After Tax Trauma

Hey guys, it's time for another episode of Space Welders. Episode 85, recorded Friday, 7th of July, 2017. After Tax Trauma. With your hosts, Mike Wise and Steve Rogers.

Hey Steve, how was your ear-ifice, ere-ifice, what did you say? Ear-ifice. Spectacular. Spectacular stress.

It's like, it's the end of year party for accountants. It is. Except they can't party because they've got too much work to do. It was the night before the end of financial year, where everyone was rushing to get their claim.

Maybe that's what Santa does in his off period, he actually becomes a tax accountant. He probably does. You could, with all those elves, that kind of offshoring, inshoring slave labour, you could probably, you know, dedicate them to the worthy cause of CPA-style accounting, and you know, get all of your stuff in. No, no, no.

You just hire them as interns, and then you don't have to pay them. Something interesting happens. Like when you get someone in your restaurant now, and you don't have to pay them. That's true.

What happens around this time of the year is developers panic, and what do we panic about? We're not really panicking about getting our receipts done and stuff like that, even though we're probably contractors and looking at how many times we've been contracting for companies, and whether it's inside and outside the permissive laws. Is it how I can justify writing off my new computer for tax? It could be.

Say that I use it for work. I could buy that Titan 10 and Titan X. I need it for work, all right. I need it for work.

It makes the Windows boot. Dotnet development needs a lot of GPU power? And just explaining to the accountant, like, why have you got this enormous, why do you need two of them? Why is there less additional RAM?

Because it's twice as fast, clearly. Why do you need a licence of Visual Studio, or ReSharper, or any of these things? Oh, I just get the company to pay for those. Because that's how I develop stuff.

But yeah, so the other thing that you're also worrying about as a developer right about now, if you're in a startup or if you're doing something that's innovative, that's the R&D tax incentive scheme. It's been around since, jeez, 2012, 2011, 2012, it was announced, and I think there were a couple of major accounting companies in Australia who were sort of sprouting and talking about it. But right now, just about every company is trying to claim some kind of incentive on it. So I've got a long history and personal history with doing R&D returns, and this will be my seventh, I think, in a row of doing something with innovation, because, you know, I love to innovate.

Just mooching off the taxpayer dime, are you, Mike? Sydney MoneyHero ran a story, July 3rd, millions rewarded from government R&D scheme. So essentially, the whole purpose, if you're outside of the country and you don't know what it's about, if you're in Canada, hello to you. We'll talk about Canada in a moment, Canadia.

But they have R&D tax incentives. I think most Commonwealth countries have probably assumed some similar type of scheme for giving money back towards innovation. But anyway, the whole idea is that, obviously, if you're in a business, part of what you're doing in order to do business is to create some kind of unique or novel way of approaching the market. And that gives you an advantage in your market, obviously, and that you need to spend money to go and do that.

But if you're spending money, that's more or less like as if you're in a transport company and you spend it on trucks, then part of that is a deductible element, because you needed to do that as a part of your business, and there's no reason why we're stinging you for tax on that, says the government. So therefore, they have tax credits, which you can claim against innovation, which is sort of more in the tertiary industries where intellectual property or the acquirement or the development of it or the furtherment of it costs money. Well, the whole point is to encourage research and innovation in the private sector as opposed to just being restrained to academic institutions and research organizations like CSIRO and other companies like that. Not that CSIRO has any money anymore to do research, but it's to try and encourage the private sector to do that.

People are going to probably do it anyway, because if you can get something innovative in your industry, then you've got a competitive advantage. But it will then eventually disseminate out into the industry at large, unless you patent it and then sue people. Yeah, well, the idea is that obviously you have to, as you're spending money on your development activity, and it's a genuine... So the whole idea is that you have to create like a hypothesis, a theory, and then build an experiment and then collect all of the results and then come to some conclusion, emit or write up the conclusion, and then talk about the flow on effect of it.

And you can do that in like a page or two. And generally, these experiments that you create are targeting ideas that have some kind of commercial impact to your business. I remember back when I started one of my companies back in 20... No, it was...

Well, I started in 20... There was one in 2012 when I was in Queensland. They had this concept called the Smart State. And what they were doing is...

Yeah, no. Queensland, the Sunshine State, the Smart State. Pissing it down right now. It turned out to be funding which was being given to universities, exactly that.

And there was no real scheme as such to have small startups or people who were developing their own IP in the course of developing their business or creating a startup back in the day. So, yeah, I went through the process of investigating all of that. And because I'm a serial inventor of stuff, we worked out, well, what can I do if I'm going to spend my own money and be kind of dead in the water while I'm trying to produce IP for later execution in a business? And so the R&D incentive scheme came along.

