 It's recording camera. Yes. The red light's blinking on the camera. All right. All right. Is all the streaming is still functioning properly? Yep. Everything looks fine. We're live on the internet. So I'll just go. It's Wednesday. It's Wednesday, August 19th, 2020. I'm rim. Tom Scott. And this is Geeknize tonight. We're talking about the Devil Man manga and the Gibi eight Gibi Ate Gibi air that that anime that's coming already out partially. Do we have any opening bits? I could talk about using the setup. That's whether that I could talk about the bike thing that is downstairs. I didn't get bring upstairs and use yet. Yeah. That's it. That's all I got. Maybe the opening bit is about set and talk and setting up panels because that actually is a nice segue into Oda Quest. I'll talk about this setup here. All right. I think go for it. All right. So I'm doing the podcast, you know, a little differently today for anyone who might be watching on the YouTubes, right? It might look a little different because I'm standing looking into a much higher quality camera with maybe better different similar audio, I guess. But yeah, we tried to set up technology to do panels remotely, right? And, you know, it's pretty easy to podcast remotely because it's only audio, right? You could just slump over your computer. You don't need to, you know, have you could just use a webcam if you want video, right? It doesn't need to be good. Yeah. And like, you know, when we live stream the podcast, we started just live streaming like the production of the podcast. And when we first started, you see, I'm just like slumped over my desk. God is like laying on his back with his eyes closed like that. We do the show. Right. So to do a panel, we need like high quality video. And if we're separate, right? This creates a whole host of problems. At least we don't have to live stream it, which is good, right? I can just record video of me and audio of me. Yeah. Rym can record video and audio of him. But we also need to communicate with each other at the same time. We need to be able to, you know, have some talking going on. Yeah. So it's like, okay, I plug a microphone into my camera and I talk at it. But then had his room here, what I'm saying, am I going to have two microphones, one for the computer? And then I need to wear headphones so I can hear what Rym is saying. So now I'm being recorded with headphones in my ears. It's not right. Yeah. So in order to set this up is ridiculously complicated. So I set it up and we're testing it out for a podcast before we use it for a panel. Yep. Basically, we recorded one panel already. So if you want, if you go to the Crunchyroll Expo online, like somewhere in that schedule, judge anime by its cover. That was like version one of our recording panels remotely pipeline. Upcoming at the penny. That was the worst setup than this. This one's a better setup, I think. This one's a lot better setup. But I'll tell you all the secret. If you watch our Crunchyroll panel, it sounds like we're doing a good back and forth like we're doing a normal panel thing. I could only understand about 50s, maybe 60% of what Scott was saying. I just couldn't hear Scott communicating. I had discord on an iPad in front of me. I had discord in front of me on a laptop and a shitty webcam pointed at me just out of frame so Scott could hear me. Rim was hearing me because I was yelling at the iPad and the iPad built in microphone was picking me up and sending it over to discord. And then I was hearing rim because I had headphones that were Bluetooth connected to the iPad and disconnected at one point. Yeah. So now the new the new setup, I managed to get my computer, my computer, my camera to output not just video, but also audio over the HDMI cable. And that's picked up by the capture card. And then on the computer, I have a whole bunch of crazy nonsense that somehow sorts everything out between discord, recording software, OBS, all kinds of nonsense. And then the camera can also is recording video and audio too. So yeah, yep, I just cannot express like it's interesting because I talked to I'm talking a lot of people in the games industry because a lot of people are having trouble making their panels in this current environment. But think of the experts on the thing they do, they're not experts on cameras and video and audio. Yeah, Scott and I like we've done Geek Nights by ourselves for 15 years. So like if we wanted a video, guess what? We're both learning premiere. We want to audio. Guess what? Audio engineers, fancy microphones, like we've basically been doing everything ourselves. So we're kind of pretty well positioned. Meanwhile, I was like coaching, literally industry professionals who like their job is to give lectures at conventions, and they are struggling to like record themselves talking for 20 minutes in OBS. Yeah, they don't know how they're not camera people. They don't know how to use a camera. Like do you think John Stuart like you watch the Daily Show for 20 years doing John Stuart like could just set up all those cameras and make all that like nice color grading and everything happened for a home podcast. Oh, he has no idea, probably. Yeah, he might but probably not. But usually the talent is like when someone's called the talent. On one hand you might think oh yeah, like they're the person who's like the star. But that also means like the stage crew front like back of house front of house all the people are like dealing with them when they refer to the talent. It means those are the people who literally can't do nothing but be on stage and our sole job is to make them look like they know what they're doing. I think it's just the general philosophy of like, you know, if I have a problem, I read Google, I read things, I follow instructions, I learn how to do something. Right? There's a lot of people who just don't want to learn, don't care to learn, don't try to learn. They have a narrow focus, not a broad focus. They only learn in their area. They don't learn other areas. All right. All that sort of stuff. Yeah. You know, I learned audio engineering. I was making mixtapes when I was like in middle school and they sounded like but when I played them in the computer like in the car. So then I wanted them to sound better and I learned about equalizers and it just went down a rabbit hole from there. Yeah, pretty much. So yeah, I guess that's a thing. Yep. But anyway, some news because there actually has already been a couple of like online anime conventions and things. I think like there was Oda Quest, I think happened last weekend. I saw people like talking about it a little bit, but I didn't really see that chatter until Sunday when it was like mostly done. Yeah. So basically all I I don't know details. All I see is on Twitter, people who are deeper in the anime scene than we are, right? Are being like, Hey, there was an online anime convention or maybe more, there's at least two, but maybe more than two. And those online anime conventions somehow, you know, got high quality Japanese guests to appear online at their