 All right, looks like we're streaming, I'll go live. Can you hear any air conditioning? Tiny in the background, and I can remove that in post trivially. Yeah, I'm seeing it show up in the wave as these tiny specks, like someone sprinkled salt onto the line. I can remove that in post. I already have to run a noise filter on you because you have a static line at a particular frequency, but I think that's just because of your pre-amp. Maybe. I can get rid of it, so it's fine. Yeah, you can see that the crisp is canceling out the air conditioner, right? You can't hear it, so. I hear a tiny bit because if I mute you, something goes away. But I'm wearing my super fancy headphones, too. I've, like, fully isolated. No, but I mean, in Discord, I don't see a green ring around my face unless I talk. But maybe when I talk, it's when you're talking, there's a little bit of. As soon as I stop talking, then you can't hear it. All right, anyway, I think we're good to go here. It's Wednesday, May 26, 2021. I'm rim. I'm Scott. And this is Geek Nights. Tonight, we are reviewing Spider-Man 2099. So I have not been called up for jury duty in, like, a decade. We just talk about it. You can figure out our whole jury duty history by listening to enough Geek Nights because every time we have a jury duty, we do an episode on it. It's the opening bit guaranteed number one. We will probably remind you that if you're on a jury, you have a natural de facto right to nullify in that even if you even if someone is clearly guilty and you're instructed just to decide if they are guilty, you can still vote not guilty if you believe the law itself is unjust or you think the punishment is unjust. Or you just fucking feel like it. Yeah. It's not illegal. They can't stop you. They can't know your heart. Give you all the instructions they want. But at the end of the day, it's like the reason you're there is because you have the power to choose guilty or non-guilty. The jury of your peers. No one can make you choose in the United States either one. It's up to you what you choose entirely. And if you just have some other reason, you can Google jury nullification on your own. Yep. I suggest you do if you get called up for jury duty. But I got to go back in tomorrow. And I am 100% sure they will never, ever in my life, let me sit on a jury, even though I really would like to be on a jury. What two lawyers opposing each other could both look at like it's a it's could be that one of them is looking at rim and saying, oh, yeah, he's going to say what I want him to say. And the other one is going to be like, he just said he hates the cops. The other one will be like, fuck no, right? There is no way that two opposing lawyers would both take rim in, question him, hear his answers, and both say, fuck yeah, going on my jury. I like this guy. The last time I went through Vardir, like it was it was almost a scene from a comedy movie. They asked me a question. I gave a short, honest answer. And I thought they were going to like follow up or grill me because the answer was an atypical one. Like it was the one they wouldn't expect. But instead, literally, both lawyers kind of look at each other and they raised their hands. And I was just dismissed with no more words. And that was it. The question was, would you trust the testimony of a law enforcement officer over the testimony of a private citizen? And I said, absolutely not. Kind of waiting for them to like ask me why. And they were just like, nope, get out of here. You're done. Go home. It's like, I'll trust the testimony of any human equal to any other human. I would actually trust the testimony of a cop less than a private citizen. Could be. Depends. You know, at least equal at most. Right. But also, I don't trust eyewitness testimony at all because I know that it's mostly bullshit. Eyewitness testimony is like the worst kind of test of evidence. I'm judging going to be based on the physical evidence more than is going to outweigh what anyone says by like a thousand. So yeah, in the news, we're not going to like do a full review here. We'll talk about spoilers and go in depth on this at some like when the last Adventure Time special comes out, we'll probably do a show where we talk about it. We did episodes on the first two. They're only making four. I really didn't feel like making four adventure episodes, four Geek Nights episodes or four Adventure Time episodes. Because we only do 26 animation episodes a year on average now. Yeah, so. So four 26th of Geek Nights becomes Adventure Time. We already turned what five 26th of Geek Nights into train game reviews. If they do if after the next one that the Peppermint Butler one, they don't they're not doing any more. We'll do an episode. But if they announce like, hey, we're going to do some more even then we'll hold off, I guess, even longer. Yeah, but I think it's worth geekbiting because we did watch Finn and Jake together again. The third installment geekbiting it. What I would say is it's good. It's solid. It is good. I think it's the it's either the weakest of the three new distant lands episodes or it's not weak. But yes, it's like saying, oh, I had this great like custom donut and then I had this fancy eclair. And then I had a really good milkshake. Like, yeah, the milkshake might have been the weakest of those three, but it was still amazing. Yeah, yeah. One thing I would say, though, is that it was poignant. It hit moderately hard. I got a little bit choked up, but it also didn't actually like push any particular boundaries. It didn't really do anything particularly new or different. And I would even argue that the major beats and moments and the story it told were already told by the show itself. And this didn't add anything, but I still enjoyed watching it. I agree with that. Like, I don't think I don't have a different opinion of the characters and even the Jake thing is 100 percent derivable from having just seen the show. Yeah. The other ones, I think, you know, had some sort of higher concept and some the Bimo one, especially the Bimo one didn't pose because it played with the timeline and also played with the like your expectations about like what be most up to that character who is so 100 percent obviously looks exactly like Finn's dad. And you're like, I wonder what the deal is with that. Like, there's good stuff there. This one is just really straightforward. It was just, yeah, it was just taking right what it was on its face and just sort of tying it up in a way. Right. And then it's like, OK, but you didn't, you know, you didn't try to go anywhere new. It wasn't as necessary, not even not even just story wise, but like, you know, art wise, the Bimo one did interesting stuff and also explored an unexplored aspect of what is Bimo like when these other people aren't around for real on a real mission, like a real adventure. Marceline and Bubblegum, like that one just resolved their relationship and a big chunk of the world around them in a really like good way. And this one just kind of told you something that if you were even remotely perceptive to the show, you already knew. I guess the part I actually like the most is the whole thing with death and the three characters involved there. Right. Because that's a whole part of the universe that did not get enough screen time in the show. In fact, I think most of the screen time that those characters get in the show are in those specials and you don't actually get much plot if anything around them. Right. The mixtape. Yeah. It's like, you know, it's sort of that part of the universe where death is is sort of established in some episodes that is one episode that really