 Coming up on D T N S Netflix thinks its competition is sleep gaming and I don't know maybe itself tumblr offers subscriptions to help the meme lords and why tiktok is not the new hit maker. This is the Daily Tech News for Wednesday July 21 2021 in Los Angeles on Tom Merritt and from studio Redwood I'm Sarah Lane in Salt Lake City I'm Scott Johnson and I'm the show's producer Roger Shane. We were just talking about Twitter testing out a downvote option if you want to get that wider conversation and some tips on getting rid of poison ivy get good day internet. Become a member at patreon.com slash D T N S let's start with a few tech things you should know. Samsung's next galaxy unpacked event will take place virtually on Wednesday August 11 with the phrase get ready to unfold in the announcement. The company also opened pre-orders for an unknown upcoming flagship device promising 12 free months of Samsung care plus up to an extra $200 trade in credit and a special pre-order offer for those committing before any official announcement. Clubhouse announced Wednesday it's open for everybody come on in sign up you don't need to get on the wait list anymore please please keep using us. Clubhouse is expanding from iOS to Android did that back in May says it has now reached 10 million downloads in the Android apps first two months. Clubhouse also added a text based chat feature if you didn't know it's called back channel they added that last week. Argo AI and Ford plan to launch 1000 self driving vehicles on lifts ride Haley network over the next five years starting with deployments in Miami this year and Austin in 2022. These vehicles will still have a human safety driver on board lift will also provide Argo with driving data from its entire network in exchange for a 2.5% stake in the company. I always think of that movie and that famous quote that I can't say on a family show when I hear Argo. ASUS announced the Chromebook CX-9 and the Chromebook Flip CX-5. They've got the new Intel Core i7 CPUs. So Z graphics are in there though. They meet US mill standard 810H to that tough CX-9 is available now starting at $749 for the core i3 up to $1,149 for an i7 and the flip CX-5 with an i7 starts at $1,049. Epic Games has acquired Sketchfab a platform to upload, download, view, share, sell and buy 3D assets. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Sketchfab will operate as a separate brand and Epic says that all integrations with third party tools even unity will remain available. All right, let's talk about those Netflix earnings and the investor letter and the earnings call and all the good stuff that happened with Netflix after market closed yesterday. You probably saw all kinds of headlines. Good and bad. Here's the actual scoop. The bad. Netflix's domestic subscribers, the ones in Canada and the US dropped by 430,000 and earnings per share. The mark of profitability for a company came in below expectations. Still positive though, $2.97. Netflix attributed all of that to a lighter offering of shows and some pandemic choppiness. What about all those new competing streaming services though asked people on the earnings call? Co-CEO Reed Hastings said, does HBO or Disney have a differential impact compared to the past? We're not seeing that in the data we have. That gives us comfort. So he dismissed that. He said, no, it's not the new services. We're not being affected by that. It's just people going out, coming in, changing their habits as you know, lockdowns come and go. Now to the good news. Revenue was $7.34 billion just above expectations. And worldwide, counting even that 430,000 drop in the US and Canada, Netflix added 1.54 million subscribers. That brings them to 209 million paid memberships worldwide. You can compare that to Disney Plus's last announcement of 104 million worldwide. And Netflix confirmed, yes, it is moving into gaming. In a shareholder letter, Netflix wrote, we view gaming as another new content category for us similar to our expansion into original films, animation and unscripted TV. Just the next new genre, video games. Games will be included in members, Netflix subscriptions at no additional cost similar to films and series. And initially, we'll be primarily focused on games for mobile devices. Now, this is the latest move towards ancillary content to the main video content. They've hired a person to do podcasts. They've been beaten up their merchandise strategy. And Hastings said they don't expect any of these new efforts, games, podcasts, merchandise to be profit centers on their own, but instead focus on making streaming better. He said, quote, we're a one product company with a bunch of supporting elements. Co-CEO Ted Serendos confirmed that the company has no interest in acquiring live sports right now, for instance. That one product is on demand video. He said our fundamental product is on demand and ad-free and sports tends to be live and packed with advertising. It doesn't make much sense and it's expensive and it's not getting cheaper. In fact, Netflix doesn't have much interest in acquiring even other companies as it watches all the other companies merge and consolidate. Netflix wrote in its investor letter, we are mostly competing with ourselves to improve our service as fast as we can. They've said they compete with sleep. They've said they compete with Fortnite. And now they say we just compete with ourselves. There's like nobody in our class. We're Netflix. COO Greg Peters said the gaming effort will capitalize on Netflix's intellectual property. Sort of implying that you'll get a Stranger Things game, a Queens Gambit, a chess game, stuff like that. He said we are in the business of making these amazing worlds and great storylines and incredible characters. And we know the fans of those stories want to go deeper. They want to engage further. So Scott, now that you've heard all the breakdown of this, where do you think Netflix is going with that