convention, right? So they must have paid the money. And so the content at these online conventions was like interview with amazing director with a translator online. And it's like, there's tons of these like an amazing amount of content that's like, you know, not been available before, because a lot of those things would happen at anime cons and rooms that weren't streamed or recorded or uploaded, right? We're now put online where anyone in the whole world could see them, not just people who could go to an anime con. Maybe I'm sure it wasn't free, but I'm sure it also wasn't 50 bucks. And a whole bunch of this stuff happened, but seems like no one knew about it. Even people who are like would have like love to do it only found out afterwards or not at all. Yeah, this was like powered by anime central, like a serious thing that I kept hearing about it like vaguely. And I thought, oh, I should see like, maybe I can submit a panel or something. And then when I actually went to look at it, it had already happened. Like if the event had happened, and I just missed it. Yoko Kano was at this thing, all this great anime. Oh, yeah, Jackie. God damn it. But there's another convention happening. We didn't tell anybody. There's like another one happening this weekend that's like, I think magfest, a bunch of other kinds of putting something together. But like, I never saw like a call to panels. I never like, I didn't get press releases. I don't like, I don't know what's going on here. But I feel like a lot of online cons are the people who are running them. And we're not saying this happened with these particular cons because I don't know the details of why these particular cons didn't pierce our bubble. Because I don't know anything about them. How can I know it's a criticize if I don't know anything? You want it like, I think what happened is that like, boss, like you know how I find out about a convention to appear at or something because I get a press release because I'm on mailing lists, like industry mailing lists. And I didn't get shit about this stuff. Meanwhile, most larger anime cons in the US at least have a history of not advertising. Like they never have to advertise. They kind of assume people will show up because they have a bad like they run out of badges to sell, they fill. So it kind of just worked out that way. Like advertising would almost make their situation worse rather than rather than better. But also I have seen some cons advertise and they usually advertise on like cheap local media, right? Because they're local events where people come visit from around town. You know, it's like you try to get the townies to come. If you're trying to advertise to the internet, especially difficult, most of the people who go to conventions in general, not just anime conventions, but also gaming cons and everything else, they all go for a lot of different reasons, mostly to hang out. Like there's a lot of stuff they want to do with these cons. And at most cons, the guests and the panel content are not actually the biggest draw. Like that might surprise you, but kind of sadly true. But I feel like, and again, not saying that this con did that, but I think this happened in a lot of instances. They kind of assumed that the people who go to the con in person would be interested in engaging with their content online. And thus they assumed that number, our normal attendance number is probably like a nice baseline number of who would come to the online version because the online version is free or cheaper. But the reality is, I think the majority of the people who go to conventions are not interested in the online versions of these conventions. Like I think about how most people interact at cons, they're mostly hanging out with their front like an anime cons, they're mostly hanging out cosplaying and running around yelling at each other, going to a room party and stuff like that. Plus you have to consider, right? It's like, you know, GDQ is happening right now. It's like, if I'm turning on, you know, my computer to watch something, everything is in the world is competing with GDQ. Yep. It's a tough guy. It's a tough ass. Oh my god. That's the two reverse boss order run. Once I realized it was also a glitch run. I didn't realize I was like reverse boss order. How are they going to get to the Thunderbird first? They have to be doing like the second or last boss first so that they can then eventually are they going to go to from dungeon one through the end and get all the items, then go back and beat the Bunjins in reverse, then I'll go to the final dungeon. It's like, no, Thunderbird first. Yeah. That was like, it was one of the glitch year. Like it is up there in terms of glitch runs with like the final fantasy four staircase run. Pretty much. But so yeah, there's probably some online anime cons, but I don't know. The only one we really know about and are performing at right now is the Crunchyroll Expo. And other than answering questions added, I don't think I'm going to go like I'm not going to go to other online content from most of these cons. Because again, like you said, no, I really, you know, if these cons want, you know, if you're if you're having online con and your online con is literally just a bunch of videos, right, for people to pay and watch, don't make it like some live event. Just put the videos up on YouTube, even charge money for the videos if you want, but just put them up there for all time so anyone can come and see them whenever and then people will come and see them whenever. Yep. Or if you're just like, all right, today for six hours, there's going to be video content on this one TV channel, temporary television channel, limited time only, then it's gone. It's like, I don't even watch live. Usually, usually I'll watch the VOD on YouTube like later that day or the next day. Some of it live, but not much, right? Just a little bit, whatever. I watch it during lunch. But whatever you do with online cons, if something's live, there's got to be some interactive reason for people to be there live for it. Even if it's like a discord where all the people watching the channel are interacting and there's some reason to do that interaction, you've got to have some reason. I just find it sad that suddenly, all this amazing anime-con type content has been created and where is it? And who knows about it? It's kind of it's like a sad situation of like, no, why? Yep. So in some other news, that's actually a pretty big deal. A bunch of shitty piracy sites for manga and anime are now gone for good. Kiss anime and kiss manga are dead. So now, like, we're never been against piracy, right? It's like, if you want to watch something and, you know, you can't afford it or that it's only on like one service, you don't want to set up for that service. You're the only thing you want to watch on there. Yeah, there's plenty of legitimate reasons that I will never tell anyone like, don't pirate, right? You're poor and they're charging 20 bucks. So many valid reasons to pirate something. You know, I'm never going to go say, don't pirate. What