But unfortunately, just recently, there's been a lot of rorting. So obviously, folks out there have been trying to claim something like, you know, maybe they've got like this amazing iPhone application and it's going to change the world. It's game changing. What are some of the other words?

It's revolutionary, evolutionary, something, something, something. So, yeah, right now, they're trying to crack down on it. However, there was a famous sports star, Steve, Ricky Nixon, and he got an offset grant to the tune of $153,000 plus some change. And I'm pretty much, I'd love to see the application for that one.

Poor things. Well, aerodynamic football. Well, he had other businesses. In the 2014-15 year, he was working on an online sports agency course.

So I guess it's something to do with that, how innovative that is. So it's online. It was some kind of commerce thing on the online sphere. Sure, let's go with that.

Right. And so anyway, he basically went bankrupt and so on. But basically, it does brings to light right now for IT people where if you're in a business or a small business or you've got folks who are asking you about how the R&D grant actually works. Now, I'm going to give a tip.

We'll have a couple of guys on to interview on the podcast a couple of weeks once we're done. And I did a bit of searching around and we're in the process of going through our latest R&D. No surprise. So Gabe from GitTime has got a great startup in Canada at the moment, and he's been selling it around.

He was or is a former R&D specialist with a programming habit, I presume. But what he's done is he's got a brilliant startup. Now, this is interesting. For us in software development, we use source control to check things out, commit processes, that sort of thing.

And we also do timesheets and we do project plans and we work in JIRA and we work in Confluence and stuff. Out of all of that, there's a lot of data that you emit about the work that you put into specific R&D activity. Now, you've got to separate it as well. There's supported activity and then there's the direct R&D activity itself.

So the process of actually coming up with the innovation and exploring the hypothesis and going through the conclusion. And so, yeah, we'll get those guys on to talk about their fabulous product. But what it does is that you can hook it up to your Git source control. And what Git will do is, because you've got a check-in that works like a time card, and because you've got files you sort of push to generate the content, you've had to have worked or spent time on the content.

And so as you push into the source control system, it tracks your time. And what it does is magically, behind the scenes, creates trailing timesheets for you, and then you can allocate to particular R&D activity even if you've got a number of projects on the go. It's a great little startup. So it's Git time.

I'll put some links and then we'll try and get Gabe and his business partner on in a couple of episodes to talk about R&D. But just it's hitting the news at the moment because there's a lot of rorting going on, Steve. That's not too unsurprising in our little world. Well, it's a government scheme that allows you to claim tax benefits.

It's going to be rorted. It's going to be rorted. That's the law of government processes. Someone out there is going to work out how to get around and get more money out of it than they should.

Sort of Jurassic Park nature finds a way. It's just what happens. That's just what happens. Speaking of what happens, a little follow-up.

So Apple have just been releasing more and more of their kits from WWDC. I'll put a link in the description and one that really stood out and shows the promise of what's going on. It's not actually the content of what's going on, but how it was written. And it's actually visible on GitHub is AR Tetris.

So ARKit, if you can remember from previous conversation. That's good because I was getting bored with Tetris. I just thought it needed something to spice it up. You walk past this like, oh my God, it's Tetris.

So if you see someone walking into a toilet wearing a HoloLens, you know what they're going to be doing. It's a little bit less inconspicuous than playing on your phone. Yeah, that's true. So there's ARKit.

You could play it like projected against the door. It's a great demonstration of how stable the technology is. Maybe you could have multiplayer with the guy in the stall next to you. That's true.

Yeah. So they've got a shed load of new controllers and other bits and pieces that make it happen. But they literally have given this dude who's developed it, who goes by the name of YSTRT. I don't know.

This is the internet. That's how it works. So yeah, he's got a brilliant little AR demo and you can kind of get a feel for what it's going to do. But he talks about the creation process, how the scene is created, how the engine works.

So apart from the game, which is just Tetris, but it does actually show you real working examples using that tech and how quick and easy it is. And there's been a flood of these. So people are really running to try and create a worthy AR example, Steve. So this is not just, where are the bloody demos?

This is like real working. It's here are the demos, but I maintain, do something with it. What are we going to do with AR? You're going to be walking in.

Well, that's the question. Down to the strip club? You got Tetris? Sorry, I got Tetris.

AR Strip Club. AR Strip Club. Oh, I don't know. It's just...