goes in on it. But other than that, it's like, it's, you know, there are other parts of the universe to get more attention. So going back there was cool. But like going back there in this way was sort of like, well, I didn't really learn anything more. I learned some more about it. But the most compelling arc was between life, death and the third unnamed character, those three, because that did the stuff I like about Adventure Time. It didn't explain everything. It gave you just enough, you know, the gist of these characters and you just have to infer a lot of what happened. Like, you don't know the whole story and it was sad. Life being angry was a very good moment. Like, that was well animated and fun. Yeah, it's good. So yeah, it's worth watching. Like, it's Adventure Time. It is better than the weakest episode of Adventure Time. Not that I could even name what that episode might be. Are you got any other news? I guess I got a couple little things we can talk about. Yeah, there's not any big news is like, I don't know. This is the camera news, which is right. It's like, is that what you do? Do people care? I don't know. I don't know if Wednesday people care. And say it right. Considering we just talked about digital cameras and then suddenly a news comes that changes some of what we said. But yeah, the camera that I have, then I use for pretty much all our video stuff and also some photo stuff is the Panasonic GH5, right? The GH4 was pretty much like the first S11 GX1. And I have a fancy Panasonic camcorder. Yeah, which was for like one of the first ones to do 4K video at any kind of reasonable consumer accessible price. And the GH5 expanded upon that. But now nowadays, like there's everyone else has gotten into that market of right. So it's like, what's Panasonic going to do, right? They started this thing kind of and everyone else is coming and been eating their lunch away, right? You know, Nikon, Canon, Sony, everybody. So they announced the GH5 II and the GH6 is coming later this year and was they announced it exists and they give some specs, but not all the specs, right? And that basically what the deal is the GH6 is going to record at like not six K or eight K, but five point something K, right? So more, more than four K at like 60 year, right? It's like, it's like ridiculous and it's going to cost twenty five hundred dollars. That's a lot. And it's like, OK, if you are someone who's a filmmaker or something like that, still twenty five hundred for better than four K video. It's like, you're waiting for that, right? Now it's interesting on the Panasonic website, they have a big caveat noted about it saying that because they because they have an estimate of the final. Yeah, the recording time, but they make a prominent note that the camera's video recording time is limited by its own temperature. Yep. I mean, that is one of something we didn't talk about on the show that the large like fancy camcorders, one thing they do have often is active cooling. So they can record. You can record. I could use my camcorder for 12 hours constantly in hot weather. It'll be fine. But if you take a micro four thirds, they have the BGH, which is one of those box style ones, which is really just a box that you put a lens on and everything else is external to that, that you have to attach yourself. And that one, I believe, has fans in it, right? But if you have a, you know, the carry around, you know, sort of SLR shaped cameras, they usually don't have fans on them. So that's a right. The cooling is a factor. But H5 to they were announcing all the upgrades of the GH5 to versus the GH5 and I already have a GH5. So those upgrades got to be something significant to make me want to switch over, right? And switching over actually wouldn't be, you know, prohibitive because I could sell my GH5 after I get the GH5 to and I'm seeing the difference. So it's sort of like an upgrade fee. If you think about it that way, I would even consider buying it from you just because all I have is an old GX one and the problem with the problem with the X's, it's actually a fine camera for like what I do. The problem is what I would want to use it for is a secondary video camera. The X, the GX cannot output HDMI. No, I can't do that. It can record video, but I had to hack the firmware to record more than like 20 minutes of video because that stupid EU tax law thing. So they're announcing all these features for the GH5 too versus the GH5 and they're they're nice features, right? Better image stabilization, which is amazing on the GH5 and they're getting making it better, you know, more FPS on the 4K, you know, you get the V-Log included instead of they did warn you the GH5 too also does not do raw video output. No, but no one almost no one does that. Only like the ultra pro cameras do that. You know, all these really nice features, right? They're announcing, but I'm like, you know what? Those are all really nice. You know, if I was buying a brand new camera today, obviously I would get the GH5 too. Yeah, but those are not worth going through the hassle of paying $1,700 for the new one and then selling the old one, right? It's like it's like none of those things really matter for what I do. And then they come out and the last thing they say is like, by the way, also the camera could just stream on its own. Like we said, all the good new cameras are doing this. It's like camera. You can just have camera and that and just if you got a Wi-Fi somewhere or you can even use your phone as a hotspot and use that Wi-Fi and the camera will go from the camera to YouTube or Twitch or Facebook live. That's it. That's all you need. Camera, internet service, no other equipment necessary. And I'm like, God damn, that's the one feature. To add that to the GH5, I would have to carry around like a thousand dollar extra piece of equipment. Or you're going to include that shit. Or a hundred dollar piece of equipment that won't work and might catch fire. Exactly. And I'm like, well, maybe I will buy the new one and then upgrade, but I have a lot of other questions. I'm going to get the answers to these other questions. They actually, so Panasonic did say... Is I put in a pre-order just in case. Oh. I can cancel it. So if I don't like the answers to my questions that are technical and not necessary to discuss on the show, I'll cancel my pre-order. But if the questions have good answers, then I'll be good. So they made a point actually, Panasonic, about why they don't include raw output in these. It's not because they can't. It's because they're... Pointless. It's pointless because, one, their image processing in the camera is better than what anyone who would use this camera professionally would probably do on their own with the raw footage. Like it's a lot of work to take raw footage and make it look good. Yep. Like I do with raw photos in Lightroom. Like that's a moderate amount of work. It's not really saving you anything unless you're ultra, ultra, you know, Hollywood in case you're not using this camera. Yep. But also that they encode at a bit rate, basically the way the camera encodes the video it saves in outputs is pretty good, like better than their previous iterations of cameras. So they basically were pretty open about why they made that decision if you want to read more. We'll see how that goes. Yeah. So that's a news. Any other news? So in some little news, it's kind of been for since Fujiko Mine came out, we've hit an era where Lupin generally is pretty good when it comes out and that track seems to be continuing. Like the 3D CG movie was good. Yeah, there was a period of time where like Lupin, you know, Lupin never truly faded