I don't like is the other side of piracy, which is where, you know, not someone who wants to watch something goes out and watches it by any means necessary, but someone who takes a bunch of stuff, a whole bunch and then sells it to make money, even though they didn't make it, nor do they have rights to sell it, right? So if you go, you know, we're talking like, I don't know, someone goes and buys a bootleg, you know, CD in the 90s. OK, someone has a bunch of bootleg CDs in the 90s and sells them on a street corner. Not OK, right? So we're talking about a situation here where if you go online and you search for various anime or manga titles that you want to watch, right? For the many, many years, including today, you know, Google, the highest results, many, many results in the front page, sometimes even the first result would be illegal sites, which cause a weird third problem that I never even considered until this occurred. It's been occurring for a while now, but the problem of someone doesn't actually realize their pirating now. Of course, they just go to Google, they say, I want to read this manga and the top link, they click it, they can read the manga. It's right there, surrounded by advertisements. It looks legitimate, but actually it's a pirated site that took scantilations or whatever, or just scanned in the actual manga or something like that. Some of these services even just charge money for access, like selling it like it's a full on thing. It's like, oh, no one's going to make a legit one. I'll just make an illegal one. And it's like, all right, though, you know, it's like one thing for Pirate Bay, right? It's another thing for someone to go out and do this. So I've got so many anime weebs who literally thought kiss anime was a legitimate site. Right. So that's a big news is that kiss anime, one of the larger of these pirated, not legit, you know, watch anime sites is gone. Bye bye. For reasons. Yep. Now what is interesting in the in the anime world more so than other areas of piracy? Like I don't see hockey fans making this argument with the pirate streams, like Reddit, NHL streams went down, but I do see this with American anime fans specifically. There's a specific sort of like weird entitlement of I have a right to watch this content no matter what, coupled with a like the official release is broken or wrong in some way. Like they always make an excuse. The first one, the first one, I kind of agree with, right? I believe that if there is art, right, that all humans sort of have a right to, you know, view it. If you have some art, like let's say you have some, you know, painting and you just keep it locked up and you never display and no one can see it, you know, fuck you, we should go and take that painting from you and hang it up in a museum where people can see it. Right. But we do need a way to compensate artists so that art continues to be made. We have not solved that. The current the current system is the correct one. Right. So, you know, this you know, we need massive copyright reform, we need public funding for the arts, etc. Right. The fact that the anime fans will try to make a dual moral argument of one, I have a right to this content and two, my excuse is and they'll make up some shit like they translated the subtitles wrong in the official release. Like if you're going to pirate stuff, well, one, they're usually wrong about that. Like, yeah, all I'm saying is if you're going to sail the high seas, do not pretend you were doing anything noble. Just sail. Like just be a pirate. Don't try to pretend that you're taking this moral stance because Funimation censored the titty stuff in your anime when they actually did no such thing and you're literally making shit up. Right. But also, you know, if you have a legitimate reason for why you're pirating, right, it's like why make up the bullshit reason or tell yourself a bullshit reason? They probably actually believe that reason. That's why they say it. Yeah. Just say the real reason. The real reason is I'm a teenager with no fucking money and I like anime. I want to watch a lot of it and I have a lot of free time and I can't possibly afford to buy legitimately the amount of anime that I want to watch. So I'm going to pirate it. And I'm not going to lie. The only reason I didn't pirate anime in middle school was that there was no way to do so. But I did get fansubs, which is very close to piracy. The only difference is those things were literally not licensed back then. That is a perfectly, that is a perfectly legitimate reason for pirating in my eyes, right? Yeah, they're overcharging and you can't afford it. All right, go ahead and pirate. Yep. On one hand, society's broken and we need to fund this stuff. But two, sites like Kiss anime are basically the bottom of the barrel because they are both extracting money as a rent seeking middleman to enable that piracy and denying money to the creators. So they are skimming off the top. They are just leeches. You if you're going to pirate all this anime, there are other ways to pirate it. And the one thing I'd say is that if you live like in America, go learn how to pirate things if you're going to pirate things. That's right. You know, to learn how to pirate things without giving money or some shady ass website. Yeah. And the only other advice I have on that for move on is don't pirate software. It's all malware 100% of it. You might think you know a way to pirate it. You're wrong. I guarantee there are ways to pirate software and you do not have access to them. Right. Okay. All right. In some other related news, not related semi related, because it's related to weeb anger, a bunch of animation studios in Japan have basically taken a bunch of classic family kids type anime and they put it all on a Japan only YouTube channel just free like Future Boy Conan Blackjack Astro Boy, a bunch of old stuff. See, this is what Japan needs to do more of Japan. It's not yet available in the rest of the world. Only they fucked it up. So so nerds are all seeing that and saying, Oh, well, they fucked it up because that's what would normally happen. However, that's how Japan is your press release saying the plan is to add subtitles in English and Chinese and open this channel up in the future. The channel is brand new. Give us a minute. Jesus Christ. Basically, there have been there have been a few recent legitimate services like retro crush, which you can just go get where you can watch a lot of they've somehow licensed a large, somewhat large number of old titles, right? I guess really cheap licenses. Things no one wants to watch. Things no one wants to pay for and managed to put them up on like a free service. I think there's ads or something, you know, they get their money some other way. And there's actually a lot of good old stuff. It's just stuff that most people don't give a crap about. Yeah. And there's not enough demand to right, like make a formal overseas release. Like you're never going to make money selling this. But no, no, no. It's also an important part of culture and history. And even the article