 All the things I want to learn. I learned some meta stuff about it. And I will find out the only terrible secret that I care to know that I don't know is what the fuck turned everyone to stone and what's the final solution for it. And I will find that out later. So the thing I noticed in the very beginning was when they find all the birds because the birds happen first and then they were the only animals because then it was just people. All the bird statues are birds in flight. So it was something that happened in the industry. No, no, no, no, no. The guy, when he's trying to do it he's like, he's like, why does he's like there must be a scientific reason. Why does it only affect humans and swallows? Oh, swallow. I didn't get that far. Yeah. He's like, why is it only human? They address it. They don't like, you know, he's not stupid. He's science guy, right? He was just like, why is it only human than swallows? There must be something in common. He's not stupid. He did the Kellis thing of counting seconds for 3,000 years. There must be something in common with humans and swallows, right? All right. I'll start this up with Dr. Stowe. He's like theories. Was it aliens? You know what my theory is? Was it an evil science? My theory is it's wind of amnesia. And he's like, is it even bad or is it good? It's the, it's Dr. Stowe. You get on the stone kind of heals you and you take it off. Maybe it was a good thing someone did. They were trying to help all the people. Protect everyone from some cosmic event. I don't know. All right. It's Wednesday, August 21st, 2019. I'm rim. I'm Scott. And this is Geek Nights Tonight. The new anime that is still ongoing, Dr. Stowe. I can open a bit. So I was feeling for a little bling on Monday and got kind of like a low key cold, like not quite even sick level, just like low key eh. A little cop up a little flan. And I was annoyed on Monday and I'm like poking around and just doing my life. And then I'm in the living room and I stepped in some water. Okay. Water in the house again. Water in the house. Water in the ceiling. We got to go back. Not in the ceiling this time. So water by the TV. Uh-oh. That's a dangerous place where there'd be water. The rug is wet. So I'm like, I didn't spill anything. And then I look and I poke around and basically the radiator had just broken. You mean the PTAC unit? Yeah. The HVAC unit. The PTAC. That has a radiator in it. It's just a radiator in there. Yeah. Basically it looks like what happened is the thing that takes condensed water out of it had clogged somewhere and it had completely filled with water. So the water that should have been leaking out the side of the building to be mystery water on someone's head was slowly filling the reservoir in the apartment. Was filling in your house. And it looks like it had been doing this for a while and it eventually, because it was so humid, only like recently, as humid consistently long enough that it actually filled that reservoir entirely and then just started leaking everywhere. Luckily, because that's a very self-contained thing, they just came in and like completely fixed it and like replaced a bunch of parts and now I'm good to go. So it wasn't like the sealing leakage. It actually was resolved quickly and did not actually cause any damage. I just had to leave the rug out to like dry before I put everything back. And it was an opportunity to dust behind the TV. I haven't dusted under there in like four or five years. Uh-oh. All right. So you got any news on this Wednesday? Uh, I mean, it's not exactly any animation or comic news, but I guess it's close enough. So the Hugo Awards happened, right? And it seems that, you know, don't they happen? Are those the ones that happened at Worldcon? Uh, yes. Worldcon in Dublin this time. Dublin this time. Okay. So, you know, there was some drama in the past about... Well, there's always some drama at Worldcon. Most drama-ish con on earth. Second, most drama-ish non-anime con on earth. Anyway, you know, there was always drama involving Hugo Awards, but it seems that the, in terms of Hugo Awards, that the good side has managed to win out. And this time, they have won even more than in the past. The Hugo Award for what? Best Related Work, I believe? Yep. Best Related Work has been given to, awarded to Archive of Our Own, which is also known as AO3. So if you don't know, Archive of Our Own is basically the number one premier central, like hub of fan fiction ever, right? It's like all the fan, it's like the fan fiction community above all others. You know, it's like, you know, if it was 1996, this would be the GeoCities of fan fiction. Yep. And it does have all of the drama you might expect. Oh, yeah. But, you know, even despite whatever you may, you know, think about fan fictions, right? The point is, is that, hey, a lot of people that you consider, you know, to be like, quote, real writers, write a fucking lot of fan fiction, right? Yep. Someone who's like job it is to write, say, Spider-Man comics. They're just writing fan fiction for a living, basically. They didn't invent Spider-Man. They're not, you know, Stanley died, right? No, although they're writing all Spider-Man, every Marvel movie. But they're writing canonical fiction. Sure. Every Marvel movie that you have seen is basically fan fiction, right? It's just great. No, no, no. It is just granted this like, this magic wand. It is entirely possible that some of the works you have just talked about were made by people who are not, in fact, fans of the subject matter. Oh, that's also true. So they might not be fan fiction. But also that, you know, regardless of the legitimacy of fan fiction, which it is super legitimate, although not all of it may be high quality, the number of, quote, real, right? Because everyone who writes is a real writer. Number of writers who are even professional, or even amateur, or whatever, got their start writing a lot of fucking fan fiction, right? And with the Hugo Awards, what happened is after they gave the award, you know, to Archive of Our Own, right? They asked anyone in the crowd, a room full of basically sci-fi fantasy authors and such, people who care about Hugo Awards, or were going, you know, nominated for them, or voting on them and stuff like that, please stand up if, you know, you're Archive of Your Own, like, you know, you're a member of the community, if you did stuff there, if it, you know, impacted you, et cetera. And a lot of fucking people stood up, like, at the room. So it's basically like this, you know, the award didn't go to a single, you know, individual or anything like that, but it acknowledged fan fiction is legit, is not, you know, something to be looked down upon, or scraped away. I mean, we've always made fun of things like Sailor Moon saves the furries and that kind of fan fiction stuff. But I think fan fiction people also do, right? But at the end of the day, you're writing stories, right? Just because your characters might be characters that someone else thought of and you modified, or kept the same, or added to, or, you know, you're... Well, I mean, what do we always say? Even if you make some, you know, to be honest, some hot garbage, at least you made something. Yeah, anyone who made even the crappiest fan fiction made more than someone who sat around making nothing and just playing games and reading and watching. Yup. Also, I get the impression that a lot of the drama in the fan fiction community is mostly people who don't actually write much fan fiction, beefing with people who do write fan fiction, because they want the fiction to go differently and they don't want to write it themselves. Who knows? So in some other news, you may have seen