Episode: 3104
Title: HPR3104: HPR AudioBook Club 19 - Tincture: An Apocalyptic Proposition
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3104/hpr3104.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 16:58:21

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3104 for Thursday 25 June 2020.
Today's show is entitled HPR Audio Book Club 19 Tincture,
an apocalyptic proposition
and is part of the series HPR underscore Audio Book Club. It is hosted by HPR underscore Audio Book Club
and is about 127 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summary is
the HPR Audio Book Club Reviews the Audio Book Tincture by Matthew D.
Jordan
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org
Support universal access to all knowledge
by heading over to archive.org forward slash donate.
Music
Hello everybody and welcome back to another episode
of Hacker Public Radio. For today we have to you
episode 19 of the Hacker Public Radio Audio Book Club.
I'm Pokey and I'm one of your panelists today
and next to me digitally in this cyber book club of ours
is X1101.
Thanks Pokey. Thanks.
Try this if I introduce you
and then you introduce the next guy until we're done.
That way I feel less like a host and it feels more like a round table.
Well then virtually next to me is 5150.
Howdy folks. I was just scrolling down.
Is it recording episode 19?
And what was the one we released the other day?
Episode 11.
So there were that far behind.
We'll try to do better folks and can found.
And last but not least we have touched.
Let's get everybody. I would just like to point out to everybody
in in audio land that that is not the order that the list on mobile is.
I'm just pointing that out.
No, but I couldn't say cyber and then call on you after X1101
a one was bitching about it.
You know I'd drop a cyber space Pokey.
Oh, I just did it.
Hey son of a bitch.
And there goes our explicit tag for the for the show.
And good riddance to it.
What was our book this this month 50?
Our book was tincture.
And I just had that open.
If you'd let if you told to find it now.
Give you the author and all that kind of stuff.
And here we go.
I'm still open.
But I have to use my tab finder to find it.
And you can find it on potiobooks.com.
There's a couple tincture books by the same author.
So there is a sequel to this one.
I've actually got the sequel page open.
The author is Matthew D Jordan.
And I think the books actually been around a while.
One of the reviews of the sequel.
I think said.
Okay, well, it's just copied right between 2005 and 2014.
So.
Okay, no, I'm still on the sequel page.
And I've been talking about nothing for way too long.
Amen.
Tincture to one of the reviews on tincture twos.
This is the best.
Best read of 2014.
So.
Tincture one must have been written sometime prior to that.
And.
I don't know if anyone else noticed,
but I want to say happy beer anniversary to.
Poki and Taj for me joined in the audio book club.
Based on looking at when the first show that I was on was recorded.
This is a year that we've been doing this.
We've been together a year.
Yeah.
I better stop calling you with a other girl's name, huh?
Yeah, sometime.
Nah, he digs it.
Just keep going.
We're really guys.
Thanks for putting up with me this long.
I've been having a great time.
Are you kidding?
The show is better because of you.
Yeah, the three of us couldn't pull the show off by ourselves.
I think the three of you guys could.
If I ducked out, you guys would be just fine.
But we wouldn't know when to start.
Oh, yeah.
No, but you'd probably have someone else in charge of the calendar.
You'd know when the show was.
Oh, we already know when the show is.
It's just nobody else does.
All right.
So what did you guys think of this book?
Wow.
That's what I thought of this book.
Yeah, it's a little different.
If you're, if you're one of those people that is the reader,
you don't, you don't like not knowing what is really going on
until about at least halfway through the book.
Then this probably isn't the book for you.
It's, it's one of those books that drops cookie crumbs.
A little bit all through it until finally comes together.
And you kind of see what it is that's going on.
But.
For somebody likes that sort of.
You know, adventure.
Then I, I would highly recommend it.
Yeah.
I think I knew right away what was going on in this book.
And that was the author was not going to tell me what was going on.
And I was, I was okay with that.
I wanted to know what was going on.
But it never killed me not to find it out.
So which is good because I still don't think I understood the end.
We'll get there later.
But I, I thought the world was just really cool.
And the, the way that the author spoke when telling the story was just fantastic.
I think it might have been my favorite part about it.
Yes, that sort of a not a new language.
Everybody speaking English, but there are certain, you know, new phrases.
That have come out that we don't, I mean, if someone.
And we probably explain a little more about what's going on the book.
But if, if someone were to hear a conversation between characters in the book,
they would sound very, very strange.
Did anybody pick up any like turns of phrase from this book that they now use or want to use in real life?
Because I got one times as they are.
Yeah, well, yeah, that one couldn't be avoided.
No, I love the one where the main character, Ramual, he was sitting and talking.
It must have been with.
Oh, I can't remember the character's name, but I'll remember it over.
I think it was over who said, don't put your words between my words.
Or don't put words between my words.
I really liked that.
I thought it was a fantastic turn of phrase.
And things like, I'm in a quick rather than I'm in a hurry.
Oh, there was all kinds of language that was very interesting in.
It's not what we would say, but it made, and it's all the same.
There's probably why in their world they adopted it.
Touch, how about you, man?
We keep talking around you.
I'm going to be real honest.
I'm going to drop some knowledge about this book.
Not Todd takes a long time to read a book.
That's why he listens to everything at like three times speed.
Because I can't get through everything in a month usually.
Not only did I listen to this book, I listened to the sequel because I couldn't stop.
I just kept going.
I love these books.
There's only one problem with these books.
And we will get into it because it is a huge problem.
But other than that, they are fantastic.
Preach.
Oh, I did not listen to the second book.
It took a lot of effort to stop listening at the end of the first book.
But I didn't want it to influence my review.
So I still have not heard the second book.
So even when we do spoilers, don't spoil that one.
I mean, please.
But if you mean huge problems, they keep referring to guns as gunners.
And that one annoyed me a little.
But that's okay.
That might be my only problem with it.
Well, Pokey, what I want you to do is as soon as we're done,
go download the second one because wow again.
I'm pretty sure I have it downloaded, but okay.
So for the person who hasn't listened, who hasn't listened and is listening to us.
And we'll try not to spoil it till after the spoilers.
But so these folks find themselves in a fairly desolate version of Earth.
And it seems to me that they're out either in the Midwest or even further.
But it's tough to tell because there's so much desolation.
And there was some type of apocalyptic event, which no one can remember,
because they really can't remember much of anything.
Even to a few days ago, people just don't seem to have memory in this particular world.
And they don't seem to be able to measure time very well.
So things could happen fairly rapidly or fairly slowly.
And people don't really know the difference.
They just know where they're at right now and what they're doing right now.
And to some people, they've gotten even accustomed to it.
This seems normal to them.
And so the apocalyptic event that happened, they called it whatever.
And they're now just after the whatever.
And that's really the only measure of time that seems to have any importance whatsoever
in this book is after the whatever.
Right, it's they do say I think, you know, I know for the sport,
they do say where the airport is that they go to.
So we do know where this is, though.
You're right, Pokey, this area sounds far more desolate than I would consider that state in modern times.
So something has happened.
People don't really don't know who they were before they know there was a world before.
That was that is like the world that we live in.
But a lot of it's because they've read about it in books and things like that that survive.
But they most of the people don't know, don't even know what their own name was
unless they happen to be carrying a wallet and they look at their driver's license.
And so one of the things that 50 mentioned earlier is any time in the book that time is mentioned,
the author always says time such as it is.
So if he would, if the author were to say, you know, after a few moments, time such as it is or anything like that.
And you keep hearing that in the book.
And it's a gentle beating in the skull of a reminder that people really can't keep track of time.
It doesn't mean a whole lot.
Sometimes they're, sometimes they hurry, but that really time still doesn't mean anything to it.
So very, very often in this book, the phrase time such as it is comes up.
And there might be something more to that than I picked up on, but there's, there is something to it regardless.
That one phrase did seem overdone. It's like, okay, I get the point already.
You don't need to do it every time you reference anything to do with time.
Oh, see, I didn't think it was overdone.
I thought it was just right, except for there was one spot, which we can talk about after spoilers.
There was one time where I didn't think it was appropriate.
But the rest of them, I thought it was like, yep, this, this room, you know,
just when I was starting to get into the story and get excited, this just reminded me,
oh, yeah, this is the whatever.
And I liked it.
Yeah, it was usually, it was usually used when the characters were speaking.
And this is, this is the manner of speech that they now use.
I don't know. I find it kind of felt like I was being hit over that that,
because I very much the point that time doesn't make sense.
But it felt like it was just kind of being bludgeoned in there.
So X 1101, you mentioned in our little chat window here that you understand the connection
between this book and the Stephen King reference references that you wanted this.
I've never read any Stephen King.
So most of that went over my head.
I was curious.
And I know it's a Stephen King reference, because he's mentioned directly.
But I don't think it's too much of a spoiler to say that the bad guy carries around a Stephen King book
or at least a book that says it's by Stephen King.
Oh, no, it, it's very much the gunslinger.
No, I understand that, but it is when they describe it's inside the book.
Is that actually the way this Stephen King book goes?
Ask me that again after the spoiler section.
Yeah, okay.
Ask you about the Stephen King connection or the...
No, that question specifically about what's inside of it,
because there's some details in there that are spailery.
But not only does this reference the gunslinger directly a lot,
the whole story feels like the gunslinger and the related stories a lot.
Okay.
The gunslinger, the gunslinger is the first book in the Dark Tower series.
And I'm not going to spoil that for anybody other than stop and go read it at some point.
But if you've read it, if you're going to read it,
this parts of this story feel a lot like that story,
not in the details, but in settings and flow and things like that.
Oh, that's cool.
I like the flow.
I thought it was a very comfortable read.
Yeah, I think that's the only King series I've really missed is the Dark Tower.
Well, in a lot of ways, almost every book he's written is part of the Dark Tower series.
So I tried briefly.
I haven't had much free time lately.
I did try briefly to look up some of these character names,
because some of them had very weird names.
You know, Ramiwool was the main character.
Abraña was his secondary character, a woman who they have a more of a family,
like a brother sister relationship than anything else.
There was the bad guy was affulent.
And maybe I didn't spell the names right, but I couldn't find any of them anywhere.
Except for Ramiwool, I found listed as the name of an angel in a video game series.
And maybe, like I said, maybe I spelled the other ones wrong.
Maybe they're all trying to reference angels or some such thing.
But anybody else, how many to say on that?
Well, from her full name, I'd have to go back in the book and find it.
It sounded like she sounded like an Arab name.
So you're right. I'm surprised not to find that.
Hey, Josh, you there?
Yeah, I got booted for some reason.
I don't know why, but yeah.
Oh, well, okay, I was waiting a few times for you to say something.
Oh, now 50 got kicked, not kicked, but disconnected.
Did anyone correct 50, 150 about her name?
Did the tea brew not their book?
I was about to, but then he disappeared and I was going to wait till he came back on too late.
I already did it. Sorry.
Well, I go ahead.
So I just didn't catch that because my knowledge of language languages and religions is poor.
I kind of made the same assumption.
No, no, it's said it in the book.
She said it's a, he are.
She didn't Marcus said that's a Hebrew word that means what was it?
See, I thought that was Rachel that he said was a Hebrew name.
Oh, Hebrew.
Yes, Rachel is a Hebrew name, but he said that Abraña was a Hebrew word that meant something.
And now suddenly I can't remember what it was.
Something like peace or shoot Taj any recollection of that.
I don't remember specifically what it means, but that was the conversation that it was a, her name was Hebrew.