notes, no one pirates this stuff either. Like it's not even really pirated that often. So no, the people who own the content, especially if it was on YouTube, costs you nothing other than the like administration of the YouTube channel. You're not even paying for bandwidth. Yeah. But I mean, we could do a whole show about how, you know, Japan, this huge country with tons of money, right? One of the bigger economies in the world has this huge media empire, right? Of, you know, music, movies, that they're slowly advocating novels, right? And they say that they have this government program cool Japan. They want to, you know, make it popular around the world to get, you know, right? Some soft power around the world and spread their culture. But what do they do is they always keep everything close to the chest, right? Even when they have like bands that tour the world, right? They'll, the band will release a different CD in Japan that has more tracks on it and they won't even put those tracks on Spotify anywhere else, right? And it's like they'll publish a manga and they won't let it go over to any other country translated, right? You ever seen a Japanese, they go on YouTube and they aggressively take everything down, right? Meanwhile, South Korea, a tiny country with a lot less money than Japan, all their TV shows, all their music, everything free on YouTube, free on Spotify, free everywhere in the world. They're just constantly putting out tons and tons of free content everywhere, just spreading it all over the place. And oh, what do you know? K-pop took over the world and J-pop, no one gives a crap, right? So that's the that's the story of Japan's media non-empire. There's I think if Japan did somehow flip the switch and just put everything Japanese translated online for free, like Japanese culture might actually take over like the whole earth. Well, you take a sort of a danger. Look what's happening here. You take a low risk subset of content that's hard to monetize both domestically and internationally and start with that. Like this is actually a very positive step. And I think this is a harbinger of good things to come. But it's still way too little too late even if it's a toe in the water. It's a start. Meanwhile, yeah, sure. Also because despite all of this, like anime is having this like fandom and monetization renaissance in America right now. Like people are stuck at home right now. Yeah, they got time to watch anime. However, the internet shouting man who like to talk about anime, like the people who are not going to listen to a show like this to learn about anime, their narrative on this like the way a lot of people reacted to this news was really weird. And I think it's the same kind of people who tried to justify their use of kiss anime. They basically tried to frame this as and this was a big enough argument where I saw like real media people like debunking it that this was Japan striking back at Funimation and crunchy roll for censoring anime and trying to push anime towards a taste because the people are making the argument crap about that. The people love censoring stuff for the West. You know what it is? I don't even say please censor this for the West. I don't want you to see crazy Japan. The weaves seem to think that, you know, they know that Tim Apple like makes every decision for Apple. So they seem to think that Mr. Japan is personally mad that their titty and there's a mission by country controls everything. So because their titty anime was taken off a crunchy roll, they think and they made up this narrative that Japan is trying to bypass crunchy roll to get to the world with their titty anime, which is just the thing that happens, you know, everywhere, right? Is people see a thing happen, right? And they come into whatever narrative they've already set forth in their head. They come up with whatever explanation matches their existing beliefs. They tie it in and then they say it as because it makes so much sense to them. They say it as if it was true and then other people believe it as if it was true because people start to spread it and then suddenly that's it's a rumor. Right. And well, case in point, half the apocryphal stories from anime in like the nineties and early 2000s came from someone who's given a panel at some kind that wasn't recorded. They made some shit up that sounded plausible. Someone saw that panel. They then years later do their own panel and they reference what they saw in that first panel. And now you've got people literally making shit up about the anime industry. Well, I mean about everything, right? And I think that the solution to this is you don't see it in the games industry as much because a lot more of the pain in the games industry, not as much. I think because the bigger game cons more of their content was recorded earlier. So there was like people had less room to make shit up. And there were fewer fans doing panels without some sort of credential check or it could just be that you're paying attention to the English games industry in English. So people it's hard to make stuff up when the people who, you know, yeah, there's a lot more people. But like right American anime fandom, English speaking anime fans all went to those conventions. So everything that sounded plausible was taken as truth even in the wider industry discourse. Yeah, I just think about, you know, I'm not even talking about like within nerdy industries and talking just about in general discourse of anything, right? You know, rumors come to be when the original source of the information doesn't reveal all of the surrounding details, right? If you come out with something and say, oh yeah, we're delaying this product, right? It must be a conspiracy. Well, it's like, well, people start to think, why are they delaying it? What was what happened? Let's you know, right? So if I'm delaying a product, I should say I'm delaying this product because it every here's every single detail. I ran out of money and I need to find another investor to get this much because I had to let this person go and that person had the skills to get us through this next phase, which isn't done yet, right? Tell everything. Yeah, I don't think that works to keep Scott as a product manager. I found that that doesn't work because if you tell everything, so a significant subset of people will assume you are lying or covering something up anyway. That's their problem. Case in point, this animation, this article we're talking about, they said in their press release, we're making English subtitles like that's that's in the plan. Yet people were still just lying about it online and saying that this is just another example of Japan being closed. Because people only read the headline. Yeah, exactly. Whoever wrote the article about the press release probably didn't, you know, anyway, I frame it correctly. I feel like even if Mr. Japan said out loud like him and Tim Apple got together on a stage and they were like, look, this is not number one secret keeper. Yeah, the secret keeper. He doesn't tell you anything. Think about this, though. Imagine