Conference for introverts

Hey guys, it's time for another episode of Space Welders. Episode 87, recorded Friday, 28th of July, 2017. Conference for introverts. With your hosts, Mike Wise and Steve Rogers.

I would talk to you, but I cannot, because... No, it's over the internet. It's fine. Oh, right.

Don't have to leave my house. That's great. That's what the best conferences are, like those webinar things. You know, you can just watch them full in the nude, from the comfort of your own room or bus.

Apparate. Apparate. Yeah, that's it. You turn up.

And then as soon as you're done, you're just gone. As effective as sending introverts to conferences. So speaking of effective, S3 and AWS is having some ups and downs recently. I think we've been discussing AWS.

It normally has great performance and it does good things, particularly if you combine it with Glacier and if you can get it to work with Glacier and realize that it's got a different storage type. But at the moment, there was a couple of breaches this week and a lot of people trying to cover up the problems. Well, breach is a strong word. As per usual with cloud services, it's as a result of poor configuration and management by customers, which is usually what happens when you have leaks where, oh, let's say you check in your secret access key into GitHub, for example, and people have done searches on GitHub for the phrase secret access key and found thousands of them to people's accounts.

What's happened this time is that people or AWS has been following up on people having read access enabled or even write read and write access enabled to their entire S3 bucket. So in AWS, you can go through on the bucket and you can permission things. In fact, in the new, it's sort of an old user interface and now you might be using the new user interface. And it kind of has like a progress bar underneath as well.

When you do something, it'll then go and update. It says, oh, do you want to do it for all folders? But the idea here is that you can select the bucket and then change up the permissions and you can do that on a per folder, per file basis all the way through. I think it's just making sure that you've done it.

Well, I think this has just come from people setting whatever just to get it working. Like oh, we need people to be able to download a file from S3, or make it, we need to make it read access and just everything, whatever. Let's just get it. We've got to get to the cloud, Mike.

We've got to get there quick. Get to the cloud. It's important. We have to get to the cloud now.

Who cares if we're doing it right or wrong? We've got to get to the cloud. Having like at least some kind of security practice when you're trying to put things into services, then find out all of the kind of holes or the knobs and dials that make the service work. So obviously, cloud security practice is number one.

You have to deliberately set this because by default, read and write access are disabled except for the account that created the bucket. So people have had to have gone in and set read access and write access for everything deliberately, probably in a misguided attempt to speed things up and make things quicker. What I was actually quite interested in was Amazon sent out emails and actually listed your buckets that were open because I have an S3 bucket that's fully public, but deliberately so because I use it as a essentially a web server. You can use S3 as a static web server.

So if you're just serving up HTML files, S3 is a really good way to serve that up. You don't need an EC2 instance, you don't need an actual server, you can point your domain through Route 53 or any other domain service just to a Route S3 endpoint and load HTML. But it's great. It just means you need it publicly accessible.

So I was quite pleased when they sent that to me and I went, oh yeah, good, that bucket is fine, I don't care and moved on. But there's been other bigger companies have had leaks of customer data from their S3 buckets. It's obviously the other end perhaps shouldn't have been stored in a full public read. Did people sort of get excited about, like, you've got service level agreements, which are SLA, so that's the agreement by which the service is provided, but then with inside that agreement you have, if you don't know, an SLO and that's the service level object, the thing that is in control, I guess.

And so people would have been looking at that because it's all well and good to beat your hands on a desk with Amazon and say, oh, well, you're meant to provide uptime for this, but then they're saying, no, no, no, no, we did and it has, but if you didn't configure it properly then the SLO... Amazon's just doing exactly what they've been told to do. It's like any computer system. Computers aren't smart, they're stupid, they just do exactly what you tell them to do.

And if you tell them to do something wrong, they will go ahead and dutifully do it to the best of their ability. So this is, do you know what I bet a lot of it was, was these bigger companies trying to do the whole big data thing and needing to move their data around and hitting security roadblocks. Oh, shoot. We need another account for S3 to get the data out into this other system to do some analytics on.

Oh, just make it public. You can't access it without the URL anyway. I bet you that's kind of where it started for a few of these companies. But it's good they're proactive.

So they're kind of saying... Well, Amazon is. Amazon's... It doesn't mean the businesses have actually changed anything.

No. And this is sort of a part of all of your agreements and setups for how you get services provided back into a company. It did make the news as a leak-type news, but it really was kind of like, no, it's not a breach. It's a leak, but it's not the provider doing it.

It wasn't the provider. It's doing exactly what it should be doing. Yeah. So they were trying to be proactive and then informing people.

It's the same as leaving your customer list on a table in a coffee shop. Yeah. Amazon's going, well, you probably shouldn't do that. It's not the coffee shop's fault.

It's your fault. It's actually your fault. So they have our silos over that to try and maintain, but they're reinforcing this idea that it's still your responsibility as a part of the relationship that you have with them. So they're not going to serve you drinks and whatever.

So yeah. But last week or a couple of weeks ago, we were talking about SoundCloud. And we're currently on SoundCloud for... Soundcloud.com.srspacewelders.

Yeah. For our delivery of our stuff. Perhaps not for much longer. We don't actually find...

It's very confusing, the stats and things that we got off it. I think it's mainly bots. It's full of bots. It really is.

So, I mean, the listening experience on SoundCloud is really good. The play is good. I love the player. I love the story.

The whole experience is good. I love everything about it. It's just they have issues with bots and other things like that. We kind of mentioned this in passing a couple of weeks ago, because it had sort of just been announced.

We hadn't really read into it, that SoundCloud's been in trouble for a little while because they're not profitable. But, I mean, that doesn't stop tech companies these days. I mean, Twitter's not profitable. A lot of companies, a lot of tech companies aren't profitable.

But SoundCloud is bleeding chips. Pre-revenue, Steve. Yeah, pre-revenue. $150 million for 10%.

They got rescued, though. Well, sort of. There's been two articles this week. First one is they're shutting down their Australian presence.

as well as its London and San Francisco offices. So it's closing its Sydney office this week. Today, in fact, as we record this and a few people, a few senior people are leaving. It's going to continue to be available in Australia, but any deals will be through the US.