from the world of anime, right? But, you know, the quantity of Lupin product being pushed at any given time has waxed and waned and it waned quite a bit. In fact, at the time when our interest was the highest in the college days, right? There was only, we were mostly watching older ones and newer ones weren't coming out too much to like the later 2000s. They started to come, right? More, and now at the anniversary times, they're coming at a steadier clip, right? So yeah, there's more Lupins coming out lately and they're all seem to be at this relatively very good quality level. I don't want to say they're S tier or even A tier, but it's like, oh, they're all at least B plus. I don't see any bad ones. Yeah. So if you want to get back on the Lupin train, one, you could just watch that 3D CG movie, like it's fine. But two, Fujiko Mine is the one that kind of started this new era of Lupin and it is a fantastic show that you should watch. So the news is what we're getting specifically is there's going to be a sixth full-on Lupin TV anime specifically for 26. It doesn't actually say yet. I'm digging through this. So those Lupin TV series were longer, right? Yeah. So part five was the one that was out. It doesn't tell me yet how many episodes are going to be in part six, but it's for the 50th anniversary. Yep. Okay. Yep. And the other little news we got. So Funimation has added a few more shows and they're a little bit notable. God Messenger, not that I've watched much Messenger. God Messenger comes later, right? Yes. God Messenger fits into the Messenger universe. Great Messenger. And then I think God Messenger is after that. It's like so. Little Nemo. The Lupin part five series just came out in 2018. So it was three years old and that one has like 24 episodes, I think. So I imagine that the sixth one will also have a similar 24 episode run. Just by guessing, I have no confirmation on that. That Little Nemo anime they picked up, which I've never actually seen except some clips, but honestly, it looks pretty good. I've just never, like it's never read the original Little Nemo comics. I could. I could watch a couple of episodes this time. The NES game was pretty good too, though it was really hard. Yeah. I mean, Little Nemo is this thing where it's like for Windsor McKay, right? It's ridiculously good, but it's in public domain and that's why you keep seeing it coming back and being published in all sorts of places, right? Because anyone can do it. It's public domain. So that'll be so awesome when that happens to something more popular than Little Nemo. The NES game was just really fun because it's got all these little animals that you can kind of like crawl into their skin or ride them around and a lot going on for an NES game. Yeah. It's not a bad NES game at all. And Space Adventure Cobra, the original one is also going to be on Funimation now. I think it's on Crunchyroll already. I kind of want to watch it. I have planned to watch it for a long time. Way back, way, way back. Gerald at Anime World Order was of all people. Gerald is like GoPro fan number one, right? Yep. But he sold me on it and I just haven't. I've seen some episodes. I just never watched like a lot of it. I never watched the whole thing. I think I watched one episode. I think there was like a newer one, like a remake or a, you know, some newer version. I watched it. I think we might have even reviewed that on Geek Nights. And I think I watched one or a few episodes of that. Did we talk about that or not? I searched our website. I don't know. That's what I'm actually doing. It was so long ago, right? That would have been ancient times. I don't think we have ever reviewed it on Geek Nights. Well, all right. Put that in the hopper. I think we can just go to things today and such. Mm-hmm. Chat's all about train games. YouTube chat? Yeah. It's anime name people. Anime day is the least exciting day. Why are you talking about trains? There's no train anime. There must be. I guess is what's the name of that train? Why don't we just make it? Why don't we make a train game that's just called 999? Oh, no, there's a, you know, Mike Gein, right? Mike Gein is the, I believe their train combining robot. Mike Gein? I don't remember. I think we've talked about it before. Brave Express, Mike Gein. Mike Gein, let's go. Mike Gein. Make a Galaxy Express 18XX game. Uh, yeah, it's called 20, whatever. Oh, I got to count mecha private. Get the bonus for connecting all the way to Andromeda. You got to upgrade, you got to upgrade La Metal to gray. You don't even have one token there. If you connect to certain places from Andromeda, all the humans disappear. No, no, if you're, if your train connects from Earth to Andromeda, then, you know, the two, if your train connects from one Galaxy to the other, it gets plus 100 to its run. All right. But it can only run every other OR. But anyway, things of the day. This is not a new artist, but I bumped into this song recently. And it's great. If you've never heard of Brushy One String. I have not heard of Brushy One String. He's a cool Jamaican singer. And his shtick is that he sings while drumming on and playing a guitar that has one string on it. He's just brushy one string. And he does a song, Chicken in the Corn. Apparently it was made famous in a documentary, pseudo documentary that I've, I guess there's a real documentary. I haven't actually seen it, but I've been, it's seen it pop up numerous times in conversation. And I've made a point that I want to watch it at some point. Rise Up, which is about the underground music scene in Jamaica. And it looks like a really good documentary, but apparently this guy was featured in it and his music is popular. It only has three albums out, but check this guy out because this song is really good and really catchy. It's a really good video. Okay. So, manga genius Naoki Urasawa, right? Who made Monster, Pluto, 20th century boys, et cetera, right? Apparently had a YouTube channel. I didn't know that until recently, so I subscribed to it. But most of the videos I saw when I went to it weren't subtitled. And we're not really useful to watch without subtitles, so I didn't really watch any. I saw one show up in my feed like today and it said it had a big thing on the thumbnail, ing sub, and I'm like, well, click. Click it on that. But most of the video is actually not Urasawa talking. He talks in the beginning and at the end to sort of introduce what the video is, but what he is doing in the video is just illustrating one scene, right? Just a character from his current manga, Asadora, right? Just standing like on a road, right? Facing out of the paper, right? But he draws it using, I guess, like fountain pen, I guess. Yeah, that looks like a fountain pen. And he doesn't, he intentionally, this isn't his normal process, right? But he intentionally does not pencil beforehand. He's just fountain pen only. And he explains in the video how he's trying to show you, right? How he draws some lines and then how the emotion of the scene appears at a certain moment, right? And his process there. And most of the video is almost entirely uncut footage of just him drawing the whole thing. Every line he draws is on video here, right? I don't know if it cuts away from the bathroom at any point, but it didn't look like it. There's not a lot of cuts, right? His entire drawing from blank paper to completed. And it's just like, this fucking genius guy. And then at the end, he's like, you know, he's like, you do a drawing and there's just so many things you want to improve. And I'm like, what the fuck are you going to improve? He's like, it really makes you want to, makes you want