if Apple said, oh, iOS 14 is delayed because of X. I feel like half the people who care about Apple News would immediately assume that because they revealed more information than usual that they were hiding something. Well, they could just that's the problem is that they've been keeping secrets for so long. It's like a reverse wolf cry. Right. Yeah, you have to never keep secrets to begin with. Build trust by keeping secrets all the time. You don't have trust. So now if you suddenly turn right and start being honest, you know, you got problems. You got to be honest and completely open from the get go to have your correct reputation. All right. So anyway, last and least, you want to talk about this Lady Monsimoto thing. Right. So they're publishing this book. It's $45. So I do not blame anyone who doesn't want to buy this book. It's only for extreme nerds. But basically, I guess if you do in research, yeah, in Japan, right, people, I mean, everywhere in the world, not just in Japan, but people write essays about things. It's a thing people do. Right. You know, write essays on stuff, book reports, you know, reviews of books and newspapers, all kinds of stuff. Right. But it's like when a topic is very local, right? You know, you're only going to find, you know, people expounding and deeply investigating something that's local to them. Right. So if you wanted to learn about a lot about, I don't know, some Belgian rock band, right? You're probably if they're super popular in Belgium, I bet you'd find a lot of articles and deep information about their history and who they were and in Belgium and a Belgian library. If you could read, you know, right? You could read their material. We can find out a ton of information on them. French French or Flemish. Any. The point is if you're in the U.S., you've discovered that band. You go to the Wikipedia page. You're lucky if it's got one paragraph. You're lucky if any of your music's on Spotify. Right. You just it's hard to learn about them. Right. I remember as a young anime fan, I found out about two makes. I was like, what is two makes? I couldn't find anything in English. Yep. So Japan, where it has this media that keeps everything close to the chest. People want to find out about it. You know, Leiji Matsumoto is someone that has a lot of fans around the world, especially in Italy. He's got a ton of fans in Italy. And, you know, if you want to learn about Leiji Matsumoto, there's actually tons of material people have written about him and his works in Japan and Japanese. Right. It's just not really available. No, it's republishing that in English because who cares? Yeah. It is not a lot of English people in it, you know, who speak English or other non Japanese languages. They care to watch Leiji Matsumoto's anime. Right. But do they really care to read essays about Leiji Matsumoto? Probably not. So when someone translates or gathers and translates a pile of essays about Leiji Matsumoto in a book, that book costs forty five dollars. It doesn't say how many pages it is, but it has that information is not actually revealed yet. But it has 60 photos in it. Yep. So Helen McCarthy and Darren John Ashmore. Right. I think they have compiled and translated a whole mess of Leiji Matsumoto essays. You can learn everything there is to know previously unexplored biographical and bibliographic detail, short of actually meeting and knowing the person himself, you know, or being the person himself, like, you know, a book of essays is about as close as a complete stranger is going to get to knowing someone and what they're all about. So this book's coming. If you got forty five dollars and you really big Matsumoto fan, you buy it or if you're if you're putting together like a panel for an online anime con on Leiji Matsumoto, this would be some really good source material. Yeah. But I have a feeling that the author should probably be doing that panel, not you, a reader of the book. Well, I mean, your panel, if you're citing a book heavily, should cite at least multiple books and have a narrative based on the citations across those books. I feel like there will be people who will buy this book and do a panel based solely on this book, though. But what it does mean, though, is that don't go read this book and just turn the book into a panel. Right. What you should do is realize that once this book comes out, there are those people who are going to be forty five dollars and read it, right. And the authors themselves are going to you're going to be able to get some of that learning without buying and reading the book yourself, because people are going to be reading it and then repeating what they have read, right. And all their relevant. Well, like most of the history books I read will cite primary sources, but I don't usually go back and read all of those primary sources. Of course not. So yeah, books coming out. So there's going to be a lot of Leji Matsumoto in for biographical information available in English. Sometimes soon ish ish. There you go. All right. Go from there to things the day. But anyway, things of the day. So you probably saw with the last Star Wars movie that there was a funny little animation of like what Palpatine was up to during the last movie. You didn't see that? It's just like he pops out of the it because it basically starts at the end when Vader throws it, you know, spoilers, I guess Vader throws him out of the ship and he goes just like flying off into space through that shoot or whatever. And it shows like how do you end up in that chair and Yoda shows up and just like this cute funny thing. That channel is the same channel that made Big Top Burger and that has made a ton of short, desperately funny animations. So what I'm linking to now, but I recommend you watch this whole channel is titled Frazier and Niles Become Demon Lords. It's just a short animated clip of Frazier Crane and Niles Crane from the show Frazier. How many listeners know what that is? You would be weirdly surprised how well known Frazier is. Like, I know it exists. I would see beginnings or ends of Frazier episodes when I was watching television programs. But I have not bought what it did not look like anything I ever wanted to watch. You would not have liked Frazier. You would not have watched that show. However, it is popular among like a lot of web comics people like people our age who ended up making web comics and got famous. They all are weirdly like have weird encyclopedic memory of Frazier for reasons I don't actually seems like a super white people show. Oh, God, yes. The show is about a radio, a pop psychologist, radio star and his brother in Seattle. OK, like that is what the show is about. And they become demon lords. So in this animation, they become demon lords. But this whole channel is just delightful. And I recommend you watch every video on this channel. So what do you got? Right. So I feel like thundercats are making a move lately. I still have to go watch that thundercats go show that came out. I got to figure out where it's where I want to watch it, too, because everyone