all this Spider-Man stuff, and I don't want to talk about it too much because I don't really care that much, but basically Disney and Sony, some of the few remaining entertainment companies... Right, so if you don't know, briefly, right? There's all the Marvel characters you know, right? Almost all of them belong to Marvel, slash Disney, because that's where they started and no one else ever really bought them away, right? However, Fox was making X-Men movies. They had those rights. And they kept making them. And as long as they kept cranking out X-Men movies, which I like none of... Do I like any X-Men movie? Do I like any X-Men anything other than the original? Well, not the original. The cartoon, the Fox cartoon. There are X-Men things I like. I like a few of the story arcs in the comics. I like individual characters. Anyway, the point is that that was Fox, but Fox is now Disney. Yup. So that has been rejoinered, right? But someone slipped into the cracks. There was Fantastic Four. I don't know what the fuck happened with that garbage. And then Spider-Man. Spider-Man was hanging at Sony, but they reached some sort of agreement at some point that I don't know the details of that allowed Spider-Man to appear. And I actually saw... Was it on a plane or was it on TV? When I happened to be near a TV, I saw, I don't know what it was. It must have been like the end of a Marvel movie. I don't even fucking know which one it was. And it was like Iron Man. And then Peter Parker was there, and he was like a really young, he was like teenage Peter Parker version. And Iron Man was like, oh, come be an Avenger. And Spider-Man was like, nah. Oh yeah, I saw that one in the theater. I saw that one scene. That's all I saw. So in a world where... So at some point they reached an agreement that allowed Spider-Man to be in the same movies. In a world where Spider-Man into the Spider-Verse doesn't exist, that might be the best Spider-Man movie? I don't know, I didn't see it. Anyway, I only saw that one scene. The point is that Sony obviously still under that agreement had the right to make other Spider-Man movies because they made, as you said, Spider-Man to the Spider-Verse. Which like I cannot express enough is the best Spider-Man movie ever made. Best? Maybe. It's one of the better movies ever made. No, not someone with the better movies ever made. Better superhero movies ever made. Oh, it's the best superhero movie ever made. I don't know about that. It depends on your definition. Depends on what counts as a superhero movie. Is that even a genre? Or is it just like, you know, any sci-fi movie where someone is powerful? It's like... Is a kung fu movie a superhero movie? Depends. Iron Monkey. Maybe Iron Monkey is. We're not going to talk about that right now. The point is, the news that everyone's yapping about is that there seems to be some breakup of this agreement and Spider-Man may have to exit Marvel movies. And a bunch of fanboys or non-fan, just fan people in general are upset about this and I don't give a shit because I don't watch his fucking movie. Here's a good, here's a pretty good take on this. So basically, Disney is now a monopoly on pop culture and needs to be broken up. Like, full stop. That is also true for several other companies that need to be broken up. The Google, the Apple, the Amazon, most of all. No, no, no, but here's the thing. The CBS is merging with Viacom. That should be stopped. Yeah, but forget about that. We're talking about Disney right now. Disney is on the list. No, no, but here's the thing. It's a long list. Disney, in particular, has a lot of just general goodwill among regular people and I believe the company is deeply taking advantage of that to pit Disney fans against the remaining holdouts to the Disney Empire. I feel like Disney is relying on the fact that their fans will defend their monopoly because they're more excited about Star Wars potentially being able to cross over with Disney's shed and all these like fan stuff they want. They care about that way more than they care about a healthy entertainment ecosystem with competition. So I think Disney is kind of actively weaponizing Disney fans. Well, it's crazy how, you know, the fans, right, it's like they really want things to happen. They'd be like, oh my God, Star Wars crossover with the thing. Oh my God, please make it happen. And then when it happens, they'll be like, boo, boo, and they'll still spend their money on it. And then boo, right? And then the next time around, they'll be like, woo. Right. And I basically, I basically never fall for that. I'm always like, right. It's like, I think I remember a time where someone was like, hey, Scott, you like Mega Man. You like board games. They're making a Mega Man board game. That game is guaranteed bad. And I said immediately, that's garbage. I don't give a shit. Tell us garbage, right? Whereas I think most fans would be like, oh yeah, that logic would be correct for most fans. But yet just like yesterday, I found myself doing the normal fan thing where they're like, hey, we're making matrix four. And I'm like, all right. Yep. Yep. Just take me with your garbage second moving. Just pull it. Pull it. Pull it. But then you skip two numbers. You just reach my money. You just reach into your wallet. You slap down on the table. Like, damn it. Here we go again. So it's like, I'm vulnerable. But I think I'm just less vulnerable than the other fans. Frequently vulnerable to be fair. The matrix was a phenomenal movie. And I look forward to there being a sequel. Yes. We made the same joke like three times. That's under a minute. That's one of my most go-to jokes. The point is, you know, even being less vulnerable, I believe at least about myself, perhaps egotistically, you know, to this sort of phenomenon. And I think that, you know, I can still occasionally vulnerable so I can understand, you know, that feeling I have when I see Matrix 4 and I'm like, ah, you got me. It must be what people feel like who like superhero movies like every fucking time. Yep. But the problem here is just that Disney is going to continue to get a huge amount of support and a huge number of people are going to pointedly ignore the real dangers of this monopoly to our pop culture and just to the entertainment industry as a whole because they want these crossover fan things to happen. And bringing it back to my first news, stick away from the big time industry arts and stay in the fan fiction fan zone in the indie arts and you won't have these issues. Particularly when it comes to tabletop RPGs. That's for sure. That's for a different time. This is Wednesday news. It's related to animation. But as you know, my little pony, which was a pretty phenomenal success, all things considered. It ended. It's like it's over. They're going to milk it forever. They'll probably do another series someday in the future. I mean, they're not going to kill off a successful money making property, but the TV show that airs on whatever the fuck that channel is called these days. The Pirate Bay. Yeah. It's not called whatever it was the hub or whatever the fuck it was called. Yeah. We talked about that. Three to four seasons and maybe three. I've seen all but the last two seasons. I'll maybe one day go back and watch. So actually the plan is the show's ending. Yeah. The show's ending. But the property will live on. Who knows how long the comical gone. Yeah. Just like adventure time. Like adventure time is not going to disappear. Adventure time is a cornerstone of like animation. Which reminds me that I was listening to guaranteed audio review. They are podcasts that almost never has an episode. Talk about. They talked about they talked