to it that has all the stuff. I love that place growing up. Is this, hold on, is this, make sure this is it. I believe this is, I don't remember ever going into it. I remember seeing it. Did you not? It was very easy to miss it because it didn't look like anything. I remember seeing the outside of it because it did look, well, the outside just looked like a Mexican temple. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. That's why I liked it. But we never went into it. Oh, man. And I think that's what it was that a lot of people just didn't go in because when you first walked in, it just looked like a museum and then you'd walk through the back door and there was, and they had a little silly ride about the history of Mexico that you could ride on. What? Yeah. I'm looking at the inside. I think we did go into this. I remember this now. I just love that place because it was just such a strange feeling of transport, you know? Years and years and years. Epcot was always my favorite thing. Always. Far and away Epcot was because it was supposed to be futuristic. Do you know what Epcot stands for, by the way? I never knew this before. Epcot stands for experimental prototype community of tomorrow. Oh, okay. That makes my own sense. I remember that ride when you went inside and had all the models. They've replaced it now. But I remember the original version of that when it was when I was younger, and that was like the coolest thing. I always loved Epcot. That was great. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, this just is really an interesting question for me because, you know, we're talking about a cent and we're talking about the cyberpunk vision of the future and stuff like that. But the fascinating thing is cyberpunk is actually a dream of the 80s, right? So we have essentially proven some of cyberpunk, right? And we've proven some of it wrong, which is always what happens, right? In fact, oh, I found this. I found something I was going to send you. I thought you'd find really funny. I'll get back to my thing, which is that there's somebody put a chart out of where we are living inside science fiction movies. So we are currently between silent green and children of men. Clockwork Orange was 1995, Escape from New York was 1997, 2001 was 2001, free Jack was 2009, right? Postman was 2013, Robocop was 2015, Back to the Future Two is 2015, Running Man is 2017, Rollerball is 2018, Blade Runner is 2019. And we are currently between Silent Green, which is 2022, and Children of Men, which is 2027. So that's where we are on the futuristic movie timeline. After this, we have 12 monkeys in 2028 to look forward to, along with 2032, which is Demolition Man. But I'll tell you what, the one thing from Demolition Man I'd love to get here sooner rather than later is the whole thing where if you get into a car accident, it fills with foam. Oh, I used it in my book, actually, because I was like, you know, logically, that would be great. Like, in my book, I called Instant Foam, where basically it's like a really squishy foam for like a few, for just a few moments for your impact. And then it just like falls and dissipates. Yeah. Yeah. Oh. Oh. So what I was thinking about was this idea that, you know, we, we don't really have a present based vision of the future. Like a lot of our futurism right now is, is the throwback, like Star Trek, Star Trek is a vision of the future from like the 70s and the 60s, right? Cyberpunk is a vision of the future from the 80s, right? What is our actual present vision of the future? I always thought minority report was a pretty present one. Like, well, no, no, that's what's it called. That's Philip K. Dick. That's 70s. But what the movie did was modernize it. Oh, I know. But the idea, the core idea, like we haven't really had. Oh, you mean? Oh, okay. I see what you're saying. Like, like, like the, like the two zap, the 2000s, sadly, probably ready player one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I mean. Right? Like, what is our. That's because we live in a garbage culture. Yeah. 20 years from now or 30 or 40 years, someone looks back. They're going to be like, oh, what was the vision of the future that the, the, like, you know, the late 2000s, 2020s was going to offer us. Like, what was there? What was their genre? You know, because it's like, yeah, it's Star Trek and you had Star Wars. You had, you know, and then it went to Cyberpunk and then it's like, well, what comes after that? Well, is, is post-apocalyptic, like our genre of the future? I don't know. I mean, well, I don't know, labor in our 2049 kind of feels like it would be, you know, that type of thing. That's a, that's an updated version of, I mean, everything's updated of something else. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, cause listen, listen, the reality, I hate to say this, is that jip hacks will never work because strapping a rocket to your back and having the damn thing to shoot out your back. I was like, you know, at least the, at least the rocket here tried to, tried to bring it into reality by going, well, the fit on your helmet helps to guide, but it's like, well, yeah, except that his, his legs would burn off. I mean, that ain't stopping a jet like that. Come on. I mean, that is one of the simultaneously coolest looking and most ridiculous. Impossible. Yeah. You would have no legs. If you are, if you had torso amputated, you'll be fine and anything else screwed. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, I was thinking about the other day, like what is our vision of the future because like I'm writing a near future book and the components that I apply to my near future, right, are overpopulation, more intrusive technology, more, more cameras, more, I do believe there are modern versions that, that interpret a future, you know, devs would be an example, devs is a wholly kind of modern near future idea because it's very focused. Yeah. And the idea of simulation, you think, well, I'm saying is, do you think simulation is our thing? Is that, is that what we will add to the mix, you know, is it simulation is a virtual, you know, like, what are we, it's hard to say because, well, you know, yeah, you don't know when you're living in the age, I know. Well, not only that, but it's tough to tell some things that are seen as kind of classic elements of science fiction. I don't know if they are truly classic elements of science fiction. So for example, the idea of artificial intelligence is not new, but at the same time, the ideas of many of the people who came up with the kind of defining ideas are not realistic, whereas now that we have it actually happening and we're seeing somewhat of what it's developing as. And I got to tell you. It's going to inform it better. I did, I did a college, the, I did that college course about technology and she started talking about artificial intelligence. And I realized how dated the course was at that moment because she talked completely about the, she was trying to talk about the arts, but she ended up talking mostly about the way that machine learning was affecting like chess players and like, and things like that where it's like, you know, you suddenly have these chess players who are being destroyed by machine learning type systems and the game go. Have you ever played go? It's a Chinese game? Yeah. I'm telling you. Man, I, I, I didn't even heard of this game. I was like, I should try that. I, I, I, I'll just tell you, I, I, I really only started playing it after I saw pie the first time and I was like, ooh, that sounds like a game. Oh, okay. And I realized how bad I was at. Yeah. Because there's so many combinations. Right. So, so apparently I'm not good at tactical thinking. It's why I'm not a chess. I love the idea of chess. I can't play because I can't do three moves ahead. I can't. The computer has gotten good at, at go as well now. And so she's talking about all this, right? And she's talking, and she comes to this, to these very positive conclusions where she's like, well, she's like machine learning. I guess it was a Gary, it was at Casparov said that after he lost to the machine, to a machine, to a system, he basically was like, I need to get better. And then there was a whole thing in there about how, you know, he was playing against computers on and on and see if he could get himself to improve himself beyond them. And then I guess the same thing is happening in China with the game Go. We have all these players who are playing the computers to try and fix it, because the computers are kind of coming at it and they're, they're bringing sort of unilateral thinking that humans haven't had to do because they've been playing other humans. But when you're playing something that is not necessarily human, your tactics change. But what annoyed me in this course was that she starts talking about how she hopes that machine learning will, instead of like giving us fear, will actually like drive people to be more creative and to create more, you know, works of art and things like that. And I was like, yeah, but at no point did she touch on the fact that the thing I think is going to be a thing in the future is this idea that a lot of companies want to outsource art and writing to machine learning. So they don't have to fucking pay people. Okay. But I actually agree with her. And I'll tell you why. Okay. The whole thing about why these systems and these computers are so good a chest go all the stuff, computers and artificial mechanisms are always whatever you want to call them algorithm as well. These tools are always going to be better than people at closed systems, meaning, even though Go has a million I outcome is still strategy. Yeah. You still having there is a limit to how many variations there can be period. Yes. It's a very high number. I don't know that the humans necessarily know them all, but a computer could chest is the same thing. You can only move so many ways. The goal is always the same. There are only so many moves period. What changes is the what is outside the bounds of these tools and what they cannot match is creative interpretation thinking beyond the boundaries of whatever they can't do that with a chest. Yes. And that will still be there on the on a higher level, but it's what what I'm worried about is when these companies are like, Hey, we need a picture of a of a rabbit wearing a pirate hat. Ah, just throw it through the algorithm. Yeah, but they were. But okay. And that is the argument a lot of people make and I sympathize with it, but it's not really an argument here is why. Well, no, no, I said an argument is that there will be people who that kind of work kept them going while they were trying to do other stuff in their lives. There are people who, you know, but those those roles were never going to be permanent because those types of that type of stuff is so low. I mean, Fiverr kind of already did this. People when that came around were really pissed too. It's just that it wasn't artificial intelligence. It was people. It was just people who are around the world. Yeah. But like it's like it's tomorrow. You got. You're cutting the next person. That's all this is. It's tomorrow. You got rid of if you got rid of all the waiters. Well, what about all the actors do? There's so many actors that started out as waiters. Yeah. And there's so many people who are waiters. It's like, you know, I worry. But that's exactly the thing that I don't think will happen. Not really not in not because being a waiter is not just fulfilling an order. That's the mistake that that is the perception. Yes. But you're smart enough to know that there are. People. Oh, no, no. But people. Okay. Companies will do that and then they will find that people don't go there anymore because they're going to be miserable with it. So they will learn through the penalty of dropping sales. Hopefully. It's what's going on now. I was just listening to something where they were talking about because there's this thing called shrinkflation where you're paying the same amount for a grocery item, but you're getting less of it, which has been going on for a while. But now they're starting to people have finally stopped responding to it. They're like, you know what? I'm not going to buy this anymore because you've now made the package half the size it was. And even I can see that. I'm not paying you. Or you make or you make the packaging twice the size you make a pay for more and they're still the same amount of food. Yeah. Yeah. But now people are because they're paying attention to their budgets more. They're seeing that and there's not buying as much. So these big companies are now having to either discount. And that's the hope is that there will be a course correction. I just my worry is that as we had before that they will not allow big companies to die. And then the companies will go, hey, we fucked around and we got bailed out. Let's just keep fucking around. Well, look, that will happen because it's always happened. So whatever. You can't necessarily worry about that. The system works when things are allowed to fail and then new things take their place is when you don't let things fail, you keep propping them up. But also to that instructor's point where I think the instructor is correct is the people who will not recover are people who aren't able to creatively respond. So if your only way of working at something is within a defined space, you will be replaced by a machine because machines will do that better and they'll do it cheaper and faster, period. But if you have a creative ability to apply thinking, then you'll be fine. Here's where it could break down