gaming strategy? Well, I mean, I've let my initial thoughts pretty freely open and expressed on the internet about how I thought they were going to go straight to the jugular on streaming game tech. And it would compete with the likes of X Cloud and Stadia and all of that. But as the day has gone on, as I've studied these words and kind of looked at how Netflix tends to do things in a way that people don't expect them to do it, I think it is going to start a lot smaller. They may get there. Those may be things they do one day. I think it sort of depends on how this rollout goes. But I'm also old enough to remember when they started renting video games. A lot of game pass not that long ago, not that many years ago and pulled the plug in that almost immediately. So, you know, their their time in that space has been limited and a little shaky. They've certainly got the wherewithal and money now to do kind of anything they want to do. I think starting with mobile is a little bit weird because it opens up other questions we don't have answers to. Like, is this all part of the app itself? And does that mean that it runs strictly on mobile devices? I'll be talking TVs at all. And if we are what ones and what streaming boxes are going to allow for anything more than that? Well, will these games be 100% based on their own IPs? Are they going to build some first party, you know, brand new stuff that will roll back the other direction on the Netflix as you know, television or animation or something else? We don't know any of those things. And so as it stands right now, it's a little hard to know what it means at all. Like, I really don't know what the what the plan is going to be. It sounds like mobile will be first. Obviously they've made the hires for that and they've made, you know, they've certainly said as much. But what does that look like? Is it just more games on the app stores? No, probably not. That doesn't really leverage anything. They already do that. It's got to be something more than that. And I'm kind of pins and needles wanting to know what we just don't know. I've seen a bunch of comparisons when the the news came out. Oh, Netflix is going to start with mobile gaming. Well, I mean, I don't really know. But I but I I saw a lot of comparisons to this is Netflix coming for Apple Arcade. But it really doesn't sound like that's what Netflix is doing, at least not right now. Netflix is saying we want to build off, you know, yes, something like Stranger Things, something that's a big deal on Netflix. Everybody's talking about that game can be an extension. And I think it was Justin Robert Young last week who said, and it just preserves that that subscriber who's about to cancel because they kind of gotten through everything that they wanted to watch already. And it helps retain that person a little bit longer, you know, so there's, you know, there's less of that burn rate. I there are precious few video type experiences that I want to make a game for myself, but I know that that's extremely successful with a lot of a lot of series or movies or one offs or whatever. So I think it makes perfect sense that Netflix wouldn't even dare have someone pay for any of this off the bat because the company wants to test the waters. First of all, if it ends up being really popular, maybe there's more maybe there turns into a well this is like a very, very premium game that now if you'd like this is this is an extra extra fee at some point down the road. But I'm with you. If it's mobile gaming, I don't know how this is something I experienced not on a mobile device because it's Netflix. Yeah, no, I think I think that's what it is. It's mobile gaming. They'll have to deal with Apple's weird rules about, you know, you can have whether you can have a gaming service or not in your app or whatever and I'm not sure how that's going to shake out. But ideally, you have the Netflix app, you're watching on your TV and it says hey play the game on your app and you go to your Netflix app and you play the game there. And it's just a way to extend the experience when you're not sitting down watching or a lot of people do watch them on their phones, watch them on their tablets, and you can play the game there. I think I think I take Greg Peters at his word. This is extending the IP. I think you're going to more and more see Netflix focusing on building franchises, building on their IP. And I think if this all goes the way I think it's trending, you're going to see Netflix get into theme park experiences, maybe not building a theme park, but doing those kinds of experiences like they did with Bridgerton, like they did with Stranger Things, maybe making some of those permanent, maybe making them travel around. But you're going to see them trying a lot of new things like that where they start to say our business's stories, whether it's in a game or a movie or a video, a TV series, whatever. That seems to be where they're pointing. It also feels like maybe they're going to, they're maybe going to go to the throat of things like Pokemon Go and augmented reality type stuff. Sure. Yeah. Stranger things are perfect for that. Yeah. That has a better tie into your properties than just, oh, there's a little side scroller we made about Stranger Things. Like there's got to be more to it than that. But we'll see. Time will tell. Tumblr back in the news. Remember Tumblr I do is they're back in the news because they're testing a new feature called Post Plus. Everybody uses pluses now. Post Plus users charge their followers a monthly fee for exclusive content. So content creators, video makers, posters, that sort of stuff. Post Plus offers a $3.99, $5.99 and $9.99 monthly plan with Tumblr taking a 5% cut of those subscription fees. Creators using Post Plus have the option to post free content as well. So they can kind of choose and pick and whatever. It reminds me a lot of what Substack and other newsletter services are doing. It's