So that's good news. That's good news. It's good news. It's good news.

It's good news. It's good news for Australia, but any deals will be through the US office. They've only been here a year in Australia, serving Australia and New Zealand. There's 173 staff members it's letting go.

So that's the first thing. But then the other thing is Chancellor Raffer has suggested that he is working on, I don't know, a partnership, a buyout, an ownership share, a cash injection for SoundCloud. He's presumably got a bit of coin floating around. One thing that's noticeable now, apart from you've got like pro-memberships and...

It's amazing they're not making money with the fact that they have paid memberships. Well, they're also now, if you don't have a paid membership, folks are putting up songs where you have to... They'll give you like a preview and then you can listen to that preview. If you like it, then obviously it'll push you into a loop, a sales loop to get you in as a paying regular contributor to the service.

So but there's kind of this listener, there's, what is it, SoundCloud Go, I think it is, and they have listener options for listening to music and then there's participant options which we're a part of that allows you to upload and do whatever because we've got quite a few hours of music up on SoundCloud itself and that's actually delivered from S3. But, you know, very interesting why they had not really thought about these business models earlier and perhaps had set about... Well, I mean, it's like any tech startup, isn't it, to just get it out and get users going as quickly as possible. Yeah.

So nothing's really been announced regarding Chance the Rapper buying it or whether or not they're going to survive more than another couple of months. I think at this point, nothing's going to save SoundCloud, I don't think. Seems like it's unlikely. It's going to be, yeah, it's going to be a cash injection, oh, we have another three months or six months or even another year.

But then they have to turn it around in that year, they have, you know, they can't... They just can't keep dumping money into something that's losing it. They have to do something, they have to pivot. I don't know what they would pivot to.

You know, they're sort of trying a social media thing. Maybe that's not really working. Maybe they just need to strip down the offering into just a music serving application perhaps. But SoundCloud was one of the fastest way to get access to...

It's like, you know, why is Beatport successful as opposed to... It's good for small, like, bedroom producers is the term. People who are just making music in their bedrooms with, it doesn't matter how they're making it, whether it's all electronic or playing instruments or production or design or remixes, especially remixes, because if you put a remix up on YouTube, it's probably going to get taken down, let's be honest. And YouTube is not necessarily conducive to having music without associated visuals.

So it's really good for that kind of thing. So I don't know how they're going to turn it around. I don't... You know, we're not...

Obviously people aren't privy to how much money, what the loss actually is that they're making. Like how... What's the gulf that they need to close? Do they need to raise their prices?

Do they need to offer some alternative? If they can't put ads in the middle of the songs, that would be ridiculous. That would kill them quicker than losing money is right now. Yeah, well, on the mobile client, they've got...

They inject ads as you listen. Nothing plays in the middle of it, of course. So it's like a sound cloud. I mean, it's sad to see it go.

Between the songs. There's so much history and intelligence built up in the service. They'd have to be careful not to lose the... Commentary.

The commentary. On that, on a similar note, that Pandora is leaving Australia. So they're not only shutting down their offices in the country, they are stopping people from the country accessing the service, which is stupid. Why can't I access a US one?

Well, it's licensing for Pandora, isn't it? It's like Netflix. So that's only happened this way. You get their final streaming dates, the 31st of July.

They're not offering any way, because Pandora, I think, works a lot on... It's very like Netflix, where you can like and dislike songs. Can you upload your own content? Is there an indie aspect to it?

I don't think so. I think it's essentially Netflix, but it works... It operates more like a radio station, so you don't necessarily just pick and play albums. You play a genre music station, and it will play random songs in that genre, but it bases it based on what you've liked and disliked and listened to in the past.

So Spotify kind of has a similar concept. They have radio stations. It's not as good, but they're not really allowing people to export the likes and dislikes to move to other places like Deezer or Spotify or other companies like that. They're being a bit arsehole-ish about it, but they must be losing money as well, unless that's a licensing problem that they're having.

If you look at indie streaming services, who's out there? So you've got Pandora. You can do this on Google Play. Like Google Play lets you put up your stuff.

Can you just upload a random song on Google Play? Tidal, you can do this. Spotify... It's for the three people that are on Tidal.

Yeah, Spotify, you can do this. Now Apple podcasting is going to be doing this. It's not to the same point as SoundCloud, though, is it? Like SoundCloud is to music as YouTube is to video.

It is. That's the analogy you draw there. YouTube, you just click upload and it's up, whereas all these other ones, you kind of have to go through a bit of a process, don't you, to get it on. But there's no PewDiePie of SoundCloud.

Or is there? Maybe there is. Maybe it's Chance the Rapper. It's Chance the Rapper.

Maybe Chance is the PewDiePie of SoundCloud. But overall, if you're an indie music artist, like I've got my own music up there, crappy stuff that I've done from like I've been into writing mod music and music in general, computer generated music for ages and using all different types of technologies to achieve it from good old SoundTracker, Cubase, you name it, I've probably touched some form of way of generating music on a computer. And I went back in early 2000, as soon as SoundCloud was available, I was like on there straight away and uploading my garbage, literally. And it's just been sitting there.

And I kind of thought, oh, you know, when I find time, I'll just sit back and maybe take one of the tracks or I've got 80 plus tracks of just ideas and then try and turn them into something. But I was never intending for that to be like a career or anything like that, even though I have like approached local music folks to try and put on music on compilations and things. So it's an unusual tidbit about myself. But I'd love to be able to do music full time, like your pogos and your smuffies and so on, because that's just so much fun.

You can create a fan base and be able to do that YouTube thing for music, which would be fantastic. So SoundCloud to me represented a place where you could actually do that. Maybe they missed out on monetization options. Maybe they didn't really consider like- They are monetizing.

They've got pro versions. Do they have ads? No, I mean as in for artists. So like buy my tune and then they take a cut of that, you see, because you can't do that.

But on other platforms, that absolutely happens. And so you could set a price. Yeah, even if it's indirect like Spotify. But like you can create a t-shirt and upload it to one that like even, you know, coffee cafe, all of the sort of t-shirt vending places.