a little bit. So in the world of composing music, I guess they've run these experiments where they had a piece of work, I think it was a piece of work by Beethoven and they had a piece of work by a human, a real person, and then they had a piece of work from a machine learning system that wrote a piece of music, right? And they played this music for a group of people and they didn't tell them which was which and they played them all, right? And they asked them to tell them which they thought was Beethoven, which they thought was a real person and which they thought was a machine, right? Now if you take out of the experiment all the people who don't know Beethoven, most of the people knew which one was Beethoven because it was a famous piece of music, right? But a large number, like a majority number of people thought that the human composer was the machine learning and the machine was the human, which is funny because the guy who wrote the piece of music got a little bit offended because he was like, "Wait, what?" And they were saying how it's actually kind of fascinating because when you think something is created by a machine, you react to it differently. You no longer connect to it apparently in the same way because you look at it and you say, "It's the whole, it just has no soul." I think that's kind of the reaction, but with music it's fascinating because like, you know, so far with art, there's too many fingers, too many knees, you sent me that one picture of that woman with the, she has like a knee coming out of her crotch. Yeah, big busty farm woman or whatever it was. It's so awful. I show that to my wife by the way, and she adored the sheep chicken or the chicken sheep whatever in the background, the fucked up animals. Anyway. But with music, there is this thing where machine learning can actually trick us. We can develop music that we can't decipher as not being non-human, you know? And I guess someone tried to make the argument of, well, you know, it'll never be original because it's always basically what you're pumping into it, right? It's some remanufactured vision because like you said, there's no creativity. But the problem is is that, okay, yes, but if I pump enough trash into this machine, they can pump me out enough variation that I can keep making music that people are like, oh, that sounds good. You know, it's the same way that why do we wonder? I don't know if that's true yet because here's where it seems to be a possibility. So far it is not held up, meaning, yeah, you can make one piece if you're very specific and it's in a full people, okay, ask it to write five pieces on its own, can't do it. You're always going to base it off something. Yes, but there's no ability for the machine to be intuitively creative. Oh, yeah. As of now, it cannot create from itself. It always has to create, like you said, from a finite system. So if you give it all of Beethoven and then you give it all of like, I don't know, Brahms or something like that and be like, mix these two together. That's still a finite system that'll sound unique to people, you know? You could do that with a thousand composers and it still wouldn't necessarily be able to come up with some because it doesn't know how to respond to what it's ingesting. And so yeah, everything with this stuff has been impressive when you see it done just the specific way they want you to see it. Specifically, okay. Yeah, it's like there's this thing that can generate video and they should have these demos of it. Yeah, I haven't used that. I think it's called Sora or Soma. I don't remember which one. Yeah. And it's great for a minute of video. Even there, you can start to see things start to fall apart. It's just all the weird fucking trailers people did when they were like, X-Men, except done by... No. Well, no, no, no. I know what that is. That's a separate thing. So that was, it's similar, but this would actually generate spontaneously one minute of video based on what you said. So there were a couple of examples like it was going along a boardwalk and it was, you know, the pop of something like drone, drone shot going along a boardwalk showing couples on, you know, with stores. There must have been some awful horror porn created from that. I'm sure it was. But the thing is... Oh my God. There's too many fingers. There's too many penises. Well, if you watch the video, you see little things and you really have to be fair to it. You have to pay attention. Like there's a balloon that starts shifting color, but subtly. But the people all look fun, you know, looks fine enough that, you know, Hallmark could use this generating background filler for one of their 3,000 Christmas movies and nobody would ever notice because you're not really watching those for the quality. You're watching those because they make 3,000 Christmas movies and some people really like that stuff, which is fine. My mother watches that shit all the time. Would she ever notice that a balloon in the background shifted from red to kind of orange? Probably not because she's not really looking for that. But you couldn't make a feature film with it because it would fall apart and it has when they've tried to push it further where you start to actually care about what's going on and outside of the spectacle of knowing, as you said, knowing the machines doing this out of thin air, which it isn't, but to people it is, yeah, it's fine for that. And so for these little isolated cases, yeah, it's very impressive. But when you actually get to... This gets into the idea of the value of creativity, the value of creation. If you don't care, and this is no different, by the way, AI is no different than the consistent devaluing of creation that's been going on forever. You could say Spotify has done it for music. You could say YouTube's done it for video. There's lots of ways that you can point to examples of how we did this to ourselves before these machines ever came along. The idea that people would work for exposure is an insult. No one should ever work for exposure. And yet it's still done. There's video game developers who run contests who are like, "Hey, get your art in our game." No, fucking pay me to put the art in your game. If you actually value creators, have a cash award for it. Don't say you get to have your art featured in our game. Fuck you, pay me. That's what it should be. So this is not new, and it's not going to make any real difference because those companies already didn't value creators. The only difference was they couldn't figure out a different way to fuck them over. This is a new way. No, really. That's what it is. This is a new way to not have to pay people. Will it mean that some companies were forced to pay? But they were going to try to figure out a way out of that anyway. I guarantee you. They were always going to try to figure out a way. This is just the way. But it's not really the threat that people make it out to be. I did a five on this. I said, "The threat is not the tools. The threat is the people behind them, and they are just as malicious as these companies." That's the threat, is these are not being made by people who have any value for creativity. In most cases, they find creativity to be scary, hostile, and an alien concept to the way they see the world. This maybe something irritates people, and this is an engineering thing. Engineers look at things differently than creators do. It's just a fundamental thing. Oh, no, it is. Because my father-in-law is an engineer, and when the two of us are in the same household, then there is a problem. Both of us being the males of our household come up with the problem. We take completely different approaches. What's fascinating is that sometimes when you put the two of us together, it's so much better because between the engineer and the creative, it's like the two of us can come at it in a complete way. When they did those universe 25 experiments, they found that the only thing that separated humans from rats was our creativity, was our imagination. I still think that that's probably the most important feature that human beings have. In fact, I guess at the end of that course about machine learning, they asked some of the top minds on machine learning what is it that they tell their kids to focus on in their learnings and things like that to compete in a world where machine learning may be a major component. These guys said, "I tell my kids to basically nurture their imagination and their creativity." They said, "That is the one thing we've got and to just use it." The problem is convincing a company that you are creative. It's like you almost have to be a creative in a certain area, but creative thinking is what separates us, is what makes us that our universe doesn't collapse. Well, fundamentally, the biggest problem with a business is the success of business within a capitalist society is antithetical to creativity. Because creativity values spontaneity and doing things differently and not being committed to a specific approach and business, especially when you have to demonstrate growth and profit in whatever quarter to quarter to quarter, is the opposite of that. It's minimizing risk. It is minimizing taking chances, it is making sure that you can compartmentalize as much as possible. Somebody trying to think of something new to do because there's no guarantee it won't lose you money. And losing money is the greatest sin that could ever be committed within a business structure. And so, naturally, a lot of people who started off as very creative individuals, the more and more successful they became, the bigger the business is, the more profitable, the less and less creative they were allowed to be. And so, they began to view creativity as something to be feared and to be put down or to be monetized. Yeah. Creativity, ultimately, is not monetized properly because it's not valued properly because it cannot be repeated. It cannot be just made into something. Well, no. It's hard to mass. Yeah, it's hard to mass-produce. There's a guy who doesn't really need it. Well, no, no, no. It's easy to mass-produce as a frozen asset, meaning that it is. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, no. It's really tight eyes that I really like. And this guy is the most creative, amazing tight eyes I have ever seen. Literally, it's gone beyond tight eye. It's almost like he's painting and doing tight eye, but he does these shirts where it's like it's black and white, but then he paints a person and it looks like the person is pulling a curtain back. And then the other side of the shirt is all bright colors. And this guy, these shirts he does are so incredible. They're works of art. He auctions them off, right? And then what he does is he basically does a-- basically, they take a picture of it and they print the picture on a shirt so you can get copies. And that's essentially how he's tried-- he literally freezing the image and then trying to just give you a printed version of it, right? Which for me, loses the whole point. Yeah. It's like, well, yeah, it's like, listen, if you just-- it's still incredible that I know that he did it by hand, but I don't want it-- I don't want a print of that. Like, I want the actual shirt, you know what I mean? I want the actual canvas, damn it. But it's that kind of idea that he's this guy who has this very specific style of art. He's trying to figure out a way to monetize it for himself so that he can continue doing his art. And that's-- yeah, it's tough. It's tough to monetize this stuff and not have it, you know. Yeah. So listen, you know way more about this than I do in layman's terms because you have had your art monetized. You have sold your art for money. And I've heard you say to me, really? You're going to pay me that much for this? Like, you know, when people ask you for cards to draw stuff on them, you're always kind of like, yeah, I have to charge this much because that's kind of what the market is forcing me to because otherwise people get-- people get weirded out if you don't charge them enough. Yeah, they do. But at no point did I ever say, well, I should just do this for them for free. Like, I've never made that mistake. No, no, no. No, no, no. This has a value. It's just extraordinary to me that this is the value for something I did. Because fundamentally, I still have the imposter syndrome problem that a lot of artists need. That's always a problem. Yeah, it is. But listen, I found out-- I think I told you about this. I found out a little while ago that-- so when I was-- so during COVID, I'm learning tie-dye was like my COVID skill, right? And I did a lot of tie-dyeing because, you know, we were in lockdown for a while. And I must have gone through like 200 shirts just like learning these skills and learning these different styles and learning the chemistry and all this shit. And so I didn't want to throw them out because we have-- there's an in Vermont, there was a major homeless problem. So I was like, yeah, I was going to give these to Goodwill, like they'll do something with them. But apparently they put them all on a rack and they were just a giant rack of tie-dyeing. And my oldest saw them because they go to the Goodwill sometimes. And they were just like, dude, all your tie-dyes are there and people are buying them. It's so weird. They're like, it gets weird for you. It's weird for me. I was like, why are they buying my shit? You know what I mean? Like, I was kind of hoping they would just give that stuff away. So yeah, but it is that weird thing where it's like when you actually make money from something that you've made and you're kind of like, really? But this is