about the recently Netflix released Rocco's modern life movie. Oh, I was. We should do it the next Wednesday show on that. Invaders in movie. Yeah. They talked about how invaders in was on Nickelodeon for like as long as a fart. Yeah. And meanwhile they've been selling merch for the thing for like 20 years. That's it. My little pony and my little pony is it's like it doesn't have they don't they weighed way more my little pony seasons that it ever deserved no matter how good it was. Yep. Because you only needed like two and then it's you just get enough to have people interested in the property and then you can just you just sell merch forever. You don't need to actually make. Story shit. Yep. But speaking of fan stuff. So the fans of my little pony had made Brony con. Brony cons been around as long as the show's been around pretty much 2011. Hundred people attended. Supposedly the most recent one had ten thousand attendees but the not the site all the citations of that are not like they're gone. I don't necessarily trust it but Brony con is also ending. And apparently sense. Yeah. It's funny because when's the last one going to be. It already happened. The previous one was the last one. So it is already done. So what's funny is at the last one they basically announced the dates for the next two Brony cons. Oh and then they change their mind right after that they're like oh yeah Brony has got gone. Big mistake. All right. Two times ago. So they so people knew that the one that was coming up that just happened was the last one. And part of the reason it had been canceled was that starting in 2015 attendance declined at a steady rate. Partly because it moved like it moved to Baltimore. And then it because it was too big to fit anywhere else. And then it moved dates. Baltimore was desperate to get any convention after Otacon left. There's a lot going on. I have a convention in Baltimore to make sure that the convention center is really cheap. And I'll go right in there. Yeah. You got to lower the price a lot. I don't know how much construction happened because that convention center had some structural issues. I don't know what this I actually do not know what this is. I mean it has its issues but it's still enormous space. And it's not big enough for our convention. We can use one room. Yeah. But also one of those rooms were good. This was a this is a moderately unpopular opinion. But when PAX first announced there's going to be a PAX East. I would. The Baltimore convention center was pretty good. They put it and they put it in Boston. I remember being pissed about it. I'm still pissed about it. But now the VCC is pretty good. But back then it had a lot more problems. But the Baltimore first PAX East was in the Heinz. Yeah. Which was awful. But the Baltimore convention center for all of its like problems of age the physical space is literally one of the best possible spaces for a nerd convention. Just the way it was laid out like no other convention centers like that. And it's kind of a shame. But anyway. You know the con left that building a long ago already. So Brony con was declining attendance rapidly because as popular as my little pony was it is really hard to dedicate a fan convention of size to not just one genre not just one thing. Yeah. One IP. Right. Usually there are conventions like say Botcon I'm pretty sure is still going. I haven't heard that it died just about transformers. But it's not a big convention. It's kind of you know medium smallish is not a big thing. And Star Wars celebration. Well it's just Star Wars. There's a lot of Star Wars. Doesn't that only happen every two years. And isn't it also like run by Disney. Like it's official. Yeah. It's like super official. Yeah. So basically what happened is this con was just declining in attendance. And rather than downscaling they were just going to shut it down. But because people knew it was the last one. I think the last one was the highest attended one ever. Oh. OK. Which they should say this is the last packs. And everyone goes up. And then just kidding except packs already sells out. Yeah. And last news. Well I can see that phenomena actually is happening. This year is the 30th. And it's right the week after packs. This year is the 30th and final New York City century. Which is not the greatest bike ride in the universe. Yep. But it was the last one. But it's like it's the fucking last one. So I think people are going to come out and droves. I intend to be able to go to the last packs. You have to survive. Yeah. I. So actually here's an over under. Will we outlive packs or packs outlive us. Well I think it's more of a question of the problem. We outlive. We outlive Mike and Jerry and well packs well Penny Arcade Corporation under or outlive them. You know five or six years ago just based on their. I would have assumed we would outlive them but they're both a lot more fit than they used to be. And no one is. No there is nobody who can there is no more Robert Koo to keep Mike from getting a motorcycle. That is true. Why does he not realize he can just buy a motorcycle. Don't tell him. No nobody nobody tell Mike Krulik that he can buy a motorcycle. Good God. That would be the last or do do. The point is right the Penny Arcade Company the convention culture in general those two jerks us two jerks right it's like which of these things will die first race against none of them none of them are immortal. Nothing lasts forever but packs as a convention has done a good job of trying to make a structure that will outlive the people that created it. Anime cons in particular has yet to be tested. Oh yeah but that is like having a backup plan and you've never done a restore yep but they're trying. Most fan cons don't even I got a backup taste. Have you looked at him. No but most fan cons are like backup tapes. Our con chair has been the con chair for 40 years he will live forever. Why do we need to teach anyone else how to do this job. But Brony con and that kind of con I've we have like pointedly as geek nights like a lot of these single issue cons try to get us to appear. I just cannot make that specific amount of content but more to the point when it comes to fan stuff I see this happen a lot when a particular fandom gets very big a huge ecosystem of fan podcast and fan video analysis things appear but too many of the people who make those sorts of things get way too invested in that thing growing forever and I see them like every time this kind of thing happens you see like a whole swath of podcasters like not know what to do with themselves and aren't able to like make a show about something else. Well I mean even we have geek nights where we have so much things that we can podcast about with our wide variety and four shows we run out of ideas. I remember in the earliest days of podcasting I wouldn't listen to them because I didn't care about Harry Potter but I saw a lot of Harry Potter podcast in the mid 2000s and all of them quote unquote pod faded because they ran out of fucking material. It's like even if there's another book that was before all the books are out but it's like yeah how many podcasts are you going to make between books. It's like you already talked the shit out of that book. How many Harry Potter news is there per week per month. We need to make one podcast per book. It's like you'll wait a year for another episode of your podcast. Like I wonder if there's still firefly was the biggest one for that firefly fancraft was coming out. I wonder. OK. I think the last I don't think there are any more firefly podcast. Right. You could do a My Little Pony podcast and you could you know there are still one season of episodes left right. Yep. You