Spotify needs like a tipping, like a tipping option. Yeah, a tipping option. And SoundCloud takes 10%, 15% or whatever. There we go.

We've solved it. That's it. Let's get Chance on the phone. Chance, if you're listening, and I'm sure you are, give us a ring.

Monetize the artists. And then, you know, obviously- Good work on the Hamilton mixtape, but give us a ring. Yeah. Yeah.

Was he on there? Yep. Yeah. Well, there you go.

That's the closure, the reprise. Right. Good one. But we don't want to see SoundCloud killed, but Microsoft has killed something this, and it's annoyed a lot of people for a really weird reason.

And I've used, like, in terms of my history of using paint programs, I think the first and best paint program I ever used was Depaint. Depaint was the shit. Never heard of it. I used PaintShop Pro, which was like a precursor to Photoshop.

I've used everything up to Photoshop. And I now use Photoshop. Well, you get Photoshop and don't look back. Well, CC.

The thing is, the problem with Photoshop is it's very complicated for minor alterations. True. Yeah. Like, if you just want to crop and freehand red circle something to point it out or to use it as a screenshot in some documentation or whatever, you go to the old standard.

You go Windows key R, MS Paint, Enter. And you bring up the old faithful, never to be changed except when they changed it a few years ago. MS Paint. The mess with the formula.

It's always there. It's simple. There's no excessive accoutrement. There's no layering.

There's no difficulty. There's just basic shapes and lines and colors and tools and save it as a PNG and you're done. Yeah. It is.

I don't think you can even make a transparent PNG. The app for simplicity. There's no background layer. It is one of those apps that says, I'm really simple.

And the history of it, like, if you've used... In more ways than one. If you've used Lisa and if you used early Macintoshes, you'll know where I'm coming from because, you know, we had that beautiful paint program there even. And you'd be able to, you know, you had a palette on the left hand side.

You can choose paint brush and everyone grabbed the paint tool, oh, sorry, the spray brush and you're spray brushing pixels around and changing colors if you had the color version of things. And then off you go. And then once you kind of got to, like, de-paint, like, and de-paint, for example, it's history goes right back even to, I'll include some links that we'll talk about a bit later. I've been watching...

It's a fascinating paint chat. GDC has been releasing the kind of backstory to your favorite games and one of them was Doom. To see Romero and the guys talk about the history there. And they used de-paint, like, furiously.

And de-paint was released on a couple of platforms. It was originally released on Amiga Workbench and it was the shit because it gave you things like fills and you could do gradient fills, you know, you had basic shape editing, layers. know it was really simple and very fast to use and you can see like other paint programs looking at it. So a lot of the Doom artwork, early Doom artwork was done in, well they had clay models to start with and then digitized or scanned and then touched up in dpaint or they had dpaint do a lot of the work and then they ported it across to whatever formats.

And so you know early file formats so you know you've got BMP the bitmap format file extension for Microsoft Paint. 300 megabyte files. Yeah massive but the the interesting bit is they're getting rid of it because it's obviously they're coalescing lots of other functionality together. This is Microsoft so the story is really around Microsoft coalescing features into other things.

So it's not just this. Yes and no. They've got the enhanced migration experience toolkit the EMET and so they're going to move features and other functionality down into Defender. They've also got their full disk backup tool which they're getting rid of.

They're saying no no no you can go and do system imaging using other tools. So paint just falls into this category of things that they just want to deprecate and just coalesce somewhere else and they've got Paint 3D. But that's, Paint 3D is a different project, a different application. You can still paint with it.

It does basic shapes. Yeah it's getting, it's too complicated though. It's like they've added this like whole side to it. Paint 3D is a different application to paint.

So this was part there, this was meant to be in the next Windows 10 update in September. Like Outlook Express is gone. Yeah but that's, people aren't using that anymore. People use Gmail.

No they use it for reading, creating reading lists. But you also have the mail. You have the Windows Mail app. That thing turned up.

When you, I don't know if you've been watching your up, if I was on before Crater Edition and then they released Crater Edition to standard download. So I'd get this message on all of my machines really keen on me pushing into Crater Edition. And then suddenly after you do the do and wait you know so many hours later mail turns up. It's like look at me I'm on, I'm actually on your toolbar ready to go.

So they're really pushing it. But you know Express, Outlook Express gone. But again they're just consolidating getting rid of stuff. So they've got like a whole deprecation page for saying shit.

Well I mean you can't, you can't blame them because they want to. No just get rid of the wacky crap. But there's no, there's no alternative. Like Paint 3D, I'm using it right now.

It's done the thing where it's got stupid like icons only for the things. It's, it's too complicated for what paint, like if I'm going to do that I'm going to use like a proper 3D editing program right. Yeah. I'm not going to, I'm not going to use Paint 3D, I'm not going to paint 3D to like.

You're trying to draw a whale there? I don't know what I'm doing. Draw an extra circle. Oh my god.

But the point of it like Outlook Express, there's the mail app. Yeah. That's in Windows 10. Yeah.

So there's no, like Paint 3D is not an alternative to paint. Here's the, here's the real story. Here's the news story. What they're doing is that they're removing applications and or deprecating.

So let me, I'll just go through what's being removed. So you can set your face astound. If you're sitting in, you're sitting and waiting for your coffee next week and you're in the line, just, just get your ears around this one. Because this is the real story.

Yes they're getting rid of paint. Yeah it made it onto news.com, blah, blah, blah. But they're removing 3D Builder. They're removing the Enhanced Migration Toolkit.

They're deprecating double IS6 management compatibility. That should have been shot in the face years ago. Double IS Digest, MS Paint, gone. That's deprecated.

That's not just removed. That's just deprecated. Outlook Express, removed. Reader, removed.

Reading List, removed. They're removing encryption for double IS. Oh they're deprecating it. And then syncing your settings, deprecating.

Screen save, certain screen saver functionality they're getting rid of. So I don't know. Flying toaster, does it get, flying toaster get shot in the face? One of those, one of those things you said is not like the other.