That's in the Spaceship Expo. It looks good, but you need to be able to do something with it. To change the world, you need to do something with it. When Apple first brought out the iPhone, they didn't bring out tech demos.

They brought out a goddamn product. But Apple's predicting by 2021, there's going to be like 100 million of these units, like VRAR units of some description, on the streets. But not doing anything. I don't know.

But every revolutionary thing so far hasn't had these little crappy tech demos. Or maybe they have, but with the rise of GitHub and open sourcing, you're now seeing the incremental advances and then you get the product that actually hits it. Whereas previously, all of these kind of demos would have been internal to a company like Microsoft or Apple or whatever. And then they would have released the consumer-ready product.

But you're now seeing, you're kind of peeking behind the curtain of these kind of innovative developments and seeing the amount of work that goes into it. And that there isn't really these huge, great leaps forward. They're very small incremental changes, which can seem frustrating that nothing's actually happening. But with the sum of what's in the market, it is progressing.

And then sooner or later, someone will release a product and the product may not add much to the previous demo. But if you compare it to the beginning, it's an enormous leap. And if you imagine that you didn't see any of that stuff in the middle, then it would seem like a huge leap forward. But due to the nature of development these days, which is generally open source to some degree, you're seeing each of these inner things.

And it means that it doesn't seem like things are progressing when actually they are. But it's slow, like any kind of innovation, it takes time. Something that's innovating really quickly is quantum entanglement. Just recently, Chinese have put up a satellite that works better.

Well, it was, and then we tried to measure it and we lost it all. Yeah, bugger. Bugger. But they've now achieved a new distance record.

So we're getting better and better at quantum entanglement. And D-Wave, we were looking at D-Wave because they actually have a commercial quantum computer. I didn't realize, so this was a video that Linus from Linus Tech Tips did where they're in Vancouver or they're in British Columbia anyway. And he did a tour of their facility.

I didn't realize that quantum computers were actually being used. Well, there's one in Melbourne that's researched, but this is actually a physical thing. I mean, this is betraying my anger for just do something with it when I say, do something with it. We've done it, Steve.

They have. But it's a company called D-Wave, I think you're saying we're one of the only, probably certainly in Canada or North America, commercial quantum computing providers where they will provide you compute time on quantum computers. Generally, the customers they have are places like NASA, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, places like that, that need that level of requirement for their computes. And it's very expensive.

I couldn't find a price on their website. They didn't have an order form, Mike. I was wanting to go through the order form, customize it a little bit. But it was a very impressive video.

And their server rack is that they're almost like self-contained little server racks where the front end of the rack is basic networking. I say basic networking, but it was like 50 gigabit Ethernet or something or 100 gigabit Ethernet, something stupid and general GPU processing. And then the whole rest of it was cryo cooling for the actual chip itself, which got down to something like 0.002 Kelvin or essentially absolute zero, just a little teeny bit above it for their 2000 qubit processes, a qubit being the quantum bit, which is in the most basic terms, where a normal CPU is a zero or one, a qubit is both at the same time. That's the most simplistic explanation of a quantum computer ever.

Guys, I'll include, there's actually... We have talked about it in a previous episode, so go back and check out our library at www.spacewilders.com where you'll find the show notes for this and... Oh no, that's at the end. That's at the end, Steve.

But there is an actual... One of the YouTube channels that I gorge on on a weekly basis is Infinite. So Space Time from PBS, they've got a sort of a companion maths channel called Infinite. And Infinite has, and I'll have some links to it, which is how to break cryptography and then hacking at quantum speed.

So the presenter there, she does a really good job of explaining how quantum computing can impact processing and how would you do that. I think buying time on a quantum computer would be pretty funny, like you've already done it. Oh, wait, what? I didn't even buy it, but I knew you were coming.

Well, that's what Linus was saying, is that it doesn't calculate an answer, it calculates every possible answer. And then I guess you collapse it down to the most optimum one or something. Well, cryptography... It's beyond me.

Yeah, cryptography is about really large numbers. But anyway... I don't even think it's cryptography. This is neural networking and things like that.

This explanation is explaining from a cryptography point of view. So if you were to wanting to break... Quantum computing solves the P equals MP problem. Yeah, something like that.

That's the idea. Yeah, so it's an excellent... Probably wrong, but who knows. It's an excellent resource.

Speaking of video... If you work with quantum computers, let us know. Come on the show. Come on the show and explain us, dumbasses.

So the other... We saw a really good... Speaking of videos, Steve, this week we... What's the ping like on a quantum computer?