Yeah, 50.
I don't know if you caught on that.
Abraña in the book, they said is a Hebrew word that means something something like peace or understanding or something like that.
Something that had no place in this book.
I also looked up the names of some of the characters, but I'm going to save it for the spoiler section because I think if we talk about it,
it will kind of give something away.
Oh, okay.
I was going to say Ramiwool also sounds fairly Hebrew to me because there's several Hebrew names that end in U.L.
There's, you know, Samuel, Lemuel.
So it makes sense that that Ramiwool may mean something and I think that U.L. sound means of God.
So there was kind of an angel connection in the name itself, as well as in me looking that up too.
But as far as whether or not that showed up in the book, first of all, I'm undecided.
And second of all, it would be a spoiler.
One trouble with the book, and sorry, guys, Plumble just up and flat crashed on me.
It's hard to talk about this book in the prespoiler segment because there are so many themes that you get the cookie crumbs through the book.
I mean, we're not talking so much about events here as we are, you know, this quest for knowledge that we all went through trying to figure out what was going on.
Oh, I can say a few things that are not at all spoilers then if you don't mind.
I will say that the reading of this book, the reading and the writing and the reading are so unique and so interesting that they were listening to even if there were no story.
Just a turn of phrase the way it was written. I thought was excellent. I really, really enjoyed it.
Go ahead if anybody has something to say about that. I have another point when we're done with this one.
Well, one thing we could talk about that.
Ramiel is a tanker. Now, that's not to say that he drives a tank.
Though they also mentioned those in the story, but apparently after the whatever, some people turned up with a thermosized tank on their back.
And with two tubes running into the running into their back.
And nobody knows what they're for, what's in it.
And anybody were there a tanker or not who tries to remove one has sort of like a mental block where they can't.
Yup, and the tankers seem to be abnormally strong and quick.
Yes, I was going to say that too and forgot it.
I want to talk about the music.
That was my other point. Thank you.
The music is a remarkably varied for what the story is.
You think kind of going into it. It's post apocalyptic. It's kind of Western that it would be music like that.
But it is extremely varied, but all at the same time fits perfectly like so much so that I went to the website for the book.
Not patio books, but the actual website for the book.
And the author gives links to all the music that he used.
And I could just send listen to that just completely separate from the book and it still evokes sort of that the feeling of the book.
That was going to be my other point was that the music in this book was excellent.
And I caught on real early that it was that he's using creative commons music.
So I knew somewhere they were going to be links to this.
It was going to be attribution because I recognized almost I'm going to say maybe a third of the songs that he used in the book.
I recognize them as stuff that I've heard on like cc hitch dot net or maybe on rat hole radio.
But there were stuff that I've heard before and they were all excellent.
There were one or two songs that I didn't care for, but that's just personal preference.
This guy really knows what he's doing in so far as finding good creative commons music.
Did we reach out to him to come to the audio club? I'm not sure.
I didn't even reach out to us with a calendar invite him.
So no, I didn't. I'm sorry.
I'm just curious. I would love to talk to this guy.
I was thinking that too that we should just have an interview with him.
I mean, if you guys felt the same way about the book as I do and you seem to.
We did it with lots of wrongs. I don't see it.
It's, you know, something we've done before. So I'd be interested in doing it if we can get hold of him.
Me too. I would too for sure.
Yeah, this, this book is, is a whole nother level good.
Not even whole nother level, a whole different level.
It's just different and it's fantastic.
Most, most times when artists try to do something weird.
It just winds up being weird, but this is really, really excellent.
I can't say that enough.
And we should say something probably at this point where the title comes from Tincture.
Ramiya and Abranya and mainly Abranya.
She, she's the one who knows how to mix the tinctures, which are, you know, usually alcohol based and.
Then mixed with found items from, from, they come from before the whatever.
You know, coffee or tobacco or something like that.
The cure headaches or something.
And this is how they apply their trade is they try to find a place from before the whatever that hasn't been completely picked over.
And get these secret ingredients for these secret remedies.
I guess one of the ones they're looking for is anything of dried blood on it, which has seemed rather unsanitary to me.
I think she also mixes her tinctures in the same way that I do my cooking in that the main ingredient is love.
Okay, come back.
Well, I'm here. I didn't go far.
We got the main ingredient is, oh, is love.
Okay, I thought you were going to say alcohol.
No, I think it was you that left is Taj got it.
Yeah, I heard him.
Oh, well, that's me. Sorry.
That's true. There's an awful lot of reference to ferment in this book.
And for the first couple of times I heard it, I thought, I thought he was saying, well, no, I didn't think he was saying.
My brain was hearing firmament. So I was thinking like territory or ground, you know, like solid earth.
But then I caught on after a bit that was my own feeling how to place.
Yeah, it's it.
I don't know.
I think that was one thing that might have been wrong.
I don't think they talk about it later in the story, but I don't think it would be a spoiler.
But that there in this world, their preferred method for disposing of their dad was, you know, to light a bonfire.
And they have the bonfire soaked in in ferment.
Now, the thing is, most of the stuff that, well, pretty much, pretty much anything that you that you can distill is also.
Edible for humans. So when it seems like everybody is so hungry all the time in this story, I wonder where they get the additional foodstuffs and grains or whatever they use to mix all this alcohol.
Oh, I thought you're going to say that it's very hard to light a fire with alcohol because it kind of is it goes up in just a flash.
And there's no no flame or heat left to ignite the fire.
We're humans, man. We'll find a way to make alcohol.
Well, that's true. But if we had all this alcohol for the normal use, do you think, you know, all these guys sitting around the bar, they're going to say, oh, yeah, sure, take our bottle and that gets shovels.
I mean, Poke will find a way to make alcohol, but then we're going to drink the alcohol.
Yeah, it's true. You and me both.
Yeah, but alcohol has a lot of other reasons to exist like sanitation. They use it to drive vehicles as much as they can.
So I mean, there are other uses for it. It's useful other than, you know, just drinking.
Yeah, I'm not so sure you can power gasoline engine on alcohol without any further modification.
I think that was one little bit of artistic license that he took with this, maybe a diesel, but I don't think a gasoline engine.
You can just not for very long, which was kind of the point they made.
No, yeah, an engine will run just fine on pure alcohol.
It'll eat up all the rubber parts that are in it and then you'll have a, you know, melting center block in front of you, but it'll run for a while.
That's true. You'd have to change the houses and stuff on an older vehicle, though. I think anything.
I think anything built after certain years, supposed to be alcohol ready or at least gas, already.
Well, well, that's the difference is it's gas, the whole versus alcohol to run on.
I did some digging on the whole ethanol thing and to run on straight ethanol, not E85 or anything, but straight ethanol.
You have to replace pretty much all the rubber parts with something that's not going to get eaten by your fuel.
I think up to the E85, most stuff runs okay, but pure grain alcohol is going to destroy everything that's not metal in your engine.
Oh, I didn't know that that rubber was dissolved in alcohol.
Yeah, and I should have said that, but it seems the problems with the motors aren't that they're dying because the fuel line breaks down there.
It seems like anything that they can get to run, it's got bad rings and bad bearings and it's only going to make it a few miles.
And no oil and tires that are stitched together with scraps of rubber and twine.
Right, they indicate that all the tires have gone flat, so which, you know, why could they, why could they get the car out of the airport?
Well, I think they did indicate they're just running it on flat tires.
But yeah, yeah, everybody's, everybody who's driving around is driving around on essentially solid rubber tires.
There was also, if we're going to go this deep into it, quite a bit of artistic license taken in the fact that the cars would turn over at all because they were described as being in such a state of decay
and decrepitness that there's no way a battery would have any life left in it, especially in this dry environments they were talking about, you would have just evaporated off a half of the electrolyte in there.
And the other half would have broken down into its constituents and evaporated as well.
Not to mention the oil and the fuel and, yeah, all that stuff would have varnished and gummed up, but that's okay. That's easy enough to get over.
Well, and then you pour straight alcohol in it and a lot of that stuff just kind of dissolves and turns it to goo and then gets into the engine and you can see the results.
Oh, man, engines run on goo all the time. It's crazy how poorly people take care of their cars. That's all another conversation guilty.
Touch anything to add to the conversation. You're very quiet tonight.
No, I'm just sitting here listening, taking it all in. I'm dying for some spoilers because that's where I'm going to shine.
I'm going to get on it when we get to the spoiler section.
Has anybody played Fallout?
Yeah.
No, but I like the idea of the game.
This, for some reason, I played Fallout 3 for quite a while and this kind of started ringing some of those bells minus the
everything's a radiated piece.
Yeah, it does feel like a Fallout game for sure.
Do the guns work in Fallout?
Yes, that wasn't the part I was just the whole post apocalyptic using weird things for currency in weird ways.
Scarcity, random violence, those kinds of things.
Yeah, that's one thing we haven't talked about. They use what they call green money for cash, but in this post apocalyptic world, I can't say that word.
One dollar bill and a hundred dollar bill are counted the same.
So it's a green piece of paper to them.
Yeah, I get the impression that no one really remembers math.
I don't think there would be any scientific reason for a cartridge not firing after a period of time.
Yeah, they could rust up, but I would think I can't imagine what would cause the powder or the primer to deteriorate.
I don't think it was a case of deterioration.
I think it was more metaphysical and setting.
Well, true. When we get past the spoilers, we start to speculate who or what caused the whatever.
But I think you're right. I think it seems like there was some sort of intelligence behind it, and perhaps they didn't want people shooting at other people.
But one place for the author or I re-listen to the first chapter yesterday after I finished the book.
And at the beginning, he says guns don't work very well because only about one in 30 rounds actually fires.
Whereas when we, you know, later in the book, when they do start shooting at each other, it's more like one out of three will fire.
I was going to mention that. It did seem like they had a much better odds than were described early on in the book.
And then may have been, you know, like you said, there may be some intelligence behind the whatever.
And that may have been part of the intelligence that gave them better odds. But, you know, more on that later, I guess.
No, they were plot bullets.
Damn it. I was just going to joke. They're literally plot bullets.
You guys nailed it, both of you.
And I guess we can talk about our, you know, pretty early in the book.
Ramiya and Abronia have been traveling together for.
They don't know how long time.
Yes, and they had.
They used to have other companions that have died, but they don't remember who they are.
I mean, this is, this is all after the whatever.
Somebody, somebody dies next week. You don't, you don't remember them.
And then they come to a hospital where it shouldn't be out in the middle of the desert.
And they meet a third companion and people are not very trusting of each other.
So the third guy, he finds Ramiya, you're rummaging through his stuff.
Ramiya was at assume just that there wasn't anybody there.
And, you know, they, it seems like every time people meet new people in this story,
it's depending on the circumstance that you, since there is such mistrust in the world,
you don't know who's going to kill you to take your stuff.
Everybody sort of assumes. So every time you meet somebody,
everybody's just on a hair trigger to start a fight.
Yeah, that's something interesting too that I had thought of when listening to the book is in a world like this.
They build the author builds a world in where no one can really afford to trust a stranger.
So anytime you meet up with somebody, it's probably going to end in one of you dying.
And Ramiya is a tanker. So he's got this extra strength to him.
And Abraña seems to also have a little more strength than the average person wandering around in this world.
And it, it seems to me like the author was trying to make the point that compassion comes from strength.
Because in this world, you kind of have to be strong enough to be kind.
If you're, if you're kind without strength to back it up, it's going to be a weakness and, and it's going to be your end.