Yeah but. Like Enhanced Migration Experience Toolkit. Who the hell uses that? PowerShell 2 is deprecated.

Who uses that anymore? Outlook Express, nobody uses that. Reader app, what's that? A shit ton of people use that.

Microsoft Paint, everybody god damn uses Microsoft Paint. And they have succumbed to the pressure of the wider internet and said that they're not, maybe not going to deprecate it. Maybe they'll just make it available as an app to download on the store instead. Yeah they look, they should have had a command prompt.

They should have done it, shot command prompt in face. No they can never do that. Scaramucci that thing and stab it in the face. Stab it in the face.

So yes they are not killing MS Paint, they are keeping it as an app to download. No no no no, they are keeping it, it is an app in the app store. That's that's where it's going. So they're not, they're not deprecating it, they're not killing it, they're probably not maintaining development of it.

They should put it on Steam. But they are keeping it available on the Windows app store to download, to use. Yay. Go Paint, good on you.

It's power of the internet. Well that's what they should do, they should make it open source. They're keen for open source for everything else. It's probably too involved in everything.

Yeah it's, you know, who knows, it's probably, oh geez, it'll be MSC something or AFX or something, one of those weirdo ones from way back when. So it's caused a bit of ruffles because most people don't understand the why of it. But they're, we'll put a list in links of features that they're removing and deprecating, all some, they all make sense. And, you know, you kind of think why don't they go further and get rid of more sort of bloatware, crackware, or do what Apple did and just said if you want it, just get it from the store.

So, you know, that's what they're doing. Yeah, so, you know, that's totally reasonable. Meanwhile, Apple's being sued left, right and centre. They're being sued at the moment by university for 506 million on their, well they've got their A7 and A8 processor.

So that's like a level two manager's got to sign that off, right? It's a little bit above, but it's not, doesn't bother them that much. Change to them. So there was a, they were using some technology.

It's just two people got to sign off on it. Yeah, so they have a... It's above half a billion, you've got to get two people. We've spoken about this before and there's also a couple of BBC drama programs around Sinclair Electronics and Acorn and how Sinclair came to be, how the Acorn came to be.

But the Acorn guys went off and developed the reduced instruction set processor, which then later went on to be ARM. And then you've kind of got the offshoots, which is what Apple bases their stuff on. And then they've been rapidly releasing, you know, I think they're up to A11 is the next multi-core CPU that's driving their iPhone series of products and stuff. And they're, I think they're legitimately considering whether or not that goes into the Apple, you know, whether Intel stays good with them, who knows.

But recently Intel's obviously been having some ups and downs, if you've been watching Linus Tech Tips recently. So I think it's kind of interesting, you know, whether they sustain more patent infringements on the A series or not. But I think, you know, that this is going to dominate yet again and keep on trucking. It's interesting because Apple, when they're releasing their chipsets, you know, currently they've got, you know, we're waiting upon, well, Steve's waiting on Pixel 2.

I'm probably waiting on iPhone 8. I've decided. Even though, does it make me a little bit of a hypocrite? It's called squeeze.

Yeah, who cares about the squeeze? It doesn't make me a little bit of a hypocrite because I was complaining about the iPhone removing the headphone jack and now the Pixel 2. It's probably, it's not been, well, it's not official, it's just been leaked renders. But the suggestion is that Google's going to do away with it too.

Does that make me a little bit of a hypocrite that I still want it? Yeah, I see that news. Like, oh, here's our beautiful render of a block. Well, it's not Google.

It's some random person has leaked them. But, you know, the only benefit to at least the silver lining of Google doing it is that the port is USB-C rather than proprietary lightning. So, at least, okay, yes, they've removed or potentially removing the headphone jack, but at least it's a bit more open hardware, uh, non-proprietary to get a dongle or an adapter or something like that rather than having to stick only with lightning. At least that's something with that.

But the renders, if they're anything like, and apparently they've come from a reasonably reputable source, if they're anything like what it's actually going to be like, it looks really pretty and I might, it's probably going to have me jump ship. I've been Apple since iPhone 4. I had an iPod Touch before that, and I think this is it because LG is making, no, sorry, not LG, HTC. One of those two, one of them made the first pixel and the other one's making this pixel.

I think HTC is making this pixel, which is a good thing because HTC is quite good at making phones like that. Good on them. Now let's, we'll get slightly controversial. Obviously Doctor Who finished, I want to talk about it, and I don't think it's really a news event, but it was a news event.

So recently, if you're watching Doctor Who, I'm presuming that's 100% of our audience, they decided to cast a female in the lead role of the Doctor. And so there's an episode which is the Christmas episode coming up where you'll have the transition between Peter Capaldi and the new actress who's going to play it, who, I think it's kind of interesting because you've always, maybe you've got to go to like BBC drama and then do your time on a BBC drama and then come back and be a doctor or something like that. But there was a whole controversy about, you know, folks are obviously upset that there's, you know, a female in the lead role. But I think it's kind of interesting to think about, you know, obviously it was a character, it was a design from the beginning to replace, to have any kind of actor play the lead role, right?

No, but Mike, there's only been men playing it for the last 50 years, therefore we can't possibly change it now. Well, I'm doing an impression. It's not unusual to have a strong female lead role because we've got Discovery coming, which is a strong female role. Well, they even had that in Voyager.

Catherine Janeway, she's been kicking it. Well, I haven't seen Voyager. I'm assuming she's a strong female lead. Yeah, she kicks ass.

I'm not up to that yet. I'm on the last episode of Next Generation, by the way. It's kind of shit. I don't care.

It's the same as any other new Doctor Who. It's just a new actor playing it, therefore we'll see what it's like after the first couple of episodes. But I don't think I can agree to a concept where you could say, oh, well, James Bond can be played by a female. Why not?

Because it's a role that's designed for male to begin with. Why? Well, it's kind of like saying, Sherlock is a male. If you want a female Sherlock, well, then that's...

Sherlock's a little different because it's not meant to be... Well, no, because that's... I'm contradicting myself. Yeah, you can.