Will I own it COD? Will I have won the match before I start the match? Is that how it works? No, they have every possibility of the matches played out.

Right, well, they all end in me winning. And it would do that near instant. We saw a great product this week. It was interesting because we've been working with a really good team over in Travel Reel for our videos and stuff.

But Proposify. And so what Proposify is, is basically a startup that allows you... It gives you an online editor for building proposals. But it has one of the best online videos we've seen in ages.

Like we really loved the Fort Awesome or Font Awesome video. I think Dollar Shave Club was the first to do that style of actually funny... Informative. But yet informative marketing video.

Which people try and copy. Not everyone is successful. I think these guys were... Maybe went on a little long.

It's the only thing I could say about it. Yeah, did bark on a bit too long. But it's one of those sort of irreverent, doesn't take itself serious. But it is actually an interesting service if you do proposals.

You know, we're talking about it. But anyway, I thought I'd point that out. We're not sponsored by them, by the way. Sponsor?

No, we're not sponsored by anybody. If you'd like to sponsor us, Satan. No, no. Moving on.

Jeff Bezos is rich. That's about it. So it turns out that... Why doesn't he have his space program kick off like now?

I don't know. Jeff, get on with it. If you're going to do it, do what Elon does. That's all I can say.

Atari is going to release a... I won't pass the video arcade... Like GameSpot? GameSpot?

Is that what they call it? Well, anyway, I went past, well I went past, you know how they got, they got the SNES coming out, the mini SNES. They had the NES, mini NES, now they've got the mini SNES, which they're going to run out of as well I bet. Alright, so Atari is a-teasing, Atari is a-teasing a new console, but I don't know if it's going to be like a 2600 remake, and it's going to be like a little one, or is it going to be like full-blown, take on an Xbox One X, whatever it is, kind of like ball-tickling power.

Now, according to my Blade Runner, and I know my Blade Runner, Atari takes over the planet, and you know because they've got advertising in the future, so it's a must-happen, this is the start, it's a sentient Atari box. Maybe it's pitfall new that you're going to, no, I don't know, but anyway, if you've been hiding around, we missed it from E3 this year, and there's been plenty of talk about it, but they're going to possibly release a new one. But Sega Master System has also had the minification process, as I was going to say, I walked past the game store and I saw it in the window there, there's ads for the Sega Master System as well, so you'll be able to sort of have mini-everything. You can have all your games, apart from you could emulate the shit out of everything these days, so you know, it's probably the way to go.

Also, just in news interesting, I know this doesn't interest Steve at all, everyone knows that the coroner did the review of Carrie Fisher's death and tried to explain it, but it turns out she had sleep apnea, and it's like, sister is like, I got sleep apnea, everyone's got sleep apnea, apart from Stevie, who does not, does not feel... My body doesn't betray me, my body is a temple. That'd be weird for her, because you've got to put, does she have the mask, and she actually does that when she goes to bed, wait a minute, that's weird, that's strange. Maybe that's what Darth Vader had.

I wonder what she's got, I've got the Philips Respronics something something, and it's actually got a little SD card that goes in the back of it, and so you can pull all the stats off. CPAP chat. It's the CPAP, there's CPAP chat. You're really getting those two people that care.

No, listen, listen, most of our listeners would probably have CPAPs and probably have apnea, because, you know, we sit in a chair and don't do much exercise, but yeah, so I think that's kind of interesting, kind of kindred, wouldn't you think, that she's a CPAP user? Come on, give me something. Meanwhile, responsible data science, Steve. Do you think we need responsible data science?

Nah, stuff him. Turns out, this is the, every time there's a standard or something comes out, the internet does this. There's a group of people who just want to band together and talk about the ethics of something or the governance of something, not the actual something, not the discrete mathematics or anything like that, or education, they want to talk about the governance of it. And so there's, I've come across this, it's called responsible data science, and they're all about fairness, accuracy, confidentiality, and transparency.

And so they break it down a little bit further and they're saying, well, responsible data science has four main challenges. It's data science without prejudice. So how to avoid unfair conclusions, even if they are true, what? And then it's data science without guesswork, how to answer questions with guaranteed level of accuracy.

And then it's data science ensures confidentiality, how to answer questions without revealing secrets. And then the last of all, it's a data science that provides transparency and it's to clarify answers that are such that they become indisputable. Like that's called doing your job, maybe, but it's kind of crazy. Like they've got a whole program, a whole governance thing, and they've got researchers from Netherlands.