can talk about those. You can talk about you know there have been different other you can talk about some merch stuff. There was a card game that came out at one point. But you turn into just the comics come out every month pretty consistently turn into what all those firefly things turn into which were literally just scraping the bottom of the barrel of any news like I heard that Nathan Filion like had lunch in LA Thursday for something like My Little Pony there is stuff that comes out right. I mean I guess the best you could do is do a. I mean look we have even finished Geeknice presents Utena. So we were doing the other thing that you can do in that situation is you can resort to reporting on the meta. Right. So that's what all the firefly podcast turned into and they just turned into like the community meta like so it's like oh you know check out someone made this awesome rarity cosplay check this out someone made this awesome Applejack Quill. So you know it's funny so and so is having a meet up in this town. I looked at photos of the last Brony con the far majority of the cosplay I saw was just random anime con crap nothing to do with my little pony. So yeah I guess I haven't seen the too much pony cosplay at other cons that I go to they do have cosplay even though I used to see a bunch. I see the most still at Megfest but mostly in like the people who are going to like the not because really have raised but I see it a lot in the concert areas and I don't see it a lot in the rest of the con. That's where there's a lot of room. Yeah. So last many I feel like the anime community just sort of forgot this but it was sort of an open secret a long time ago that Neil Gaiman basically penned the English adaptation of Princess Mononoke. See I didn't even know I didn't know you didn't know that I mean those you know manga I feel like we've talked about this on Geek Nights. I know you know translations and people don't realize this do have writers right you know it's usually the translator does sort of like you know just turning it into like what is the meaning and then the writer will sort of edit slash rewrite it and say okay that means that let me rewrite that sentence in a better way right and that's what the writer's job is when you're doing an adaptation yeah like that right you know yeah but anyway so you know I knew that somebody did this for pretty much any anime movie ever that's been translated right but you never think a famous person would have that job but like I mean people like name name the English writer of like any manga or other anime like yeah I guess someone someone did it for Naruto who the hell did it but like I feel like there was a person when anime nerds just knew it was one of those things people would talk about like I did not know this okay interesting so I feel like everyone forgot because the news of this broke again recently and I saw a whole bunch of people losing a shit about it which is really funny but I didn't know about it before but why would I lose my shit about it so but there is some interesting stuff because one thing that I never knew because this is one of those things like before the internet was like kind of what it is today you could it was often hard to research these kinds of things to find out the full story there's a lot of like tribal knowledge in the anime community that like no one can go research so Neil Gaiman started talking about it like now and revealed some things I didn't know so whatever so now I'm yeah on Twitter now we know why this wasn't quote open secret and like why it was seen as this like sort of secret knowledge I'm just gonna I mean I did know that when Disney was adapt did have the license and was adapting the Ghibli movies for the U.S. that pretty much for every job involved they were hiring like top tier famous people all the voice actors they got for those things super famous people not the regular anime voice actor and it's right it showed because those dubs they had their problems but they were light years beyond right in the best like traditional anime dub in the U.S. all those Ghibli that Disney had adapted as you know not that G kids do a bad job they do a great job yeah but Disney when they did it they hired the famous just famous people because remember back like Disney did this through Miramax they didn't do it directly no but it's Disney so I'm just going to read Neil Gaiman's tweet because it's actually fascinating now we know why this was seen as like a weird secret quote my biggest secret the biggest secret wow studio Ghibli asked for some of that about his biggest secret isn't something that happened at Fengoku it's like yeah I met these two jerks in this guy named Steve studio Ghibli asked for some of the Miramax I'll never forget the guy who fell asleep while I was telling my story how rude how rude studio Ghibli asked for some of the Miramax execs to be removed from the poster and credits okay the execs he's not an exec he was in this purpose here's the thing the execs looked at all the names determined that theirs would remain and realize that mine was contractually expendable so basically the Ghibli wanted to reduce the number of English names and put more Ghibli names on like the posters and in the front credits and all that stuff so the executives were like I'm not taking my fucking name off of this and they basically removed all the names of people who did not have contracts that specifically gave them the rights to be in the credits and Neil Gaiman was one of those people they just took his name fucking off of it like they took it off of everything they could okay that's it that's the story they couldn't fit another name on there is none of room no they were the Ghibli executives wanted fewer American names like that's just something they wanted okay why didn't they just say no American names if I was studio Ghibli I'd be like you can't put your fucking name on that we made it you're just adapting it and putting it out there in English you don't get to put any fucking names on it as well yeah this was part of the negotiations yeah well so there's a further thing here that is crazy oh okay that doesn't see because that part just is normal Hollywood bullshit Neil Gaiman also confirmed that he received the opportunity upon recommendation from Quentin Tarantino apparently why was he even why was Quentin Tarantino have anything to do with it so the rumor was Miramax went to Quentin Tarantino okay who said what no go to Neil Gaiman okay so Adam Turney asked Neil Gaiman is it true that they first asked Quentin Tarantino who then suggested you instead and Neil Gaiman official twitter account said yes okay so they went to Quentin Tarantino who said why would he why would he what I get the impression that Quentin Tarantino's reaction to this was about the same as yours like I mean somehow this became news and it became fascinating news so but anyway it is time for Sam's people don't know about a thing get put in charge of a thing it's like when that kid asked us for autographs on his burning wheel books instead of Luke who was standing right there right so things of the day this is a Japanese YouTube channel and basically it is a professional pianist performing in her house it looks like Chopin's a to like one of Chopin's works you'll know like a good Chopin yeah you'll know which one it is it's the one that everyone knows alright you'll hear it you'll be like oh that song okay so what's special about this thing of the day then so the video doesn't start with the pianist it starts in her house and there's another there's someone else in the house and this person they're going around doing stuff and they're slowly moving