See, I didn't get that she was stronger. I got that she was faster and smarter.
Well, that, I didn't mean physically stronger. I'm sorry. Mentally stronger. It's what I meant for her.
Okay. Well, then I concur.
And then of course, there's other characters in the book who have physical strength or mental strength or
you know, maybe strength over other people. And they'll seem to be fairly cruel.
And there are, you know, and as seems to be always, always a facet of post-apocalyptic.
Hey, I got it right that time. Fiction.
No, you don't.
Close enough. You guys know what I mean.
Uh, you know, there's the, there's the, you know, crazy religious groups, you know, building forts out out in the desert as well that really don't take kindly to anybody who's not part of their part of their group.
And early in the book, the three, uh, three travelers find themselves out of water and out of options.
And so they have to approach one of these fortified towns to try to get some water and some work post-apocalyptic, nothing.
We got those now.
I was going to make that point.
Wait, I was distracted briefly. I'm sorry. We got what now?
Crazy religious groups building forts out in the wilderness.
Oh, yeah.
And not taking kindly to folks who don't agree with them.
Now, let me be clear here. I'm all about folks having their own religion and folks having their own space.
It's the not taking kindly to folks that I kind of take, take offense with.
Fair enough.
Do what your heart tells you unless your heart tells you to shoot at me.
Then don't do that.
My heart tells me to drink a beer.
Well, then do that.
I can't until we have our beverage review thing. It's my only one tonight.
Well, it's the only one I should drink tonight.
Well, then let's do that.
Is everybody done talking about unspoilers?
Yes.
I just want a beer.
All right. You guys mind if I start tonight?
Please do.
Oh, shit. I thought I double-keyed.
X-1-1-1. Are you back?
Did you leave?
He just walked away.
Oh, damn it all.
I wanted him to hear this one. This is pretty good.
All right. Why not someone else go first who doesn't care if X-1-1-1 hears it or not?
Well, I'm retrieving said beverage as we speak.
You know what? I'm buying each one of you guys
one of these bottle-shaped beer goosies.
So you can put your beer in the goosie before the show
and it'll sit next to you and be cold when it comes time for the review.
It does seem to be a recurring problem.
Well, I will go since everyone else is busy getting the beverage.
I got a little crazy today.
And I'm drinking a half iced tea, half lemonade concoction.
That is pretty tasty.
Oh, is it carbonated?
It is not.
I wouldn't like it if it was.
So it's just straight up iced tea.
Some lemonade is good.
That was my question as well.
Pokey is this something you made himself rather than something you purchased?
Oh, yeah, it definitely helped me.
That's the only way to roll.
Well, I mean, I didn't like grow the tea leaves or anything.
You know, the tea I bought I made and then the lemonade I made.
So that's how many does it get?
Now, you said you buy lemon.
Do you see you grow lemons? You say you had a lemon tree?
No, I wish. That would be awesome.
It's much money.
That's probably say some cash if I had a tree.
But no, unfortunately, we can't grow them here reliably.
Why did I think you said you had a lemon tree?
Okay, yeah. Buying lemons, that makes sense.
All right, X-1-1-1 is back.
So, all right, I remember, let me second key up and get my hand off this thing.
All right, there it is, holding my mic open.
All right, I remember on one of our episodes, I believe it was 50,
had an Innocent Gun beer.
I don't remember exactly which one it was.
But we all thought it sounded like he was saying innocent gun.
And if there was ever an Innocent Gun, it was ram-huel in this story.
So when I saw an Innocent Gun beer in the store today, I grabbed it.
And they just call it their Oak Aged Beer.
It is Innocent Gun Rum Aged Beer Aged With Rum Oak Chips.
And I don't think they could say aged or rum or oak anymore than they did.
And it's a bottle that I'm going to open with my new metal wallet tool thingy.
Like we were talking about last month, I got a metal ant.
It's called, which is similar to the wallet ninja and made by the same people.
It's wallet ninja.
But I like that the bottle opener was facing the right direction on this one.
So you get a little more leverage to open it.
So here it opens beers just fine.
Did you say metal ant because if I Google that, I'm coming up with just pictures of metal ants.
Yes, I did say metal ants.
If you add the letters A-R-I-I-C, you come up with the company.
And I think they really like the name metal ant because there seems to be two completely different and disparate products called metal ant by this company.
It's same font in their name and everything.
But apparently they have a, I don't know, like a hard drive case or something made out of aluminum.
And they call it the metal ant.
And then they have this thing, this multi tool that fits in your wallet that's called the metal ant.
And so the Oak aged rum beer by innocent gun is kind of nice.
It's got that nice subtle like hard liquor taste to it without tasting like hard liquor.
If that kind of makes any sense, it's, you can get a little bit of the sour mash that would be in there in a little bit of the, I don't know, kind of the nose of a hard liquor without, you know, it doesn't actually have it.
That's kind of nice as an aftertaste to a beer, kind of like the Kentucky bourbon beers that we've talked about on here before.
It's fairly mild. It's pretty sweet.
It's almost not bitter at all to my taste.
And just a little bit of carbonation, not too much.
It's nice. It's a little too sweet for me to drink it every day.
It's thick enough, which I like, but maybe a little too much on the sweet side to have a whole bunch of them.
I'm pretty sure my wife and I have had those.
Yeah, and it's 6.8% alcohol by volume if anybody cares about such things, excuse me.
Oh, they want this sucker cold.
Bottles says serve it four to six degrees Celsius.
I bet that that would make the sweet a little more palatable.
Yeah, maybe I sometimes I think drinking beer too cold, kind of hides too many of the flavors, especially if they're subtle flavors.
Oh, I agree. I agree.
Yeah, there are a lot of beers intended to be had closer to room temperature.
Yeah, I don't know how close to room temperature I want to get, but I think it's closer than three or four degrees.
And this medallant wallet tool is almost okay.
I've opened a couple of beers with it, but I haven't needed it for opening beers.
I've always been near a beer opener.
I opened a box with it, but the box cutter on it is kind of lame because it's not on the corner.
So it's not really where I would want a box cutter to be.
It has a couple of wrenches on it that I don't think I'll ever use.
I've got a cell phone stand that I may or may not ever use.
But it's got a built in can opener, which I think is a good idea.
Like the old P38s, I think that was the standard issue can opener.
It's got that kind of a manual can opener built into it.
And it's got a couple of screwdrivers.
And one of them, even though it's flat, is shaped and sized as if to work on a Phillips head screw.
There's only two of the slots, which I thought was a really good idea.
I hadn't seen that before and it seems to work.
Or no, I had seen it once before, but still it seems to work.
So I guess it's all right. It was less than 10 bucks.
And I got a couple other, I hate to steal the review section.
But since we talked on it the last show, I had a couple of other wallet tools too that I wanted to compare them.
And I got another one that was on Amazon.
It was like $2 or something.
And it's like Silvery and doesn't seem to have a brand name or anything.
It's just kind of import from China.
And I can't see any use to that thing at all. It's completely useless.
It's smaller than a credit card and it's got sharp edges.
So it kind of has to sit in a little plastic bag that it comes in.
Or it's going to tear the shit out of your wallet.
So that thing was almost completely useless.
And I got a third one, one that I'd seen a couple times.
And I have to take it out of my wallet here to see the name of it.
But it's an Ianson Claire designs card sharp.
And it's a knife kind of embedded in a piece of plastic and you unlock it.
And then it folds out into a knife, which is kind of handy to have with you.
But then and I'll carry it and see if I ever need it and see how it does in real use.
But it's very thin metal. It's very flimsy and feel.
And it was super, super hard to sharpen because it was so flexible.
And it's really hard to hold the thing with any kind of leverage on it.
So even with my really nice sharpener, the Taj said he loves.
It was very difficult to get a good edge on this thing.
But now that it's got it, I don't know if I'll ever need it.
But it has it. That's all that matters.
Yeah, I know. I know.
It started getting really frustrating.
And that made me more determined.
But it's shaving sharp now.
Yeah, I tried to do that with one of my knives with a stope wetstone.
And I'm almost sure I did more harm than good.
It's not hard to do.
I've never really used a wetstone to any good effect.
But I've seen on videos a tip that several people have given out.
It's that if you're not used to using a wetstone or you're not good at using a wetstone yet,
to make yourself a little wedge that's at the angle that you want and you rest your knife on it.
And this kind of, you don't slide the wedge along with your knife,
but you just use it as a starting point.
And it helps you to keep your knife at the right angle as you're sharpening.
That's an interesting idea.
I love sharpening systems, but I'm pretty sure on certain knives,
it's just a barestone is the way to get the sharpest edge on a blade.
I mean, sometimes just going back to the basics is where it's at.
Oh, I used a file.
Well, actually, it's a diamond sharpening stone,
but I used it like a file to try and sharpen my lamb splitter.
And that's been working pretty good.
But I had a couple of beers one night,
and I wanted to see how tough the knife was.
That people can cut wine bottles open with a sharp enough strong enough knife.
So I tried it on a beer bottle,
and it just put a big dent in the blade of the knife.
So it's clearly not a tempered steel yikes.
If I could slow clap and push to talk at the same time, I would be.
Hey, man, I tried it.
Sorry, Apog got so much of the review.
50, what do you got? What do you drink it tonight, buddy?
I have perhaps one of the more unique brews that I've had a chance to review.
This is Shiner's prickly pear.
And see, I picked this up. I thought they were.
They were just being cute, and this was going to be a parry,
which for people who don't know what I'm going to parry is.
Like a apple cider.
You know, I'll call it apple cider.
This would be doing the same thing with pairs.
So I was expecting something fairly sweet.
So I brought home, opened one up, took a sip,
and instead of something as pretty sweet,
that was incredibly dry, not a whole lot of flavor, some.
Little bitters, it's 20 IBU, so it's not, it's not terribly bitter.
And just ahead of sweet, you know, that you more have is an aftertaste.
They weren't kidding.
This beer is actually made with cactus, prickly pear cactus.
Now, I don't know if they've added the cactus after fermentation
or if they've actually used it as the malt.
On the bot, well, I should see it looked at the bottle,
because it's got prickly pears all over the label.
I guess I didn't look that close.
It does show them with the fruit on there,
and I don't, I don't know if that's where they're getting the sweetness.
I know that, okay.
I know that you can, I've only had it a couple of times,
a little, a little restaurant actually picks prickly pear cactus
and they make, you know, they slice up the pad
like a fridge cut green beans and serve as a side dish.
And it tastes just exactly like green beans almost.
So, you know, it's interesting,
but I'm not sure it would be, it would be worth the effort
because I was doing a little looking into harvesting cactus
because, of course, I've got prickly pears all over my pasture.
And apparently you have to do it with thick gloves,
not necessarily because of the spines,
but once you've picked all the spines out,
they're tiny little silly that you cannot see
and they will get in your skin like fiberglass fibers
and make you itch like crazy
and are almost impossible to remove.
So, I don't know, I would think I would rather have professionals
handle my cactus preparation
because, you know, who knows if you got any of that stuff
into the actual food.
But, I don't know, if I ever get in the home brewing,
I've got a pasture full of cactus to experiment with.
But it seems rather dangerous because I think these silly,
they're even on the fruit.
So, as far as the beer, it's growing on me.
The first one I had, I really didn't care much for.
It would be very refreshing, I think, on a hot day.
But the dryness in there, I think,
drives your throat out as well.