Our industry tends to do this a lot, but they've got seminars coming up, they've got workshops you can go to. I mean, it doesn't actually talk about the doing of the work in here somewhere, it just talks about the governance. Well, that's governance in a nutshell, isn't it? You don't do the work when you talk about governance or something.

I can't understand that they're trying to form a consortium. You tell other people how to do the work and then you move on to the next thing. It's like PONS Institute certified something, something, something. I'm certified by responsible data.

You can see recruiters down the road going, do you have RDS certified? Yeah, any TLAs to get on with. Yeah, it's true. So I just saw it, I don't know what you guys might think of it, I just saw it as I was doing my round trips of all of the sites.

They really only updated their site from 2016, so I don't know, they've got a Twitter feed and I just couldn't really understand what the hell's going on. They have been tweeting recently about editorials and getting some, it's in the Netherlands where obviously they must feel it's important. Obviously anything to do with data and governance around data and having folks work on data must have some kind of ethic or some kind of established ethic that they can certify in some way. So I thought it's interesting.

If you have a look at it, it's really interesting to talk about work. So Steve, it's media time. Sloan Newsweek. It's been Sloan Newsweek for a couple of weeks and plus we've been busy doing work, but we've been watching a lot of media and there's plenty of media to look at.

Doctor Who finale came by. I actually, it was good. I also, Whovians is over as well, which I'm quite disappointed with, well not as in, I'm disappointed that I loved Whovians. I loved it.

You may have hated it, but I loved it. I'm going to stand true. The ad in the credits with Rogue going, oh my god, it was amazing. It's like, yeah, that's why I don't watch it.

You're not encouraging me to watch it. It's such a heartfelt show. I thought it was a bit awkward when they had the, they tried to get politicians on, but I think if you just get comedians on who love Doctor Who and can talk about the theories and really enjoy talking about that and joining in on it, I like that. It's not exactly a show that lends itself to theories and in-depth discussions.

This is like The Neighbours. You can get it in podcast form or that sort of thing, but it's something where you can just go to on TV and have that event moment where you can be tweeting about it and stuff. I liked it. Anyway, Doctor Who, you were quite right in predicting Missy and obviously the return of the Master, and the Master was some other dude.

I would say spoilers, but it was in the trailers. It was in the trailer. You could see it. When you got to the last episode and John Simm hadn't been in it yet, you're like, yeah, he's probably in the last episode.

I didn't, I wasn't expecting the end, I mean, this is, I guess this is spoiler, shall we go into spoilers? Are we okay to do spoilers? It was only last week. It is okay.

Are we okay to do spoilers at the end? Or do we want to come back around? Because then we can talk about Twin Peaks spoilers as well, but not that that's exactly spoiler-y. People are just driving in their cars or sitting in the bus or in the cubicle.

They might swerve violently off the road. They might swerve violently. God damn, didn't need to know. I think they've seen it.

And then you'll have someone's death on your conscience. In a sampling of our population of listeners, Steve, I think we're guaranteed everyone has seen Doctor Who. Well, if you haven't, skip ahead a couple of minutes. But I wasn't expecting Missy to, no, which way round was it?

John Simms to shoot Missy. No, I did not expect that, because that's how he dies, so he knows how he's going to die. Because Missy is a later, a later iteration. So he shot her because she had kind of turned, and she was going to go back and help the Doctor.

And he didn't like that, because he was still at the Doctor must die period of his life, whereas the Missy iteration had kind of mellowed somewhat and was helping him. So that's why he shot her. I wasn't expecting it. But why did they put that circular loop in there?

If I know my time travel, he's now completed his own loop. So he can only operate within that period of time. Yeah, but he probably isn't kind of thinking that far ahead, is he? I mean, well, in terms of plot device, but obviously it's the last of the showrunner, so they're going to be moving on, they're obviously going to have bigger production value, they need more people to continue on.

Nardole, for me, stood out, I thought. He was equally annoying as anything, and the best character of the season. A season that wasn't that great, let's be honest. No, it was not a good season.

It wasn't a great season, trying to be... the three-part thing, was it like three parts with the monks? I think it was like a three-part mid-series part was sort of... Unnecessary.

Eh? They weren't really... It was never really explained why we should fear these people. Sure they enslaved the whole human race, but I mean, really?

Something to do. The ending of this one was good, so they had David Bradley as the first Doctor, David Bradley as William Hartnell as the first Doctor. Now, he's the cat guy from Harry Potter. Yes, he played Filch in Harry Potter, as well as a lot of other things.