toward the room where the practice session is happening and they interfere with the practice okay and this happens several times because this is in fact a video of the cat one of her two cats getting bored and apparently is pissed that she is practicing the piano instead of playing with him and slowly goes into the room waits for his moment jumps up on the piano and messes up the performance over and over and over again this is normal cat shit yup it's really really really cute okay that's my thing of the day alright so if you've ever seen anyone play drums there's a very important thing next to drums almost always that people maybe who aren't musicians don't pay enough attention to and those are symbols usually think about symbols you think about like a marching band with a guy banging two cymbals together like pshhh yup so what I can say is when we were in marching band in high school the cymbals that the band would carry those cost more than any other instrument the school and except for a handful of silver french horns sure but also you know symbols are like one of the most important instruments there are that I guess don't get enough credit like even like you know that's part that's part is symbols well percussion in general if you're not a musician it often blends into the background you don't realize how important it is think about well I think it's just that like if someone's playing guitar you go ah guitar if someone's playing bass you're like wicked bass solo right but it's like if someone plays a drum solo you go ah drum solo even though there's plenty of pshhh and all kinds of ehh in there well depending on the drum set there could be like 14 different instruments that that one person is playing right and but no one does a cymbal solo right so it's not well it's hard to do a cymbal solo you could do pretty good stuff anyway well and a lot of cymbals aren't even called cymbals like if someone's got a hi-hat that's fucking cymbals but you know what I'm saying you don't call it cymbals like a hi-hat or anyway I feel like Buddy Rook has done some cymbal solos you could even argue that like a gong is a somehow a cymbal cousin or something well gongs are gongs are actually hard to play regardless if you've ever now that you're thinking about cymbals more than you have in the past 10 years more than you've ever thought about cymbals right you might think common sense every cymbal you've ever seen almost almost every cymbal you've ever seen says ziljin on it yep right it's super rare to see a cymbal that does not say ziljin on it it's safe in it otherwise right it's like there's one other company that you may have seen maybe and it maybe looked like a knockoff cymbal maybe people who really do know about drums are like wait a minute there's more I know them yeah but 90% of the cymbals you've seen say ziljin on it I've seen three kinds the two we just talked about or unlabeled garbage cymbals so my thing of the day is a video from the ziljin cymbal factory that shows the 100% entire process of making a cymbal out of a lump of fucking metal all the way to a playable cymbal with ziljin printed on it it is an incredible video that is amazing how they mass produce them the highlight of the video is the guy whose job it is as his only job cymbal tester that is a fuck he's had the job for decades there's one dude that is a fucking amazing I want to get this guy on that show each of these two things is more expensive that's the dude, that's the cymbal testing dude that's the guy also after you watch the cymbal testing video go and read the wikipedia page about ziljin cymbals the company it is fascinating it is one of the oldest companies there is they do make an absurdly large percentage of the world cymbal supply and the history is somewhat similar to the history of adidas adidasler who made shoes and then his brother went and made puma ziljin is a family and they chose one person at one point among the generations of ziljins it says who the current ones are they're still ziljins, still a family company but at one point in the history of what's it called what's the word for that what the dynasty at one generation someone was chosen to take over to be the ziljin guy and the one who wasn't chosen went off and made a different cymbal company which is something else I was watching that winter garden guy was making the crazy marble machine x he recently chose the cymbals for the new machine he has very similar opinions he got a bunch of non-name brand cymbals they were all shit but yeah awesome to see how I remember on sesame street back in the day there was a video they would always show saxophones being made I have kid memories of that one and it was fascinating seeing get bent it was really fun but this is equally good and they don't hide nothing you could probably copy that factory from this video they're not hiding nothing they're so confident that you cannot beat them at the cymbal game they're like yeah here we'll show you everything like watching watching one of the best hockey players on earth play it's not like they have to hide their techniques so someone doesn't steal it one of the most fun parts of the video also is they're making the cymbal they're flattening out this big piece of metal making it a perfect circle putting a lump in the middle poking the hole in it and all this stuff right and then at the whole time it looks like it's all filthy and disgusting it's like when are they going to polish it and then only like very close to the end they don't polish it they throw it on the lathe and the dude laves it by hand how many cymbals does the dude lave that's dangerous as fuck holy shit he does it really fast watch this video I mean one of the comments on the youtube video is part 2 is hildjens cymbals retail I mean when I tell them that my kit is worth $10,000 and it's only $1,000 if I didn't own cymbals right you look at like a few hundred dollars per cymbal and in this video there's like thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars just floating on buys because they're like cymbal cymbal cymbal cymbal but I guess each one was laved by hand that's what you're paying for and tested by hand that's what you're paying for because a cheap cymbal sounds bad like garbage go take a piece of metal and take a hammer and maybe a forge and try to make it sound like any fucking thing try to even make like a castanet good fucking luck if you can't afford a real cymbal if you can't afford a real cymbal not even a whole tambourine just one part of the tambourine you're better off just using a drum machine good luck yeah you know what's in the drum machine recording the sildjens cymbals yup in the middle of the moment the Geeknites book club book is the tale of genji I actually started reading tale of genji I read the introduction and I'm in the beginning of the first chapter of a very long book so it's still going to be a while I got to fly to Seattle soon and then I got to fly to London by way of you'll read maybe the introduction and a few chapters yup I will read the introduction because usually that gives us a lot of insight the introduction gives a lot of info whenever you're reading these translated slash old books like when you read the odyssey so here again is another translated old book and therefore you need to read the introduction to get all the historical meta info and translation meta info from the translate tool real soon we will be at PAX West 2019 the true PAX we will be there doing a panel on Friday morning well Friday afternoon technically and on Saturday morning and the rest of the time we're going to be in the tabletop area playing games you should go to PAX and then we'll go to every