I mean, it may be a thirst quencher,
but it definitely leaves a very distinct taste in your mouth,
even though it doesn't have a whole lot of flavor
as you're drinking it.
So, I don't, you know, generally I like pretty much
anything Shinder does, and it's a very affordable
for a premium beer, but I'm not sure I would ever buy this again.
You said one thing I can relate to,
and that's prickly pairs have a unique and distinctive flavor.
It's really hard to describe them because they don't taste quite like anything else.
And it's not something you used to,
so your first bite of one is not like,
hey, this is great.
It's just so different.
For me anyway, it was, it was so different from anything
that it took some getting used to.
And once I got used to it,
I don't think they're worth all the effort, but that's just me.
But you, you can probably, 50,
you can probably get them at the grocery store
if you just wanted to try them without exposing yourself
to all the danger part of it,
which it sounds like there's more than I was aware of.
Yeah, I think they do sell jars of it already cut
and everything in the grocery store.
Oh, I've never seen in jars. I only ever just bought the whole fruit.
Oh, okay. I haven't seen that.
Now, you know, and I've seen the fruit with the,
you know, the thick, you know, peeled
or, well, you wouldn't actually peel it,
but, you know, the outer part cut off with a knife.
And once that's done, I mean,
I saw it on the internet when I looked this up,
it's looks like Kiwi sort of.
I think the one that I've had had kind of a red flesh to it
and a ton of seeds.
Well, that's where I meant it.
It's, it's like red in the center
and sort of yellow orange on the outside.
I mean, I meant how it was constructed
not, not the actual color.
Oh, okay. All right.
Yeah, I don't think I remember. It's been a while.
It didn't taste anything like green beans, though.
That was weird that you said that.
I thought they were fairly sweet.
Well, you're thinking of the fruit.
I'm talking about the pad.
Oh, oh, the cactus itself?
The plant itself?
Yeah, the big round part.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, that's what I've had.
I've never had any, I've never had any of the fruit,
though looking at the article tells me,
I never knew what time of year to pick it.
And they said the fruit's always edible,
but it's, it's only going to taste good
when it's, you know, sort of the blood red purplish,
you know, color to the outside.
So I may try that sometime.
It's got a ton of seeds in it.
I didn't think it was worth all the effort
to spit all the seeds out.
Oh, so it wasn't like kiwi then
that you couldn't just eat the seeds?
No, it was more like,
come grape seeds inside,
which I know people who just crunched
the grape seeds too.
So maybe you can tolerate it.
I think I wound up just doing that
with the prickly pear.
It was just swallow in the seeds,
just saying the hell with it,
because it was too much work to spit them out.
And now there's a cactus growing in my belly.
Well, where I'm moving to,
I'm going to have trouble not stepping on them
every time I walk outside.
So, you know, I'm plenty of raw material.
Cool.
Next, one, one, one.
What do you got, buddy?
I saved the last glass
of a very special bottle of bourbon
I bought when I was on vacation.
I bought a bottle of
wild turkey rare breed
that is a barrel-proof
version of wild turkey,
which is a straight bourbon whiskey.
The batches are about 55% alcohol by volume.
Very, very sharp smell.
I take mine with one or two cubes of ice
and then I let it breathe a little bit,
a little bit of the high smell,
so not quite neat.
A lot like your wild turkey 101,
but a much smoother,
but also much more powerful taste.
Mmm, so very good.
Did I have a real special price on it, too?
What's a bottle that costs?
It's a 700-mL bottle.
It's about 40 bucks,
or it was where I got it.
Oh, that's not too terrible for that size.
No.
The wild turkey's good.
There's a four rows,
one that's about the same price
that's also very good.
I think that's their small batch.
They've got a single barrel one
that's more expensive.
And the other one in this price range
that's also as good is woodfords.
Woodfords reserve.
Okay.
So what is wild turkey taste like?
Yeah.
For a bourbon,
it's a little heavy on the rye,
but as it steps up into the higher proofs,
that really mellows out,
and so you get the flavor
with quite so much sharpness.
That, for me, at least,
that's the real downside to
a lot of the bourbons and ryes
that are heavy on rye,
is the ones that aren't aged well
or aren't filtered well,
just get really sharp pleasant.
This is quite nice.
Yeah.
Some of the cheaper bourbons
even can be sharp
and unpleasant.
I agree with you there
that the Jim Beams
and the Jack Daniels,
I think, are...
I've never really enjoyed either one of them,
though I did drink my fair share
of Jim Beam at one point.
Yeah.
I'd know who you're saying.
You call Jack Daniels bourbon, didn't you?
Oh, it is, it is.
Yeah.
That's right.
What is it?
Tenancy whiskey.
It is not a Kentucky bourbon.
Yeah.
Excuse me, my mistake.
Them fighting words.
Yeah, they can be in some parts.
Yeah.
I have absolutely nothing
against Jack Daniels.
It's a fairly nice beverage.
It's just not bourbon.
Right.
I don't even like it.
I don't think it's very good.
But that's just me.
It's too wordy for my taste.
Oh, see, that's...
That's what I...
One of the things I love about
a good bourbon.
Actually, at Christmas time,
my dad and I bought a bottle.
It was a wild turkey 101.
But it came with a little pint jar
and a kind of a corkscrew cut chunk of
charred wood.
And you put the corkscrew, the chunk of wood
and the bourbon in the jar
and you left it for two weeks.
And it got crazy dark like it had been aged
in a barrel for quite a bit longer.
And so you got a lot more of the smoky,
woody flavors.
And that was really out of this world good
for, you know, $22 bourbon.
Huh.
That's not a bad idea.
I don't know if they have them in the liquor stores down there.
But at Christmas time in the stores here,
we get these little holiday gift pack things.
It's usually like a bottle of this Santa glass
to go with it or a couple sample sized bottles
of this that or the other.
And this was a bottle 101
and the Mason jar and the wood chunk
with instructions.
At one point I had a full set of
they were kind of like inverted Christmas tree-shaped glasses
but they were from Kaluah
because they came with a bottle of Kaluah.
And this is what we got this last year
for Christmas.
My father was up.
He is the one who turned me into a bourbon drinker.
That's pretty cool.
Hey, since we're in our beverage review section,
well, do you have more yours?
I don't mean to cut you off.
It's good.
It'll get you some.
Okay.
So it's coming up on, like,
hiking and camping season.
And I think one of the things I want to add
to my kit this year is a flask
and some booze to go in the flask.
So maybe you guys could make some suggestions
as to, like, I keep looking for a decent flask
and they all seem to be, like,
they all seem to have a plastic cap
and I'm afraid that that cap's going to bust.
So I want one that's, like,
eight ounces, I think, would be ideal
and a metal cap anyway
that isn't going to break
is going to be a prerequisite for mine.
Though I did see one that was interesting
at the whole top of the flask
so you could get in there and clean it
but it was a little bulky.
So I don't know if I want to do that.
Do you guys have any suggestions for a good flask
and something good to put in it?
Though I was thinking maybe Absent
would be nice on a
dynamic camping trip,
but that's, you know, maybe not.
I don't know.
I don't know.
I could swear in both the food section
and the camping section of Walmart here,
I've seen metal flask
with what appeared to be a metal top.
I never picked one up to,
to actually see if it was or not.
That's sure.
Looks like a shiny metal top
and the type that, you know, is on a hand
so you don't lose it.
Yeah, they're shiny.
They're chromed.
But it's like chromed plastic
and that worries me
because that plastic is usually fairly brittle.
If it were like that tough plastic,
like the,
the, um,
uh, Stanley stuff is made of.
That's, that's okay.
That was one of the flasks I was looking at.
But yeah, those shiny caps aren't actually metal.
There's none of them that I've seen in person or anyway.
Yeah, that's probably not something
you want to go leak it in your pocket.
I just throw a picture in chat of,
uh,
flask that I have.
I have the larger of the two pictured there.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, I don't want anything with a skull.
I'm not into skulls,
but anyway,
but yeah,
put, put these links in the show notes too, by the way.
I think there's a bunch of links going by
in our chat that aren't hitting the show notes in there.
Is it a metal cap or is it like a chrome plated metal cap?
I mean, a chrome platic cap.
That's a great question to which I don't actually have an answer.
Oh,
yeah, that usually is what makes something a good question.
Doesn't actually make it a good question.
It makes people say it's a good question.
That's neat though.
You put in your,
your flask,
which is also,
is it probably more important than the flask itself?
What are you putting in that?
I put wild turkey in mine,
and then I put it in the freezer for a while,
and then I take it with me when we go to the beach
because I hate the beach,
and that's how I tolerate the beach.
Okay.
Is that an eight ounce flask?
I actually know.
Is it too much booze or is it just enough booze?
I admit the beach surrounded by sand.
I'm not sure there's too much booze.
Yeah,
so I don't want to be surrounded by sand.
I don't like sand in my butt crack,
but it's being surrounded by it's okay.
Oh, speaking of going to the beach,
and it being like mostly terrible,
we bought a couple of,
I don't know if you've seen them.
They make these like half tents,
and you can set them up in the sand,
and it's like a half a tent.
It's got a floor,
and it's got like plenty of sunshade.
And I think they're usually like 50 or 60 bucks,
but they were on clearance at Walmart for like $15.
So I bought two of them,
and my wife said we don't need two of them.
So if you want one,
you can have one.
But what I want is to not go to the beach.
Give it a,
and no one would see you drinking your flask if you were in it.
You're assuming he cares if anyone sees him drinking his flask or not.
That's true. That's true.
It's, uh,
yeah, you don't often care if anyone sees you drinking
after the whatever.
I see what you're doing there.
I hope you did.
It was,
it was as obvious I could make it without being subtle.
Is this your way, Poki,
you've told us we need to get back to talking about the story?
Well, you have it not in like a accusatory or judgmental way,
since I'm the one that got us so sidetracked.
He was trying to be smooth,
and then we pointed it out and just totally train wrecked it.
Nah, I wasn't really trying to be,
that's not going to work at this point.
Well, come on, train wreck is what we do.
Well, I want to hear about the,
the Stephen King connections.
Okay.
So the first,
most prominent, most obvious one is,
Apialan and Marcus's guns.
They're described as great big blue steel,
not steel,
but great big blue with,
and they were very clear on this,
they're sandalwood grips.
And that is exactly the way that Roland's guns are described
in the gunslinger.
And hopefully pictures to follow if I can find them.
Blue steel is an accurate description,
which is something that when I started getting the guns,
I was a little disappointed about,
but when they say blue steel,
what they mean is black.
Blueing is a chemical process
that has some degree of rust inhibition,
inhibitance,
or someone else can conjugate for me,
but it's to try to stop rust.
It's the blueing,
but it winds up being very black,
usually if it's done really well.
And these guns are described as being massive.
Yeah, very often revolvers kind of would be
because you'd have like your magnum sized cartridges,
so you'd have a big massive revolver,
not like a little,
you know, like 38 is not a small cartridge,
but usually a 38 special is a small gun.
So if they have massive guns,
they're probably massive cartridges,
which is not unheard of.
I'm trying to find a good chair.
And Pokey isn't blowing more of a coating
than a chemical process
because it does tend to wear off over time.
No, a blueing is absolutely a chemical process.
It's a form of rust,
though it's not oxidation.
I believe this is how I stand,
what I read about it,
but it's not a coating.
Well, that would,
a coating would be like Parkerization,
I think, is what they do nowadays for a coating.