to draw better the next day. And I'm like, fuck you. Or is that mean going around just recently? I can't even draw a goddamn stick figure. And he's sitting there being that, like that, you know, artist, the typical artist. He's like, oh, my beautiful drawing that I made with the fountain pen and no pencil beforehand. Oh, yeah. You know, it's got so many problems. I'm like, oh, my God, he starts by drawing begins, right? He's drawing the hand attached to a hat before he draws the head underneath the hat, right? So he starts by drawing a hand attached to the brim of a hat. And then because that's the emotional center of the scene. Right. And then he draws the head and the neck. And then somehow the arm, the arm comes around to meet the hand. Everything is correct in proportion and angle wise and everything, even though the hand was there long before the shoulder. Yeah. If either of us tried to do that, you know, the image where two railroad tracks meet in the middle and they don't line up. Exactly. It's like, God damn this guy. But yeah, if you want to watch, you know, genius Urusawa draw a still picture, here's like youtube.com. And then, you know, while watching the video, I realized like, you know, I had thought, you know, because I think he had a manga, wasn't there like a Shonen Bat manga he did? Oh yeah. I don't think that ever came out in English as far as I'm aware, legally. Irva did, we just didn't notice. I have to search again, but I knew he was working on this Asadora manga, but it's so recent, like it's not that old. I didn't think it was in English, but I went and I searched and actually volume one came out like January of this year when I wasn't paying fricking attention cause you know, pandemic going on. So yeah, there's two volumes out already and volume three is on the order form this month should be out in July. So I went and I grabbed volume three onto my order form and I put one and two in my cart. So maybe we'll talk about that. Maybe. All right. In the meta moment, we're slowly cautiously emerging into the world bit by bit with outdoor stuff. I was a jury duty today, obviously, but... And you went to your office one time? Yeah, went to my office one time. I'll go every now and then, but not going to make a habit of it. But yeah, no conventions yet. Stay tuned on what we're going to do at PAX East online. It seems like it's branded PAX East online to replace PAX East. Well, yeah, I mean, the online PAX is the way they differentiated them geographically cause obviously they're worldwide no matter what was time zones, right? All of, they weren't having events around the clock, right? So the live streams of things were at times in the local time zone of the PAX. So the existing, the two PAX online that already happened, the West one and the OSS one broadcast their events at West local times and OSS local times. So the PAX East online is going to put out its events at East local times. So if you're in Australia, it'll be really inconvenient for you because all the, if you want to watch live or chat live, because it will be happening at the 24 hours opposite, whatever. Or 12 hours opposite, whatever time. You get the idea. Yep, but otherwise obviously no conventions in person anytime soon. So we're kind of just waiting. Everything's still just hanging out in the hopper, starting to prepare the technology and pipelines for the stuff we want to start doing once the pandemic, once we're more in a post COVID world, there's a lot of stuff we've wanted to do that's kind of just not hold. So I guess stay tuned for a lot of that, Biz. A camera that live streams itself, if we get that thing and it works, right? It's like suddenly we don't have to do the effort of setting up OBS on the computer. We don't got to do the effort of editing video, right? We can literally just go somewhere, plug microphones into it somehow, turn it on and just live stream. So whether at a convention, just hanging out, playing a board game, we can just turn this camera on and push a button and it streams. You might want to follow us on YouTube or whatever because this camera might, you know, if that thing works out, we might just start random unscheduled stream for appropriate, right? So that and that's ultra low effort for us. If it works, ultra low effort. Yup. It also makes some of the larger things that are high effort easier because this reduces the amount of effort necessary, but there is a lot of other high effort pieces we got to deal with being vague because I'm not going to shit talk anything, but stay tuned. Exactly. Book Club book, which I'm reading it a slow, I pause reading it to read a bunch of Spider-Man, but I'm going to resume reading the tale of Genji. I'm in a reading mood, but I'm pretty much in the mood to read anything. So yeah, I used some of my read mood to read what we're about to talk about, but prior to that and probably starting after tonight, I'll do some more Genji reading. So, you know, it helps when it's warm out because then I can go on the balcony and read. That's nicer than bed reading. Yup, balcony, go to the park right there because like that Queensbridge park is just like right next door. Can't use our little garden yet. There's still, there's like 20 workers and a whole bunch of platforms as they're replacing the entire facade of our stupid building. Well, so yeah. Anyway, Spider-Man 2099, I will admit, I had never read any until now. This was something that Scott would bring this comic up a lot when we were just like early days at RIT, like anytime superheroes came up, Scott would like make a point of saying, oh yeah, Spider-Man 2999, that was the good one. That's the one I read. So yeah, so the backstory is that when I was a kid in the early 90s, I didn't really, you know, I read comics in the newspaper and I enjoyed a Spider-Man or whatever, but I wasn't reading comic books, comic books. And then a friend down, the kid who lived down the street was reading comic books. And then the comic books start open in the mall. So once the comic books start open in the mall, well it's like, well now, right, I can buy comic books. So I went there and while there were many comics characters I enjoyed, like regular old Spider-Man or X-Men and all the space, cosmic stuff obviously, mostly Marvel stuff. All the comics, I just had this thing where I needed to know the whole story. I couldn't, even then I was against the, I understood these crossovers and I was against them. Even then, A, because I didn't have enough money to buy that many comics. So I was like, no, I'm not following for that, right? But B, I was like, well, I haven't read, if you're on Uncanny X-Men 200 and what? It's like, I'm not buying 200 comics, right? There weren't trade paper bags or anything in those early 90s days, you know? And I wanted to start with number one and get the whole story, right? So there were comics that I would buy. I bought this mini series like Annex at one point, which is only like a four issue mini series just because it was a cool cyborg dude, but also I could get the whole, I saw number one on the shelf in the comic store and I'm like, I can read the whole damn thing, hooray, right? So it just coincidence that at that time, 1992, I believe, when I was a kid going to the comic store, right? There was a new thing from Marvel, which is 2099. They made a whole bunch of comics that were based on the idea that, well, it's the Marvel universe, but in the year 2099, like almost over 100 years from now, right? Because it was 1992, so 2099 was sort of like, you know, out there, right? And it's sort of a cyberpunk universe because it's so far out there. And what they did is they had