just sort of, hey, why not? You may have thought Tumblr was gone or at least forgotten a little bit. That probably means you're, well, you're old like us probably. But Pageviews did decline 29% after it banned all pornography on the site back in 2018 if everyone remembers that. But it was sold to WordPress owner Automatic in 2019 rather. And that's when the new generation arrived. More than 48% of its users are in the GenZ demographic. GenZ folks spend 26% of their time on the platform. More than older bloggers and average daily use time in the demo increased 100% year over year. So that's a lot of growth in that demographic. Tumblr, Tumblr rather hasn't released official Pageview statistics, but similar web estimates, Pageviews have stabilized somewhere between the 310 million and 377 million per month, which is no small potatoes. There's no expression that talked about this till TechCrunch quote, not, excuse me, not reserved only for professionals or those with 10K followers or higher. Tumblr's Post Plus will push the boundaries of what's considered money making content on the internet. Shite posters, meme lords, artists, fan fiction writers, all of the above and everything in between will be able to create content while building their community of supporters and getting paid with Post Plus. Don't sleep on automatic. I looked at this and obviously I had all the thoughts that everybody did like, oh, look, Tumblr, getting some momentum, getting into the subscription game. We talked yesterday about how it's become more acceptable to just pay directly for content instead of having to get it free with ads. But I immediately thought about the Pocketcasts announcement that automatic is buying Pocketcasts and I'm like, I wonder if automatic is our next big rising star. Good ol' automatic from way back in the WordPress days of the mid-2000s might be the rising star because they're jumping ahead and getting things that are in growing markets like podcasts like Gen Z-oriented Tumblr instead of messing around, just buying the same old stuff and trying to bolster aging platforms like Facebook is. Tumblr is also, it's such a mixed media network. I once was very active on Tumblr and then I was sort of following a variety of other tumblers and so I was more lurking but that was also an easy experience for me. And a Tumblr blog is very different depending on what kind of template you're using or if you're using something that you've customized. Whereas Substack, you think long form writing doesn't have to be super long form but paragraphs of text. Instagram is photography and video. Now, the company is certainly wanting to go into the video route but you see places where a lot of people are hanging out as places where people try to push the boundary. Like how many Instagram photos do you see where it's a photo but it's really a quote that was written somewhere and then someone took a screenshot of it, that sort of thing. Tumblr has already done all of those things really well and in a way that can work for creators to make them stand out. I never had an issue with Tumblr. I just felt like the folks that I was following and myself included kind of just lost interest and went to other places. I am really interested by the idea that the younger adults of all the generations that we throw out and how we all act differently and we talk about it on the show all the time are the folks who are most comfortable with saying if you're a good creator, you should get paid and if you're somebody who enjoys that good creator then you pay them, it's just the right thing to do whereas the rest of us are like, God, there's somebody's subscription. Try to really be paying for all of these things but it's a different way of looking at stuff. That younger demo doesn't have as much money so that's the risk in doing it this way but they're just more tuned to it. They're like, like you say, older people are like, why should I pay for that? And younger people are like, oh, can I please pay for it? And so maybe that makes up the difference. I think so. There's this whole other aspect too for artists specifically that I can speak to. Used to be that's where Tumblr, that's what you found on Tumblr, tons of artists. Artists loved it there. It's a great way to post stuff. Yahoo got weird with their terms of service, put a few people off and then kind of the Yahoo stink sort of stayed and without being gone now, I think there might be a mass return of art especially because they might be able to get paid for some of their work but also some of those rules have loosened up and the smell of Yahoo is not there anymore potentially it's not but also the place they all move to Instagram is getting weird with still imagery and art and they may need a new home. So there may be a real opportunity here and I'm actually kind of stoked about the idea. I hope that means that some of these other sites have quit chasing each other and just calm down and think about maybe what they do best and then do that because that feels like that's what Tumblr's doing they just kind of let some time go where people had to realize it and now they're like, all right, well have you all had your moment? Now come back here and just blog or post art and you know, let's just be Tumblr again. I like the idea that Matt Mellenweg fumigated Tumblr from all the Yahoo. Yeah, I was running out of words for the Yahoo smell, stench, stain, but yeah, I'm all out. Hey, Yahoo Finance, still kicking. Yahoo Japan, top brand. There you go, there you go. In the fourth and final installment of our seniors in tech mini podcast series Dr. Nikki Ackerman's talks to Dr. Ruth Ports about her amazing career running IT for multiple particle accelerator and physics labs plus her role in the development of the worldwide web. You know, that little thing you may have heard of it. You might be using it right now. Watch for it this Saturday, July 24th in the DTNS feed. All right. I'm