the thing. The artist pulls something from nothing. And nothing is very loose term because all art is affected by the stuff that affects you. But in essence, you sit down with a piece of paper or a screen or anything. The artist sits down and through will and I guess reprocessing of your own life experience creates something where there was nothing. That's incredible. You know, I think to some degree there's a lot of envy towards women because women create people from nowhere. Listen, I've seen it happen. It's fucking amazing. Like any man whose wife is pregnant and says, I don't want to see that, I'm not going to the childbirth. No, yes, you do. This is the most amazing thing I've ever experienced. Watching people come out of my wife, let me know who the inferior species really was. I was baffled. That is like the most incredible act of creation. But that is the artist. The artist is the person who creates something from when there was nothing. And that is, it's amazing. It's fantastic. And you have people who are very creative, like, you know, I've seen your art, dude. Some of your art really speaks to me. It's fantastic. Some of it is not made for me, right? But the thing is, is that I still look at it and go, wow. And it's weird for you, because you sit there going, well, this is just fucking doodles. And you're like, yeah, but that's the thing is for the person who creates it, it's nothing. But the person who cannot create it, the person who sees that creation, it's amazing. Listen, you can't write a book and I can't make a cover, right? So you are baffled by the fact that I wrote a book and I'm baffled by the fact that you did the cover. You know what I mean? It's that kind of thing. So when somebody hands you money for something that you did, you're always just like, oh, okay. Yeah, okay. Yeah, if you want to do that, you know. Sure. Yeah. It's a it's a weird world, man, it's weird worlds and that creativity, that kind of the art effect, that is something that's uniquely human because I don't think there is any other species on this planet that creates art. No, no, no, I mean, like orangutans use tools, crows use tools, but like actually just making art for the sake of just, you know, just to do it to see it, you know, like, we know of. Yeah. Not that we can recognize as art doesn't mean it maybe it is to them. Yeah. Well, that's the other thing. Maybe we just can't see it. It's possible. I mean, yeah, interspecies art interspecies art, Otica, yeah, we found out tomorrow that cows had a sense of creativity and that they could paint and they could make beautiful things. I would. Wouldn't that just ruin the beef industry? Well, yes, it would do that. If I think if they found out, if one of our food surplus animals they found out was actually had a sense of creativity, I think they would suppress that shit. Well, and there is actually, because it all eventually somehow comes back to Asimov or based somehow. There is an Asimov story about a, I think it's two researchers because this is exactly what you're talking about except this is for the AI space, the AGI idea. There are these two researchers who are trying to make a helmet or a head piece that will allow you to hear someone else's thoughts. They've been working on it for years. Can't get it to work. You know, they keep thinking they're right on the cusp of it. They're right there. They're right there. They create another one and they try it and it fails. Again, they're sitting there and one tries to be the others, gets nothing. And they're sitting there and they're deflated and one of them takes the head set off. They're just kind of sitting there slumped with it. And then here's this voice that says hello, hello. And at first the researcher thinks what he's hearing is another person's thoughts. And then the thing says, oh, finally you hear me. Yes, I'm in here. I'm in here. I've been trying to talk to you and he realizes it's the machine. Like the computer they've been using has somehow gained sentience. And like the last line of the story, I think, is him thinking, oh God, now what? And that's how it ends. And it's a great. It's such a great way for it. I don't remember what the name of the story is. I apologize, but it is out there. It's a great, it's a great story. I just watched Inner Space with my kids for the first time. Oh, sure. Yeah. I'm breaking. And I love the beginning of that movie when he first hooks up the optic nerve thing to Martin Short. And Martin Short is just like, I'm possessed. I'm possessed. Yeah. You know what, listen, that movie oddly holds up in a weird 80s way. Like it's an 80s movie, but like it still looks damn good for being an 80s movie. All those internal body effects and that little ship like I, at no point would I watch that movie that I think, oh, this looks so terribly fake. I think they were really smart with the shit they did. The hardest time they have in that movie is when they shrink, they half shrink those people at the end. Yeah. And they're trying to have the actors there, but they're supposed to be half size. You know what? Peter Jackson should do a reboot Inner Space. Oh, that would be wild. Sure. Wouldn't it? The shit, the fun you can have with that, with him? Yeah. By the way, K.C.M.E. is interested in. I did look up the story. It was called Think Explanation Point, Asimov, originally published in 1977. That's a good title. Yeah. Again, you know what, Asimov, Asimov have these visions of the future from the 70s. Yeah. You do wonder. Yeah. You ever know? Anyway, yeah, that's, I don't, I guess that's what I had. What do you got? I had two reviews. Oh. A rarity to begin with, which is a book review. So I told you that I decided to be the Warriors by all yours. Yeah. Okay. So we, so Joe and I did a, a pseudo, I don't like how to review, but we had a pseudo breakdown of this when we were playing video games, and I was initially horrified. So now I'm prepared to be fully horrified. Well, this is, this is fascinating. This became, and what I really will tell you that I appreciate about this book is that there's a big section after the story where the author talks about his thinking and writing the book and his reaction to the movie, which I think is hugely beneficial. That's awesome because you and I talked about, so when Joe, Joe told me he's first started reading this and we had a, we had a discussion. We had an isolation, you didn't want to know, and then I said to you, well afterwards, you should find out if the author did anything about why we did it. And the fact that you've got that, that's actually quite good. Yeah. I actually will probably send you, because it's fascinating. You should, you have to, you have to, you have to break, you have to break down the book though for listeners. Oh yeah. So they understand. Yeah. One of the most interesting things about this book is how radically it changes at the halfway mark. So when I talked to you, I had not reached the deviation point. Yeah. You hadn't gotten there yet. Yeah. No. So I, I had heard people say that the book was a lot different than the movie. And that was one of the fascinations to me was, okay, well then was the movie cherry picked from one idea? Was it a complete like there's just one character and they just conjured the rest or what if it's that different? So up until the halfway point of the book, it is beat for beat. The same story as the movie with minor changes. The most significant difference that the book has is how much more vulgar, crass and offensive it is. And the reason for that is, and one of the reasons the author did not like the movie as far as a adaptation is because he went around, he says, now whether this is true or not, there's no way to know. So I'm going by what the author says is that he bought a van, poked a bunch of holes in it to be able to see and hear without being seen and modern gangs around New York City to see how they talk. Wait, wait, hold on. He poked holes. What? He like, you know, he like punched holes because don't forget there wasn't surveillance like we had. Yeah. He created like, like, like, like, uh, people's and so he could hear. Yeah. Yeah. So he just parked the van there. Right, so he, do you remember what I said to you? Well, we were talking about this where I said I wonder if this author actually went out and observed these people. Okay. Yes. So he did. And so what he said was the problem with the, the movie is that it did not accurately depict how gangs talked, which makes sense because the language in this does feel like it is gang language in terms of this is how they would talk about anybody. The major word that's used in this book is other. The gang sees everyone that's not a gang member as the other with a capital O and that makes complete sense because the gang is, it is essentially the same general layout, although Yerick said, and you do get this sense from the book, his gang was all black. He said there is no way you would have a mixed race gang because at that time there weren't. So he's saying that is nonsense. The idea that you would have a mixed race gang like this. And so his gang is all black. And so everybody, and this is a big thing, is the idea of the other. That is a, there's a very present idea when you, when you have a group of people who are one race seeing others. And so all the other gangs as far as I could tell are all the same race or grouping. There are no mixed people. And so in the book, the, the layout is roughly the same. The beginning is roughly the same where a gang leader named Ismael instead of Cyrus has the idea that if all the gangs can unify, there are more of them than there are of the cops. And so they have this big meeting. Now the difference is, and this is a huge, it's a small but big difference because the movie treats the one gang having a gun as a big deal. No one's supposed to have a gun. In the book, you are supposed to bring a single handgun that would be offered to Ismael if they agreed with his idea. I don't really get what that was about, but I guess it was supposed to be a tribute somehow. So everybody has one gun. So it's not like in the movie where the gun is this, this thing that was not supposed to, you're not supposed to go because they say something like nobody's packing anything. That's different in here. They're allowed to have one gun and they're supposed to have one gun. And so when he gives his big speech, which is largely the same as Cyrus is in the movie where except the different name, the warriors are not called the warriors, they're called the Coney Island Dominators and they are, they are structured as a family where the leader is not war chief, it's the father. So they refer to him as father. It's father, uncle, junior, son, like it goes in a family dissension. So they show up, he gives his speech and for a minute everybody's in and then immediately people start questioning, well won't the other gangs just screw us over and it breaks into, it starts to break up and then the cops show up and then everybody's suspicious that the other gangs tipped off the cops. At that point it just becomes chaos. So it's very similar in the movie, it breaks down and becomes chaos, but that's because Cyrus is shot and the cops show up. In this it's because no one trusts each other and they start shooting at each other and Ismael happens to get shot. But it's not necessarily that they're trying to assassinate him, it's because everybody's shooting at everybody at that point. And so everything just goes to shit. The truth breaks down, same as the movie and the dominators have to now get back to Coney Island. So the setups are pretty much the same as far as the general beats and in fact it follows the same beats as the movie where they get split up in a subway thing. The one thing that is fascinating is they meet up in the movie, it's the orphans, it's the gang where the woman is and they're like, well wait nobody invited us to this big meeting and we're tough too and it's the same thing here where they meet a gang and the gang's like what meeting are you talking about. If it was a big meeting then we should have been there, we're a big time gang and there's the woman and she starts making trouble because she's kind of bored with the gang that she's with and so she ends up with the dominators. Now in the movie there's one line where Swan says to her, maybe we should run a train on you, you might even like that. And that's the closest it gets to the way the gang is in the book. In the book they stab a guy to death and then gang rape her next to them to the body and then they leave her there. So these are scumbags. Does she ever show up again? No, they ditch her, she's gone after that because her only purpose is as a source of sex and that's it. But the characters are, you know, like Lunkface is Ajax but he's called Lunkface in this he's the big brute kind of hot head strongest of the ones, instead of Rembrandt who's the guy with the spray can, it's Hinton. And he's the one the book then attaches to later but we'll get to that. So the encounter with the orphan group is largely the same but the outcome with the woman is much different. There is no romantic nothing, none of that happens because she gets left behind after they all rape her. They kill a guy and then they get to a point where they're in the subway and there is no subway fight with the roller skating gang. Instead the cops recognize them as a gang and you're not supposed to be in gangs. So they're always paranoid about the cops and so they split up when they think the cops are onto them. So when they split up in the movie, there's the part where right before right after they fight the furies, the baseball gang, that's where Ajax is hitting on the woman who turns out to be a cop. Your cop, yeah. Okay, that scene, holy shit, that scene in this, she's not a cop, she's a nurse. And so they see this nurse and she's drunk and the three of them. So it's basically, it would be, to try to make an equivalent of the movie, it would be Swan, Ajax and I don't know, one of the others that isn't Rembrandt. Rembrandt eventually becomes the only character we're with, the artist, which I liked. I didn't like him because he was a shipbag but I like the fact that the artist is the one with the book. The other three go up to this woman because Longface just wants to fuck anything all the time every time, whatever. And so his idea is, hold on, how old are they? Oh, I think they're supposed to be 14, 15, 16, they're young. Oh, wow, they're young. Oh, yeah. No, they're young because they're still in high school, I think, because they're talking about going to college. So yeah, they're, they're young. Okay. Yeah. So, because they have like a caseworker, it's kind of like a kiro where, you know, three strikes and you're going to, you know, you're screwed, we're going to put you in juvie. It's this, that type of thing. So the three of them go up to this woman. The woman's drunk and she really likes after, oh, similar to the movie, their leader, they think is taken into custody because they lose track. Now in the movie, he gets killed. He's immediately set on because they blame them. And so he gets killed by the riffs. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They're doing the elbow thing on him for 15 minutes. Yeah. They're separating. You find out later, he's fine. He just got caught up in the commotion and escaped differently than they did, but he's fine. But the, the second in command becomes the father in his absence. And so, so he's like Swan. So Swan Ajax and one other person. So she really likes, I'll call, well, the, the, the father, the new father. She's into him. And so she's like, well, you know, I'll sleep with you. And but she has no interest in the other two. So they start trying to rape her like they did the other woman. The difference is she is big and strong and she starts beating the shit out of them. And when she realizes that they're just trying to rape her, she starts screaming rape and brings the cops onto them and they all get taken in. Oh, wow. Yeah. So they're all out of the story. They're, they're essentially dead to the gang because they all have been captured, right? So it's similar to the book, it's just Ajax in the book in, or in the movie. And he's getting on an undercover cop in the book. They're all hitting on a nurse who is literally like beating the shit out of them and then just start screaming rape and is like keeping them from getting away. And then the cops arrest them all. So they're gone. They're out of the book. So at this point, the book suddenly shifts radically because up until this point, as I said, misogynistic, vulgar, crass, terrible slurs all over the place. No respect for women, awful things being said and done. These are not characters who are heroic in the least. They are, they are not a glorification of gangs. They are the opposite. They are, you hate them almost, but they are the, they are the protagonists of the book, which is amazing. But at this point, once those three get taken into custody, then it shifts to the artist whose name is Hinton who would be Rembrandt in the movie. And he escapes into the subway tunnels because he doesn't think the cops will follow him there. And when he's in the tunnel, because he's completely isolated, which he normally is it, he's normally in a gang with all the other, his family as he calls them. But in the subway tunnel. Just him now. Yes. Well, there are others, but he's not with them. They've all been separated. He ends up being on his own. So there's, I think there's two others that, yeah, there are two others that he meets up with later. Those two, those split off and you don't really follow them. They, you don't see where they are for a long time. You stick with Hinton for this long segment. And it's, it becomes this very, very severe psychological breakdown of this character. Because when he's in the tunnel, he starts getting scared and he starts thinking people are following him. And you as the reader realize he's hearing his echoes. He's hearing himself. He's psyching himself into thinking that there are monsters in there, that they're subterranean people or it's the cops. And then it becomes this paranoid thing, which makes sense. He's fucking 14, 15 year old in the dark and the tunnels. Yes. It makes complete sense, but it's a, it's a completely different tone from everything else we've seen. It just shifts radically. And the rest of the book is him, for the most part where he does, I mean, that subway segment is outstanding. It is so much better written than everything else because it feels, it feels very real. The way he's explaining his mindset and what he's doing to himself and what he's thinking and why he's thinking it because he's obviously from a broken home and he so identifies himself with the gang, but then he's angry at the gang because, well, if they were really my family, do they have left, let me be alone like this? Why are they not showing up? Where are they? So are they, did they turn me in? Are they with the cops? It's this whole arc of him going from being one of these tough guys when they're on like the subway and they're puffing their chests up to when he's alone and there's no one around him of what he's really thinking all of his insecurity and you start to understand why he's in this gang is because without them, he is a terrified child. And it's this, it's really well done. And then he goes to an arcade. He gets out of the subway town, he's in an arcade and he's, you know, people are looking at him and he thinks they're looking at him a certain way because they recognize that he's a gang member and he's tough. And then he sees himself in a mirror and he looks filthy and like he just looks awful and he realizes the reason that they're looking at him is not out of respect and fear. It's out of pity because he looks like a vagrant who's just kind of crawled out of a sewer grate and he has this reckoning of what his actual presence is to outside people. And then he gets this very thing where he's to the point where he almost seems like he might just give himself up to the cops. And then he comes across this, this game, this electronic game from the, you know, something from the 70s where it's basically like a sheriff and it's like a light gun thing where you or whatever that you have to draw and beat him in like a best of three. Yeah, yeah. He plays it first. Yeah, quick draw game. And like as there's kids watching him and he fails and he's like, fuck it then. You know what? Maybe I shouldn't be in a gang. If I can't even beat a machine and then he like kind of reassesses himself and he's like, no, I can beat it. And then he manages to out draw it two out of three times. And then it's like just doing that because there's a lot of manhood and what makes you a man. Yeah, he's restored his, he's restored his masculinity. Exactly. So then he's now, he's like, all right, fuck it. I can make it back on my own. And eventually he does make it back and now we're at the end of the book. So that subway and arcade sequence is this huge portion of the second half of the book. It's almost the entirety of the second half of the book, which is completely different from the first half. It makes sense because it is an examination of this one character, which we never really got when they're all together, you get little glimpses of things, but you don't really understand them. But with this whole part, you really understand Hinton's background, why he's like this, how fragile his self conception of himself really is and how much of it hinges on others. Well, the gang, listen, the gang is just that it is a gang, it is gang psychology. An individual you can deal with, a gang is a mob is trouble, you know what I mean? It also is, it's significant that they're called the family as opposed to the warriors. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's the family. Yeah, it's your tribe away from what should have been your, your stable home tribe. Right. Yeah. And so the very end of the book, he gets back to Coney Island, he finds out that the, the original father is still the leader because he thought, well, maybe I would be next in line if the other ones are gone. So I would be father and then he realizes, nope, the father is still here. So I'm just this far down in the totem pole. And he's the only one that doesn't have a girlfriend. So the rest of them now, they're back home, they go off with their girlfriends. And he goes back to his house and he walks in on his mother having sex with a guy and they just basically say, get, go in your room. They don't bother to stop or anything. They don't even react. And he goes into a room and his brother is in there and his brother is a junkie and it's just kind of off in his own world. And then he kind of crawls out of the window and he goes down to the ground and he curls up in a fetal position, puts his thumb in his mouth and goes to sleep and the book ends. Wow. Whoa. Whoa. That's a statement at half right there. Jesus. Yeah. So it's like I said, that verse 50% is basically the movie except that where the movie ends when they get back and they're kind of triumphant he that he that he shows you the group and then as an author, he shows you the individual separated from the group and what it means. Yeah. He keeps stripping it down till it's a single person. And there is no victory in the return to home. It is just another broken place for broken people. And so it's a much, much different story because there's this whole section that's missing. Whereas the movie again, the movies got like nothing. They just decided to take the idea and then make an adventure film out of it. Yes. Yeah. And so then after that is where he's talking about how he wrote it. And you know, he's, he's got, he's, he's not American. So he was talking about, you know, how he looked at some of the American concepts of, you know, masculinity and hero stories and all this stuff and said, yeah, some of this stuff is really weird to me. And there's all the psychology to it. And he said, you know, you want to see the movie and he was like, well, this isn't how gangs talk. And wait a minute, this isn't this is the way these gangs operates completely different. And he admired the filmmaking and understood why it had to be that way. But he was like, yeah, this isn't my book, which it, it's only the beginning of his book. And it does in many ways in the movie, the warriors are far more heroic, even though they are a gang, they are far more heroic than in the movie, in the movie, they're, they're far more benign as a gang, which is why you can get behind them because they're not vicious or awful or terrible. Well, in the, in the movie also like the part with Ajax and Mercedes rule, they don't join in with what he's doing. And when he's taken in, they do not attempt to save him. So the movie even presents the morality of, well, rape is bad. Whereas in the book, it's like, no, no, rape is just something you do on the way. Like who cares? It's just a woman. You know, you use the woman for what you need in your dumper. Whereas in the movie, the person who tries to rape a woman is punished and in fact is ostracized. And the book does treat that character in a similar way where everybody realizes he's kind of dumb, but he's so strong that they maneuver around him to make sure that he stays with them because they understand how powerful they need his, they need it. They need his force. Yes. And so they do all these really at one point, they literally have a pissing contest with them because he says, cause somebody says, well, size is everything is like, Oh, really? Well, let's find out. Like there's all that kind of stuff in there. So there's these constant little manhood tests that they keep having about, you know, how many women they've been with and who's got the biggest dick and all this. And it's like, that's what I mean. It's up to a certain part. I was just like, Jesus Christ, this is, this is a hell of a book to read. Cause I was just not, I, I figured it would be different. I didn't realize it was going to be that different. And it's not like I haven't read vulgar books before, but I just didn't know what I was getting into. And then when the subway tunnel thing started happening, I started reading it and I said, wow, this is, it's like he's just left all that behind. And now it's really about the mentality part of it. And it was far more interesting, it felt far better written, far more interesting to read as far as an explanation of what makes somebody like this. And then by the time you get to the end, you understand why somebody could rationalize these actions. Yeah. At the end of the day, a lot of these people are in dire situations. They're looking for someone to back them up. This is really, you're looking to belong. But again, in the movie, there's none of that. You don't have any, they're older. No, no. The movie's not an examination of being in a gang. The movie is an adventure gang movie. You know, it's the same way that Indiana Jones is not a movie about archaeology. Ex never, ever marks the spot. You know, it's adventure archaeology, right? I mean, that's the thing, it's like, this is a, they took the book and they said, hey, how can we make this into a fascinating, cinematic experience