said it's just Teen Titans go. But for thundercats, which you want to sell something to me, that is exactly what I want. I want the Teen Titans go version of every popular media and the more it angers people who like that original media, the better. But this video got posted on YouTube like just a few days ago, not very recently. And it's the thundercats opening, except the exact same. It's just not a parody or anything. It's the exact same thundercats opening as the original only computer generated graphics instead of hand drawn. Right. So somebody basically just CG the opening instead of, you know, right? And, you know, it's not like the most impressive you've ever seen. But it's like, oh, all right, pretty good. Pretty good job. Right. What makes this a thing of the day is that this was made not by like some famous CG animator person, not like some Pixar person in their spare time. Obviously, if it was, it would look way, way better than it does. Well, if you're in this business, I thought I'd have a go at learning how to use 3D animation software. So I thought I'd go have a go at learning to use 3D animation software. And you didn't do Pixar level, but look at that. Right. Look at that. So to think of the day is not. And it's got hundreds of thousands of views, by the way, more than any Geek Nights episode, right? So or Geek Nights anything for that matter. So yeah, the Geek Nights YouTube channel has like two millionish views, I want to say. No, does any single video on the Geek Nights YouTube channel have as many views as a couple hundred thousand is like the Max and those are not Geek Nights episodes. Those are that's dumb shit I made, like the Simpsons to handle the Brexit or like or goons. This thing today, the point of this thing of the day is obviously if you want to have a go at learning something new, right? Just pick a project, finish it. It could even just be something like, oh, yeah, remake the Thundercats opener in CG and just upload it. Yeah, just do it. And look at that. You know, don't be like, oh, my crap is bad. I'm not going to upload it. This this person, you know, if I was this person, I'd look at it. I'd be looking at what I output and it'd be like, this is this is back in up on this. Look how crappy this is. Right. But, you know, look what happens. So, you know, and they've never seen you animated anything before. Right. They just learned from nothing. Just like I learned cameras from nothing. Yep. It's good stuff. So yeah, met a moment, I guess, doing Geek Nights from home. We're a little bit busy trying to get panels uploaded, but shouldn't disrupt us too much. So look for us at the Crunchyroll Expo and look for us at the Penny Arcade Expo online with Judge Anime by its cover. And where is the finish line? Any other meta things? If you really the book club book is still technically, I can't even remember the tale of Genji. We'll get to it for the novel to ever be written in human history. And we only stop reading it because we're stuck at home and don't have any like time to read like we normally would. I had a feeling. I had this feeling in my gut like must read fantasy novel, right? Or sci-fi novel because it's summer and it's like, but there was no beach to go to to read one. And I haven't read one. Actually, I should check. I hope I knew our Scott Becker book didn't come out because I definitely don't. It's not like I'm going to read anything right now. Well, maybe who knows? So yeah, just type the word Geek Nights into Google and you'll find our stuff. Come to the forum. But more importantly, find somewhere in the forum. I'll link to our discord, the official unofficial. But yeah, it's official Geek Nights discord because it's hopping more and more. We've been playing train games with the listener. So you could join us and play some weird train games and stuff. I will give you a personal train game teaching lessons. Scott really trained the listener in pop up and how to play 18XX 1846. And then we played it together, the three of us. And it was a good time. Yeah. Yeah. So come on down to give you if you have never if this is somehow the first Geek Nights thing you've ever seen, you don't know who the hell we are. Just Google for Geek Nights and find us. We're like, you know, a lot of stuff. But the only thing that won't show up that much is our website because we're working on it. Don't worry. I'm working slowly. Yeah, bit by bit. If you know somebody who is really good at HTML, CSS, JavaScript and wants to work on the Geek Nights website, contact me. Yeah, we're paying someone. If you know, yeah, we're paying money for this, obviously. Good money. So if you know someone or are someone, right, contact me or refer them to me and we'll we'll get talking. Yep. And if you want us to appear at a panel or something like if there's a convention and you want us to like be at that convention online doing panels, contact me. And I will sort out those details. Also, if you think you're the kind of person who should be a guest on Geek Nights because you made a game or an anime or something like we're working out. We got a pipeline set up. We're going to do some interviews soon with some people. But email me. I'll take care of that. Maybe we'll make it happen. So yeah, but not, you know, people who are just shamelessly shilling their stuff, right? We're not interested, right? We're interested in like actual human beings. Yeah. Yeah. We get a lot of those requests that you get random email like so and so that doesn't even know who you are. Wrote a book and sent an email to every podcast in the whole world trying to appear on podcasts. It's like, no, so and so who saw you at a convention once is working on a video game. It's like, yes, OK, let's do it. So yeah, Scott, I've been watching and reading a lot of different manga and comics and animation lately. So we figured we each talk about something we've read or watched recently. And I have to avoid talking about Kipo because I've talked about it in the opening part of the show like four or five times and it's great. But I think I'll have to remember talking about it even one time. OK, we wow. You should watch it. It's actually pretty good. It's short, too. There's two pretty short seasons. It's just on Netflix. It's a pretty good show. It could theoretically be in the Giveyate universe that actually tracks pretty well. Oh, all right. So which way are we going to talk about Giveyate first? Or give you out or give you it because it's so in the not yet published judge anime by its cover panel. This was an upcoming anime. So we judged it. So if you want to hear what we thought it was going to be like, check us out at the country roll expo. But based on the images that we saw to paraphrase what we said, it looks like a bunch of characters who are very anime in a fist of the North Star looking world fighting demons together. Well, that's not immediately bad. Yeah. And I figure like the way we looked at the show, the worst case scenario is it is just a shown in fighting show, meaning it'll be four episodes of good stuff. And that'll be shown in