other part of PAX once each probably at least yup because PAX has some nonsense actors now I feel like at this point magfest is the only kind we go to that doesn't have like ridiculous fake security yup it's the only one yup alright let's get into it so one of the anime we needed a Wednesday show I said what anime do we watch the kids are all watching Dr. Stone I went and I looked on Crunchyroll I looked at what we judged Dr. Stone was near the top let's watch that it sounded like the premise had possibilities everyone on earth gets turned to one that's all I knew so I watched enough episodes I watched I watched three episodes and I said alright how usually we watch four but I kind of want to learn exactly this much stuff before I talk about it and I learned exactly that much stuff I think in episode six and I think seven episodes were out but I decided not to watch anymore ever and I'll just read spoilers when the show is done yup that's my similar that's how I handled Attack on Titan after the first two seasons I was like you know what I'm going to read the spoilers to find out what the secret of space is I know the secret of space do not watch anymore of that show I don't know if you even want to know what the secret of space is but I do want to know what the secret of space is in Dr. Stone so here's the deal there's a high school kid he's in typical Japan high school he obviously most of the other people in high school are non characters because they don't look cool yup he looks cool it's weird though the character design of these two main characters are like a cross between Yu-Gi-Oh! and Jojo's bizarre adventure yeah they're pretty extreme characters like crazy hair but the main guy the dumb guy the real main guy who isn't the doctor yup he is the guy's not a doctor either the stone is the doctor the soap is the doctor well there's another doctor the stone itself is anyway yeah but there's it's weird because when I saw his face he looked weird and I realize that he is a weird amalgamation of the most generic possible anime high school protagonist crossed with basically the golden boy face kinda like he makes the golden boy face a lot like to the point that I think it's based on the art style of the manga creator yup as soon as he frowned I was like it's just the golden boy holy crap golden boy and then they briefly introduce because he stops in the science lab for like two seconds this clearly other main character who is like science guy who's a genius and then they introduce the girl the main guy is into is obviously also a main character so in terms of do this in about a minute yes here's the thing I'll break in here as we describe this shot this was the first make or break moment for what I was going to say about the show because my worry was there's like five episodes of build up to all the crap and introduce all the people nope one minute the and then as soon as he's going to confess his love to this girl outside by the tree the girl you just saw for the first time who he's been talking about for the past maybe minute the whole entire earth everyone every human being on earth some mysterious green wave it comes turns everyone to stone yep but but then it's just him he's still conscious and he's just like I can't pass out what if I die and for three thousand seven hundred years he's just laying there just trying to stay conscious right he really really really really wants to somehow stay conscious get out of this rock that he's been the people clearly have not been turned to stone like Medusa turns people to stone he there he's like alive inside a stone shell which is already terrifying now which is also it makes no sense because that would be worse than solitary confinement you would just go insane very quickly in a real world the this doctor kid probably would have woken up fine and everyone else would have woken up insane doctor kid would also know because the doctor kid with his second counting not that any of you listening to Wednesday he nights have read the prince of nothing but that's some killish shit right there kind of but I still don't anyway the point is very unrealistic it's an anime so the one guy concentrates on the girl that he wants to confess to the other guy just counts three four or five thousand years the other guy literally counts every single second while simultaneously having thoughts in the other half of his brain say about about the situation whatever and he's science guy and basically yeah they wake up thousands of years later and no one else is awake so my second point when they wake up you've got brains guy and bronze guy teaming up to rebuild civilization from scratch and I'll point out up to this point not only is it moving fast and but it's also pretty funny like right away the science guy is like hey I made you a love potion I'm the science guy and he's like I would never use such a thing and he pours it out and then the kids like good thing he poured it out that was just fucking gasoline yeah I didn't make a love potion he's like I was like I was a hundred percent sure he wouldn't take it yeah anyway he does that a lot where he does the I'm X percent sure yep and it's actually like he's a pretty funny character like it's a little bit of C3PO it is but yeah so this anime I see it as a combination of aspects of other anime so the the comedy aspect right that's sort of the wackiness there that you see right really reminds me of you know not of like a chromarty which is sort of like the you know it's it's just like you know it's just sort of like these the you know the extreme not sd art wise black extreme reactions like you know someone says something and someone's like holy shit oh my god it's like the shonen equivalent of like the sd stuff that happens in like for she right all the characters reactions to things like our our extreme and like when they're emotional it's like you know they cry and like a river of tears come out right you know that kind of thing yep so this was the next point now they don't then the set the other anime I think it's a combination of right it isn't it's not even anime it's a little manga is it has the sort of storytelling structure of delicious in dungeon where it's like you're there you know this is this this plot that's happening right you know oh the world is turned to stone what do we do we're trying to accomplish this trying right but they pause and explain science things the same way the delicious in dungeon pauses and explains you know recipes of monsters the same way that any of those you know I guess mushi she pauses and explains a mushi the made up nonsense of mushi she right but and it's pretty accurate to the point that the show has all these warnings at the end like kids don't fucking eat mushrooms in the wild right the other thing it combines with I think is obviously attack on Titan with you know what is this the big secret of this world then obviously attack on Titan isn't the first one to do it but it does it in the you know attack on Titan way like Evangelion also has what is the secret of this world but it doesn't come across the same way this is overt ham fisted what is the secret of this world but in another point one thing that I do enjoy a lot about it is that like in western fandom people like especially fanboys really like the zombie apocalypse like okay basically all the people are gone you got a small amount of people and there's zombies everywhere what do you do like how do you but in this case how do you survive like the enemy is just like the conflict is science like alright we got to make food we got to make shelter we got to make fire we got to make agriculture that is the final anime that I think this is