But it's been played by many, many different actors. It has, yes. But, I mean, who cares? Why is this even a thing?

Who cares? Put the best actor or actress in the role, they'll do good or they won't, and then we'll move on. Like, who cares? That's very true.

Anyway. The gender of the person playing the role is irrelevant. Does that mean Daleks now can be... Well, how do they reproduce?

I don't know, through the head thing? Through the side thing? I don't know. Are they asexual?

They just split in twain, and then you have two. It's like a Hydra for Daleks. That's the important question. Yeah, it's like Sexy Times.

We don't give a shit what gender Doctor Who is. We should answer... Change the title of the show, Steve, to Sexy Times for Daleks. Sexy Times for Daleks.

That's it. That's the next spin-off. We've had Torchwood. Yep.

Next one is Sexy Times for Daleks. Or Daleks Sexy Times. Anyway, congratulations to Jodie Whittaker. Just to correct us from, I think, a couple weeks ago, you were suggesting it was the person from Broadchurch.

Well, she is in Broadchurch. She is, but I said the main detective, and you agreed, but it's actually she was the mother of the boy that dies in the first episode of Broadchurch. Spoiler? No.

No, it's the first. It's literally what the entire season is about. A boy dies. It happens in the first 30 seconds.

Marley is dead. So it's his mother in Broadchurch is the next Doctor Who, and she does very well in Broadchurch. Yeah, Broadchurch is an excellent series. That's why I was a bit confused when you said it, because...

I guessed it was something like that. Olivia Coleman. No, she was a companion. Whoever was the detective in Broadchurch, I thought was a bit weird for the role.

Oh, the lady or the...? Well, the other detective was David Tennant. I'm not sure if you're aware. David Tennant would be a great Doctor Who.

David Tennant's doing the voice of Scrooge McDuck in New Doctor Who. I know that. I'm well aware of that. Yeah, Olivia Coleman, who's in Broadchurch.

She's been in Peep Show. I thought it was her. But I thought she was a bit odd for that role, thinking about her. But it's not her.

It's the mother. Yeah, it's the mother, and I think she'll do a great job. I just hope that they go with great story development now. They've got the ability to just completely change it up.

I kind of hope they just have a throwaway line at the beginning about changing it. You know, whenever they regenerate, they look in the mirror and they're like, oh, big ears. I hope they just have one throwaway line that's just... maybe she looks down and goes, oh, and then just moves on.

And that's it. And no one ever mentions it again. Totally. So I think that's it for news that really sort of took our interest.

Well, that's led neatly into media, Mike. You're not the only one that can segue, dammit. Yeah, I was working your way to the media section. That's kind of what is interesting at the moment.

So media, Steve, I'll go with what I'm watching. Go on then. I'm watching absolute crap on YouTube yet again. There's two or three things that I thought were...

PewDiePie? No, Two Minute Papers. I'll direct you to Two Minute Papers. I love my academia on YouTube.

Fabulous. He always introduces us like, welcome, Skylers. This is blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, so he loves graphics and anything to do with, you know, interesting new algorithms for rendering, like fluid systems and all that sort of cool stuff.

Anyway, he has a beautiful YouTube channel which is all about papers that he's found that are really interesting. And he introduces the paper, then shows you where all the links are, and you can go and read them and think that you understand the maths in them, and off you go. Fabulous. That's number one.

Number two, Thug Notes. I'm late to Thug Notes. Our intern told me during the week that he was like, no, Mike, our English teacher showed us those episodes like, you know, a week ago. Jeez, Mike, get with it.

Oh my god. But Thug Notes released a recent summary of Ready Player One, which was very good. It was quite accurate. But he, in fact, and he obviously does it as some sort of gangster rap thing, but it's not, he doesn't rap, he just sort of does it in jive.

I don't know, I speak jive. Anyway, he does a very good job. His summary is excellent, particularly of each of the stories, like Tequila Mockingbird was really well done, which I think is great. The other thing that's taking my time, this is more a dad thing.

So I love my 8-bit computers and all of the history and so on, and that also dovetails to Ready Player One, but the one that I'm watching is all, it's all the games for a, it's a channel that records all the games for a particular console and plays it continuously. So what you get, say for example, if you love Amiga, then what this guy's done is found every Amiga game, recorded the video for it, audio, and just lets it play for seven hours. And so, you know, if you're putting your kids to sleep, you get the kids to sleep and you just want to lie down the bed and then chill the hell out. And so you just put this on and it requires commitment because seven hours of watching all Amiga games is amazing.

But he's done, not just Amiga, he's done every handheld you can think of. And I haven't really seen or seen the catalogue of, say, like Sega Dreamcast, of the Dreamcast, for example. Dreamcast is an amazing piece of hardware, if you think about the sorts of games. But the other aspect is, is that, gee, no one's...

It was the first, like, internet accessible browser. Yeah, it had everything, but I know we... It just didn't last. First world problem.

We complain about, we complain about innovation in games and game mechanic and so on, but if you... Do we? I don't. No, well, you can sit there and watch these games.

Like, obviously, the, you know, JRPGs and cutemups and shootemups and bashemups and all that sort of stuff. There's, you can see the consoles which have said, that's what we're going to do. And there's not much variation in all of the games that you see. But the fascinating thing, like, how many times does Afterburner get ported?

How many times does Pac-Man get ported? You can kind of see that, but it's interesting when you go and watch these things, how they're ported. Like, I watch video game history as well, which also looks at, you know, how the arcade game was ported to different platforms. Like, how did it turn up on C64?

And it's, like, obviously completely turd and different, but you kind of understand the interpretation of the game with respect to the constraint of the technology. So I find it fascinating. You can just put it on in background. If you're like me, you just finish putting the kids to bed, you just lie down for half an hour, you just smash through an hour of it, and you just sit there and go, oh my god, I don't...

There was zero innovation in games back then. Like, everything's, like, something falling down, something moving across. How many times has Choplift been ported? Anyway, so I love those sorts of things.

I've also been watching, or my wife's been watching Handmaiden. Everyone's been telling us to watch Handmaiden. She made it all the way through. Good lord, that's depressing shit right there.