different series. They had Spider-Man, obviously, they had X-Men 2099, which I bought the first issue of, but didn't read any more of. It was Ravage 2099, Punisher 2099, Doom 2099, and maybe some others came later. I think there might've been a fanfastic 42099 later. I could be wrong on that, but at the start, they just had this set of them. So I obviously couldn't afford to buy that in my comic books. And as we discussed earlier, I was stupidly spending a lot of money on superhero cards. That was something, we were talking about that a lot in our own life. I did a similar thing where I would buy these fucking cards and then I'd have them and I'd piece together the stories, or at least try to piece together the stories of superheroes I'd never read because they weren't in the comics I was reading, but it would have been cheaper to just buy the comics they were in. The first issue of Spider-Man 2099 was $1.75 in 1992 US dollars. And nowadays a comic book would be like three or $4. Yeah, so for comparison. It had a fancy foil sort of cardboard cover and it came with a poster, I think, but issue two and it was a $1.25 maybe. And I think the price went up over time a little bit, but really cheap. A pack of cards then was about the same price, maybe even more. Well, a pack of, because there were a bunch of, there are a lot of different Marvel cards and the regular cards you bought. Yeah, the regular ones were about the same price for a pack as the comics, but there were these, there's this one series that was fancy because I remember as a kid, this was probably $92.93. A masterpiece this one, which was an advertisement on the back of issue one of Spider-Man 2099. That's why we were talking about it. Marvel masterpieces, which were thicker cards with fancier like oil painting art, right? It was, they were really unbelievable. I have this very, very clear memory of being at the Draper Ultra Trade Center in Michigan and those cards were $4 a pack. Yeah, they were expensive. I only have like a very small number, like a handful of those cards because they were so much money, but they're really nice. Maybe I could get a full set of them on eBay cheap or something nowadays, right? Who knows? Anyway, so when I was a kid, Spider-Man 2099 came at an exact right time and I bought every issue until the comic book store went out of business. So I didn't finish the series because the comic book store eventually went out of business when that was no longer a thing, but that was after years, right? It's like only 12 issues a year. I would once a month I'd go to the comic book store and get an issue and these issues are tiny. So you're gonna get a very small amount of story every month over this very slow pace, right? I got like 20 or 30 issues. That was like three or four years worth. And then the series ended after that, but I wasn't able to get those issues until later in life by using eBay and such, right? Much later in life. Like I would think I was living in Beacon maybe when I scooped those up, the remainders. I don't even remember. Maybe even later than that. So I never read the whole thing as a kid, but I read it every issue every month for a very long period of time. And also, you know, going back in my mind, you know, as I became an adult and realized, like, you know, I hadn't read, for example, like William Gibson novels, like pre-college I wanna say even, right? But when I, you know, or, you know, but when I would read them or watch Ghost in the Shell or something, like all these cyberpunk tropes, like I already understood them, right? And I didn't know from where. And then I realized, oh, it was from Spider-Man 2099. That's where I learned all cyberpunk related things was from this comic. And now reading it again, just yesterday, it's like there's even more stuff I can see that this comic borrowed from and introduced me to. You know, it's fun cause I double checked. You know what I got me into cyberpunk primarily as a kid cause it also came out in 1992 was Shadowrun second edition. Yep, okay. Cause the first edition was in 89 and the second edition is the book I had. Yep. I also just want to briefly, we got to talk about the advert. So, you know, comic book, floppy comic books. You read this pirated version online, right? Yep. Yeah, okay. So I read the actual comics. It's on Comixology too. I checked. You can actually read it legit. Oh, okay. But yeah, I read the actual comic books from the 90s that I have, which means the advertisements were still in there. Oh, that's a treasure. So, you know, we say block all ads everywhere always, which is true. But once the thing an ad is for is no longer a thing, suddenly that ad transforms into art, right? Cause it's like, you can't buy the thing anymore. So notable things advertisement wise, lots of ads for cards of all shapes and sizes. Cards were so big back then. Not that they're not big now, but. Ads for foods like Charleston chew or, you know, Justice Fruit Pie equivalent, right? Lots of SNES and Game Boy game ads, right? I mean, 92 is some peak SNES time. Hook for SNES, you know, things of that nature. Wing Commander SNES, Chuck Rock SNES. But that final fantasy mystic quest ad, cause I, when Scott mentioned that he saw an ad for it, I imagined in my head what that fucking ad looked like. Cause it was weird and I remembered it. It was a big ad campaign in all the, in all of the, it was a weird ad campaign because it was like some of these SNES ads from the early 90s were like, Hey, this is a game you could play, but a lot of them did this weird, like the ad almost had nothing to do with the game at all. Like it's a picture of a brain, get out of body, brain transplant $40 and tiny print at the bottom. Final Fantasy mystic quest on the SNES. Yep. Also ads from movies, which were basically, when there's an ad for a movie in a comic book, it's basically just the movie poster taking up a full page. I saw Aladdin coming soon. Ooh, ooh. Disney's Aladdin coming soon. Candyman coming soon. Ooh, those hit, those hit me right in the old. Right, exactly. What was the other one? Army of Darkness coming soon. Wow. It's like, I saw all of those in the theater. Right. I don't even know if I saw all those. Anyway, but yeah, the ads were really something and then lots of ads for like, you know, buying comic books, right? I didn't, I forgot you could subscribe to comic books like directly from Marvel. Like that was a thing. So yeah, really interesting. The ads are really a historic thing going on here. Okay, so now let's talk about the comic, right? So Spider-Man 2099 is basically, it's far future. It's still, it is the Marvel universe though. So there was like this, the Marvel universe is in the past, but clearly something has happened that has, you know, the heroic era ended, right? Yep. It's very mysterious, but all the superheroes are dead and or gone. Yeah, with a few caviar, like Dr. Doom is doing something. But is that the, I don't forget if that's the, I haven't read and I have some Doom 2099, but I haven't read enough to know the original guy. All I know is whoever is in that Dr. Doom costume is like, Oh, just as I re-emerge, so too does a Spider-Man. There is no way this is a coincidence. Sure. It could be the original Dr. Doom resurrected. It's definitely running Latveria, which still exists somewhere on the map, right? Yeah. But clearly there's the, you know, if there's a government, it's not really doing much. It's now a very William Gibson as cyberpunk dystopia. There are mega corporations that sort of really actually run the world. The police are just, you know, they work for the corporation, right? They're corporate cops. They're not public