a combination of is that it is a combination of also the MMO anime how is this a combination of MMO anime where there's no video games involved well I'll tell you I hit that I may simply have replaced the MMO with a game like don't starve or even Minecraft you know any of these games the survival type games you start or you know one hour one life any of these games you start with nothing and you build up from the only things that you can gather from the environment and create full things by combining and combining and combining and it moves so fast there so it's it's always literally like a video game once they start picking mushrooms now they just have mushrooms all the time we never even look at that again it has that same structure of one of those games and it comes across the same way MMO is adapted to an anime you know say hack sign just as one of those a different game slightly different game genre adapted to anime slash manga right so take all those all those elements right the wacky comedy the pause aside to explain science you know the big secret of this world and the survival game and put them all together and that is Dr. Stone it's got a a susan's list of the north star in the sense that it's it's a post apocalyptic world but the action scenes when humans conflict with each other which I was wondering if that would even happen I was wondering if the show was literally just gonna be we science for 24 episodes but it does move quickly to its credit so far like they wake up another person like almost right away yeah they do not hesitate and also the girl right so the statue of the girl the guy finds it right he knows my warnings if the statue of the girl had been a statue for more than like 5 or 6 episodes right you assume that like oh waking up the girl is going to be like the last episode no he wakes her up in episode 3 or 4 or something like that like right away but they wake up muscle guy instead they have to wake up muscle guy because lions come so that's the fist of the north star because muscle guy basically immediately turns into a fist of the north star villain right well he's not really a villain he's a good he's good he's just got one bad he's got one bad good idea but he's dangerous and he's making the society of muscle men like right away like I'm stronger than all of you and you can't kill me he's like raw he's bad but he's not I said fist of the north star villain that's why I thought of raw but there are other villains like that yeah but he's not one of those like skeletary fist of the north star villains he's a conflicted villain but this is where the show gets a little he fucking punches a lion to death and then turns its skin into an outfit like instantly like he can just fight lions he is immune to crossbows this guy is all sciencey right the science guy and he tries to he's trying to figure out the mystery of you know why everyone turned to stone and how come only people in sparrows turn to stone it's like okay you know see everything's cool here everything's really legit science there's no bullshit going on why does nitric acid wake people up at least it's real science but the thing is it's like he doesn't question his own superpowers the superpowers of his best friend the superpower of the guy they wake up or the apparent lack of superpower so far that's obvious of the girl now that's what I don't know it's like a little bit of lord of the flies here right where each person trying to survive and each person is a specialty but they're all superpowered in that specialty beyond all reality except the girl who probably has a secret superpower and they're not questioning these superpowers and it seems they did have the superpowers pre everyone turning to stone yeah right it's like whoa so that's what I wonder because in shows like utena the weird superpower crap that happens that you might just write off his anime crap is literally the plot it is explained specifically but then in some other anime well it's also the plot in one punch man but then exactly why what is one punch man's deal that anyway but in other anime yeah this person just randomly has powers because it's an anime that's it there's no explanation that's the only thing that's like not they didn't even try to explain in any way my based on the like six the few episodes I saw because not even there aren't even that many episodes out yet there are going to be 24 episodes total a grand total of seven is that going to cover the whole thing which I assume is the manga doubtful because the manga is 13 volumes it started in 2017 it's already got 13 volumes it's ongoing okay so the manga is still going and there are 13 volumes of it all right but yeah so that's that explains what the show is the thing is I don't think I really want to watch more of the show interesting because it's so the characters are so two-dimensional they may be the most two-dimensional characters I've ever seen I was almost inclined to keep watching just because despite that it was moving so fast the plot moves at a very rapid pace they're already like trying to make gunpowder yep it's like they move it right fucking along but at the same time not waiting despite how fast is moving based on the opener alone there are a shit ton of characters well I mean you didn't if you watched two more episodes like I did yeah you'd have seen they meet someone who is not awoken by them there are other people who have already been awake when basically when they set up the gunpowder it makes smoke and then they see a smoke signal in the distance and like what other people oh my god so on one end I'm very happy to see a lot of the things you could normally get out of it like fantasy world isekai or out of a like uh zombie apocalypse type thing but instead it's more like kind of real well kind of real science space like it's a very different setting for this kind of story and I think it's just like yeah but but it's still in the end a shonen show yes the two dimensional characters to think of the number one thing that turns me off the rapid pace is good because you're not sit around doing nothing yeah as opposed to say like a titan which is like stop but you're rapidly plowing through a really flimsy kind of meh plot you're not rapidly plowing through a deep meaty plot that gives you a lot to think about it's not like a floney which is just like every episode is a two hour movie condensed to 23 minutes the thing is that I think stands out most about the show is it definitely feels like somebody created this for Japanese children which is all anime is created for Japanese children almost all of it right but and there's so much stuff that blatantly reeks of we are trying this show is trying to teach Japanese children how to be right it's like you know oh that guy who is only wants to give her to the old people he's bad look you can solve anything with science science is good oh you know I'm not amazed with your science I'm amazed with your hard work and how you you just patiently kept working until you got the job done you took your hours but you saved me you beat a lion to death with your own hands and the show reeks of like pausing constantly and they say things that really sound like things that like would be after like the more you know star or whatever but to their credit in a lot of shows that teach stuff they tend to like like Murashima had this problem a little bit they spend a lot of time talking about very little when they actually explain stuff in this show they explain pretty accurate things very quickly and then they move on like hey here's the chemical here's what it does 30 seconds later they're fighting oh did you know you can use seashells for you make sodium