Yeah, blueing is like bare steel.
It's just got that protective layer
of essentially rust.
Okay, so the description of the guns is similar.
And one detail that Athelian picks up on,
and I picked up on too,
because I will freely admit I am a dark tower nerd,
is one of Marcus's old family's name,
the one who taught him to shoot,
his name was Roland.
Roland is the name of the gunslinger
from Stephen King's The Gunslinger.
Okay.
And just the longer the story goes on,
the more it feels like the author tried to create parallels there.
Yeah, I kind of figured he was doing that
and I just wasn't able to pick up on it,
having never read any Stephen King,
but I could tell that's what was going on.
To give you just enough information to know
what the gunslinger is,
they're kind of somewhere between a cowboy
and a king Arthur's era knight,
is kind of where they are.
Okay.
And seriously badass.
So like a US martial type,
times several hundred thousand more badass.
See, this was my number one thing
that I disliked about these books,
is the Stephen King references.
I was just like, to me,
it felt like there was a point in the middle of the book
where I was like,
is this supposed to be like almost dark tower fanfiction?
Like, is that really what I'm supposed to be getting out of this?
Because the world is so cool on its own.
I didn't understand why it had to keep referencing
somebody else's books,
even though they're supposedly awesome.
My wife is totally a dark tower nerd.
I've not read them,
but it's just,
I wanted the story to be the story.
And thankfully,
it got less and less and less as the story went on,
but it's just every time somebody brought up Stephen King
it just drove me crazy.
And see, I come out from the other side
where except for the,
yes, this is almost another dark tower book,
but it was well done.
And the feel was the same.
The dark tower,
specifically the gunslinger,
which is the book they keep referencing,
consistently,
yeah, I mean, it is set in a,
kind of a desolate,
barren, deserty world
where time is funny.
Does that sound familiar at all?
So, would you call it dark tower fanfiction?
Because I had the same kind of question rolling around in my head.
In setting only,
it's not,
we don't get enough of a picture
into Marcus' interactions with Roland under who Roland was
for them to really say it's the same Roland.
Very much implied,
but it's, there's not enough interaction with him to say it's really the same.
It's just,
I would say it's dark tower inspired, heavily.
Okay.
Well, I got the impression that there,
I mean, obviously there was a Roland because
Aphelan shows Marcus the picture
and it's the same Roland that they both met new.
So, but since you forget people
right after they pass on or go,
you know,
how did they both remember it?
But I mean, that was clear.
Very late in the book,
they both knew the same Roland.
Now, I think it's a stretch to think that the author
means that it's Roland from dark tower
because,
well, in the dark tower,
where books is,
is it supposed to be a post-apocalyptic world?
Now, I missed it up again.
Or is it, you know,
that's just the way the world is.
Yes, no, and kind of.
Explaining any more clearly than that
really gets into spoiling the dark tower,
which I don't want to do.
Okay, let's not do that.
Because Mr. King has much better lawyers than we do, I'm sure.
What,
did you put into your Google search
to find that picture of the gun
because you said a massive gun,
and that's actually a tiny little revolver
with just a long barrel.
I didn't do a very good search.
I kept looking for Roland's guns.
Oh, okay.
And let me give you his last name.
I'll type it out,
because I still want you to actually pronounce it.
Okay, because I was going to say that looks like a 22
or maybe a 25 or a 32,
one of the older guns
is a tiny little cylinder on it.
But it's a long barrel,
but you can tell by the hand grip
you couldn't get more than two fingers on the thing.
But there's a picture of a Smith & Wesson 44 Magnum.
That's a massive gun.
Okay, so probably something more like that,
but looking a lot more like what I picked, what I sent.
I would expect it to have a longer barrel
and it had wooden grips.
Yeah, what you're saying,
it's as big as that is,
but as big as the one I sent looks.
Yeah, and again, yeah,
and you said blue, this is chrome or not chrome,
but stainless.
Yep, I understand.
And it's the specific kind of revolver
where you can,
I don't know the name of the action
where you can hold the trigger in
and fan the hammer
to continue firing
because that happens a lot.
Yeah, nobody in the real world can hit anything that way.
But it sounds like what you're talking about
it's like a bugline special.
Oh, that's because no one in the real world is a gun slinger.
I'm not so sure that there is an action
that you can hold the trigger in
and just fan the hammer.
What they do in the old western movies
is a single action revolver
where you have to pull the hammer back
but I think it's,
you pull the hammer back and then the trigger.
I'm not sure if you can actually hold the trigger in
I could of course be wrong.
Oh, yeah, I think you can.
In fact, back in the day
they had guys actually removed the trigger.
Oh, okay.
And I mean, as you say,
no one could hit anything.
That's because nobody is a gun slinger.
It's almost impossible to describe.
But I mean, you see what Marcus does
where he can, you know,
fire all six shots from his revolver
before anybody else can move.
And that's normal for a gun slinger.
Yeah, like I said, we had Marcus
hitting targets
quite, you know, small targets,
quite a distance away doing that.
And that really happens in the movies.
Yeah, if you're standing right in front of somebody
you could probably do that.
But if you're standing that close,
you get the job done with one bullet anyway.
Shoot with a handgun,
especially the revolver.
It takes a lot of practice before you can hit a large object
that's far away.
Yeah, I don't think I'd qualify as a gun slinger.
No, me neither.
I have a hard time hitting large objects
far away with long guns.
I would, but only if you can't just
picking it up and just checking it at somebody
like literally slinging the gun
then I could be a gun slinger.
If you could throw the gun and hit the person
you could shoot them with a bullet.
That's close enough that you could hit them with a bullet.
Any further than you could actually
and that you could accurately throw the gun
is very difficult.
You know, you got to practice.
Well, but that's how these people learned
is practicing until they were stupid.
Yeah, and that's sorry.
I mean, as with anyone who becomes
uncommonly skilled with anything,
there is the one way to do it.
And that is practice until you're sick of doing it
and then do it that much more.
Yeah, but okay, and that was another thing
about this world.
How do you do that when only one in 30 rounds fires?
How do you how do you get that much ammo
that you can practice that much with it?
That is the one piece that's a little unbelievable
given that he that Marcus could shoot
like a gunslinger, but the only way
even the gunslingers learned to do that was
a ridiculous amount of practice.
Was that the question I was supposed to ask you again?
I don't know, but we got there anyway.
Now one thing I thought that was
wasn't explained.
Where, you know, they talked about the tanks out
in the desert and people go there,
you know, basically they didn't run
and there's a hoping to find boots from
dead tank operator.
Apparently the desert was littered
with military hardware.
At some point there had been a war,
but you know, now we're since the
we're post
spoilers.
The whole book makes it seem like
they went from in a flash
they went from a normal world
to the whatever,
you know, after the whatever.
So where did the war come from?
Well, it was not so much a flash.
I think it was more of a yawn.
And you know,
I mean that's why I'm thinking
that this the whatever is
was caused by some sort of intelligence
because if you want people to
stop fighting a war
easiest way would make them be
to make them forget who they are
and what they were finding about.
Yeah, that would work.
And we did find out in the latter half
of the book that this is
the whatever includes some kind
of time travel,
at least it's not time travel.
It's more like dimension travel
or something.
And it explains extreme decay
of a bronya.
She's still a young woman.
So it couldn't have been
if everybody just suddenly
lost their memory.
And they continued
in the same timeline.
The huge amount of decay
we see around us that
all the vehicles, most of the bodies
are completely rusted out
and the pain is always
completely gone.
And all that,
that one makes plainness.
Let's say it's been 30 years,
you know, between,
you know, and obviously a bronya,
there are, you get later to book
to the listeners, there are flashbacks
to the beat,
to before the whatever
explains, you know,
helps explain to the reader
what's going on.
And Randall somehow gets transported,
well, not somehow,
that the end of the book,
he falls into a basement
that is sort of like
a time portal
and
winds up back at the beginning
of the whatever.
And it's sort of had,
the whatever sort of has elements
of the rapture because people just
disappear.
And some, you know,
some of them at least came back.
I get an idea that the population
of the earth is now,
that some people either
just were transported directly
to the afterlife or
that they, you know,
they're going to appear
sometime and later in the future.
But, you know, so there are definitely
I think religious undertones to this.
You have the guy who keeps
showing up like an angel
to Ramila Ova
and to, and to a bronya.
Uh, apparently he can
move through time
or in space or whatever,
at will.
And right after the whatever
where a bronya still had her wits about her,
uh, she asked if it was
short for Jehovah.
And he says, no, definitely not.
I'm not.
I'm no kind of angel.
So, um, there's,
and this is probably, you know,
if this is freaking listeners out
that, uh, all these different bits
that we have here, because we don't,
we tend not to tell the story.
Well, if we told the story, you
wouldn't need to read the book.
So get the book.
Actually, that's one of the things
I really loved about this series of books, um,
trying to say this in a way
that isn't
derogatory or offensive to people,
like being somebody who was not
raised in like, uh,
Judeo-Christian background,
like Christian mythology
is a better one.
It's fascinating to me.
And just how this plays with some of those ideas
is really cool, especially,
like, if you know a little bit about it,
there's connections that are,
that are insanely interesting to me.
Like,
like we were talking about all the, um,
the names of the tankers.
Like, they, if you,
if you go back, all those names are
some kind of strange bastardization
of Hebrew words that are related to angels.
So I mean, there's, there's that.
And there's, there's hints that they may be angels,
but then at the same time,
it's kind of discounted,
you know, they say, nah, that's not what it is.
And like, the whole,
yeah, that makes sense of this Jehovah.
But even that character is totally
not what you think of.
Wouldn't, wouldn't even be,
it's just like,
kind of in my mind is,
even if these characters are
representing that mythology,
that we have, is passed down for,
you know, thousands of years.
And, and how much does it change
from what it really is?
And maybe this is what it would really look like.
And we just have this built-up expectation
that it would be, that it would look different.
But really, it's, it's, it's grungier and dirtier than we,
we would imagine.
Um, we imagined this perfection.
And it's just kind of this worn out
and tattered thing that, um,
it's just more interesting, I think.
Well, there is indication that,
you know, at least it
wasn't around before the whatever,
that he came
from somewhere as, as
part of the whatever,
and all the tankers are that way.
However,
affulade has this photograph of him in Rowland,
where they're serving
in the military,
uh, somewhere together.
So at, and him,
not with the character on the tank,
I think, in, in the,
in the picture.
So obviously, affulade comes
from before the whatever.
I'm not, I'm not entirely sure
that they made a point one way or the other
about whether or not he had a tank
in the picture with Rowland.
I'm not sure if I'm pulling this from the second book
or not. It's not really a spoiler,
either way. Um, a tanker,
specifically mentions
I woke up and I had this tank.
So I, I would assume that
they did exist before the whatever.
Uh, the feeling you get
as they existed kind of in the time
leading up to the whatever.
Yeah, I'm not sure
because how would they remember that
if they don't even remember their own names?
That's one thing is particular to the tankers
that they actually have their names
tattooed on their neck
and every one of them.
It's a, it's a strange name,
you know, not like anybody else's name.
I got you.
And most of the people in the story,
they have, you know,
Bob and Sally. Well,
no, I guess the old, old woman,
it was it.
I heard it like it was a regular name,
but it was, what was her name?
It had like an extra letter in it
than I would expect.
So I got the impression from the statement about, uh,
I woke up and had this tank.
Not as I woke up and had the tank
that I didn't have the day before.