trying not to use Amazon's assistant more than once or twice, but please forgive me if I do. It would be hard to explain the next story otherwise. Amazon's vice president in charge of Alexa, Nadim Fresco, told CNET that 140,000 different smart home products interface with the voice assistant. It's a lot. More companies are now taking advantage of Amazon's custom assistant program that launched back in February, which lets product makers lease the technology to make their own assistants with their own wake words. For example, a Verizon smart display was announced on Wednesday as one of these devices. It would respond to hi Verizon, how it help customers set up new services and manage their broadband account, among other things. Along with that, Amazon announced Alexa shopping actions, which lets developers earn affiliate money by promoting physical products in apps or letting users browse project listings. And Amazon also says it plans to integrate matter. That's the smart home interoperability standard into who its voice assistant devices do an over the air update. So don't have to do anything. Pretty cool though. Amazon also plans to introduce matter compatible bridges to connect non-matter devices. So then the company joins Google and Apple in announcing support for matter, meaning we may in fact be headed to a world of actual smart home interoperability. Yeah, I mean, there was a lot at this conference that announced lots of cool features, but this was my big takeaway, which is Amazon officially joining matter. We expected them to. Now it's official. They're going to push it. They're just going to make it easy and push it into any device that can support it. Go back to our episode where we talked about matter a few weeks ago, having Google on board to support it in Google Home, having Apple letting developers implement it in HomeKit and bringing it into Siri, having Amazon supporting it on Echoes and all their other devices that are in the smart home universe is going to make this work. Now the tech still has to live up to its promise. It seems like it will. It hasn't really been put to the scale test yet, but I'm starting to feel optimistic about matter that everybody will support it and I will eventually live in a world where I just buy a smart door lock because I like its features and I don't worry like, wait, is it going to be compatible with the system I use at home or maybe I should run three systems at home just to be sure. You could just pick the voice assistant you want and go with that. I've always had this question about matter and services that have tried to be the interoperability link between these competing services and that is at some point, at least on the surface, I go, oh, cool, they're going to tie them all together and it doesn't matter what I'm using and I can use multiples for different needs in the home or in the office or whatever and they're all going to work together because there's this layer of interoperability. That I love. However, then I start thinking, well, what about a competing layer of operability and then what do they bring that matter doesn't? And one of them is being supported by all the makers so that's cool, but does that mean there's not some better alternative being worked on or there's this forever line of potential competition and really all I want is all of them to just kind of speak the same language. This is it. This is it. That's why it's like, this is our other episode where we talked about we addressed all of those concerns because this is the one that finally got everybody to work together on it ahead of time. It wasn't coming in going, hey, we fixed the standard. Everybody onto our wagon. They're like, let's all build a wagon together. Let's make sure that it works and let's all make it a standard instead of a proprietary thing that we try to that we open up and let other people use. I'm not saying it's perfect. I'm not saying it's guaranteed to work, but it's certainly the best shot we've had so far. I'm pretty interested in this leasing out of the technology. The Verizon example is a little bit of a strange one to me. I cannot imagine needing a smart display where I go into my Verizon account and make some changes. Now, not that that wouldn't work. It seems like overkill when there are already many ways to do that with a screen. However, if there are other examples of this where a particular company that you interface with with either one product or more is able to build a smart display where Amazon is simply running the back end, that'll be interesting too. Yeah, for me, it's just a matter of can we all get along if we can? Great, let's do it. It's just a matter of that? Yeah. I will say the one we didn't mention yet, but another announcement that Amazon made was the functionality of widgets on something like an Echo Show. Anybody who has an Echo Show now, you see a sort of carousel of information, you can program it to some extent. You can add certain information and skills to sort of be part of that cycle. But to be able to have... Here are the four things I want on the screen that are automatically updating. That takes it to the next level for me because sometimes I walk by and I'm like, recipe, I don't care about. But if that was a recipe, plus a few other things that I do care about, then there's just more information on a screen that can handle it. Yeah, I think it was back at the end of May, maybe around May 21st, if you want to get that episode of Daily Tech News Show where we did talk about matter. Meanwhile, TikTok posted some results from a couple of studies. One from MRC Data conducted a music perception study in November, and London-based Flamingo Group conducted a study on TikTok's impact on culture. Both studies pulled around 1,500 TikTok users online. Among the findings, 75% of TikTok visitors discover musical artists there. So if you are a TikTok user, you're like, yeah, I discovered somebody I like just by watching TikTok. 