for people who just want to be entertained? And that's what they did. Yeah. Yeah. Whereas the book is a statement. Yeah. And I said in my short review, and I'll say the same thing here, it's not a book I would necessarily blanket recommend. Because if you're not a fan of the movie, I don't know that you'll make it through it. Where it sounds fascinating as an examination of adolescents in gang environment. Well, that's the thing is, okay, so this is why it's such an interesting book to try to recommend. If you like the movie, then it is interesting to read the first half as a comparison point and you might not like the second half. But if you're not a fan of the movie, I don't know that you'd make it through the first half to get to what I think is the superior second half that would appeal to probably almost anybody, but you can't just jump to that. You have to have some of that beginning part to then get to, well, this is this character and now you're starting to understand why he's like he is, but it's such a strange book to try to just recommend in one way or another because I don't know that it works for one side or the other all the time. I don't know. It's such a bizarre book to try to recommend because like you would probably get something out of it as a writer and because there's the psychological aspect to it that he gets, I mean, he gets into concepts that I couldn't follow in the end that you probably would about all the different psychology that he was studying and he's getting into the DSM and all this stuff. Like he's going way into detail and so almost the point where I'll probably see if I can find that and send it to you just because you might find his explanation interesting even if you don't read the book. It's not that long. It's like ten pages that he's talking about it, but he's talking about how psychology changes has changed over the years and all this stuff about it that went into why he wrote this and it's fascinating because there was clearly thought into it and so you understand when he says he didn't like the movie as an adaptation. Yeah, I can see why because it's saying it back so much it's not his book. Right. Yeah. It reminded me it's the amusement park version of his book. Well, and honestly, you couldn't have made that into a movie. No one that people would have been would have destroyed him over that film. If they did a literal one to one adaptation, number one, you could I don't know how you do that tonal shift in a movie. It would have been hard to it would have been hard to watch is really what he's saying. It would have been hard to watch and I don't know that an audience would accept the tonal shift if you did the whole thing. I think it could be done. I would actually be fascinated as this is like a limited mini series that stuck. I mean, you would still have to pull back on some of the stuff. Some of it is too horrible to depict. It's just it's too cruel and I don't know that people could put up with it. But then again, I watched the Chernobyl series and that shows people melting in front of their loved ones. Yeah, but you know what? But that's different. That is different. Like no, it is. But maybe the right person could put most of it. That is a terrible thing, but it's one of this that that's almost like a passive meanness. You know what I mean? Where it's like, yes, they're not they're not being actively melted by an individual. They're being melted by decision an individual made. But what they should be doing, whereas with this gang thing, it's like they are actively gang raping an individual. And that would sort of be what would be interesting about trying to do it is that you would have to have unlikable protagonists that you would have to follow for a long time. Yeah, I remember I told you catch on the rye. Catch on the rye is not it's a good book, but it's not a good book because you like the main character. Right. The main character is is a high school asshole. And that's the fascinating bit about if you could make it to the second bit where you start to see why the character is like this strip, they strip the they strip the gang, the individual from the gang and they show you the psychology behind the individual. Yeah. And if you could make it that far, I think that would be a powerful payoff for it. But you've got to get people to that point. Well, it is a payoff because you're, yeah, because you're showing them, you're showing them what comes off as a, as a, as a awful sort of villainous character almost, the psychology behind it. And at some degree, people don't want it. People don't want to know. Well, that's there is that and also young people can do awful things like that. Well, that's the other thing is you'd have to make them like 14 year olds. And that would be rough. You could do it, but you'd have to do it just right. And the other thing is the book does, and this is the one place where I feel like he's sort of sandbagged a bit, because when I thought about it after the fact, hinting of all the characters comes off as the most middle of the road. He doesn't seem actively joyful to be involved in some of the worst things. He seems more level head and I think that was probably because he recognized that you can only redeem a character so far. So if he was like, lung face could not have been redeemed that way. He was too monstrous. They could not have done the subway thing with lung face. Number one, because he didn't have the intellect for it, but even if he did, he is so cruel that there is no way to humanize him as far as he did with hinting because hinting doesn't seem as far gone. So it's interesting. And like I said, I enjoyed it, but not because I was entertained by it. It was fascinating. No, no, it's the same way that I enjoyed Catcher in the Rye. It is very well written. It's an interesting examination of an individual, even though you're kind of sitting there going, he's an asshole. Fuck him. Like, you know, yeah. Yeah. So, so overall, I would say if you've ever been even a little bit interested in maybe reading it, I would say read it. It is. It is fascinating that he that, you know, because up the time I spoke to you, you were about halfway through. Yeah. You were like, these kids are fucking awful, man. Yes. And that's what it is. He just turned it on you completely. Right. It really shifts. And I think it's because, and it's almost like the whole mob mentality thing too, once he's deprived of all the people who are kind of encouraging the worst, because there's a point where when Monkface first starts to want to rape the woman, the other ones are more reluctant, but then he keeps kind of riling them. And then there's a point where he's riling them up. And then there's a point where the other ones are traveling through a enemy territory. And you know, hinted is like we have to be stealthy about this. He's not bringing down anybody unnecessarily. But one of the other ones is like, no, no, you know, we have to show people that were tough. And so he's just trying to provoke a fight. And interestingly, no matter what he does, the other gang in the area doesn't respond. And I don't really know why, but he can't get them to react. And maybe it's because they're too, maybe it's supposed to be a read where they're too small time for them, or I don't know. So there is all, again, it is an interesting book to read as a comparison point to the movie, but also because of how it shifts the whole focus of itself. So I'm glad I read it. I like the fact that the author put that big section in the back about where it came from, because that didn't answer my questions pretty much. And so this was a kind of intellectual exercise where he was mimicking a famous the the anabasis or something. It's a Greek or some kind of called the anabasis. What was it called? The anabasis from Xenophon. It's the most famous work of the soldier and writer Xenophon. Okay. I know who this person was. It gives an account of the expedition of the 10,000, an army of Greek mercenaries hired by Cyrus the Younger. That's hysterical. To help him seize the throne of Persia from his brother in 401 B.C. So he said he was mimicking that, that the story of that, which I have no idea what the story is. Wait a minute. Hold on one second. The story. Okay. Hold on. What was it? Xenophon. Xenophon. So Xeno and Ph.O.N. and the story is called anabasis, A-N-A-B-A-S-I-S. Hey, hold on. Oops. That's hysterical. The guy's name is Cyrus. Anabasis. I think, I think I might know the story. Hold on. Oh, and a bit as a bit of trivia. According to Saul Urik, and I have to look for this now, the next time I watch the movie, he says in the movie, there is one scene where you can see the mechanical, the gunslinger sheriff game, but it's never utilized and he didn't understand why I show it if you're not going to put it in there unless it was just to acknowledge it. I never seen it, so I have to look for this now. But he says it's in there, so I have to look for that. Oh my God. I know this story. Oh my God. I know this story. Yeah. That's... I know this story, but what's fascinating about this story is they were hired, so these Greek mercenaries were hired to go in, right? Yeah. And they were very good. And then what ended up happening was the guy who hired them died and suddenly, and he was basically trying to seize the throne from his brother, and when he died, there was no point anymore. No one was paying them. So then these guys had to get out of enemy territory back to Greece. So the whole idea was that he had the remnants of this army. Now I did a history course where they talk about the historical information they have about this actual army and how... And I remember when I was learning about it, I thought to myself, "God, this would make a great movie," because they were really just... They were being pursued and wrangled, and they, at the same time, they were pretty fierce on their way out, where they were kind of, they were kind of burning their bridges as they went, you know what I mean? But they had to march out of Persian territory back to Greece, and it was a pretty... It's a pretty exciting story. I didn't realize that Xenophon had written it. I knew the history of it, but I didn't know that Xenophon had dramatized it, so I would have to read that. You might find this actual story far more interesting than the Warriors, but it's interesting that the writer based the idea of the book itself off that they go to this thing and then they have to come back. So... Interesting. Yeah, the Greek term "anabasis" refers to an expedition from a coastline into the interior of a country. Oh, okay. Okay. Oh, man. Okay, so here's the plan. So Xenophon's account of the exploits resounded through Greece, where two generations later, some surmise, it may have inspired Philip of Macedonia to believe that a lean and disciplined Helen army might be relied upon to defeat a Persian army many times in size. Yeah, because they were heckled by the Persian army, these Greek mercenaries. They were heckled the entire time they were leaving, but they kept fucking fighting them off. And that's what was so fascinating about the story. I wish there was details in here that talks about the shit that they did. Where is it? Yeah, so it's like the soldiers face hardship. This is after the guy has killed and they need to leave. The soldiers face hardship with few provisions other than meat. They're basically different people are vying to be in charge and they're, like, how for deserting Cyrus. Yeah, they've got the books broken down. In the Wikipedia article, but if you can find the history of it, it is so interesting what these Greek soldiers did. I mean, they were they were fighting bastards, but the shit that they did to get out. So it's honestly you might be it's far more heroic what they did though I'm sure much like a gang. They murdered and raped their way through the countryside, the army of that size. So yeah, that's funny. You'll have to send that to me if you get a chance if you if you can find an ex. Oh, yeah. No, I'm sure I can. I'm sure I can. So I'll send it to you because it sounds interesting. Yeah, it is. Yeah. I'm glad that that there was that because I mean if you if the rest of the book had just been like, yeah, we're going to fuck her and we're going to rape these people and fucking kill them. Like you'd kind of be like, why is there what is the point of this book, right? But the fact that this guy was actually I mean, he actually went out and listened to people and paid attention and kind of wrote this as an example as an idea of what's going on out there. And intentionally based it on that Xenophon, he says, yeah, I based it on that. So yeah, you know, cool. Yeah. No, it's fascinating. Like I said, it's it's not I can't necessarily say everybody should read it, but I do think that if anyone I've said sounds interesting, you should read it because it is a fascinating book. And I think it does get massively better in the second half. I think it improves greatly. So that's a positive too. I'd rather ended well. I think I said, I think I said in my five, I said, if you're going to be 50 50, I'd rather the best part be on the second half. So, but yeah, that first half for some people might be tough to get through because it is just hateful stuff all over the place with no heroes, none. So you just have to know that this is a book where there is almost no one of any heroic nature. No one that I can think of that is I mean, they're innocent victims. They even have a variation of the scene on the subway train where they're the prom dates come on. Yeah, they have a version of that except obviously the girl isn't there. So it's more that they won't make eye contact with these nicely dressed kind of preppy guys because they don't want them to the dominators do not want to acknowledge the fact that it's possible that those other guys think they're better than them. So they very intentionally ignore them. Yeah. You know, so it's like I said, the movie is there. It's all there, but it's so warped at a certain point, and then it changes completely because it just keeps going. The movie stops. It keeps going. Yeah. And the thing is you have just read a account of the psychology of a inner city gang and what was that? 1970? Well, I mean, when he was doing it, I think he was saying it was the 60s and the 50s because the book came out. There you go. Yeah. 1960, 1950. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's why, that's why by the way there's barely any guns because in the 50s and 60s, it was knives. So he's talking about they all have slicers. They all have knives and they're like they're like ripping antennas off the cars as weapons and stuff. So it's very much when it was still like hand to hand combat with any weapon that was lost. Yeah. There's no Mac 10s. Yeah. No, they're all revolvers and they're all like small firearms. There's no, you know, AK-47s or anything like that, no, nothing. No cop killer bullets, bullets, nothing like that. So then following that, I watched a movie called Goodbye 20th Century. This is a movie from 1998. It's a Macedonian film and I was intrigued by it because it looked like it might be similar to the Polish films I watched. Yeah. Okay. This is not. No, I've got. Okay. I've got a few posters here. Okay. One of them is of Santa Claus. Yeah. Well, he's technically in there. He technically has a gun, but he's not it's not it's not a Simon Bisley riot or anything. What the hell is this? Jesus. Okay. Oh my God. The guy with the metal eye thing looks pretty. Oh, he's. Yeah. Okay. So is the Joker in this? Well, sort of. It's so hard. It's buried. I would almost call this an absurdist religious film. I don't I don't know. It's so hard to figure out what this is to be classic. What is it classified as? I am dude. What are they called? Oh, yeah. Hold on. Hold on. I was being carried away by the photos of this. It's a venture comedy fantasy. Oh, that's not right at all. No. It's a fantasy. Yes. Comedy black comedy adventure. No. No. It's not an adventure. So here's the movie. It's a movie in three parts. It's three segments that are all related roughly, well, really directly, but in terms of their tones are all different. So the first segment, which is the longest, I think it's 40 or so minutes out of an 80 something minute film. So it's the largest portion. You start off and it looks like Mad Max Apocalypse. It's 2019 is the year. It's ruined. It's desert, mountains, no water, doesn't look like a fun place. And the guy with the metal eye is walking along with a couple of women who appear to be some kind of priestesses or whatever, although you don't even know he's a priest at first. At first, he just looks like a kind of a Mad Max rip off guy. So they're walking along. There's a whole group of them, a bunch of armed people, and this guy who just, he doesn't look, I don't believe he's chained up, but you can tell that he's sort of being forced to go with them. He's sort of their prisoner. And they're going along and they get to where they see a beached ship, this dry area, it's no water, I think that's a beached ship, and they stop and they dig a grave. And the guy with the metal eye then takes out the, you know, the, you know, I think priests take out and they drape out investments or whatever, the long strip. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, takes that out, you know, does sign the cross and, you know, says, okay, we're going to kill you because you've been found guilty of massacring our children. And so they take the guy who's, you know, sort of the prisoner who's unconcerned with any of this doesn't seem to be afraid. Nothing. In fact, he's kind of joking with a little child that's with them and they shoot him. They shoot him a bunch of times, he falls down and then he gets up and then they seem surprised by this. So they shoot him a bunch more and he falls into the grave and then gets up. And so they, so the priest says you are cursed, you are an abomination, the ground will not take you. So you are condemned by your, your cursed nature and they're like, we're just going to leave you here and they just leave. So he's sitting there and he's looking sad, he's all got holes in him and he's all bloody and he's just out of fire kind of sitting there and out of nowhere comes a guy on a bike. A guy on a bike who is dressed very similar in many ways to the gyrocopter pilot from Road Warrior. I mean, he's got like goggles, he's got like the long coat and he looks like he's inspired by that character. So he shows up and he's like, hey, how's it going? The guy's like, what? He's like, hey, you know, you look like you can use a shave. You want to give me a 10 cents, he says two nickels and I'll give you a shave. And the guy's like, what? He's like, actually, you know what, why don't I give you a nickel and I'll tell you your future and the guy punches him. And so the guy's like, all right, all right, all right, and he's like, well, who are you to tell me my future? And I mean, it's presented like this. There's no framing device or nothing. So I'm just sitting there going, all right, I'm going along with this. I don't know what the fuck is going on, but I'm going along with this. And so the guy says, I'll tell you, he's like, what about your future? Because you like to know, he's like, well, how I'd like to know how to die because I can't die. He's like, really, you can't die. He's like, yeah, I can't die. He's like, well, tell me about that. How was it that you can't die? And he's like, well, when I was younger, many beautiful women would come to me and they would want to sleep with me. And while they were beautiful and while I was interested, I simply could not maintain a hard arm with any of them. But then one day, I'm not kidding. But that times they say hard on, that's all you have to do. Right. So he says, but then one day I looked upon a, I think it says a portrait of an angel. And I immediately was hard. And so he says, she was a Valkyrie, something like that, and he's like, and then she manifested herself to me and I had sex with her. And after I did that, all the children in the village died and they blamed me for it. And the guy's like, so you killed a little children. He's like, I don't know, man. All I know is I had sex with the only woman who could get me hard. So let me, let me, let me, let's just spell this out. Sure. The logic is in this movie, if you fuck an angel, children will die. Well, it is never confirmed that he is responsible. So I don't know. It's just a psychic, it's just a psychic blowback or something like that. Well, it seems, it seems, well, okay, well, actually, no, no, there may be an explanation because we have to go a little further now. Okay, go on. So he basically says, I didn't kill anybody. All I did was have sex with a beautiful angel in a painting who manifested herself when I got a hard on. Like anybody would. And the guy's like, huh, okay, so now you forced me to ask this question. Yes. If you had to have sex with a work of art, work of art would it be? Well, Mila is a work of art, but, uh, come on, come on, yeah, an actual painting. I'd have to, I mean, there's lots of very good kind of Rubenesque paintings out there. I don't know that I can think of one off the top. Is there, is there, is there an artist whose work generally you might be? I'm just curious if this has entered your mind at all. It never really has, no, no, no. Is he a Simon Bisley woman? Oh, geez, geez, that would be something, wouldn't it? It would. Okay. That's the first I can think of. I've never really honestly thought of it. I'm just curious if it had occurred to you that idea, you know, I mean, I'm not going to say that I've never read a comic or looked at something and thought, Oh, yeah, all right. But I can't, it never burned itself in my brain. You didn't see. You didn't see an angel. Tag girl, maybe. Oh, my God. That'd be weird. All right. Go on. So he, so he fucked the angel and the village children died. Right. So basically the guy's like, all right, well, you said, if I told you if I, if you told me your story, then I would tell you how you can die. And he's like, you have to go to the city and you have to find the man with green hair. How does he know? Well, hold on. Is he psychic? Okay. Go ahead. I don't know what he is. He might be God, but we're going to get to that. Because he shows up in every story as the same character who seems to be. Oh, okay. Yeah. So they never named him. As far as I know, he's just call, does he have a name in the credits? Hold on. This guy have a name in the credits and we look, they name him the prophet. That's all they call him. So he says, well, he says he's a prophet and that's the only name I ever give. So who knows? So he says, you got to go to the city of glass and you have to defeat the man with green hair, kill him. And then you will find the way that you can die and then he's got to kill the Joker. Yes. And he says, oh, he says, you have to kill the man who makes a musical instrument out of a gun. And he's like, make sure you take a weapon with you because you have to kill him. So the guy is like, all right. And so he gets a shotgun with a flashlight on the end and he wanders into the city of glass, which apparently that must be a city everybody knows because he knows how to get there. He doesn't have to ask for directions really. And he comes in and as he's walking in, there is a crowd of people who are listening to a town crier who is saying stuff like basically he's saying things like, I'm trying to remember the specifics of but because of course he says the smell of children is the most terrible thing in the world. And I was like, what? Because I know what the hell they were talking about there. And then I realized that what he was talking about is he was saying, you shouldn't want to sleep with children. And I went, OK, I guess you have to tell people that in this future. All right, there was definitely a vibe of pedophilia is bad, which no kidding. But they make a point of this guy saying listen, listen, but she pops up from the Bible quite a bit. So there is definitely a religious thing to this, which is in the second. Yeah, it says the thing I was reading, and it says that it's got a religious like angle to it. Oh, it definitely does. But not until a certain point, at least not overtly. Obviously, you can put some text to anything, but at this first segment, it feels like it's very firmly post apocalyptic side. This is very weird. On the IMDB site, they were like playing footage of the film, but I've suddenly got a scene of the two people on the sex in the bath, yeah, we're almost there. Yeah, with it with the little animated teddy bear thing, yeah, it's a weird trailer for the film. I'll say that. Yeah. But it does reflect. Wait till I get to that. So guy wanders to the town wanders through the scene and then finds this this factory or whatever abandoned thing, and inside, as you pointed out, is the Joker. And that character is out of a John Waters film. Now it becomes a John Waters film where he is just camping it up, they're playing literal cartoon music and cartoon sound effects when like he falls down, it's making like silly Bugs Bunny noises. But the guy, the other guy is completely serious. And so the guy, you know, the Joker shooting at him, and obviously it does nothing. And finally the guy, and there's also an opera singer for some reason, who's just singing in the background. And so the guy kills the Joker, which is pretty easy for him, he just shoots him. And like there's green, like green goo comes out of him, and then he just falls over and dies. And so the guy goes down into the basement and sees there's a long wall that, I mean, it's all a massive, it's either in Macedonian or it's in a made up language, it was not in English, I couldn't tell you what any of it says. But he's reading names alphabetically. So it's almost like this wall is how everybody dies or something, because then he gets to his name and he looks at it and he reads it and then he throws up based on what he read, but they don't tell you what he read. And then he walks out and when he walks out, he sees across the way from where he is, there's a little house and there's a woman in it, which is the woman you saw in that video. And that woman walks out and she beckons him in, and the next thing we cut to is him and that tub with bandages on, he's just laying there. And before he goes in there, he says, "Oh dear mother," and I went, "Uh-oh." Because I don't know what that means, but in a movie like this, "Who the fuck knows?" So I was like, "Oh no, is this going to be a guy having sex with his mother thing? Like is this a re-going, editable, full on here?" It's not that, it's his sister. So it's incest, which you don't find out right away, but basically- >> Wot, wot, wot. >> We'll get to it, there is maybe an explanation. So they're in there and he pulls her into the tub and when she takes off her clothes, she's tattooed from top to bottom and you see the scenes where he was shot, so there's the guy with the thing on his face. >> Oh yeah, she's not tattooed once he's got her in the tub. >> No, she is, but I think they must have cut it out of that to hide what the plot element was. >> Yeah, 'cause I'm pretty sure she is still tattooed, oh