He's an old British actor. But he was in the BBC docudrama of Doctor Who. Yeah, which was very good. He was Walder Frey in Game of Thrones.

Oh yeah. Or is. Was or is. I don't remember.

Well, they're all dead in Game of Thrones. There's so many people have died in that. I don't remember who's dead or who isn't. Roland Dice.

They're all dead. So, when he first came out, I thought, well, it's the first Doctor, because you can tell by the silhouette. And I thought they'd rotoscoped in stock footage, which they've done before. They've used original footage, because William Hartnell's obviously dead, because he was like 70 or 80 when they filmed it.

So I thought they'd use stock footage and rotoscoped him in. And then it's like, this is very high def stock footage from the 60s. And no, it's David Bradley, who looks very, it's a very good lookalike of William Hartnell in it, talking to Peter Capaldi. So I'm guessing Peter Capaldi will be in the Christmas special.

I suppose a Christmas special will be both of them. But the conundrum is, he doesn't want to change. He just wants to be who he currently is. Yeah, so Peter Capaldi doesn't want to change.

The problem is, of course, he has already announced that he's leaving, therefore he's going to change. But to what is the big question? Yeah, we don't know who the next Doctor is going to be. Have they ever left it this late to announce the next Doctor?

Well, it's not really late, I mean, there's another six months or so until the Christmas special. That's cruel. That's really cruel. I don't know how long before Peter Capaldi, the first episode of Peter Capaldi, they announced him.

That was a bit different because he was a bigger actor than any of the previous ones in terms of their body of work. David Tennant had obviously done a lot of work, but he had done a lot of English television and theatre and stuff like that, whereas Peter Capaldi, it was a much bigger star. So I think that was a bit more exciting. You know who I heard?

You know who I heard? Who? You know David Tennant. What was the show he was in, three series, which was really good, the BBC drama?

Broadchurch. Right. Who was the cop with him in the Broadchurch? Olivia Colman.

Her. So they're saying she's going to be a Doctor and she's actually, she's like teasing everybody. I don't know. I don't know.

It's true. It'll happen. Well, I don't know. She's pretty good.

What would be the purpose of having a female Doctor for the next... She was also in Peep Show. I don't know. There's no reason not to have a female Doctor.

I'm down on the idea. You can do whatever you want. You've just got to have the appropriate person for the job. I mean, how many, I know this doesn't sound too good, but it seems like all of his companions get killed and run off as lesbians with somebody in the universe.

Well, what was her name? Bob? No, the previous girl did. Who was the name of the companion in this season?

Was it Bob? No. Curly-headed girl. Yeah.

Wasn't it Bob? I don't know whether you're thinking about this and you're sitting on the bus or in a cubicle in the car, but think about this. Do you appreciate the way that they transitioned that character in and out of the Cyberman outfit? Because when she spoke, she was herself.

That was quite good. That was either... Yeah, I think it was quite good. That...

Because there's no... I kind of... It was pretty obvious as soon as she was there. It's like, oh, bugger.

Because she was walking quite stiffly. Reflections always had the Cyberman outfit. Yes. I think the consistency with the idea was executed really well.

I thought that was kind of good as a plot idea, because there's probably no point as an actor having them in a ski mask for the entire... No, you may as well swap them out from standing at that point. Yeah, it's like, oh, Steve, you're a Cyberman. Cyberman stuff.

That was good. But they haven't closed off her... Loop. Loop.

No. So she's still around, even though she's a Cyberman. And she's run off with some... Nardole's still around.

Well, he says... The actual actor said he was coming back for the next season, so he must be in it. I think production values-wise, they've just knocked it out of the park. It's like where you expect this kind of production to be at this level now.

I think next year's Epps will be kind of interesting, depending on who they have as the lead. So speaking of confusing as hell, Twin Peaks, Steve, you seem to be having no luck with this show. It... It...

It... Uh... It... Uh...

It... It... Uh... Uh...

It... It... Uh... It...

It... Uh... Uh... Uh...

Help? I love you. Help me. You...

Listener, every time that Steve comes into work, he sits at his desk and he goes onto YouTube. He tries to find someone who explains this shit. Oh my god! Help!

And it generally is like a YouTube video of a guy talking to a camera who's just talking on and on about what they think happened in an episode when it's clearly no one has a clue. No one knows. When there's no dialogue for 40 minutes in an episode, it's not good. I don't even think David Lynch knows what's going on.

Beautifully shot. The production values in them is... Oh, gorgeous. And the visual effects are amazing.