fighting till the end. So I actually watched the first two episodes of the show. And you know what? It's all right. It is. But it took a twist. I'm going to spoil something. It is more like Ghassaraki than I expected. Oh, that's a positive for me, but probably negative for everyone else in the world. Right. I feel like you, me and our friend, Peter, the only people on earth who watched Ghassaraki to the end and thought, you know what? I like that. Should I think? Oh, yeah. But I don't think Alex liked it as much as we did. I don't remember. I don't know. I don't know if anyone liked it, except us, our little group. All I remember is that that show is 24 episodes of build up for a payoff that, for some reason, hit with us, but did not hit with anyone else on earth. But there was a moment in that show. I guess spoilers because who's watched Ghassaraki? None of you are going to watch Ghassaraki if you haven't already watched Ghassaraki. Ghassaraki just goes and goes and goes. And then there's an episode like episode 13, where the opener is different. And it's just a different fucking show. That happens in the middle of the first episode of Gibi Ate or Gibi Ate. So Gibi Ate starts with a girl and she's like in an apartment in a Mad Max world. And she's got a camcorder. It's funny because you see the camcorder and it says it's a like 16K resolution camcorder, like clearly near future style. And cool. It's like the year 2030 something. And she's like, I'm making this video. I don't know if anyone will ever see it, but I just want people to know that I was here and that we tried. And you get this story of like there was a virus that appeared and it turns the Gibi Ur virus and it turns people into Gibi Ates, which are basically zombie monsters, like giant animal monster that attacks people and that caused an apocalypse and destroyed the world and there's humans left over trying to find a cure for this disease. Like that's the plot. Like five minutes in, the show then cuts to the year 1600, like Tokugawa and these samurai. And there's these two samurai on a boat. And one of them's like, oh, I know who you are. And the other one's like, oh, yeah, I know who you are too. And the first one's like, so why did you get exiled? And then like he tells his story. And the other one's like, oh, yeah, so I got exiled because of when he tells his story. So we've got a ninja and a samurai on a boat in like 1600, leaving Edo because they have both been exiled for reasons. And there's a whole like backstory and plot there. And that's where the show starts. But basically those two characters actually kind of makes me want to watch it. So that did make me want to watch it. And I do kind of want to watch more. However, I looked online just to get a link for this episode because there's like seven episodes of the show out so far. And the show has mostly one star reviews and people seem to absolutely hate it. All right. Like the reviews are resoundingly bad on every website that I've gone to. And the crazy part is they're even like, the reviews are all like one star. Like the majority of the reviews everywhere for this anime are one star. But reviews either gonna be one star, five star, right? Maybe sometimes four star. Two and three basically don't get used. It's been so here. Very often. On Crunchyroll. Two is almost never used. On Crunchyroll. Six, five, seven, fours, nine, three's, 13, two's, 34 ones. On my anime list, there's like 5,000 reviews. It's the same distribution. Almost all ones. But the show's not that bad. Like the show's not great. Like maybe in the later episodes, like the show Peter's Outer Gets Barring or something, but this is not a one star anime for the love of God. This show feels so anime. It feels like Fushigi Yu-Gi or like whatever the show's like, it feels like the show that would be the one everyone's cosplaying as and popular at an Otacon where the nerds like us are like, oh, that show's overrated. I'm not that interested in that show. Like it feels like that kind of show. I can't understand why people hate this show so much. They mostly say it's boring, so it might actually be good. Oh, maybe. You did say it was Ghazaraki-esque. Yep. But yeah, so based on what I have seen, I'm actually gonna keep watching the show. Like it's, I'm intrigued by the premise a little bit and I wanna see why we have these samurai from 1600 in the year 2038 fighting of disease that causes humans to turn into monsters. And I imagine that you will, the samurai's will be somehow near the origin of the disease, right? Yeah. And you'll see it's the diseases effect all throughout history. And that way, setting up a story like that allows you to create new content at any point in history of like, oh, here's Giviates in the 1800s. Here's Giviates in the 2030, right? It's like, you have a huge span of time. You can just keep make up some characters in a different setting and throw in the Giviates and you're good to go. I mean, Madoka Magica did that in a certain scene near the end where we saw a series of vignettes from different magical girls throughout history. Yeah, that's true. So yeah, the show seems like, I feel like the show's gonna end up being like a three star okay show. And I really don't understand the weird vitriol in the reviews of the show because I have seen way worse shows that have higher ratings than this. The only thing I could think is since you've only seen two episodes, something could be coming up in an episode up ahead that you will be like, oh God, one star. Yep, it seems though like most of the complaints are that it's boring or people don't like the CG of the monsters because they look weird. That seems to be like the only things people are actually saying about the show. It's boring and I don't like the way the monsters look. Seriously, should I talk about Devilman now? Yeah, let's talk about the Devilman. All right, so who published this here? All right, Seven Seas. So Seven Seas published these two volumes, the classic collection, Devilman by GonaGuy. So it's two big ass books collecting literally all of the original GonaGuy Devilman manga, right? It's just two books. That's it. So if you perhaps watch the amazing excellent anime Devilman Cry Baby, which we did talk about on this show, I think. Pretty sure we did. Yes, yeah. You can go and read the original. I don't think we finished it when we talked about it, but we did talk about it. Okay, I finished it. You can go back and read the original Devilman manga now in English, no problem. So I read the whole frickin' thing. And first of all, it was a lot more similar to I was under the impression watching Devilman Cry Baby that it was quite a large departure from the original Devilman, right? With only like the base, you know, sort of intact. No, the original Devilman is much more in line with Devilman Cry Baby than I had any idea. Interesting. That actually makes me want to read this manga. It should. Something else, you know, it's only, even though it's big books, there's only two volumes of this. So there's actually a second manga called New Shin Devilman, New