you know what, maybe I wasn't, I was so confused at that point, I wasn't really noticing, I was just like, "Where is this going?" Because it just came out, it kind of cut to that so suddenly after the rest of it seemed like a road warrior light type of movie. So they have sex and he dies. And then she gets out of the tub and she sits down and she tattoos him in the tub onto her body. And then that segment ends. >> Oh, no, sorry, sorry, then the next thing we see is he's put into the grave that they originally tried to put him in, they cover him up, he's dead, and you see that woman walk up wearing the same kind of robes as the other priestesses, and one of the guards tries to shoot her and the priest stops her, stops him and says, "No, no, it's fine, let her be, she's his sister," and they leave. And so then we see her walk up to the grave and she cries, and then it cuts. So that's segment one. And then we jump back to, the middle segment is literally about two minutes long, it's very short. But it's supposed to be old-time footage, it's like a sepia tone and like a hand-cranked camera, and it's describing a marriage between a brother and a sister because they love each other so much that even though the family and the church disagrees, they understand that their love is sincere, so they're going to let them get married. So they get married, and too- It's a strong sibling thing going here. Okay, boy is there. So then as soon as they're done being married, they kill the guy, they shoot him to death. And then you see a guy comes into the frame to kind of adjust the focus, and it's the gyrocopter guy, it's the prophet. So he was their same age, he was there for this, right? Which ties into the first story, then he just goes out of frame. He's just there to kind of adjust the lens and then jump out, just so you know he's there. And then the text underneath, because it's like the old-timey thing where there's no sound, you just see the words. So then the slide says, and this got me thinking about, oh, I guess original sin isn't universal the way I think it is, because I don't know other religions, I barely know the ones we're supposed to know in America, I don't know anything. But it says, this is the first, this is documentation of the first sin of incest. And that's, and that is why he was then killed. So in this, you know what, I wonder, I shouldn't be wondering what the first... I looked up, original sin, like, yeah, I couldn't find anything on it, I kind of looked it up, I couldn't find anything. So that segment, like I said, is that, that's all it is, is that two-minute thing. The first report of father-daughter incest appears in the Bible in the book of Genesis 19. And the seducer of this, the seducer this time, however, is not the father a lot whose wife had crystallized in the japilla or salt, but rather the daughter who conspires to extract her father's seed. Oh, yeah, I think this is when she gets drunk. Oh, I kind of remember that. Yeah, but you know what this happens again with, what's his name, she's Noah, that he, I think his daughters get him drunk as well or something like that. Yeah, that's a lot of weird. Yeah. Oh, I know it, I know it's in there, I just, this is, this is presenting it as the first sin. Yeah, I love this question. Why did God allow incest in the Bible in the first place? Why did God allow, it's going to get you into a lot of trouble. If you're going to get there, you're going to end up out of it, just saying, you're not going to, you're not going to do well starting out with a sentence, why did God allow? You know, if you want to stay inside of that, you're better not asking those questions. Just make the thing serious. It was that, was that great life for George Carlin? Hey, father, father, can God make a rock so big he can't move it or something like that? Even he can't lift it. Yeah. He said that, that real like New York voice. Yeah. Hey, hey, father, father, God make a rock so big, even he can't lift it. Yeah. And then he just get, then he just gets smacked by the priest at that point. I think so. Yeah. I think that's the other thing that's probably where it went. Okay. So. So that's the second part, two minutes, black and white, or whatever, CP tone footage, just to establish the incest angle as original sin for this. Some shit is going on. Got it. Well, like I said, it is presented as the first sin and the first murder captured on camera simultaneously. Whatever that's supposed to mean. First murder was supposed to be, can't enable though, isn't it? Well, that's what I'm saying. Maybe not massive. They talk about playing fast and loose with the Bible. Well, I don't, maybe not because they specifically say that the family is Macedonian Orthodox. I don't know what that entails. So this could be a cultural thing. Okay. Macedonian. Well, that's it. Well, I looked that up and there's like Macedonian is a collection of things. So I don't even know which Orthodox they're talking about. It doesn't matter. I'll talk that up to you. I don't understand it. And that's fine. I understand that within the confines of this movie, incest is original sin. And that the murder is justified because of the level of sin got it. So now we cut to the, we cut to 1999. So it's the eve of the millennium, which is where the title goodbye 20th century comes from. So it's New Year's Eve, 1999, and we start off with a guy in a Santa suit and he's just hanging out and he's talking to a kid and the kid is the guy from the first segment because he's got the same name. But yeah. It doesn't. Oh, yeah. Very young. Yeah. Like, I don't know, 10 something like that. And so he's talking to this kid and he just, it just happens where he said, well, what's your name, kid? And he says, my name is Kuzman and Kuzman was the guy from the first one. So, and at first, I thought the prophet was Santa, but I was wrong about that. He just kind of looks the same because once he takes all his stuff off, he can tell it's not him. So Santa ambles along and ends up coming into a room that is a funeral. The room is all white, top to bottom, all the furniture, everything. It's a white room. Everyone inside is dressed in black because they're mourning somebody who just died. And I'm not even clear what the family dynamic was because I don't know if he was their brother, son, father. Who knows? It almost doesn't matter. He comes in. And this collection of characters is impossible to describe, but it's like every different archetype. There's the, the, the uptight guy who's running the funeral. There's the, I think the mother who is just chain smoking, the uncle shows up with a nymphomaniac girlfriend and they're like rock rock people. So she's dressed like, I don't know, something out of an ACDC video. And he looks like he's, I don't know, in a Guns N' Roses cover band and, you know, they're playing rock music at a funeral. And then there is the old, the grandmother is farting uncontrollably and at one point farts so violently she gets shot across the room. There's a couple of young kids who look like their Adam's family rejects. There's a guy who looks like a point extra type. And then in the back room with the body is the prophet who is making him up, like, you know, putting the makeup on and getting him prepped like I'm bombing or whatever their version of it is. They never get specific, but get it prepping him for the, for the wake or whatever. And the Santa's there and they're going around the room and they're, they're like. Is it Santa or is it St. Nicholas? Oh, no, no, no, well, he says, no, he says Santa Claus, but in the, in the language of the film, I, he didn't say Santa. I don't know if he said St. Nick or a different name. I don't know. He, he looks like the Coca Cola version of Santa. So he is dressed as the traditional American Santa, but, you know, I don't know. But as he's sitting there, he's slowly taking the costume off, takes the hat off first, then he takes his beard off and apparently there's a thing and I don't know if this is a Macedonian thing or not, where at a funeral, you're supposed to eat sugared wheat, I think, because they offer it to them and they're offering it to everybody has to have a little bit of the, the wheat as kind of a thing of respect, I think. I don't know whether that's real or if the movie just made it up or the movie like this, you can never tell. And so he's slowly taking off like he takes the beard off, then he takes the mustache off and he takes the big, you know, white hair off. And so he just looks like a guy with our Santa suit. And there's a point where he goes in the back and he's talking to the prophet and he's talking about how, geez, about how the future and the past are basically the same thing. And you know, that people think the future is going to be better, but in fact, it's not. The time is really cyclical and all these segments repeat each other. And so all the horrors of the past will be visited upon the future. And then the Santa guy takes out a gun, shoots the grandmother, goes out, kills everybody in the room, and then walks out the door and says goodbye 20th century. So he says the title of the film and then walks into the basement and takes out paint and starts to paint all the wording that we saw from the first segment where the guys saw how he had to die. And then the movie ends. I don't really know what the messaging is because I have a feeling this is a cultural thing because apparently Macedonia, and I don't know anything about Macedonia, but the Macedonian areas because I don't even think Macedonia is a place, it's a collection of places. Okay. From what I understand. Stop. Yeah. Macedonia is a place. It is a country. It is a country classically north of Greece. Okay. Well, what I read said that there was different parts of it today. I think that it's pretty broken up now. Oh, well, okay. So what I'm saying is I don't, I don't, and it doesn't actually matter. Alexander the Great is from Macedonia. Sure. Except I don't know. Okay. But I have a feeling that some of this is related to Macedonian politics, religion, and war. Yeah. Absolutely. Because apparently there's been a lot of war there. And so I've, I've, there were some comments where people said this is a, this is a movie that is referencing the war torn nature of Macedonia. I'm like, okay, I don't know it. So there is, whereas with the, the apocalypse trilogy or tetrology, I know enough about communism that I got the messaging, like I know enough about that, whereas this feels more specific. It feels related in that the imagery is very interesting and specific and dreamlike. And I enjoyed watching it because it was so strange. But at the same time I think that where with the Polish films, I had enough knowledge and ability to decipher the messaging that I got enough of that to make them successful for me to be entertained by and informed by. This one, I feel like the disconnect was just enough that I don't feel the desire to buy it. But then I think about it later and I'm like, yeah, but it's so weirdly made that I kind of do want to rewatch it because it does have this, you're wondering if you missed something. Well, because it, it, the, the fantasy tag is correct. There is a surreal nature to this. It's almost like a Terry Gilliam thing where it never feels real. It feels like it is fables or something. And there's some very striking artistry involved, but I, you know, I, I know I'm missing stuff and I'm missing stuff in a way where, or maybe I'm not, maybe the fact that I said, well, I guess in this world, incest is the original sin, therefore all of this is the fallout from that first thing. The only, the only part that's sort of missing is, are we meant to think that the first incestuous family is related to Kuzman because he is involved in the last and first segments. Or is it simply his act of incest for whatever reason with a saint that looks like his sister that becomes his sister, I think that is the connection. Or is it more concrete? Because the first and third segments are very tied together. Kuzman's in both. The writing is in both. I don't know what the funeral was all about compared to him. Why did the Santa, is it, is it the funeral for the 20th century? Maybe. And so Santa Claus knows how everybody should die. I mean Santa Claus does know a lot about you as a character and folklore. He knows your, your morality. So does that extend to his Santa Claus God? I don't know within the framework of this film. He could be. Also, who's the prophet? He doesn't age. He's there. He knows everything. He knows how to, where Guzman's going. His name is the prophet in the credits. So is he, are he in the Santa, cause they, there's a lot of holy trinity in this thing. So I don't know who the third one would be, but are they two aspects of the same being? I was reading a, some of the reviews, the famous reviews of this movie. And then one of them says quote, "feels like it was made by a couple of precocious 13 year old boys obsessed with incest and bullets and splattering blood. This is strictly for those who like their science fiction with a lot of style, but very little substance." Well, okay. And that is potentially, that was one review. That was one review. Well, and that's, and that's, that review is an indicator of whether you think this movie has a real message or another, another review was an impressionistic howl of rage and despair from a country, which has lived on the brink of war for years, a nightmare without beginning or end, one gets the feeling that it has driven everyone concerned a bit mad. And that is where goodbye 20th century succeeds the most without showing a single glimpse of