cops that someone voted for, right? The company that runs everything is Alchemax. If you watched these, you know, what's the Spider-Man movie? The good one. Oh, into the Spider-Verse? Much into the Spider-Verse. The name of the company is Alchemax that came from... I assumed it was just Alchemax, like Alchemy and chemistry. It could be, sure, Alchemax, whatever, but how you pronounce it, I don't know how to pronounce it, but that's where the company came from, right? It's, that was from this. So yeah, it's corporations run everything. There's a cyberspace world. You didn't get that far to actually read about the cyberspace. No, I got up to reading this. I got up to when he fights the vulture and deals with him and goes back uptown. Sure. So there's this jerky dude who is a genius, geneticist person who was brought up by the company. Like he went to company school, right? Because he was gifted. They brought him into the company school. They taught him everything he knows, right? But he's a huge asshole, right? He's just an asshole to everyone. Yeah, like it starts. He's being an asshole to people who deserve it, but then he's also an asshole to like his friends, his fiance, he's pretty much just an asshole to everyone. He's like the best, awesomest person and he treats her so poorly. It's like, why are you, how did you even get with this guy to begin with? He treats his brother who's a really nice, you know, if somewhat milk toasty kind of guy, you know, but talented and has his own positive trait. Dude reminds me of a good-looking Cyril Figes, if any of you have watched Archer. Yeah, his name is Miguel O'Hara, right? So he's half his, his mom is Hispanic. His dad is Irish. She didn't get to that part yet. Yeah, he did. That came up right away. Oh, okay. He brings that up like four times. Oh, okay. You actually see the mom and dad eventually in there. When you, in later issues, there's sort of a backup feature that is like young Miguel O'Hara and it shows him in the company school and stuff and you actually see his parents and everything that you wouldn't get that far. So, but yeah, he's this guy and he's just an asshole. In his mind, when you see what he's thinking, he's not really thinking bad thoughts or doing bad things. In fact, one of the first things you see him doing is advocating for not human testing. He's got like a genetic device. He doesn't want to test that on humans. Like he has a high moral standing in terms of what he wants to do. Like you're each presented as a good person. He just is really rude and nasty to everybody. Yep. But at least in that case, he's rude and nasty to people who deserve it. And like it's not spoilers for this old comic book, but like in the first couple issues, like basically what happens is he's like working for this evil company. They make him do something too evil and it causes him to die. It's a very Robocop style scene. And then he's like, fuck it, I quit. Fuck you all. And he just quits and leaves. Yep. And high moral standing actions wise, right? But not behavior wise. It doesn't work out, of course, but she tries to quit. Yep. So yeah, he become, obviously he becomes the Spider-Man, right? The genetics of the original Spider-Man are like in their database and he combines them with his own DNA in order to kick the company guy, the evil company boss guy, sort of gets him addicted to a drug, right? That he will die if he doesn't get it and sort of trap him in the company. He tries to kick the drug by modifying his own DNA. He figures, well, I'm gonna die from the drug anyway. He's like, I'm gonna, all right, if this fails and I die, I'm breaking even. So he tries it, goes wrong because this other jerk comes into the play and combines his DNA with the original Peter Parker Spider-Man's DNA and now he's biologically Spider-Man, right? His webs come out of his actual, like these glands in his arms or some shit as opposed to Peter Parker who made a web shooter, right? He climbs with claws that he has to retract, not with stickiness. The only thing he has that's not his actual power is he has a costume that, because he's Hispanic, from the day of the dead festival, he had a costume made out of UM, what's it, UMD or something? Yeah, like it's ultra unstable matter or something. Unstable molecules fabric, UMF, I think? I don't know, but it's basically fancy material that is bulletproof and everything. It's really fancy and he has that because he wanted, he owns it because obviously he got a lot of money. So he bought it to wear to the festival in case, you know, because the festival's gonna get rowdy, right? And then he turns that into his Spider-Man costume. And now it's armored. But other than that, all his powers are biological in nature. And so yeah, he ends up just by, you know, he's not like even trying to be Spider-Man the way that Peter Parker like decided to go out and be Spider-Man after a certain amount of time. He's like, oh, I'm gonna go find criminals and stop them. He's just caught in these scenarios, right? If people going after him, going after the people he knows and loves and, you know, just bumping into circumstance, like he has to do Spider-Man shit. And even though his skills are not high, his powers make up for it. And he usually wins even against like these trained killers sent to hunt them down, right? He's just too strong for them, even though they have much more combat training and such. And yeah, other than that. It's interesting because he's like the first troubles. The first many issues are, he's just trying to figure out what to do and like some random jerk off the origin. Yeah. But it's like, every time he just almost has a moment to rest, some random superpower jerk off shows up and tries to fight him. Yep, pretty much. You know, and, you know, there are some issues that are like too much fighting, right? Like he fights the vulture for like most of an issue. And it's sort of like, all right, dude. But all the circumstances is like, they got a lot done when they're not fighting. There's a lot happening in just a few pages, right? It's like, there'd be like two pages where the boss, like the, you know, Spider-Man's girlfriend, the good one, the fiance goes to meet the evil corporate boss, right? Stone, Tyler Stone, yeah? To sort of ask him, you know, cause he's like, hey, he's like, where's my fiance, right? I haven't seen him in forever. You're his boss, you know where he is, right? And he shows her all this shit. Like, hey, look, we're terraforming Mars. We're terraforming under the sea. Here's, he shows her all this stuff. And like you, it reveals like this whole part of the universe within like two pages. And it's like, whoa, that's a lot of information, you know, that really fleshes out this world a lot. The world is actually moderately complex in an interesting way. Like I enjoyed reading what I read and I'm going to keep reading it. It's a really good cyberpunk world. And it bar, cause it's bar, it's not really inventive as far as cyberpunk worlds go. It came out in, you know, the early nineties after other cyberpunk things already existed, right? Like when did neuromancer come out, right? Neuromancer, no way it came out after this 84, right? So it's 10 years of cyberpunk or more, right? At least 10 years of cyberpunk stuff. It's borrowing. But like the cops fly around on these bikes. They're a hundred percent Akira, you know, Pete David. Fly boys. Peter David is the writer on this. Like you go downtown to where like the corporations don't give a shit and they basically just hire random thugs to be the cops down there. Well, so New York is it takes place in New York slash New York, right? Which is very