It's a sensation. But what the fuck? But it's got... For anyone who isn't aware, Twin Peaks is doing a season 25 years after the first two.

David Lynch at the helm again. And there's a lot of black backstory. Yeah. So the latest episode, episode 8, I believe.

To be honest, I don't know. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it.

I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it. I haven't seen it.

There's a lot of black backstory. Black story. Backstory. Yeah.

So the latest episode, episode 8, I believe. Just before a couple of week hiatus because of Independence Day in the US, was the weirdest hour of television I have ever watched. Full stop. It had literally, and I'm not using hyperbole, 40 minutes with no dialogue of abstract computer generated imagery.

The giant guy, the bald headed giant prophet guy that appears every so often, in black and white, doing something, something, for like 10 minutes of that 40 minutes. Some woman who I guess is his wife, but I don't know. And then it sort of continues. Oh, and there was a musical interlude by Nine Inch Nails five minutes into the episode.

Of course. Because why not? Yeah. I'll be doing it.

So, I mean, we can talk spoilers about Twin Peaks, but I don't know what's a spoiler and what's not. So, I got nothing. Apparently, this is the only spoiler, there's a potential spoiler, apparently the whole sequence was the birth of Bob, who was the bad guy from the beginning, from the first one. The kind of supernatural being that inherited the body of the person that killed Laura Palmer, which is a huge spoiler, even 25 years after.

So I don't want to say the person, but Bob is the evil entity. That's probably a spoiler in itself, but anyway, so the whole 40 minutes was like the birth of Bob. But I mean, goddamn. Can we talk about, speaking of...

Anything else, please. Interesting TV. There's a lot of interesting YouTube coming on. One that we saw and we'll share, you may not have seen it yet, is Oates Studio.

So Neil Blomkamp, I've mentioned before a number of times and loved his short film work, and he's actually done a couple of movies, which you may have seen, like District 9, probably the most popular or famous. We talked about Racker a few weeks ago, didn't we? No, we haven't spoken about Racker at all. That's an oversight.

Yeah, so Oates Studio, he's put together like a... I think he's got some cash and he's probably, he's doing things with famous actors and put together a bit of a studio and said, well, let's create, let's do stuff. And so what they've been doing is producing these absolutely ultimate high quality, good as you could go movie or TV quality clips or shorts and putting them onto YouTube. Racker is one of them.

It's a dystopian sci-fi future Earth where aliens come to Earth and do nasty stuff. The other one is, I couldn't work it out, but it's Firebrand or Firebase, and it's sort of another futuristic, oh no, it's set in the Vietnam War and there's some kind of supernatural occurrence going on. And the latest one they've put out is God, which is absolutely hilarious to watch. It's kind of reminded me of Populous, but it was basically God doing what God does.

And it always... It's like an indifferent God. The thing with Neil Blomkamp is there's some kind of real emotional connection as you're watching it. You kind of, towards the end of God, you kind of go, oh, yeah, sure.

But one of the things I like about Racker is the production quality, and he always does gory death really well. Like if you see someone explode from... Oh, District 9. District 9 has that.

Good gore. Yeah. But not gratuitous. It's not gratuitous.

It's like, what would happen if you got hit by a high powered weapon? That's what's going to happen. You're going to pretty much explode. And so Racker has got similar themes and actions in it, but it's very, very well done.

It's good on Neil. Well, all of these shorts that they're releasing, they've released like VFX packs on Steam. Yeah, sorry, this is the interesting bit. So you can buy some of the VFX assets, the 3D, like Blender models and sound effects and 3D assets.

I think they're also working to release the scripts. Yeah, it's kind of crazy. I don't think they have released them yet. There might be like copyright issues with other people, but they're working to have extra stuff out on Steam.

So you can go onto Steam and buy for like only five bucks or something. Yeah, you can get a little bit of assets. These actual like Blender, I'm not sure if it's Blender, it might be Maya, but 3D assets that they use in these movies. It's basically what they are.

They're like show reels for the stuff that they're selling, and we don't really know what it's kind of leading towards. They're sort of behind the scenes. It seems like they're having a bit of fun. I think it seems like they're having fun putting together a studio.

It's really, really good. In the movies, Baby Driver came out, Edgar Wright doing what Edgar Wright does. Oh, it's got good reviews. It's been doing really, really well, and Wonder Woman has also been doing really, really well.

It's surprisingly well. I think it was like the highest grossing DC movie? Yeah, it's pulled DC back out of the toilet. Baby Driver's got 97% on Rotten Tomatoes at the moment.