63% say it's a source for music they haven't heard before. Discovery, this is where I discover the hits. And 72% associate particular songs with TikTok. So among the TikTok users, most of them are discovering music and artists there. 67% of TikTokers are more likely to seek out songs on music streaming services. So if they hear a song on TikTok, they will go to Spotify, Apple Music Title, etc. Music industry is paying attention, trying to get new artist exposure on TikTok, while also, and this means they're taking it seriously, beginning to grumble about the compensation rate they get from platforms like TikTok. They used to grumble about Spotify all the time. They still grumble about YouTube. You don't hear them grumbling so much about title, Spotify, Apple Music. But not everybody uses TikTok. And Variety points out that a study from last May by Music Watch found that music streaming services are cited as the main driver for music discovery by most people. So they were surveying people, not only who used TikTok, but also who don't use TikTok. And it's still the biggest music discovery driver for the general populace, followed by video streaming services like YouTube, then radio, then short video services like Reels and TikTok. So when you look at the TikTok platform, users of TikTok discover a lot of music there. It's definitely driving music, but not everybody uses TikTok. And so it hasn't really pervaded into the general populace, probably because not the general populace doesn't majority use TikTok yet. It's funny because it feels like TikTok gets away with something here. And by that, I mean, they get to play a bunch of music, short versions, mind you, but music nonetheless, that other services can't get away with playing when you're creating content. And it's just right there to choose from a list of songs and you can just play it. And they pay for it. They just don't pay as much. They didn't exactly. But it gives more. I have found more weird music that I ended up liking because of TikTok than any other service I've ever used. Like straight up, including like full blown music services, their discovery system is fine, but it's very traditional. This thing's like, Oh, what the heck is that riff? I got to find that. And I find it and I go get it. And I build my own playlist and there's playlists that exist across the services that are just TikTok famous songs. And that really surprised me about the service. I wasn't expecting to be, you know, find a bunch of new music that I care about and like. Yeah. TikTok is fun in that way. And I'm with you, Scott. There are songs that I've, I've figured out what song it is, you know, even if I don't know the TikTok video itself doesn't make any mention of it. But I also might have, you know, I it's, it's linked to that really funny TikTok with the dog or that roller skater or whatever. You know, so it becomes the song. And sometimes it, it's, it, you know, it, it organically grows into something we were like, Oh, the song is everywhere. Everyone's doing the meme, right? You know, the TikTok memes. It's, you know, part of the fun of TikTok, depending on who you follow. And I can only imagine folks in the music industry being like, look how this song is now trending on Spotify, right? Or Apple music or, or, or wherever. And we didn't necessarily predict that and we can attribute it to something like TikTok. But yeah, we're not really benefiting from it starting on TikTok as much as we would like, even though we can see the fruits of, you know, the rewards down the road. And that gets a little bit tricky. I, I also, I, I, there are certain songs I enjoy on TikTok, but they've already been mashed up. And I go back and I figure out what it is. Watermelon sugar is a great example. I did not know that was a real song. I thought that was just like some funny TikTok thing. It's a real song. Watermelon sugar? Hi. Good morning. I only noticed like the ha ha thing. And so I heard the song and I was like, pretty good. Kind of like the TikTok part. Yeah. And also, we would be remiss covering this if we did not acknowledge Lil Nas X, whose entire career went from selling directly to TikTok star to getting a Columbia record deal and now becoming one of the biggest artists in the world, collabing with the likes of BTS. You know, that, that I think was another big wake up for the record industry to be like, oh crap, we can cultivate entire musical artists on this platform. Let's get Doja Cat over there. Let's get our existing artists that we think will resonate with that audience. Let's get them over there now. Yeah. There's some, there's some artists who are some TikTokers who are started as TikTokers, gained a huge following. Turns out can sing or make music or dance or whatever. And now they've got these, their own record labels, or they get their own single coming out or whatever. Yeah, yeah. Um, Thora, Bella, Thorch, I forgot her name. Anyway, she's got a song that's really popular. Olivia Rodrigo. Oh, I don't know if it's her. Bella Porch. Bella Porch, that's it. Who makes funny eye Googlies. Yeah. And she's made a, she'll make a music career out of this. Like it's just such a different place. And I don't know, you're right about how the short little blips tend to ruin some of those songs for us, but there's other times where I'm like, I'm going to go find that track and I'm going to love it. So good on them. All right. Let's check out the mailbag. What do we got, Sarah? This one comes from Jake, uh, who is kind of answering a question we got in the mailbag a couple of days ago about, uh, cutting down on, on spam coming through our, our phones and who's to blame. And also the idea of replacing SMS. Jake says, I work for a telecom security company. One of our products is securing mobile networks from spam and fraudulent messages. The basic flow of a messages. Sender's network sends an SRI. That means send routing info. Destination