fascinating. What they've done is there's the original New York is on the ground, right? The floor of earth. Yeah, that's downtown in this comic. That's literally down downtown isn't south. It's down, right? They ran out of space and they built New York at some point, vertically up. There's two style jets. It's sort of Jetson style in that it's up, but it's more, it's not Jetson style where everything's spread out. It's compacted and up, right? So if you're up in the in New New York, right? Up above, you're in a flying maglev car, right? You're not using the wheels on the car. You you're you're in a skyscraper because everything is a skyscraper, right? It's in the the the there's no dirt, right? If you've got dirt, you've got the dirt from somewhere, right? There, you know, you go to the park, it's not dirt. It's like a floating platform of some kind, right? And then you can you can pop the wheels out of your maglev car, get bop onto a road, drive down a tunnel that goes down and come out into the old New York on the ground where everything sucks and everyone's either unemployed or part of a gang. And it's the Warriors down there, right? And everything up above is cyberpunk dystopia. So it's either the Warriors cyberpunk or or, you know, evil, wealthy cyberpunk people on top, right? It's a kind of a fascinating world. Yeah. Especially because it's all layered over this like the precursor, like the like the people who are reading other Marvel comics have fresh in their minds. What was going on in the Marvel comics in the contemporary era? And you see echoes of what was going on in this future era. Like there's the people who've worshiped Thor, like the Thorites wandering around dressing up like Thor. Even though the heroic era has ended, it clearly it was so impactful, right? I mean, if anything from the real Marvel universe was real, that would impact history forever, right? And so it does. So yeah, there's the people who believe in Thor like that's their religion. And some of them are fanatical and some of them are sort of normal. They just believe in Thor the way like a normal Christian person would believe in God. Yeah, you know, it's like, you know, whatever. And then you have, for example, you know, you might not, if you're not big, you know, I didn't realize this as a kid, but like they taught like one of the evil cyber companies is Stark Fujikawa. It's like, oh, I at some point, Iron Man's company merged with the Japanese company. Yep. One sour note that does not hold up well is that the first villainy fights is this like super fakey Japanese samurai stereotype. No, the first villainy fights is Venture. True. The second villainy fights is... Venture's cool. The specialist is the second one. The specialist is a stereotype. He is a samurai screaming phonetic Japanese with both a samurai sword and nunchucks for some reason. Right. It's the typical, you know, racist stereotype depiction of, you know, of Asian-ness, especially Japanese, you know, imagery and aesthetic merged with the cyberpunk stuff, right? So it's very in with the times and the style there, but it's, you know, a very, you know, the depiction is like, oh, we have to uphold our honor, right? And it's like, oh, God, really? Yeah. It's like that. Don't, you know, but it's from 1992. So, you know, it doesn't excuse it, but you gotta, I gotta point it out that it's there, right? It's not, it doesn't hold up well at all. Yeah. I mean, the character is dispatched and it moves on from that pretty quick, but that corporation is still one of the major players. So it's not going to go away entirely. No, that plot definitely comes back into play after a certain point. Yeah. But yeah, it's, if you want to read a Spider-Man story, right, but you don't have to know shit about anything else. Yeah, you don't need to know anything. If you ever heard of Thor, all right, you're good. Right. It's like, if you know some stuff about the Marvel Universe, like it plays in, but not really, there is a, really didn't get to the crossover. There's a, there's a hammer Thor related crossover at some point that go- Oh, Thor shows up. How can I have possibly- Well, no, there's one issue, the crossover that comes, I forget what it's actually called. It's hammer something. It's related to the Thorites, but it's one issue in each of the 2099 comics, right? So I forget what the order is of that, but it's basically like, you would have to stop reading Spider-Man 2099 for a minute and read like a doom issue, a ravage issue, a punisher issue, right? And to get the whole story together. It's a very tiny little crossover. I can deal with that. After that, it's sort of, I don't think a crossover is again after that. I think it's just keeps going straight. I don't know if they wrap, you know, I don't think I've finished all the issues that came out at the time. So I don't know if it ever like wraps things up, but what does happen is over the years, you know, obviously there was a big gap of many years, but they started using Spider-Man 2099 again in other comics. Like he still exists. There have been other Marvel comics where he came as a character like from another dimension or they went to the 2099 dimension or, you know, I think he was trapped in the regular Marvel universe for some time and then got sent back. It's like, you know, Miguel O'Hara, the character, he keeps going and he's still a part of Marvel in some ways, right? But this core story of Spider-Man 2099 is, you know, I don't know if it ends, but it goes and then they don't print any more comics. So it's ending whether you like it or not. Yeah, the dialogue is actually better than all the other comics I read from that era. Like it's a little verbose, like these kinds of comics tend to be, but the dialogue actually conveys a lot of information. So it doesn't bother me. I hear you little guy, right? It's like when they're fighting and all the frames and the panels are full of combat, they're actually just talking to each other about whatever it is that is at issue here, right? Usually they're like bargaining, right? It's like, listen, just stop fighting me and you know, I know what you want. This is what I want, right? It's like, don't kill me. That's the kind of conversation they're having. It's just sort of a big contrast with regular Spider-Man who will have sort of witty, good natured banter, right? And not generally kill people. Spider-Man 2099 will have an asshole to people and kill them by accident. Like he kills people and he's like, oh fuck, right? Oops. Cause he's like, usually with his claws by accident cause he forgets he has them, right? It's like he slits a dude's throat with a claws and he's like, oh fuck, I wasn't trying to do that. Yeah, he's still learning his powers. Yeah, just killing people by accident, that's all. Man, no big deal, just murder. But it's also got just like a pretty fun and varied cast of characters. And I'm honestly pretty into it. Like there's not really much to spoil. He fights the corporations, he does superhero crap. I grew up on this thing, right? Like I was reading this every month. This is like my number one thing from like the early nineties for three or four plus years, right? And that really, you know, looking like I didn't think about it much at the time. Like after I, you know, but now that I think about it, it's like, oh, that really does inform a lot of what I like now. I like things like this. And this was probably the first thing like this that I was into, right? That probably set my taste, I think. More so than a lot of things. So, one last somewhat unrelated thing. So I guess you wouldn't see this either, not having read the actual issues. But