I think it's just, I woke up
and don't remember anything before waking up
and had this tank.
That was the impression entirely.
I began existing by waking up
and having this tank.
Yeah, exactly. Like, I know I must have been here
before this, but I, I can't prove it
and I can't make any claims about it.
And like I said before,
before the break,
there are, um,
indications that this is not
our earth that they're on
because when they're in the airport,
they're a sideage.
And I got the impression that this was,
you know, regular printed sideage,
not something that won the crazy
religious groups have painted over
that the airport was
in the district of some sort.
I forget what term they used,
but some sort of,
uh, religious leader
and they, they do talk about
in the flashbacks to win the,
uh,
uh, whatever is starting.
Uh, this, you know,
if you, when they talk about the papers
and you read the stories in the papers,
the hurt, or you connect the stories
in the papers two years,
1983.
And they talk about
Reagan is probably in a,
in a bunker somewhere.
So we have a president Reagan,
but they also talk about,
um, you know, like,
uh, religious leaders as well.
In other words, it sounds
like in this reality,
before the whatever,
uh, America was some sort of
theocracy.
Also, dark tower-esque.
Not the theocracy part,
but the maybe our world,
but not quite kind of thing.
Yeah, I noticed
a lot of, uh, religious
overtones to it as well.
Um,
in the quotations,
in the names of the chapters,
um, I mean, on and on and on.
It kept saying,
or kept trying to hint that it
wasn't religious,
but a lot of it was.
There's no two ways about it.
Um, I gotta let go of my
key here to scroll, but, uh,
did anybody else catch
the Kansas reference?
No.
Now, uh, the uh, the lyrics
or the, uh,
what they say over people
as they're lighting them up on the
funeral pyre,
or the dust in the wind.
I did catch that actually.
I forgot about a team
mentioned it.
Yeah, I think I remember it now too.
Uh, there was one other little thing
in my notes that I took
that was, and I don't remember where it happened,
but the other was a, uh,
uh, to another Stephen King
drop name drop,
is they mentioned Richard Bachman,
which was Stephen King's pen name
when he wanted to be writing
and not writing his Stephen King.
I remember where they dropped it.
I remember.
I can see that I wrote it down.
Yeah.
So the religious, uh,
overtone here,
one, one particular one is
right at the end of the book.
The last chapter is called
End Dust You Shelley.
Um, and then it was semi-quoted.
Like everything in this that has to do
with religion is kind of semi-quoted.
Nothing's a direct quote
ever read, and I have read several.
Um, but, uh,
uh, at one point, you know,
when in Genesis,
when God curses, uh,
the devil, he says,
you know, you shall go on your belly
and dust you Shelley.
Something to that effect,
and it's kind of paraphrased
in this story, and, um,
uh, rough, or affulent,
I think that's how you,
affulent, right?
And then, uh,
Marcus thinks he sees
wounds, but they're made of bones and tatters.
So that kind of gives the impression
that he is a fallen angel,
and which would give the impression
that rammual is an angel.
But the more I thought
about it going through it,
I think that rammual
is also a fallen angel,
and that the whatever is his
chance at redemption.
That was kind of what I get out of this.
That's not it.
Then I completely do not understand
the last chapter of this book.
I don't really understand the last chapter anyway.
Well, I would say that they're, uh,
not so much there's
because, uh, necessarily,
they've done something
that made them fall,
uh, you know, it's,
it's not a punishment.
It's just that all the angels fell
and became tankers,
because obviously there was a good
battle because what Marcus saw,
you're right, he said,
you know, he saw
these boned leathery wings on
affulent and on,
uh, on
rammual, he saw these beautiful
bird-like wings.
Butterflies.
No, no, no, no, no.
You're confusing.
That was Marcus' perception
and all the girls,
I'm sorry, but her perception
rammual was, you know,
had butterflies all around
and where, uh,
uh, affulent had
creepy crawly insects
that you want to step on all around him.
Oh, okay, yeah,
all right, I think I conflated the two.
But I think that,
I think I agreed that
all the tankers are
something else.
But we'll go with angels
for lack of a better term.
I think that affulent
specifically became a
fallen angel
because they said that, uh,
Ova says that all of the tankers
have a specific purpose
and affulent turned
from his purpose to do what he wanted
instead.
And that seems to be the
metaphor for the fall.
Oh, how Tolkien asked of him.
All I know is, is that scene
we're at the end where they're getting
the biggest fist-pumpy
moment of this entire book.
I was just like, let's do this.
I was ready for it.
You have it then nothing happened.
Well, the good guy beat the bad guy.
Yes, but how?
It never said how.
That's, see, that's why I didn't get the last chapter.
I had to listen twice to the, actually,
I listened twice to the first chapter
because I couldn't figure out
what the hell the setting was.
And then I got it the second time.
But I listened to the last chapter twice as well too.
And what happened and what the purpose was.
And I felt very let down
by the last chapter.
Well, he won by being the good guy.
Yeah, but the town, the ghost town
or reappearing town or whatever,
it zapped out of existence
while they were fighting.
So we don't know who won.
Yeah, there's that too.
I mean, I think there's a very
clear indication that, that
I didn't say what he did.
It doesn't say how he did.
If all he did was be the good guy
and walk into him,
that could have happened much earlier in the story.
So it wasn't like the old,
you know, trope of,
well, you have to know that you're the hero
before you can be the hero.
It wasn't like that, you know.
I think if it was anything like that,
it was not only was he the hero,
he was willing to die being the hero.
I don't know that he was before that.
Okay, yeah, maybe.
Which does kind of fall into the,
you have to know you're the hero
before you're the hero.
But in this case, he was willing
to not walk away if that's what it took
to make the other guy not walk away.
Right, it's, uh, well,
that's a familiar science fiction,
uh, you know, meme,
you know, like,
and let this be your last battlefield
of things were, you know,
the you had to,
the good guy had to stay behind
to battle the evil guy
for all eternity.
That would be exhausting,
just fighting for all eternity.
You ever done like a three-minute round?
That's, wow.
Not fun.
Actually, I take that back.
It's a lot of fun, but not continuously.
Right, exactly.
It is super fun for the first minute
of just a void fighting.
I do, in general,
with like, people I don't know,
but with people who can
centrally agree to it, it's a lot of fun.
Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, you can,
you can say sparring instead of fighting,
if you like.
The first rule of fight club,
hit the other guy, repeat.
Yeah, trying not to get hit
in your way in.
So there was one moment
in the book,
where it was the time there was,
you know, such as it is,
or time such as it is,
there was one spot
in the whole book where that felt
out of place for me.
And that was when they were
assaulting the town of all good.
And they were kind of in a hurry.
And he seemed to be hurrying.
And there was something about, you know,
he waited for a few moments
before opening the hatch or something,
but, you know, he waited a few moments
because in that spot,
time wasn't such as it was.
They were actually in a hurry at that point
and it felt out of place.
And it felt like he read it fast too.
Anybody else catch that?
I don't remember that,
but it's not saying it didn't happen.
Oh, it did. I listened to that chapter twice too
because that chapter was just badass.
It was.
Oh, yeah.
In the main ingredient,
and her tinctures seemed to be love
and like the tinctures didn't get it.
But she's the only character
who is not a tanker
that Ova says,
well, you have a purpose.
So I think there's something behind that.
Yeah, that's, um,
the only other story that I know of
that plays
as openly as this
with, um,
with, with Judeo-Christian tropes
is, uh, it's actually a comedy.
It's, um, the movie dogma,
uh,
oh god dogmas.
Awesome dog. Dogma is great.
It is a really, really good movie.
It's really funny.
And it's, it's the whole play
with the Judeo-Christian stuff is done so well
in that movie that
I mean,
I don't see how anybody could be offended
by it, even though it's super, super offensive.
I just don't see how you could be.
It was done so well with such.
Definitely offended by it.
Oh man, I don't, I don't, I don't.
Anyway, in that,
they called the only person
who wasn't an angel that had a purpose.
She was the last sion, um,
so the, the last blood relative of Christ.
And, you know, maybe that might be the,
that was kind of the role
that I saw Abraña in,
in this, though it was never
even close to being spelled out,
like that.
I mean, there's enough hooks in this
that, I mean, it's these questions
that made me just like,
drop everything and go to the next book,
hoping that I would find the answers to the questions
that I wanted to know.
Ha ha!
Lawles, I just really liked
the setting and the theme
and the way the guy spoke,
the way that he talked.
I could just listen to that go on.
There didn't even really have to be
a plot to it for me.
I just enjoyed that.
Ideally, like from these books
is because I think
that he is capable of writing these
and leaving enough hooks
and answering enough things
to make them satisfying,
that it reminds me of like
the old days,
like the men's adventure novels
where like you would have somebody
and they'd write a book about a character,
you know, a new book would drop every like
eight months or something like that.
I would love to see like a
movie with it.
Like just keep running this story forever
because I think you can flex
in and out characters
because the world is so cool
and you can flesh out the world.
But it's so ambiguous that you could keep building on it
as long as you wanted.
Okay, I thought
from one of the reviews I saw in this book
that he brought us pretty much
at the story to the end in the second book.
If that's the end, I'm pissed.
Todd, you said that you'd be happy
to ask questions about the world.
Would it really be that satisfying
if he answered any of the questions?
Or would it be like
when night didn't watch it?
But it would be more like
lost when people were just pissed
because they thought of it as
purgatory the whole time.
And there it is. It's purgatory
even though they said it wasn't.
No, because
and this is me having read the second book.
There are enough things answered
and they give you all this crazy
shit through the whole show.
And then, you know,
obviously not knowing where that was going to go
and then just making something up at the end.
That's pretty much what happened.
But with these books,
wait, wait, wait,
JJ didn't leave us his notes
and where this was going.
Shit, we got to come up with something.
Let's make it purgatory.
Right. Anyways.
But like, there's enough
yet every time something gets answered,
there's another wrinkle to the question.
So it's not that the question ever
goes away. It's that the question just
kind of gets deeper.
Here's the answer.
But then three more questions.
Nice JJ Burns-Jab, by the way.
I appreciate that.
Well, you got to admit from the beginning,
you have a plane that breaks up
in the air and people live.
Do I sound okay?
I switched over to the PC
or are we out?
Questions?
We may be out of questions that have answers.
Yeah, I think I said most of
what I had wanted to bring up.
Oh, wait, there's one more.
What the hell was up with the black hole?
That didn't make any sense to me.
No, it wasn't a black hole.
Read the second book.
Well, that was a portal
that Ramiol was able to fall
through and go back to the whatever.
I figured that much out.
Of course, the second time he went in,
how he just popped right back three minutes later.
I thought that was a little different.
I think he popped out three minutes earlier.
It just looked like it was later.
How have you ever played portal
poke? It's like that.
Yeah, I played the hell out of the first one.
The second one's also pretty badass.
I've heard. I haven't played it,
but I've heard it's just as good.
At one point,
all the games on my rotation were sequels.
Portal 2, Borderlands 2,
Bioshock 2.
I haven't played many games in a long time,
except for...
I went and played, went back
and played a little bit of Gran Turismo
three and four for a short bit.
And a little bit of
ace combat.
I don't know, maybe five.
And then other than that,
it's just like games on my phone,
like casual games.
So does anybody have anything else?
I think I'm all done.
Anybody have a book?
Or do you have anything else?
No.
I just want to impress upon everybody listening.
If you did not listen to this book,
you need to.