It's on SBS here in Australia. It's a free-to-air TV service. It basically is, it's meant to be a dystopian future where women are now barren and only certain women can have babies, and Handmaiden, as it suggests, you know, it's people who look after other people's babies and also have babies on behalf of other people, and just looks at the... It's kind of like the relationships and it's very drama driven.

It's beautifully shot, it's amazing DP in it, the colours, everything about it, gorgeous, great sound, really great dialogue and interesting action. It's just a shame it's boring AF for me, I just can't get into it. But my wife was loving it, but it's the most bleak thing ever, like, God, God, go watch 8-bit shoot-em-up games or something if you wanted to switch off as a parent. But anyway, those are the things that are tickling my bones.

Steve, Game of Thrones, that rhyme, see, see how I did that? Got it. Is on. So what's happening?

I'm not watching it, but you tell me. People die. Of course they die, that's the point of that thing. Yep.

There's only two seasons left, the first show in? Second. Second show in. Third episodes this weekend.

Right. Did anyone die? Yes. All right.

Any main characters die? No comment. Dang, no, is this a spoiler cast or what? No, not for Game of Thrones.

All right, so. We will be lynched. Right. How many episodes in a season?

I think there's 10 in this season. Sure. Or maybe even eight. Right.

It's a short season, I know that much. But Jay, what did, no, Jay, we're probably all Tolkien. No, whatever his name is, hasn't written, Martin hasn't written any more. No, he's saying he might release it next year, maybe.

Oh, God. But we're now ahead of the books. It's got Harry Potter crossover. Separate from the books.

Yeah. So who cares? The books are irrelevant now, largely. Which is why some people, and I might agree with them, say that the writing has perhaps gotten worse since they've diverged from the books.

There's plenty of news articles about that point. I can't, not that help that. Suddenly all the main characters have plot armor again. It's funny that.

What's plot armor? Like, you can't kill them because they're the main character. They, like, get away. They have armor, but it's due to the plot.

Oh, I've been saved at the last moment. Yeah, the arrow just missed me. Just missed me. Oh, that was close.

I need to be available in some season further down. Yeah, exactly. My contract's still going. Oh, okay.

So, all right. So everyone's... But one of the interesting things is that, obviously, in Australia, they're trying to crack down on people who are channel-teeing, channel-tee-tee-teeing, torrenting the she-yola. Episode 1 was the most torrented TV show episode of all time.

Didn't help that Foxtel Go crashed. Good on you, Foxtel. The only legal way to stream it in Australia, Foxtel's streaming service, didn't work on the night. Even on shitty NBN.

It completely crashed. So, nice one. Cool. Just, just, way to go.

But in other news, obviously, Comic-Con was back on. We didn't... San Diego Comic-Con, be specific. Which is, introverts aplenty at the conference.

And it was just TV and movie trailers galore. It was just non-stop trailer-ville. So, obviously, you guys... We're in the middle of the year, aren't we?

So it's all the trailers for the back half, movies that are coming out in the back half of the year. And, oh, they're good. We'll link to a round-up of them all. But just, I guess, we run through them quickly.

Westfield's back. Westfield, yeah, who cares. Thor Ragnarok actually looks good. It's colourful.

It's pretty. There was... Was it Nerdwriter or Every Frame a Painting? One of these video essay channels was talking about the colour in Marvel movies.

That was really... They were all really washed out for a while. When they moved, they shot the first couple on film. And then they moved to digital.

And they were really washed out. But for Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and the ones from now, they've moved on. I think they've moved to an Aria Alexa camera. And they've changed their colour grading.

And the trailer for Thor Ragnarok is really pretty and vibrant and colourful. Which is what... It's a comic book movie. It needs to be pretty and vibrant and colourful.

What's also interesting is... So they can do colour grading after the fact and do it. Well, they do. They did that for all the other ones.

But it was always really muted colours. If you look at Iron Man 2 and the first Avengers and the first couple Captain Americas. They were all really muted. Have all of them been digital or not?

I think the first couple were film. And then they moved to digital on a red camera. And now they've moved to an Aria Alexa. They've moved to a different camera.

Which they all... Obviously, different cameras capture colour differently. But yeah, it looks really pretty. Something else interesting is that the titling has a real 80s vibe to it.

Like it looks like an 80s movie or game. The Ragnarok in Thor Ragnarok. What is Ragnarok? I don't know.

It's like this place or the city. No, it's like End of the World or something. They say it'll be Ragnarok. I don't know.

Anyway. It's one of those movies with the title, I have no clue. So it's Thor. It's starring the Hulk.

So John... No, Ruffalo. Mark? Mark Ruffalo.

Ruff... Mark? As the Hulk is in it as kind of the special guest. As well as obviously Loki.

It's one thing they filmed in Brisbane. Yes. So that'll be interesting to see. You'll see glorious shots of Brisbane if you're posed as a...

Probably not. As like an Asian city with people running. So the scene with people running, that's Brisbane. Yeah.

Westworld Season 2. Yeah, whatever. I haven't watched the first one because it's not available. Robots go wild.

Shoot everybody. Yay. Doctor Who Christmas Special. With David What's-His-Name as the first Doctor.

The morph at the front is fantastic. Yeah. The face morph from William Hartnell to David B something? Yeah.

Whatever his name is. Who was Walder Frey in Game of Thrones. Stranger Things 2. Oh my god.

The song. Holy shit. Thriller with like the synths beat backing. Like holy shit.

The soundtrack. The soundtrack. The remix of Thriller for the trailer was amazing and perfect. The soundtrack for Stranger Things 2 is going to be...

Glorious. Yeah, it's going to be mint. It's lit, Mike. L-I-T.

Oh yeah. That's your Reddit stuff. You're looking at Reddit and you see the little flames. That's what the kids say.

Lit AF. Like Stranger Things is lit AF. Yeah, that's right. I've got to, you know, got to keep you in.

Use your Reddit. Star Trek Discovery full trailer. Looked amazing. Come on.