in the day, they would always dedicate a page of each comic to the bullpen bulletin, which is sort of like this behind the scenes, sort of like you'd get one, there would be a one panel comic, like a far side, but it would be the main character of it would be the editor-in-chief of Marvel Comics, right? The top half would be a letter from Stan Lee and the bottom half would be a letter from the editor-in-chief guy who at the time I think was, was it Tom DeFalco? Or I guess maybe, I don't know. I had to look at it again. And it was like telling you about what was going on at Marvel Comics, right? And it sort of, it was interesting in that even if you were just reading one Marvel comic, by reading this thing, you sort of got this behind the scenes, they brought you, sort of, you would give you like more of a community feeling, right? Like, hey Marvel readers, you're in with us, right? Yes. Because if you didn't have that, you would just be reading the comic. You wouldn't, as a kid, you're not looking at who the writer is. I didn't pay attention to who the writer was until late 2000s, right? I knew, I didn't know Peter David's name before then. Now I know exactly who he is, right? But now, you know, I didn't know it then even though it was written, we wrote all of these issues pretty much. And that sort of community building by having that one page, I think is something that nowadays, we have it, but we have it so much that you don't notice it, right? Like someone has a Patreon, it's like you are involved with the creators on everything, right? It's like no matter what art you're into, like you know who the creators are, you're following them on Twitter, it's like, that's sort of like automatic, right? That you're in that behind the scenes, knowing what the creators up to community thing. You don't have this sort of, you're only getting the artwork and the creators are inaccessible and unknown unless they purposefully bring you in kind of thing that really stood out to me, that bullpen bulletin page. And also, just to wrap this up with another feel old, the bullpen bulletin page and the very first issue, Stan Lee's note is basically an advertisement because he's so excited that X-Men cartoon is about to be on Fox. Oh no, I remember when that premiered. Stan Lee's like X-Men's gonna be on Fox real soon and I'm so excited. Na, na, na, na, na. Yeah, and he's excited because it's actually true to what X-Men is about and isn't one of those messed up adaptations. And then in the further issues, like four or five issues in, you start seeing ads for X-Men cartoon VHS tapes because each of these issues a month apart. So yeah, by the time you're on issue five, you've seen a bunch of episodes, they're weekly, right? The VHS tapes are coming. So that dates this comic. Yep. And I guess the last thing is the dialogue, they just clear these characters say the word fuck specifically a lot and they just translate it to shock. But the way they use the word shock is 100% just fuck. Yes, obviously. But I think it gives it sort of like a, they're trying to increase the cyberpunk feel, right? Of like a different language, but they didn't go far enough with it, right? People still have like, you know, their 20th century accents from whatever, you know, nationality it was. I feel like by 2099 there's gonna be a lot more, you know, a lot less of that, right? Yeah. I mean, what do we sound like compared to people from the like 70s? Mostly we just use a lot of new jargon. Same swears for the most part. Like, you know, accents that like my parents' generation had, a lot of those are fading already, right? So. Yeah. Though I did see a thing about how there was, there's a strong argument that the total number of English accents is not changing. It's just that different ones are gaining prominence and local, like they're localized based on interest and internet stuff as opposed to physical location with a few exceptions. That's good. Oh, well, I guess we didn't talk about the artwork at all. The artwork in this comic is serviceable 90s. It's interesting because some parts of it, like not Mobius quality, but like, it has this Mobius aesthetic to it, like some of the sci-fi stuff, but some parts of it are just very comic book punching. Yeah. I think what it is, is you can definitely see the effort that who's the pencil or was it Leonardo? Oh, they're really trying to make it look good and look cool and look different. And they're definitely leaning into the, it is the future. Things are weird for real. Yeah. But the, there are some parts where the effort level clearly goes up on the drawing, right? So it's like, there'll be these really impactful panels suddenly where like, they, you can tell that all the artists, the ink or the color or everyone just like, that was a big two page spread. They went hard, right? And then there'll be a bunch of panels you're flipping through quickly and you can see that they didn't put as much effort onto those, right? They're not as detailed. They're not as attention-grabbing. And then you'll turn the page and like it'll, you'll see one that's amazing. It looks like Spider-Man 2090 is like coming out of the page at you and like staring you right in the face, right with something really intense. And then the next page is just a lot more sketchy. Just, all right, breeze through this, right? And it's sort of like, okay, you know, you want to be disappointed. They didn't put as much effort into all the art, but it also, that effort controls the pacing and impact of, you know, the story as it goes because you okay, flip through, flip through, suddenly don't flip through, right? Really, you know, this page you're going to spend some time on. So they'll put better art to sort of keep you on this page longer, right? But it also serves a good purpose of it's often a little disorienting about where the characters are in space, but usually, especially during a fight, at least in the issues I read so far, but that almost serves to highlight how disoriented the characters are in terms of what's going on. Like he didn't even know a lot about downtown. Dude, vitamin 2099, this is dude who's been living in the fancy cyberspace. Like imagine someone who was born, went to Google school, worked at Google his whole life, quit Google when they made him kill somebody and now he's pissed at Google and has literally like never ridden the subway before. And his biology has gotten completely fucked up with a bunch of powers, right? And it's like all these like first year of this comic, like the dude doesn't even get to go back to his apartment for like more than five minutes. Like he's just getting bounced around all over town by villains and it's just like, he's on this hell rollercoaster. He's a jerk, but he's getting bounced around like this hell rollercoaster of life between different situations. Like you can't just like, take a nap or fucking eat it, stop and eat a sandwich. Like he is just like everything that's bad is happening to him constantly. And you know, everyone in his life is trying to find him. Like, where are you? I've been trying to call you for days. He's like, you know. So yeah, I'd say it's pretty worth reading. Yeah, no good, no good, very bad month. So if you need, if you want to scratch a Spider-Man itch and you also want to scratch a cyber punk itch, you could do a lot worse than Spider-Man 2099. You could also, you know, Peter David who wrote this is a really good comic writer. So if you like this, you can look up other comics that Peter David has written. He is quite good. Right. I think that was the solid show. Gotta figure out what to eat for dinner. Probably buy something.