Because Edgar does it right. He knows what he's doing. He knows how to... Give him creative freedom and he will knock it out of the park.

Don't do an Ant-Man. No, and he got onto Twitter and he was talking about supporting the movie and so on. I think he's got a lot of props he can bring that kind of social attention to his work and well done. And then lastly, I've been, now I came across this in an odd way and everyone's doing it and we'll talk about it probably more as we progress, Ready Player One.

And so most people, most folks have probably read the book. I didn't get around to reading the book. I actually listened to it across the holidays at the moment on Audible. And there is a Wil Wheaton version that you can download and listen to.

It's roughly around 16 plus hours or something. He does a really good job of bringing that book to life. And I can honestly recommend to read it. I think the movie is coming out.

They've already filmed, I think they've done all the principal photography and speaking of effects, I have no clue how they would do the effects in this. This would be the most effects heavy movie you would ever see because it's kind of like they're jumping from 80s sitcom sets to futuristic space stations to gandum robots fighting each other and all sorts of malarkey. You're going from the Rivendell style scenes, there's so much involved with it. They've already on Google when you search for Ready Player One, you will come up immediately with who's been cast and a lot of the cast have been on Talkback Show talking about what they've been doing and the involvement and on YouTube you can see some behind the scenes stuff.

But the lead character, which is Wade Watts or Parzival, is being played by a guy called Ty Sheridan who I don't know, Irox, TJ Miller, but TJ's only that would be in it for a limited period of time. He'll just turn up and have a couple of... Probably too expensive. I know, yeah.

But Simon Pegg is Ogden Morrow, which I kind of in my head thought a Simon Pegg type character when I was listening to it. Ben Mendelsohn, who's an Australian actor, is Nolan Sorrento, who's the baddie. And I think Ben hopefully does a better job or gets a bit as able to not be a whingey bitch in this as he was in the Star Wars, last Star Wars outing that we had. And then there's sort of a cast of folks that we don't even know, but yeah, I really thought that Wil Wheaton did a good job on the Audible.

There's two versions of it. I came across this through an alternative way. I watch... I also listen to another podcast called No Dumb Questions or No Dumb Questions and it's got Destin from Smarter Every Day and he actually does it with his local pastor.

So he does this amazing podcast where they talk about things that are going on in the world and it's an adjunct to what Destin does with... He's a rocket scientist for JPL and they talk about what's going on in the world, but his best friend there is a local pastor and so they talk about stuff. And they actually did a chapter-by-chapter review and question and analysis of Ready Player One as they were moving through that. So that's how I kind of got into it.

So I'll put a link to that. It's worth listening to Wil Wheaton and then going back and listening to Destin on No Dumb Questions talk about it. It really is kind of thought-provoking and if you like kind of... Obviously it's a VR, AR, all the tech that's involved and all the futurist type stuff that's going on.

It's really interesting. Like some of the things like... Some of the stuff that was interesting to think about was, you know, if this technology was so prevalent, what would be the effects of it? So for example, like in Japan you've got the lost millions where there's just kids who just live in their houses and don't go outside.

Little things like if you're wearing haptic suits and you want them to work properly then you've got to shave off all your hair to get them to work properly. Just little things that I think the detail level inside there is really well thought out in terms of the practicality of how VR affected the world and what the Oasis is like and so on. So I thought that was kind of interesting from that point of view, just as a futurist enthusiast myself. So I can definitely recommend it.

It's worthwhile. If you're on a long drive going back and forth to work, you can definitely knock it out of the park in about two weeks of driving. So yeah, you should get onto Ready Player One. Totally recommend it.

Download it from Audible. Probably got credits already. Get it inside your credits today. So Steve, if you wanted the space welders to sort out your tax and, you know, to get past the trauma and get your R&D out the road, how would you write to us and ask for that stuff?

Just fill out form 762B in triplicate. Send one copy to you. One copy to yourself two weeks in the future and one copy to us two weeks ago. We'll get back to you in six to eight working weeks.

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We're at episode 85. We're not that far away. That's nearly 86. It's nearly.

We're not far away from 86. We're not far away from 100 either. So we'll keep on keeping on. It's been a slow news month.

It's been slow news around. And there's just way too much Trump. And we haven't been blown up yet. So that's pretty good.

So if you're listening to us from a bunker in the future, then hold on. But if not, I'm dead. We've probably run out of episodes. We've run out of things to say.

All right. So we'll catch you in the next one. It's Mike out. Steve out.

We'll catch you in the next one.