responds with information of customer. Sender's network sends the message. That's the MT. That means you have two opportunities to block an unwanted message at the SRI, SRI or the MT point. SRI is routing only, no context. MT has content because it's on the other side. When a person sends a message to another person, P2P, regardless of network, there are usually agreements for the price paid for delivery between networks, usually a negligible amount. Business is different. Their messages are considered outside of these agreements or A2P. Now, most businesses don't want to pay a lot per SMS. They're sending millions each day. Every penny counts in this sort of pricing structure. This is where SMS aggregators come in. They combine many connections, some directly to a network, some in agreement with another aggregator. At any point in this chain, an aggregator may decide, I don't want to pay that fee. I've got a guy with some Sims and modems. I'll use him. So is SMS secure? Yes and no, says Jake. It's clear text and open to an operator to view and aggregators to change. But from an operator point of view, they have extremely strict controls to protect privacy. What we should do is complain to our operator when we receive an A2P SMS, again, from a business, from anything but a short code like Google, or we receive an A2P SMS that we didn't ask for, or we receive an SMS that appears malformed, like Google with the O's as zeros and the E as a three. These are all indications that both the sender, Google, for example, and your operator have some work to do in both pressuring their supplier and considering security. So there you go. I learned a whole lot from Jake about how this all works. In fact, I'm going to try to do a little bit of a review of what the short version is. Talk to your carrier if you're getting text message spam because I didn't realize till I read this that the text message security against spam is much tighter than the voicemail security against spam. At least it seems like it based on this description. Thank you so much. It's of amazing listeners, by the way. Amazing. What an incredible email. So good. I know it's great. It's great. And I know there's more out there. If you ever have feedback for us, whether it's a question or a comment or something where you go, I've got the answer and I can help everybody know a little more, send it to feedback at dailytechnewshow.com. Shout out to patrons on our master and grandmaster levels. Today they include Mike Aikens, Norm Physikus, and Chris Allen. Also, guess what we have? We have a brand new boss. And that boss's name is Dave Peake. Dave just started backing us on the show. Dave. Dave single-handedly stopped us from dropping down on the number of patrons over last month. Dave was like Gandalf appearing at the turning of the tide and said, no, I will keep that number in balance. So thank you, Dave Peake. We may need another to back up Dave Peake if you're listening out there on the free feed and you want to get some of those perks, patreon.com. Thanks, Dave. Thanks, Dave. Thanks also to Scott Johnson, for being with us this week after week, Scott. We couldn't do without you either. What's been going on? Geez, I don't know about that. Lots of cool stuff going on. And if you want to see some of it, you can find it at frogpants.com. We're now to the point where production is getting ready to ship all those games out to everybody who supported us for the card game. So that's happening. There are new comic strips going up and there are shows every day. Something for everybody. So go check it out, frogpants.com. And as always, I'm on Twitter live on this show Monday through Friday. Yes, folks. Every week at 4 30 p.m. Eastern 20 30 UTC. You can find more at find out more at daily tech news show dot com slash live book market. Tell a friend, Tom is going to be working on know a little more tomorrow. So Rich will be with us. So we'll talk to you then. This show is part of the frogpants network. Get more at frogpants.com. I hope you have enjoyed this program. That was weird. Hey, go vote on titles. DTNS dot show about TV GDI dot show about TV. And let us know what title you think we should title these shows. Yeah, I hit it and it started playing and then faded itself out. Well, that's not as bad as somehow muting the chip thing and not knowing you guys were talking. I thought I'd lost everybody. Yeah, no, we heard you say like, Sarah, what do you think in the middle of Sarah talking? And then I apologize with your headphones. I don't know. I hope he gets it back, which you did. Yeah, it was weird. I still don't know what happened. It just came back suddenly. I don't know it was a Skype thing or what, but I didn't mean to do that, Sarah. You were already talking and talking. Okay. Skype ghosts are rude. And never they never properly announced themselves. They just kind of come on in and muck up the place. That's right. Well, it's very hot here today. Is it not as hot as yesterday? Yesterday was actually almost 100 degrees. That's hot, but but it's still pretty hot. We are currently 95. That's hot. Yeah. With a high of 96. So not too bad. But we were 103 yesterday. So that was fun. Yeah. Well, why am I complaining? You got me beat two days in a row. I don't know what's going so hot for like we expect hot July's, but usually August is when things get real weird and the weird happen in like early July, late June. So I didn't know what to expect from from August. We're starting to get flies early. I hate flies. You don't really have a lot of fly. Well, I mean, I'm sure there are flies around. It's not like I have a lot of flies in my house or anything, but I don't leave the door open. They come out with the heat. The flies. Yeah. It's usually August for whatever reason. August is like fly time. You think it would be all when I moved into the warmer area of LA away from from from the coast. Some of my neighbors were like, oh, and we get insects now in the hot weather. And we used to never get that. And I don't know if it's because it started slowly been getting hotter over time or or what? But yeah, they they associated it with the heat. Yeah. I always forget the heat would have like dissuaded the flying insects from being out. Maybe it hurts them. They're birthed by the heat. Our California smoke is some though. So it's not California smoke. Everybody keeps calling it California smoke. All right. From Oregon. A little bit of Oregon, a little bit of Idaho, a little bit of California. All right. So it's a salad. So you get a salad. Fire salad. Even a little Arizona. Yeah. Yeah. But for a few days there, it was like thick as soup. And then we finally got to work on the East Coast apparently. Now the East Coast has a doctor in our discord was posting pictures of the smoky sky. Smoky sky out there. Really? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. It's spread all over the whole continent. Yeah. Spread all over the whole continent. You're right. Take that America. Take it. I mean, I'm floored that we haven't had air quality issues. I mean, it's I know it'll happen, but I we've been really lucky over here on the west side. I've been very impressed that my area. This part of LA has not. Normally this time of year you can smell something burning and I haven't smold anything so far. It's it's knock on wood, both of you. I know. Incredibly lucky that the fires have been happening elsewhere this year. Yeah. And there's nothing like I'm not like, yeah, fires elsewhere. There's like the whole thing is just horrible. But yeah, also we're not we're not done with the season yet, aren't we? No, not even close. Not even close in November, late September. I'm just kind of used to, well, I mean, I guess we all are, but it's like, even if there's no imminent danger, no evacuation, you know, I've just gotten used to. Yeah, that kind of like the past two or three years there have been kind of ashy Southern and Northern California at this time of the year. And maybe they burned up the fuel for once. I don't know. But yes, it's nice not to have them. I wanted to briefly mention this just because I talked about it on GDI yesterday. I did get a diamond in Supernatural. You did? We knew it. So, okay. And the reason I'm not like jumping for joy and like, I am very happy about it. Don't get me wrong. And you you all wielded into existence. So thank you. But the one that I almost got the diamond on that I was so bummed out about was like a full on 30 minute workout. Like that's like a intense workout. Yeah. The one I got the diamond on was seven minutes. It's called a quick hit. You know, we have quick hits on DTNS too. But it counts. It counts. And I was still super excited and I took a photo and I posted it on our Facebook page. But just I'm not that weird. Like everyone does that when they get a diamond. But I like, why couldn't I have done it on the really long one because that would have been something where, you know, I really would have gotten a high five. Yeah. Sort of like, good. You like kept it up for seven minutes rather than you got a diamond. How long was your workout? Seven minutes. Yeah. Because it was it's two songs rather than like seven. So it's like, yeah, I mean, for two songs in a row, I was really it is harder to pull it off over a longer period of time. There's just no arguing with that. Exactly. Right. I was just so close on the long one. Anyway, so this just goes to show you I'll never be happy with anything. Achieve a goal. Not good enough. That's what drives you. Yeah. Yeah. Like if you were ambitious or you people called you ambitious person, that's what they would call it drive. She was a very driven person. She's just hungry for tacos. She wants a double diamond. Don't say that. That sounds great. Double diamond tacos. I mean, a diamond is it. Diamond is it. It's nice though, too. And in the on the on the mobile app, you know, you're you kind of have like a just a feed of your activity and other people's activity. If you're following them whatever. And like when you get a diamond, it's like it's all sparkly. Oh, yeah. The other ones aren't like even triple platinum is just like this is what it is. We have a karaoke machine that gives you a score. And we've learned that the scores are fairly arbitrary. Like we've done really what we thought was really good and gotten like a 60. And then we'll do one where like, oh, that was that was touchy. And we get a 98. I'm like, I don't think this thing's very good. But it does make you feel good because it does the fireworks and, you know, big celebrations and graphics whenever you do a higher score. It's it's amazing how much you you know it doesn't matter. Yeah, your life doesn't change in any way. It's not a person. You're impressing. It's a machine. No. But and and yet I mean, for exercise for me, I'm like, it's a driver. There are certain people that I who fall, you know, we follow each other. And so they show up on my leaderboard. And I know when I'm slipping because I'm like, oh, how'd she get a thousand points today? Like, okay, let me do another one. And that is like, I mean, I don't always like, I'm not going to over exert myself just to, you know, keep up with the Joneses of exercise. But it can it can be like a motivator where I'm like, I was going to pop off of this early and I'm going to stick with it a little bit longer. So it's it's good and bad. You know, the whole like obsession with getting a diamond. You know, I was starting to get really annoyed with myself because I'm like, you're never going to get it, Sarah. Like, just let it go. You know, just give it. We'll give up and just continue to exercise and have fun, right? You know, instead of that's why gamification works. If you're if you're built that way because you're like, no, I can't give up. I must keep going. Right. I have almost no desire. I mean, I am a great giver upper on any other kind of