I mean, yeah. All the costumes. Everything for that they had on display at the show. I thought it would look great.

I don't know. I'm going to be there for it. I think they have a good premise. I think it's definitely set in the war with the Klingons.

Yeah. Which is why we were talking about Ax... Ax... Axion.

Ax... Arax... Araxna. Arax.

Araxana. Araxana. Naxxra. Naxxramas.

Anyway, they're in deep trouble. They're getting... The fan movie. Fan movie.

That got a cease and desist because it was set in the Klingon war and we and people were suggesting and we agreed that the next season was going to be set at the same time. That's why they wanted to cease and desist. I think it's pretty obvious that it is set during or very shortly after or around the first war with the Klingons before they kind of got a bit... Axonar.

Axonar. That's the one. So they're... Yeah, they're obviously trying to get canon going here.

Yeah. Well, it is canon. It's a Star Trek series. Yeah.

So they want to be able to talk about... But it being pre-original series means it's in the Prime universe. So it's before the J.J. Abrams movie split.

So they don't have any issues with Prime or alternate universe which future movies or TV shows do. Justice League? I agree with you. There's lots of popcorn moments in here.

I think with the change up of director, probably. But I ultimately think it will be... Superman's not in it. Well, he probably is.

But he is. No, he has a mustache. He's probably in it. But he's not really in the trailer.

Aquaman and Wonder Woman and The Flash and Cyborg? Question mark? Yeah. The best bit of that trailer was Flash.

They never cosplayed as him in Big Bang Theory. No. Flash was the best. He's the best bit.

They need a standalone Flash movie. Ready Player One? Well, you're all over that one. Yeah, I loved it.

One of the interesting... The trailer didn't do it for me. No, for most people the trailer probably... Because they're mashing different timelines together.

If I didn't know anything about it, I wouldn't know. There was no narrative to the trailer. You think, oh, this is Matrix or it's something kind of trying to be much like it. Like, the interesting thing about this, and I don't know if we're...

Like, first of all, the trailer is beautiful. I did comment when I had finished with the book, how are they going to transpose this into a movie with the amount of properties involved to do it? That is, you know, referencing just about everything you can think of in the 80s. And not everyone...

How would he construct a movie to do that? The other is the visuals that would go along with it. The giant sort of wars that they have. I mean, it's Spielberg, so he can basically come to anyone and say, I want to use your property in a movie.

Yeah, but Spielberg himself has basically said, no, it's not a Spielberg jerk-off movie. Because there's things like, you can see Daito and Parzival, and then there's suddenly the giant robot in there. It's like, how did that get there? And this is an interesting thing I want to raise, is one of the problems after you finish Ready Player One, if you understand and grew up in that time, and understand kind of this nostalgia of it, I felt kind of like empty afterwards.

It's like, oh, it's over. And I wished it would kind of... I don't mind if it continued on. I know he's written another book called Armada, and I don't think I really want to read it because everyone said it was bad.

But I just want to continue. I love the universe that he constructed. It was so well done. I love the ideas.

I love all of the concepts that are in there. Even in the trailer, they show you having a big war, and there's someone shooting someone else. And then as he's leaping to the next person to kill, he's picking up his coins. It's like this classic looting behavior inside of games.

So all of that transposes quite nicely. But I think in this case, it doesn't have to equal the book. I only would mind if he doesn't hit all the popcorn moments and the redemption of Wade, or how Wade transforms his feelings, and how he arrives at the ending has to happen. But I don't care if they change up as, you know, much of the kind of background noise that goes along inside of it.

So that, for me, it sort of did hit all the notes. Like, you get to see Artemis, and she's on Makira's bicycle sliding around. And, you know, there's some scenes in there we're thinking, I can't remember that happening in the book. But I'm looking forward to it.

I think it sort of made me kind of feel, oh yeah, cool, there's something for me. Cool. A few of the Marvel things. So there was Defenders, which is the Jessica Jones Iron Fist.

Who was the big black guy from Jessica Jones? Whatever his name was. What was his name? Fury?

No. Fist? No. Not the Punisher.

The other one. Anyway, that one. A few other random things. A new Saw movie called Jigsaw.

I kind of liked... I liked the first two or three Saw movies. First one, yes, absolutely, because it's really good. Second one is pretty good.

Third one, and then it kind of just goes into just gore for the sake of gore. So I don't know if they're returning to their roots. I doubt it. I think it'll just be another gore fest, really.

But the traps looked quite... Cruel ways to kill people. Pretty much. And the traps are always fun.

So we'll see. It's a traps movie. That's a genre? Traps movie.

It's called torture. No, it's torture porn. Really? Yeah, it's just gore for the sake of gore.

Buckets of blood. Kingsman, the Golden Circles, Kingsman 2. I love Kingsman, the premise of it. The first Kingsman.

There was a question on Reddit I saw the other day, which was about movies you went into with no preconceptions. I went in and saw Kingsman. I thought it was just some average British spy movie comedy. Think like Get Smart, the one with Steve Carell, or maybe like a funny James Bond.

It blew my mind. The scene in the church is incredible. So Kingsman 2, hopefully they haven't blown their load with the first one. Hopefully it's not just more of the same.

Hopefully it is actually a bit original. Well, it's expanding on the universe. So you've got the US version. You've got the US...

What do they call themselves? The US ones? The Statesmen. Yeah, and they don't drink brandy.

They drink whiskey instead. And they use whips instead of umbrellas and canes. So yeah, expanding the universe is good. So yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of other trailers, a lot of things that we don't kind of bother watching, like The Walking Dead and the sort of second part of Game of Thrones had a trailer.

Gotham, can't believe that's still going. The showrunners are going off to create a new series, which is... From what, Gotham? No, no, Game of Thrones, which has caused a lot of consternation because they just said the name, got the link bait, got the news.

Was this like the Targaryen thing? No, so they've gone off, they want to do like a Civil War, American Civil War... Oh, that's right, yeah. ...style piece.

Like Game of Thrones, but for the Civil War. But for Game of Thrones, but for Civil War. Like a historical drama, which would actually be quite interesting. Was it the Civil War or the War of Independence?