And if you'd like it,
please buy the ebook
so we can give this man some scratch
so he will continue to write good books.
Yeah, there's always that. I don't think we say that enough.
Oh, okay. Speaking of guns,
Lingers, I thought that
there's one more thing. Sorry.
I thought that Rammell's choice of a
double, double barrel shot gun
was about the worst choice you could make
for a gun.
When your ammo is only about,
you know, one in 30 shots is going to be effective.
Those things
compared to other kinds of guns
take forever to
to follow up a shot with.
You know, I think if I was out
in a place where
only one in 30 rounds is going to work
or even one in three
or one in six or whatever,
you want either a revolver
if it's a handgun
or you want like a pump action
or a lever action gun
if it's a long gun.
I don't even think I'd want to bolt the action
in that case, but certainly not like a
not a break barrel
gun that only holds two shots.
You know, I didn't think he chose
a very good gun for that.
And not a shot gun either,
because all these shots
were over great distances
and shot guns have very limited range.
That's all I have to say about guns
and story.
Yeah, I agree with you
because you know what I do.
If you did have a revolver
and you fired a round off
and it misfired,
you brought a sucker
to load a new round that
was right then off.
That sounds
mildly terrifying.
Yeah, it sounds like
Joe Biden picked this guy's gun.
I don't know if anybody ever heard Joe Biden
say the best thing you can do is
get yourself a double barrel shot gun
and if you feel threatened
going in the back porch and shoot
it off in the air twice.
I'd not heard that, but wow.
No, it wouldn't work.
It leaves you with an empty gun.
It's the author
this technical nitpicking.
I mean, because the
author seems confused
during different times
in the story about whether
this was a one or two
trick double barrel shot gun.
I mean, you can't have
double barrels where
one trigger is the first barrel
and then second trigger pull
that fires second barrel.
But no, of course, double barrels
shoot two triggers
usually one behind the other
which makes it hard to shoot both
at the same time.
And at one point in the book,
Ramiel fires both barrels once.
I would say a vast majority
of double barrel shot guns
only have one trigger.
And when you pull it,
it switches over to the other barrel
so that you can pull it again
and shoot the other barrel.
It's very rare to see
you're right about that.
My father-in-law
has a
double barrel side-by-side
with two triggers
and my lovely wife
at one point decided she was
going to pull both of them.
And then she was flat on her back
staring up at the sky.
Yeah, that's a wallop.
It was a good time.
It was funny for everyone to hurt.
And if you're just tuning in,
there's a gun review.
I had to do that for Kim Fallon.
At least this time it's
somewhat topical.
It's way topical
because we would have just chosen
different guns if we were
Ramiel.
We started out very much on point.
This is much less of a
rattle than we usually end up down.
We've been very good this week.
I bet we haven't.
I bet we only think we have.
We've been really good this time.
I don't even remember what we've talked about.
Uh-huh!
We'll tie it back in.
So you don't remember the first part of the podcast.
It was so long ago
time such as it is.
Also
possibly previously mentioned
4am conference call.
I know I gotta wake up.
We're going to go to court of all things.
I know. So who's got our next book?
Don't look at me, fellas.
This one, so it's not my turn.
If no one else has one, let me go to my
Vault of Audio books and pick one out.
Yeah.
Well, that's cheating because you've already listened to it.
Oh, that's not cheating.
I've listened to many of the books I've recommended.
I recommended them because I like to
excuse me like to them and thought they would be good conversation.
Todd is saying in the chat that he has a suggestion.
But he thinks everyone but him has
listened to it.
I don't think I'd let that stop me either.
Go for it if you want to suggest
a one that you want to hear.
Why not?
I had a feeling.
You guys keep bringing it up.
So it's like one of those.
I can get to it sometime.
Well, let's do it.
If that'll get you to read the book.
I'm hearing tea. You'll read all of them.
Yeah. If you thought it was hard to stop
listening to this series,
you're going to have a real hard time
making it to the end of this one and stopping.
Good with me.
All right. Sounds like it's a done deal.
We will be doing Trader Tales 1,
Quarter Share by Nathan Low
because everybody tells me I need to read it.
And apparently I'm going to waste
a lot of time making these books.
But here we go.
Oh no. It is not wasted time.
If anything, it is not wasted time.
Okay. Maybe I shouldn't have said wasted.
I will spend a great deal of time listening to all these books.
Which I'm cool with. I'm down for any good sci-fi.
So let's do this.
Yeah. Yeah. Bring your coffee.
I can do that.
All right. So yeah.
We are next audio book.
Who will be Trader Tales 1,
Quarter Share by Nathan Low.
It's definitely available on podiobooks.umb.
It's probably available in other places as well.
Nathan's got several websites.
He's got Oh boy.
He's got Nathan Lowell.com.
He's got Durandus.
Durandus, thank you.
That's when I was trying to think of Durandus.
Is that a dot com or dot net?
Yeah. I don't recall.
He's got a bunch of websites.
If you did a Google search for Nathan Lowell,
he's got a bunch.
He's a really cool guy too.
They interviewed him several years ago now
on the Linux link tech show.
And he was just an awesome guy
with a really cool story.
A cool life story.
And just just neat.
And very few people don't like
the Trader Tales books
from what I've heard.
And it seems like the people who I've talked to
who don't like them
didn't really give them a fair chance.
They thought that
it opens too slow
and they didn't like the slow pace of it.
And it is a fairly slow pace.
I'll warn you there.
But I'll also warn you,
if you don't listen to it,
you're really missing out.
Did it?
I think that's a wrap.
All right. Thanks everyone for listening.
Thanks everyone for being on the show.
And tune in tomorrow
for another exciting episode
of Hacker Public Radio.
Night everybody.
Good night.
Peace people.
Folks.
Music
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All right. Do you guys want to get started?
Or is this going to be a nerd stuff
to talk about first?
Like we're not going to talk about the
nerd stuff in the middle of the book club.
Oh, I meant like on a personal level.
Like I was all but offered a job in IT this week.
Well, awesome.
And prepare never to sleep again.
Oh no, I don't think I'm ready to take that job.
Yeah, I got scheduled this week
and next week for a con call
on Tuesday morning
starting at 4 a.m.
Nice.
So,
and I have this thing where if I know
I have to get up earlier than my alarm
usually goes off, I sleep like shit
and I keep waking up.
So I've been up since about 3.30
and I've had two cups of
a mountain dew and two cups of
I'm going to call it coffee
but that kind of does it in injustice
because I bought local
French roast,
made it in a French press,
and it's way too many beans in it.
So this stuff could like
wake the dead or something.
Sounds like my kind of coffee.
Only if you French kiss them.
That's not happened, Bowie.
Sorry.
Yeah, I don't know if it ever actually
wakes me.
My stupid phone.
I've got notifications
off.
Every time something comes in
it doesn't ring but vibrates.
But it must probably
enough to disturb my sleep.
I don't know how to
get in and turn that stuff off.
I mean, I don't need it
vibrating every time I get an email.
I use a...
I'm assuming it's an Android phone.
I use an app called
Sound Manager from the Play Store
that messes with...
It does all the volumes.
I don't know if it'll do the
vibrates settings or not.
People are like, oh, well, I just
turn my volume up or down.
I almost never touch my volume my phone.
Unless I'm going into a meeting
in the middle of the day, I'm muted.
But like at 8 o'clock at night,
it goes down to almost nothing.
At six o'clock in the morning,
it comes up to the normal volumes.
And I just don't worry about it.
I'll bring it in.
Yeah, I think I had my old phone.
I had something similar.
I just hadn't thought about doing it again.
I was terribly, terribly disappointed
in an app that I've been using
kind of heavily, not heavily heavily.
But I found a cookbook app
in the Eftaroid market.
And I've been putting all my recipes
into that as I make stuff.
I've been putting in or if I find stuff
in a magazine or whatever.
I just put it in there.
I got my new phone
and come to find out there is no
reliable way to import and export
from that thing.
So all that time I spent putting in there
is just completely wasted.
Well, that's terrible.
You can tell it to export them
one recipe at a time
via email.
And then you open your email
and one at a time
attempt to import them.
But as I said before,
there's no reliable way
to import and export them
because it only works about half the time
and it's very frustrating.
If I ever get my,
I've got another little project
I'm working on.
And she called the Open Cookbook project
where my goal is to build a set of scripts
that you give it recipe files
in a modified markdown format
and it'll generate a cookbook
for you.
That's EPUB.
That sounds cool.
Right now it's about three scripts
and it's wicked simple.
It hasn't actually gotten the compressing
into an EPUB yet.
It's a bit of HTML pages.
The idea, my long-term goal
is to, you know,
press it out to an EPUB
and then open that up on Kindle
so that my Kindle is my cookbook.
Yeah, Pucky, if you try
just locating the folder
on the old phone
where the app lives
and then install the app
on the new phone and then just
copy the files across.
I think so.
I think I did try that.
Android obscures
system files so much.
It's, I'm not good at that.
It's Linux except it isn't.
Yeah, exactly.
Except it's not Linux at all.
This is the number one reason
I refuse to buy any phone
that I don't already know
has a root for it.
Oh, I'm running Science in Mod
which also is not Linux.
Well, because it's Super Android.
Couldn't you use Titanium backup
and just backup the app data
over?
That might actually work
because Titanium is badass.
Maybe I could.
I didn't know what Titanium backup is.
Give me a minute. I'll find a link
because I use that all the time
and I love it.
Oh, I'll need to do a link now.
I'll look it up tomorrow.
That's cool.
Or someday soon.
Maybe or not soon.
But I have the Google.
I don't know if a bunch of
Microsoft apps now.
No, that is Cyanogen OS, my friend.
You're confusing the two things.
They are not the same.
Does Cyanogen Mod still exist
separately from Cyanogen OS
since they started a company
and gotten bed with Microsoft
and I don't know what else they're doing?
I kind of stop paying attention.
If my nightly builds
or any indication than yes.
Yes, they are separate.
The majority of
it looks like from my perspective
the Cyanogen Mod people
are still the people that were always there.
So it's the open office
liberal office thing except they stayed
with the original project.
Well, they're not interested in making money on it.
Of course they stayed.
They're interested in sort of the open source,
you know,
free to put on ROM
that everybody likes instead of
the built-in ROM that
will quit supporting us as
they make it deal with another country.
Well, but that's
the ROM's notwithstanding.
That's the same kind of reason
that the liberal office folks did
liberal offices
because the open-off folks
weren't or couldn't do
the things they wanted to do.
Right, and they forked it
to get some work done.
But this is different.
I think
that I've heard
is that
the open office, excuse me,
open office.
Yeah.
Like maybe Cyanogen himself
is probably working on Cyanogen OS
and the community is still working on Cyanogen Mod.
But everything I understand about Cyanogen Mod,
the goal of the project
is to provide vanilla
Android open source project.
It's not
like, especially tweaked
in any way, shape, or form
for any particular purposes.
And I think the ideas from the
mistake like that.
They do tweak for devices
but not for special purposes, I guess.
I wonder how long
until they change their name
because that's like
not the first time I've heard that joke
about the Microsoft thing.
And I'm sure eventually
it will make them angry enough that they're like, you know what?
And I'll go do that instead
because I kind of like Cyanogen.
Then again, I've been considering
looking for another
OS for the phone anyway
because I kind of like
the idea of
like
your location
working by picking up Wi-Fi signals
near it
and just knowing where those are at.
And you can't do that without Google
if you use Android
or Cyanogen Mod.