game. I don't like this game. I'm not good at it. Right. I don't want to play anymore. I don't like it. I'm not good at it. Is it because you're getting a benefit out of this one? Is that what makes the difference? You're like, you know that you're also improving your health. You know, that's a huge part of it. I mean, my calorie goal in between songs, you know, under my headset, I look down and I'm like heart rate up. Yes. Okay. Doing good. Like this hour is going to represent so much of my whole 24 hour period of, you know, getting all these other numbers that I'm trying to hit. And this is how you get through a pandemic, folks. You need to dance your way out of it. Yep. Yes. Like Kevin Bacon, except that you're not dancing against John. Let's go. Yeah. That's, you know, that happened like, I think I tell you this every time, but like 20 minutes south of me is where that movie was filmed. Oh, I was about to say that was like part of your back story, like growing up, you dance. He did. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's this, it's this roller mills like flower thing and there's, there's nothing there that would even be remotely considered like anti-dance or small town at all. Which is funny because we all joked that my hometown was the footloose town because even though the town didn't have a rule against it, the college did. The, the, and the, and the, because the college was run by the free Methodist Church. Free Methodist Church had a prohibition against dancing. And so the college had a prohibition against dancing. And so everybody was like, oh my gosh, it's us. We're footloose. Yeah. You guys were footloose. You should have all kind of danced in unison towards an imaginary camera. We had dances in high school. It wasn't like, it wasn't like the college stopped all dancing in the town from happened. So it wasn't quite that dancing police. I want you to be the Kevin Bacon though, who's super rebellious and had underground dance parties and all that. And then you just somehow end up at the flower mill in Utah and you just start doing like dance slash aerobics slash gymnastics. Because he does like an uneven bar routine in there, which is not something I normally associate with dancing. I don't think the college does that anymore, but we had to sign a lifestyle statement, which said I wouldn't dance, drink, smoke, chew tobacco. What? Yeah. This sounds like BYU. Dance. Yeah. Could you snap your fingers to a beat? I mean, all of those things, I'm like, yeah, you're better off without them. But dancing. Could you snap your fingers to a beat? They used to. They used to not allow them to dance. They used to. They used to not allow them to dance. They used to not allow them to dance. They used to not allow them to dance. They used to. They used to not allow them going to the theater to see movies. Oh. And then they liberalized in the 70s and took that out of the lifestyle statement. So you could go back to the picture show. Yeah. Picture show. My girlfriend, my high school girlfriend's father taught the business course that I wanted to take at college. He's the one that was encouraging me like you should take this business course. Get college credit. And he was telling the story about how he, in his, when he was at college, at that college, he led the protest to allow them to go see movies. Like he was part of the push to drop movies from the lifestyle statement. Hmm. Hmm. Yeah. I never had to do that when I signed up for a couple of courses in high school at the JC. They just said I had to pay money and then they get the school to sign off on. Yeah. Different different colleges apparently do have different rules. And I can start my fingers to the beat. I don't know. Seems like it's pushing it. It turns out there's no standard. No, Billy Joel. Let's pick a title over there at DT NS dot show about dot TV. People have been diligently voting. 48 votes on the DT NS 34 on the GDI side. Biocow suggested Alexa do all the things because he wanted to make me set off my echo. Now I realize that here's something I found on reference.com is what I'm hearing right now. Thanks a lot. Biocow. Zoe brings bacon suggested let's all build a wagon together and L Butler used emojis. Very clever. Thumbs up on thumbs down but thumbs up and thumbs down emojis. Very clever. What did we go with Roger? We went with Stranger Netflix chess game. Excellent. I'll build her because we wanted to get Netflix into the title. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Over on GDI top three vote getters making money off the fire hose from Zoe brings bacon. Tom is ninety eight percent thumbs. And still excrual the adventures of Tom's thumb. So we went with Tom is ninety eight percent thumbs from Biocow. Just funny. Yeah. It's ninety eight percent of my thumb. Actually I probably have ninety nine. It's not. I'm not missing. Oh and also I should say it's also shared with Elbultor because they did the thumb as an emoji in the show. Okay. Excellent. Elbultor. Thank you for that. Also thank you to gain Foster. The tip is right there in the name. He helped us gain a raise. Gave us a raise on Patreon. Thank you. Gain Foster. Really appreciate that. We said we would work hard to earn it. By gosh. We did. Thanks to you. Also thanks to everybody who supports us over there on Patreon. Zoe brings bacon with some bits. The twenty fourth month with prime. Don't like the new submenu but yay for pie. PC Mylesy and Good Boy Fido gave us some bits. We also got Beatmaster gifting a tier one sub to Mira Vina. Spreading the love. I like that. Elbultor flings some money at us. Said flings money at the gang and re-subscribed for eighteen months. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for throwing that money. And thank you Scott Johnson as always. Good to have you. The pleasure was mine. I cannot major. My pleasure. My pleasure. Major my pleasure. All right. Have a good day everybody. Good day. Internet.