One of the two. No, Civil War. And it's basically if the South had won. That's right.

They were projecting a universe where that was the case. And people were saying, oh, it's like glorifying slavery in the Confederates. Again, who cares? It's a show.

Damn, Yankee. No, Yankees were the North, weren't they? Yeah. So, yeah, that caused a bit of problems.

I don't know. Lin-Manuel Miranda needs to do another musical about the Civil War, because I know all about the War of Independence from listening to Hamilton. He needs to do Lincoln. Yeah, no.

Wait, was Lincoln Civil War? I don't know. Someone's got to do a musical about Trump. Yeah, no, Lincoln was the Civil War.

He did the fourth score on seven years of the war. And hasn't it been interesting for comedians recently? There seems to be a plethora of call to arms for, what is it? It's kind of like a satirical uprising.

Or Ulysses S. Grant, the musical. Ulysses S. Grant.

William T. Sherman, the musical. No. Well, you combine other figures in history together and they form a super team.

That's generally what happens. And then you have, like, one... So, like, the Justice League, but for the Civil War. Yeah, so Madame Curie does.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, if you're listening. Kind of steampunk, too. You probably are. Come on the show.

Do another musical about that. Yeah, different technologies together. So, like, Madame Curie's, like, super awesome radioactive girl sort of character. And, of course, Comic-Con.

Everyone's cosplaying and doing their thing. Plenty of YouTube footage out there to see what's going down. Adam, of course, walked the floor. He was a Wookiee, so he was doing his thing.

I also saw on YouTube that it was excellent. He visited MIT Labs. Really great, great bit from Tested. Tested, I'm a bit up and down on, but most certainly these couple of eps where he dropped visiting MIT Labs and showing their fabrication, new advancements in fabrication processes was really interesting.

I loved it. Every inch of it. That was good stuff. I wish he would do more of that because he's got access to do that sort of thing.

So that's amazing. So, guys, it looks like we're at the end of another Space Welders. So, Steve, if you may want to approach us at a conference and you're looking at your feet, how do you know if a mathematician is interested in you? I don't know, Mike.

How do you know if a mathematician is interested in you? Did I get this joke wrong? Are you staring at your shoes? No, is he staring?

No, I may have got that wrong. Terrific. You can head over to www.spacewelders.com where you'll find the show notes for this and every other episode. You can subscribe to the show, iTunes, Stitcher and SoundCloud, maybe for not much longer, but we're still there for now.

Now, if you know an introvert likes you, they're staring at your shoes. Right. Good one, Mike. Just do a search for the Space Welders podcast.

Make sure you leave a rating and a review and share it with your friends. You can follow us on Twitter, twitter.com.spacewelders, facebook.com.spacewelders, Mike's on Twitter, twitter.com.spacewelders, where you'll get fantastic dad jokes. You can follow me on Twitter, twitter.com.spacewelders, where you'll get... Feather boas for Daleks.

Yeah, where you'll get mostly silence. Because Daleks can come out now. Because there's no reason they... Are all Daleks female?

Male? They... I don't know. Are they gendered?

Are you assuming their gender, Mike? I am. Because you... Well, you had Davros.

He's male. He's obviously male. He created them somehow. Yeah, but Davros was different.

So you must have male and female Daleks. Like, male and female Cybermen. Because you've got Cyberwomen. I don't know, but you're asking the important question.

Cyberbabes. So you don't see that. Cybabes. Cybabes.

Do they have, like, moulded kind of breasts in their suit? You could have Daleks that come out and they're, like, fabulous. And so they're, like... Fabulous Daleks.

Well, they had coloured Daleks for a while, didn't they? Coloured Daleks, yeah. You could have, like, a rainbow coloured Dalek, I'm sure. There's no reason.

So the LBGT version of Daleks... As opposed to Trump, who would announce by Twitter that you can't have the tea. Because that's just stupid. And then all the Joint Chiefs and Services went, yeah, that's not a thing.

No, no. Dalek Command is like, what? Someone needs to take his phone away. You may need to do the parenting thing, like when you have teenage kids.

And you're like, when you go to bed, like, give me your phone. So you're not on your phone in bed. They need to do the same thing. They need to take Twitter off that, man.

They do. Yeah. It's just wrecking his country. Anyway.

Make sure you check out our store. That's on the site, www.spaceworlders.com. You can buy a t-shirt. Mike sees you wearing a t-shirt, he'll buy you a drink.

I will buy you a drink. If you're wearing a feather boa, then I know you've listened to this episode in particular. Finally, if you have questions, comments or feedback, email us info at spaceworlders.com. So guys, another episode down.

We're heading to 100, Steve. It's going to happen soon. Probably in this year, it looks like it. If we keep up this, we're good.

If we keep up this incredibly irregular release schedule. We're so busy. Then we would have something. Please send us articles to talk about.

How many times do we get to Friday and we're like, I haven't looked at anything. I've been reading all sorts of stuff. So I am going to change up the website. We're going to move to more of a news article type way and pin the episodes at the top.

I'm just looking at the different themes we want to go with and probably have other people write on to come in as guests and write articles that they want us to talk about or things that they may want to talk about and just have a bit more of a community feel about it. So if you're interested, please let me know. Just email info at spaceworlders.com if you want to be a part of that and sort of get like a bit of a news thing going about stuff. we're interested.

Except if you're one of those dodgy sites that emails us, hey I noticed you could have some blog post written for you, we write good blog posts, can we write blog posts for you? Yeah. Just go away. Yeah.

We got another one the other day, did you see it? I saw it, it was great. I savour every moment. I feel like I want to write back and continue the conversation.

Yeah, I'm totally interested, let's go. So we're trying to do that, obviously trying to get some more guests on, and at all I know it's pretty dry at the moment. And I think that's really about the news at the moment for the site. We are obviously very busy, we've got lots of, we'll talk about say Next Data Engine, and we'll talk about Travel Reel maybe next week, because we're releasing some of those things out soon.

So that's what we're busy doing, and that's about it for the welders this week. So it's Mike out. Steve out.