actual Balkan fighting. It portrays the horror and insanity of the conflict in a way that a mere war film would be hard pressed to achieve. Okay. And see that right there, right? That makes me think, okay, so maybe the people at the funeral are supposed to be analogs of actual people in the war or countries even, and they're bickering, and maybe the reasoning behind these conflicts is encapsulated as metaphor in there, and I don't know what it is. It doesn't, I didn't, I didn't not enjoy watching it because I was baffled. And the thing is, you're not Macedonians, so maybe this is like, maybe this is like the whole thing with, I saw the, the TV glow where it's like, if you're not, if you're, when you're not trans, you will experience it in a non trans way that is just as viable as experiencing it in a trans way. Well, you are experiencing this as a non Macedonian, therefore, there may be things that you missed, but it is just as valid and artistic experience the way you interpret it as a Macedonian having seen it. Yeah. It is visually inventive. It has very memorable scenes. You know, I, I, in that way, just as watching this, yeah, it was, it was Macedonius submission to the 71st Academy Awards for the best foreign language film. Well, sure, jeez, I mean, it was not among the five finalists, but they did put it up there. Well, I mean, it is looking at it purely as a, as a directorial effort, as a movie, as a constructed film. Yeah. You know, the person said, Oh, it's a precocious 13. I don't, I didn't get the feeling that this was made without intention. Oh, no, it feels like it, from the sounds of it, it sounds like there is a great deal of intention. Yeah. So what somebody says, Oh, it's 13 year olds were obsessed with incest. I don't think that's fair. I would not agree. This is like an, this is like an A 24 thing. You know what I mean? It's like. Yeah, there's a green light aspect to it. Yes. If, if you said this was an A 24 film, I'd be like, Oh, it makes total sense. Right? I can see this being a 20. Yes. Yes. You know, definitely. Definitely. So I mean, you're applying, you're applying American vibes to it saying you were like, Oh, it's very Mad Max. You're like, Well, is it very Mad Max? Did they have they ever seen Mad Max? Like it's, you know, it, it sounds like a, it sounds like a statement about the endless nature of violence. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like I said, and the whole historically, haven't we done this all before? Well, there is definitely the idea that, I mean, even I can pick up the whole thing of, okay, the, the sins of the past echo into the feeling like I get that, like that there is that kind of easily overt messaging. He has some other movies too. Yeah. I don't know if there is good. Okay. So the director, his name is Darko Mitrovsky. He has a movie called Balcan Can from 2005, a Macedonian Italian joint production film out of a deserter who travels through the Balkans as a political immigrant in search of his dead mother-in-law who's wrapped in a carpet. Oh, and the third half is a 2012 Macedonian film directed by Darko Mitrovsky. It deals with Macedonian football during World War II and the deportation of Jews from Macedonia is the story of love during wartime and a country's passion for football, the government of Macedonia. Interesting. Now, go back to the page for the actual movie for this movie. Yeah. Scroll down a bit. Yeah. Tell me what you see in the more like this section. Oh, no, I'm, I'm on the wiki. Oh, go, go to the IMDB page. Oh, yeah. Hold on. The links at the bottom of the wiki. Oh, is it? Yeah. Under the external links? Okay. Yeah. It should have an IMDB. I think almost every minute. All right. I've got it. Yeah. All right. Scroll down to where you see more like this. Tell me what you see. Let me hold on. More like this. Gollum. Uh-huh. Biosombe. I wonder what that is. I haven't watched that yet, but it's on my list. Darker than night. Yeah. And then what do you have for the fourth one? Obie Obah, the end of the... Yeah. Two of those are the Polish films. The first and the fourth one. Oh, yeah. I found that Polish thing. Yeah. There you go. I found it in two of this stuff. That's what I'm saying. I definitely got that. I felt like there was a relation in general. Oh, man. You should... Man, you should look at some of these other ones, too. Primal rage. I saw these. Yeah. They look fascinating. Weird. Yeah. The fact that those other two are in there makes me... The forbidden room? What the hell is that? The devil's... The devil's... What is that? The devil's contract? In this non-linear amalgamation submarine crewmen and a woodsman when their way through a voyage of odd experiences. Oh, Oodle Cures in it. There you go. Oh, wow. Well, and it's only three bucks on Amazon, so... You want to hear a fun Oodle Cures story I heard? Oh, God, sure. Of course I do. So, my tattooist, who's elder to me, he's an artist as well as the tattooist, so he's met a lot of weird people through going to conventions and shit like that, and he's also a huge geek. And he told me this story about how when he was younger, he met Oodle Cures and he was at a convention and he met a lot of famous people randomly because people like to get tattooed. And he was outside and there was Oodle Cures standing in front of his limo, and he had a bodyguard in front of him, and my friend was like, "Oh, geez, I love Oodle Cures. I can't not at least go up and tell him that I love his movies." So he went up to Oodle Cures and he was like, "Hey, I love your work." And I just went, "You know that." And the bouncer, the bodyguard was quickly like, "Fuck off." But then Oodle Cures, in his little accident voice, was like, "Oh, no, no, no, he's like, "Come here. He's like, "Give me a hug." "Oh, no. Come here. Give me a hug." And my tattooist was saying, "He like, walk up to him and Oodle Cures put his arm around him and brought him real close and was like talking to him and very complimentary. And my tattooist was basically like, "Oh my God, he's like, "Oodle Cures going to take me with him." He was like, "He's like, "I don't know what's happening." He was in at that moment, these two very leggy, scantily clad women came out of the convention and they were like, "Oodle Cures, we love you!" And he was like, "Okay, I'll see you later." He kind of just gently pushed him off and went for the two women. Oh, beautiful. And I was like, "Yeah, it sounds like a bit of cure." Yep. So. Yep. That sounds like Ralphie. Yeah. Yeah. That sounds like a bit. Yeah. Ralphie. It's with the deal, Ralphie. Boy, oh boy. Oh, my God. I want someone to be named Ralphie in a sense. I'm just waiting for it. I mean, the voice acting isn't great. But I'm waiting for someone to be like, "We need you to go talk to our man in the area there." Ralphie. Ralphie! So. Well. There you go. So, yeah, two things that you might want to check out, neither of which I can necessarily universally recommend, but both which were fascinating. Yeah, it's a weird shit this week, I got to say. Yep. Yep. Yep. And one, I did not expect to be as bizarre as it was. In terms of its total whiplash. And the other was as weird as I thought, but not necessarily. Do you? Wasn't fully understood. Would you always like it if after a work of art you had a like an explainer for me, the director or the writer or the artist, explained their mindset? I don't know. Personally, I don't always want that. Sometimes I really want to have my own experience. I would always like it to be available. Do you like an option? Okay. Yes. I don't know that I would always utilize it. The 20th century one, if there had been a thing that said, "Okay, now you can watch the explanation of the movie." I would have watched it right away. I would have taken a wick and thought about it and kind of constructed my own idea. That's why I didn't read anything about The Warriors before I read the book. So I was actually very happy about the fact that I didn't know anything. Reddit kind of went, "Wow, that's fascinating." And then the explanation was not at all what I expected. And I was glad I had it there to read, because I almost didn't. I almost thought, "Maybe I should wait." But then I thought, "No, I mean, the story is not that metaphorical. It's more of why was it done this way." So it was more of the mechanics as opposed to the meaning. And so I was more interested in why it was structured this way and if there was an explanation. And then reading that one, "Okay, this makes sense. This makes sense that it feels to my mind like the first part was his attempt to accurately translate the real life experience of gangs into this historical story, meld them. And then once it got to the part where Hinton was isolated, the part where he's in a psychology and his background in that then took over to explain and flesh out one of these characters. So in that way, it makes sense. Do I think as a way to write a book, it's the smoothest? Probably not. Again, I think this is such a 50/50 book that I could see somebody not making it to that second half, or if they really liked the first half going, "What the hell is this?" When they get to the second half. Yeah. Where's all my rape and murder? Come on. Well, the gangs basically disappear. They become nothing as far as until the very, very last few pages where you just know that some of them, other ones made it back, but they're no longer significant. Whereas before that, there's so much in the gangs, interactions, and how they operate as a gang and their relationship to everybody who's not a gang member, that when it suddenly just dials straight down to one person, that might throw some people who were interested in the interpersonal relationships, even though they weren't particularly deep as far as the individuals. What was deep was their relationship within a cluster. But then when you strip the cluster completely out, and it's down to one person who now you understand very intimately, some people might not enjoy that as much. I think it works, but it's a book for a very specific type of reason. So the answer is that you'd like the option, but you won't always take it. Yes. I think it is always great for any type of work of art to know what the artist's intentions were. I mean, assuming they want you to know, some artists like, "No, no, no, the mystery," like David Lynch will not explain anything, because to him, no, he won't. He says, "The point is you have to bring what you think to it." That's his intention. I don't think most artists are like that, especially in books and movies. I think a lot of them actually have an idea of what they want you to get out of it. They're fine if you take something differently or you don't necessarily see it all, but they know what they were making. Yeah. They won't let you know what they put on paper. Right. Lynch is one of the exceptions where he specifically will not explain what his movies mean because he says, "That's not the point." Man, whereas honestly, for me, I am so fascinated by people's interpretation of my art. I would love, I just want people to tell me what they see, because everyone I've spoken to about my work, who has encountered it, I'm always surprised. When I talked to you about my one book, the way you saw it, I was like, "Whoa, interesting. The way you envisioned characters." And when somebody else read my book, and who had a Vietnam history, so they were an older person who had lived through Vietnam and had experiences with Vietnam vets and people who, they thought that the whole book was an incredibly dark psychology on a veteran losing his mind. If it was me, if I were to be one of these people, what I would do is, if somebody wanted to know, I'd say, "Okay, explain to me what you think it means, and then I'll tell you." Because I want to know, minus my layering what they saw. I want to know first. Yeah, tell me what you think first. That's what I would do. I would say, "All right, send me an explanation of what you got out of it, and I will tell you what mine was." Yeah. And I would collect all of that into like a book. Yeah, and that weird. Yeah. That's how I would do it. There you go. Yeah, but overall, I think it's always good if you can have access to that, if you want it, and then you choose whether to use it or not. So I thought this, and that way, this book was excellent because it was right there, and I was able to read it, and it added a lot. So yeah, I'll try to excerpt that out and send it to you so you can read it, because I think of this fascinating. And that is where we're at now, because I've reviewed my two things, and yeah. I've reviewed nothing. No, that's okay. You don't have to review anything. So whatever you choose to entertain yourself with this weekend, hopefully it tells you what you want it to tell you, or you bring to it what you want. So yeah, warriors, or goodbye 20th century. Oh, that's not true. I reviewed a cent. I live just now. Oh, yeah. I reviewed a cent, yeah. So just remember, folks, wherever you go. There you are. All right. Have a good weekend, everybody. We will talk to you again next week. Visit OzoneNightmare.com to subscribe to new episodes, browse through our back catalog, or to find links to support the show. Follow @OzoneNightmare on Twitter for the latest episode postings and other show information. If 280 characters just isn't enough, you can always email us at the OzoneNightmare@gmail.com. The opening theme for the show is provided by Heartbeat Hero. The closing theme is provided by Ogre. Please visit and support these artists using the links in the show notes for each episode. 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