Devilman, right? And in that separate manga that is not part of the original Devilman series, Devilman goes on like adventures throughout history to fight demons in various places. So it's like go to Rome and fight demons or whatever, right? And normally, you know, I guess originally that was published separately, but here they've been sort of combined and mixed together a little bit. The chapters, it's like you're reading and you're going through the story and suddenly it's like Devilman in Rome. And it's like, what's going on here? And then the next chapter goes back to the plot again and you're like, huh, what's up with that? Why was that random chapter in here? But I researched it's yet, yeah, when they published these two giant volumes, they interspersed Shin Devilman chapters in it. So that's a thing. And that is making these books fatter, right? So the parts of these books, the parts of these books that are just regular Devilman is still most of it, but not all of it, right? So the original Devilman manga is not long. It's not very long and it contains basically almost, pretty that whole story you saw in Shin Devilman. If you haven't seen Shin Devilman, watch it or read this first. I don't think it matters too much. Contains the whole Devilman storyline. It's such few chapters and that lets you know the pace of Devilman is fast. It is a fast story, right? It blitzes through, right? If there's like a fight, it's like it can, it's self-contained in one chapter, Devilman beats some evil demon, boom. So it's the literal opposite of one piece or Kaiji. Oh yeah, Devilman just blitzes right through the enemies. He's just charging towards the, it's like, it's like he's in a rush to get to the end, right? And, you know, because it's so short, it's constantly referenced, you know, the whole story like, you know, stays with you the whole time, right? You're not like, you know, we're reading one piece. You'll be like, you know, the events of the beginning of one piece, right? And like sort of starts to like not be as relevant when you're 100 volumes in, right? But there's like four pieces now. Right, throughout the whole story of Devilman, every time they add something new, all the previous things like continue to be carried along right up to the end, right? So it's a very well constructed story in that like every single thing they add is there's no like wasted, even though it's going fast, nothing is wasted or extraneous or unnecessary, right? It's like every step in the plot has meaning and relevance and continues to have meaning and relevance right up to the finale. Of course, if you don't know, Devilman is a pretty extremely and not safe for life. Yeah, it's not like Apocalypse Zero level. But it's but it's close. So on the one hand, visually, right? It's it's not visually disturbing. Oh, even though there is lots of gore and violence and sexy, gory, sexy, gory violence, right? It's like I don't get nauseous looking at the illustrations of Devilman. They're actually pretty awesome. True, because Apocalypse Zero is gross in that way, too. Right. But what is being depicted is horrifying often, frequently. But I think in a way, obviously, it's going to guy, right? That's what going to guy is all about. But at the same, you know, sex and violence. But at the same time, I think it serves the story because it's about like literal demons, right? And it's like it's hellish, literally hellish. And it's like, yeah, that's the kind of shit that's going on in hell. Right. Crazy, you know, like an extension family, like when the when the one character goes to hell for a little while. And hell is hellish. Hell sucks. Yeah. So it's, you know, this is a hell on earth scenario here. Right. So I don't think it's in a it's not inappropriate sex and violence. It's just be aware that it's there. Don't read it if you don't want to see that. Don't have children read Devilman. And I guess I don't know how old children were supposed to be reading Devilman in Japan. Yeah. Yeah, that's a thing. But yeah, it is, you know, if you can get past the extreme sex and violence, also, you know, sexism and things. It's actually a pretty compelling story. You can see that same most of that same compelling story in Devilman Cry Baby. And I guess this is the original Devilman anime as well. I assume also has the same story. I haven't watched that. Um, but the only thing that really stood out to me is kind of meh, is that there's a storyline towards the end where Devilman goes around the earth collecting the other Devilman and creating like a fighting force of Devilman to fight the demons. Right. Because before then he's all on his own. Right. And that was, you know, the pace of the thing is so fast that felt sort of like a rushed insert thing. It wasn't meaningless or like wrong. It just felt like it was like the manga was about to end, you know, and rather than end it, they came up with this idea of a way to extend it a little bit more, right? And then they threw that in there and then they ended it. So that was because it's like they add a bunch of characters that get barely any screen time, right? And it's like it's kind of a little bit awkward in there. But yeah, if you don't know, just summarize the story pretty quickly. There's a kid and his friend and his friend is basically like, hey, let me show you something cool. He wanted to see a dead body. Yeah, pretty much. He wanted to see a weird mess. Basically, that's the start of the story, right? Hey, kid, you want to see this cool thing? And then he's possessed by not just demons, but like the most ridiculous, powerful demon there is, right? And he finds out that like, yeah, actually, that there's demons on earth and they're trying to come back and get rid of all the people. But because you've been possessed by a demon, you can fight back against them with their own, you know, fight fire with fire. You know, that's very similar to the plot of Evangelion. Yeah. So yeah, I guess in some ways, yes, but in some ways, no. Yeah. Well, I guess if you haven't seen Evangelion somehow, what are the avers made of? Yeah, but sure, double men is a classic of Gona guy, you know, popular, you know, super important manga anime for the history of anime. If you've never experienced any Gona guy, this might be the one to experience. I'd say like you can go from messenger Z to get a Gona guy experience, but you won't understand the sexy violence of of going to do that, right? Not that there's none in messenger, but, you know, this is really this is really the like, I think the core of who the Gona guy is, right, is this manga. So check it out or not. And it's only two volumes. You can probably get them at the library, return them. And I just search for it on Amazon and Amazon itself is sold out. You can only buy used. OK, the hardcover is a softcover version. I have I have two hardcover volumes. I do not believe they are there for sale for like 50 bucks each used on Amazon. Well, can't have mine. Yeah, they're mine. All right. So that's that's devil man. Is he man or devil? All right. I think that's solid show. OK, let me.