bicarbonate and you can use that for this you can use it for that you can it's like oh okay I'm curious where they're really going to go in the long run with gunpowder though because gunpowder is not hard to make you know it's hard to make a cannon yeah there's a reason why cannons are explosives are way easier to make than things to harness explosions right well the show is called Dr. Stone and the first time they mentioned Dr. Stone when he makes soap and he's like this is the only thing that will keep us alive it's like he's like he's like without society we have no medicine if we get sick we're fucked the soap is our Dr. Stone the soap is our Dr. Stone but I love it when shows say the name of the show in the show they say the name of the show again because as it turns out right when they're covered in stuff you'll notice all the characters of these cracks on their faces yeah that's because first you think it's just character design but they know it's because the stone was cracked when they were turned to stone and apparently when you get stoned that un-stoning like heals you in that part that you got un-stoned in so wait you know they're gonna re-stone someone at some point I don't know maybe but that's actually the girl they un-stone her and like her foot is still stoned and then they un-stone the foot and then like her foot is like healed like somehow when it like it hurt and then when they and then it got healed by the un-stoning so and they're like maybe this stone that everyone turned into is the Dr. Stone maybe what turned the world to stone wasn't malevolent but was benevolent so these are my working theories having seen a little bit of the show so they already have two meanings for Dr. Stone if you maybe count the third one and that the science guy he's not a doctor but it's like you know it's the stone age maybe you could call him you know because he's a smart science guy Dr. Stone maybe gotta see the stone doctor Dr. Stone anyway so my idea number one is this is a wind of amnesia situation if any of you have watched old anime aliens did this to see if humans are actually I don't know if you saw the scene where the science guy is thinking what are the possibilities number one aliens number two evil mad scientist number three like foreign government number four some sort of in environmental he's like going through the list of all the things that you would think of it could be an oryx and crake situation he's like he's like he's like could be a virus that did this to the to the humans and only if the virus only affected swallows humans or bacteria that would explain the light right but it's like he's trying to he comes up with all the explanations it's that you're thinking of two and he runs down them all yep he doesn't settle on he doesn't know yet he's still trying to figure it out but my real thinking is either it's a wind of amnesia situation of aliens like testing to see if humans are worthy to the world our actual world is actually a fantasy world from a long time ago and this is the world resetting in some way like I could see that like some weird thing happening with that but everything is everything is science though yep true there is no is not a fantasy world I could see science world I could see benevolent aliens doing this to protect us from some cosmic event that was going to kill us like radiation storms coming through and the aliens like do this to save us that's the only thing they could think of yeah anyway maybe so if you're the kind of anime fan who likes you know like the most popular you know shonen type animes then you're probably going to like this type of show I like this way more than any other shonen show yeah I guess it's better than like a Naruto or something that goes into a tournament and drags on yep but it's still you know but it's better than an attack on titan because it seems like it might actually be going somewhere but I don't think it's going like bocarano it's still shallow as all fuck bocarano was another show that was well bocarano was legit though yeah but it was characters in a predicament those characters were not two-dimensional true they were not two-dimensional but it was still it was characters in a like very contrived frigate predicament who intelligently worked to solve the problem and bocarano was going somewhere that would make you cry a lot right but I don't think those bocarano characters all had their own deep back stories with things they had to deal with yeah this show's back story is like I was a you are science guy you are girl you are you know brawny guy you are fighting you are fighting guy it's literally 40 seconds on screen of a long time ago an adult hit me no no there actually is a whole like half an episode that shows his back story so it's more than that it's little no it's literally just dad bought him a bunch of science stuff and he always science do you want to go to space because fighting guy his back story is literally one time an adult hit me when I was a kid so I'm going to murder all the adults yes but that is it is the but like I said is the most maybe even one dimensional characters yeah right they don't have it they're just literally science guy brawny guy fighting guy girl yep at one point that might even just be zero dimensional there's no dimension it's just also you know super sexist that obviously I don't even need to be mentioned that it's super sexist that the girl the only thing that could be worse is if the girl character's superpower ends up being nurturing healing yeah she only exists as love interest and thing to be protected defended etc though in the opener there are a lot of other motivation for men there are clearly a bunch of other female characters they did the person that they met who is not who is not you know thousands of years old was a girl so if I were you though like if you're an anime fan at all just watch the first episode because it moves if you're a fan who wants the high brow anime's stay far away but if you're okay with the low brow popular anime's then this is the low brow popular anime of the season and it's better than other similarly equally low brow anime oh god on Crunchyroll views are like this also like Long Horizon, Majin Bone, Taboo, Tattoo and Bleach yeah so that's it I'm not going to watch anymore because I've seen what I got to see I'm going to read a spoiler because I really want to know I only want to know the big I've learned everything I need to know except for the one big secret which I can now learn from a spoiler of course be careful because I know the fullness of Attack on Titan and kind of wish I didn't well I don't care that if I don't waste my time watching the show that it's not a problem yeah but I kind of wish I didn't know what Attack on Titan's about also probably no one the writer might not even know because the manga's ongoing yeah and you know serialized manga sometimes I'm waiting for the tournament to enter the show the science tournament could get to one because it's already gearing up to like punching nation versus it is gearing up to a war between brains and brawn to see whether which society will prevail right because it's a it's about that you know sort of dynamic right where it's like okay doesn't matter how smart you are there's a strong person they rule the world until you have society built and then people who are smart rule the world and being strong doesn't help you gain power which is part you know fist of the north star mad max in a world where all technology's gone the biggest strongest shittiest dudes end up being in charge of things because they can physically force themselves into power it's an old story alright and we're done that's an anime