I don't believe that works in Cyanogen Mod
but there are plenty of other ways
to get it done.
If your ROM comes with that
functionality built into it,
comes with that software package
that kind of hooks into that.
And then there's several different providers
and all kinds of stuff.
And I'd like to play with that.
Just see what works and what doesn't.
But I don't want to do it through Android
and it doesn't really work through Firefox.
I don't want to do Mozilla.
I tried the Mozilla one,
but they only collect the data.
They don't share it back out.
Probably for legal reasons.
I don't know about that.
I don't know about that specific functionality
but I went from Cyanogen Mod.
Ow!
I've been Cyanogen Mod.
That was me dropping the executive knife.
Wow!
Anyways, I went from Cyanogen Mod
to AOKP.
And I love AOKP
just because of all the little knobs
and switches that I get to play with.
And I was going to say
I haven't aired enough
to significantly try and decoglify my phone.
I just install Cyanogen
and install the G apps.
For me, it's been I want root
and I don't want the crap that Verizon put on there.
I still use the Google stuff
but I mean, as far as my information,
it's all off my own cloud server.
Like my contacts, my calendar,
all that comes off of own cloud, not Google.
So basically, they just get a login
and an email.
And it's about it.
All my calendar is still in Google
because I just don't care.
Yeah, my calendar and contacts
are in Google.
And then, of course, I have the play store
because I can't bring myself
to tear free of it.
You know, I probably should.
And then I think
it's almost it.
I used to star thing, the Google star map thing
that's kind of neat.
And I've had Google voice since before it was Google voice.
So I have that number as well.
Grand Central.
Yep, I was Grand Central user.
Though, I have that.
I actually have an Ohio number
on one of my Google accounts
through Grand Central.
And then I have a Portland main number
through my other account
because my actual cell phone number
and I wanted to have a local number
I could give out to people.
Yeah, of course.
And it's just cool technology,
because I was a, you know,
I was a VoIP guy for years
and I just thought it was awesome.
And you can do some cool stuff
with asterisk plus Google voice.
That is cool.
Not that I have, but I just know you can.
Yeah, and you get all that setup
and then people just text you
while you're driving anyway.
I can do this, so I'm going to start it.
Nothing I'm ever going to finish it.
But I'm going to set up everything to where I can do it
if I ever decide I want to.
Oh God, that sounds like me so much.
That's why I love OpenStreetMapProject
because I use it all the time.
I wish I've tried so many times
it's just the map sucks so bad for here.
I mean, like, it's terrible.
Fix it.
That takes time.
Yes, it does.
Every time I think about using OpenStreetMap,
it's like, I want to spend 10 minutes
and get this running on my phone and stuff
and then I don't, and then I need maps
and so I go back to Google.
Well, I'll tell you what, I really don't use OpenStreetMaps
for navigating streets.
I'll confess that.
I have my Tom Tom in the car
and, you know, it's a standalone device.
It works fine most of the time.
So I just use that.
But when I got in the woods
OpenStreetMap all the time.
For trails, for hiking, for riding a bike,
or anything like that.
It's just it's all I use.
And see, my in-laws have a Tom Tom.
And we will travel with them.
Us using Android Fun and Google Maps.
That using Tom Tom.
And they get lost and they get bad directions.
And it's just terrible.
And so either you use it better
or have a better one or something
because after having seen people use it
Tom Tom, I could never go away
from Google Maps for GPS.
Oh, really? I don't know.
I just tell them to update their maps.
Most of them come with a, like,
one free map update.
If they have an updated, go ahead and update it.
But also, while you're helping them with that,
while it's plugged into the computer
and you're downloading stuff from there,
you can download my POI lists that I put up there.
At least the one that's all of the,
uh, everyone POI lists.
That's all of the, uh,
New Hampshire State liquor stores.
So, you know, those are actually a point of interest for me.
I know.
New Hampshire's a place for vacationers.
What vacationer does not want to,
does not wonder where's the nearest liquor store.
There's 72 of them in New Hampshire.
And I have them all.
Um, I would say the vacationers
who are current or previous members of AA.
They're probably vacationing with family
that they love who deserve a drink
for putting up with them for all the years.
That they ruin their lives.
Point.
Yeah, I was going to say,
I, I, I wouldn't want that.
But then I was like, yeah,
my wife would, she has to deal with me.
So, I guess that confirms that.
No, I'm glad you brought up the whole, like,
hiking and trails thing, POI.
I never even thought of that.
Like that, that, like,
gives me an excuse to get off my ass and go hike
and, like, fix maps like that.
That I can get into.
I'm going to go to the Osman.
There are ways with Osman.
You can record your track.
End it uploads.
But I like a standalone for that.
I'll use.
I have to look at it now.
I'll send a can't think of the name of it.
So has anyone heard the, uh,
the book club that I edited and got out yet?
I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet.
No, but I got email notifications
that people are talking about it in.
Um, on fracked.
Did I do an okay job with it?
I still sound stupid.
So no.
But is that edited?
Or is that just the source material I'm working with here?
I'm magic.
I can make anybody sound like a genius
throughout audio editing.
Sometimes I choose not to.
Well, I'm not a genius.
Oh, that was all good.
For example, when I edit,
every time I say like or om,
I take it out and I sound like a genius.
See, see,
when poke and I say like and um,
there's a pause.
And so it's easy to take out.
You say like this thing right here.
It's there.
I'm not that good.
Yeah, that took training on my part
because I edited several of my early
HPRs where there were not pauses there.
And it was really hard to cut out ums.
And when you're editing like that,
your own ums sound like
you're easily irritating.
So you like nitpick it every one of them.
And so I kind of trained myself to
put a pause in there
so that I could take them out.
But now that I do book club shows,
I try not to take out my ums and stuff
because it feels like I'm being unfair
if I take out mine.
And now everybody else is.
And everybody else isn't always easy to do.
So now I mostly leave mine in.
Unless they're like um.
See, I tried to take them out
where I could.
Well, and you've got to leave some of them
because like if you take them all out,
see I said because like you know
as that's how I do.
If you take them all out, it's weird.
It sounds unnatural.
So it's like you once again, I did again.
You have to like really?
I'm going to get one of the
are you at all a no agenda guy?
Time.
Yeah.
What are these rolling around in my head
as we have this conversation?
I'm going to get one of the little bells
and dang every time someone says like
or um.
But that just,
but that just more shit that it out.
So no, I won't.
I got the guy who sits next to me at work
that he now picks up on.
Yeah, no.
Sorry, what?
Yeah, no.
See, I say that on purpose.
It's a great way before no agenda
ever even mentioned it.
So that one, that one I hear,
it's, it's.
Yes, except a lot.
And I got the guy who sits next to me
to notice it.
I listen to no agenda for a while,
but every time I start up listening to them,
I just get really depressed because
every they talk about.
I'm sure fairly accurate,
but really, really depressing.
Oh, yeah, man.
I stopped six months ago or something.
So I would say no, not recently.
Oh, man.
Okay, so if they mentioned
two facts put together,
really like open,
out in the open facts
that anyone can look up and verify
it's no problem.
But when you put them together,
it's the most terrifying thought
I've had in a long time is,
you know, this,
there's a big push right now for automated driving.
So, I think they said it was a
lot of people's,
and they said that,
I think they said it was in Nevada.
There's actually an autonomous truck
driving the road right now.
And I forget whether they said it was
Volvo or Mercedes.
I think they said it was Mercedes.
So they have an autonomous truck
driving the roads delivering
things.
And it's, you know, Nevada.
I don't know if they,
or whatever, but that's happening now.
And, you know,
so that we're perfectly capable of having
fully autonomous trucks.
And the other fact that they brought up was
in all 50 states in the United States,
with no exception,
the leading job
is truck driver.
So they're trying to put a whole group people out of work.
I don't think that's their intention,
but that's going to be the result.
Look at the,
how automation,
you know,
a change with UPS.
You know, now they've got,
now they've got that clipboard
thing they carry around.
And they push a couple buttons on it
when they deliver the package.
And you can see on the internet that your package
is downloaded and used to be
the guy carried natural clipboard
full receipts.
And, you know, you'd have to sign.
And at the end of the day, you know,
when the driver got back
at five or six o'clock,
you know, you got this back room full of clerks
that had to, you know,
take the,
I just said, you know,
but had to take those receipts
and put everything into their computer.
Or before the days
when they had a computer,
whatever filing system they had.
Or maybe they did them the next day
or something, probably.
And there was enough.
This is hard, Pookie.
But you get my point.
You had a whole class of people
that were just out of a job then
when they start carrying around
those electronic tablets.
Yes. Two things.
First, it wasn't you know
that I, I key in on.
It's yeah, no.
Like, yes, no.
People say, yeah, no all the time.
It drives me bad.
But anyway, the other thing is,
yeah, I am not to invalidate your point.
But the number of clerks
that were put out of business
compared to the,
the number of jobs is, you know,
fairly insignificant.
But if they start replacing
actual truck drivers,
that's a majority of the jobs
in America as people driving trucks.
Well, I'd have to do it all in one day
because the first time that came around,
the teamsters would,
would go on strike and say,
yeah, you better,
all it's going to take is one accident
with an automated vehicle.
And that's going to be into that.
Oh, I don't know about that because,
you know, it's going to
statistically insignificant that one accident
it's going to be sensationalized.
But over time, you get,
you get, you know, a custom to that.
Your senses get dull to that.
And I want to correct myself.
I said that it would be a majority of jobs.
Not a majority of jobs. Just the leading job.
Well, and to further back up your point there,
we didn't take cars off the road the first time someone got
died by getting hit by a car.
That same logic applies
that the first time someone gets hit by
an automatic car.
We don't take car off the road.
We just file a bug report to fix the bug.
Yeah.
Yeah, I was going to say,
like, I think once
this happens and there are automated
trucks or cars or anything,
which come on, bring it on.
I'm ready for that.
It's good for me.
The statistical,
just how, how bad
of drivers human beings are.
The machines are going to be better automatically.
So yeah, that one wreck is going to have
a huge news blitz.
But it's not going to talk about the probably
thousands of crashes that didn't happen
because they were using an automated system.
So like in the grand scheme of things,
it will be a whole lot less.
I'm not sure the 80s.
And I'm the one building the automated truck.
And every time
a crash happens,
involving one of my vehicles,
right up until the point
where Americans are desensitized
to the whole looking automated vehicle
was involved in an accident.
Right up until that point,
I'm going to spend every penny I can
and probably going to debt
to make sure that each of these accidents
is deemed the fault of the human driver,
not the automated machine.
And that in the group chat is
who you call to do it.
Yeah.
Kill and open strategies.
Absolutely.
They know exactly what they're doing.
The company I worked for before
was started
by them as a spin-off
for their IT department.
They were our biggest customer
until the same time that I left.
So I was, you know,
neck deep in
those strategies.
Wow.
Hey, is X111
breaking up for anyone else
or am I breaking up for anyone?
Okay, I was going to ask that.
Yeah, he's not right now,
but he broke up earlier for me.
Sorry.
Sorry.
He sounds fine to me.
Sorry.
I'm sure my wife's watching the office
swabbling that.
I'm just not building the internet fast.
Yes, Daredevil is not the office.
Okay.
I can't start talking with the show as I started
watching and stop watching.
So let's get started with the show.
Sounds good to me.
See, Poki, we did have a lot more geeky stuff to say.
It's true.
