Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2019-09-09

Hello everybody, this is Shane Arman row you’re in the passenger seat with me passenger seat radio. It is September 9 2019, nine 919 99 99999. Welcome to the show. You’re on my 13 mile commute home. I’m actually going home. I’m not making any stops. So that’s always nice. Get a couple extra minutes and show. It is Monday. Back to work to the extraordinarily short weekend. You know, I was out for two or three days last week. Monday was a holiday and I was out Tuesday through Thursday. I was back on Friday. Yeah, so my ear continues to weep over the weekend and it’s still still not great I keep I keep keeping it clean. I keep you know, keeping the drops and still taking the antibiotics blah blah blah. So Hopefully it’s okay. I mean, I mean, I would have thought it would stop gushing out crap, but apparently not so anyway, so otherwise the weekend was fairly nondescript. Why do you have one thing we did over the weekend I’ll talk about but we did. We went to Costco, my son and I went to Costco, my wife stayed home and graded papers. And so we went to Costco, which is always fun guy that places a frickin zoo. And the one we go to is on the west side of town up at 83rd, and Bell, and that’s where all the old people from Sun City go to because that’s their closest Costco. So not only are there a plethora of people, a lot of older people who, let’s be honest, they don’t, they’re not in a big hurry. They don’t have anywhere to go and they have all the time in the world to get there. So it tends to be slightly less of a great experience. Then on Saturday, of course, they have all All of the samples out right samples of everything pizza, popcorn, drinks, vitamins of all things, gummy vitamins, beef jerky. There’s a little bit everything out there. And of course, everybody’s got away. You know, it cracks me up, you know. So some of these, and I’ll get back to the rest of the story, but some of these some of these sample stations, they’re like, they’re cooking chicken patties in these little toaster ovens right now, I made a chicken Patty in a toaster oven, it takes like 12 minutes, right? So they’re making like four of these Patty three or four of these patties at a time, right? They pull them out, they chop them up into the smallest possible bits that they can and put them in those little Dixie cup things right? Like you’re taking meds at a hospital. And they go in like, less than a minute and then it’s another 12 minutes or you know Whatever the differential of time is, so what’s odd is is you would think that the people making the samples the second they pulled those out of the oven, the Little Toaster Oven, they’d have four more in there because then that that lessens the time between the time you have a full set of samples to give out in the time you have no samples to give out right? And before the next batch comes out. Anyway, bunch of nonsense and people will sit there and block every fucking aisle to get a thumbnail size bite of a chicken process chicken Patty. I don’t get it, man. I mean, I love beef jerky, right? I love me some beef jerky. If it’s not there, I just keep moving. There’s another there’s someplace else for me to swing by. You know what I’m saying? I can swing over to get a Jews zip Zippo fees Zippo vis drink, you know Got one of those I can go get I don’t have to wait for the jerk yeah man people sit there like 12 minutes and wait. It’s like dude don’t you didn’t you come to the shop? I mean the sales are great if you’re happened to be walking past whatever anyway, so that always makes the Costco run that much more entertaining. Let’s see So, so yesterday Sunday was our big day we’ve been waiting so in January I bought tickets to Arizona Broadway theaters presentation of Zana do that scenes and to three times the theatrical, you know, the music theater version, not the movie. I’ve seen that more times than I care to admit. I’ve went to with Chad in Denver with his family, which was a lot of fun. Lots of audience participation in that one. And then we went to a twice. I guess we went twice to Harberger theater downtown Phoenix. So actually, I’ve been four times my fourth time going to Susanna do I love the show. I love the music. Let’s be honest. It was not a great movie. But the music was spot on the music was top notch. And the concept of it was pretty good. It just didn’t quite translate to the small screen. But for those of you who’ve seen Zanna do on the stage, it’s a lot of fun. And my son loves it. It’s a family favorite whenever sanity is around anytime Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat or is around, sometimes Book of Mormon where I met Travis, a sister actually at Book of Mormon. So yeah, so we really enjoy seeing Zanna do and so we went up to the Arizona Broadway theater is a like a dinner and a show type scenario. Now we’ve been to one that was a buffet style version of this, right so you get there like an hour before Showtime. You get your table, you go and you get food from a buffet and then you go sit down, you eat and then when everything’s done, the cast might come out and walk around a little bit just before the show and then the show starts and these are always these little intimate. theaters. In this case it was more it was table service driven, right? And so you bought your you bought your show ticket and dinner ticket ahead of time. So I bought these back in January, January, absolutely crazy of this year. So it’s been nine months we’ve been waiting to see this show. And we had not been to this venue, right? We had not been to the Arizona Broadway theater. But it’s cozy. It’s nice. It’s, I mean, it’s very clean. very intimate, very small. So there’s really not a bad table in the place. Sort of like the one in Denver. I went with Chad. It was very nice. Now, it the one in Denver. They spent a lot of time in the audience. They sort of extended the stage kind of into the audience. So they were out running around a lot. In this case, there were a couple of times when when they would come up the sides are through the middle but not not very often. But the show is Good, I thought that was some very interesting things going on. So for those of you are not familiar, I’ll give you a little, little quick brief overview. The show the show is about Sonny Malone and artists. So this is set back in 1980s. He’s an artist, he wants to kill himself because he doesn’t feel like he’s being able to accomplish his dreams whatever. A Muse is sent down from Mount Olympus to inspire him, of course, that’s the Olivia Newton john character in the movie. And between her and you know, she inspires them and they fall in love and it’s forbidden for the Muse to fall in love. And she has to go back and get yelled at by her father and the father agrees to let her go back. So the play is a little bit different. The the stage version is a little different. The concept here is, excuse me, that there’s still Sunday Malone and Cara right there’s still the two of them, but the nine sisters which is often played by men, which always cracks me up and sometimes one of the Muses or one of the city This is played by a stagehand, which is fantastic. And one of the performances, the guy playing the guitar, which is live music. That was really cool. One of our presentations, they actually had live people playing the music. So we’re like an orchestra, but it was, you know, synthesizer guitar drums. Yeah, basic band type thing. In that case, they did not have nine sisters. So one of the sisters ended up being, you know, Bob on the guitar, which is great and they always refer to him as the ninth sister and blah, blah, blah. So in this case, in this in this stage production, two of the Muses, sister muses are really pissed off that Kira is getting to, you know, get the reward of Zana do blah, blah, blah. So they decided to, to put a curse on her and make her fall in love with the mortal and create art both of which are forbidden and will send her to the nether realms of hell, whatever, right? The two sisters that they always get, they always do the ant sponge and answer biker bit light from James and the Giant Peach. They always get a really heavyset girl to be one of the the sisters, those two sisters and then they get this really skinny, you know, with the glasses, the horn rimmed glasses and the whole bit and those two always steal the show. They are so funny and this performance was no different. Two or three, the Muses are always played by men, so they’re sisters, but they play basically played by gay guys. And it’s always fun because they always they always play it up really big and, you know, they put themselves in situations which makes it more funny. It’s really it’s really a fun show. It’s got it’s got good writing, of course the music is great. They kept most of the music from Zanna do. They do the crossover with the tubes and you know the big band thing. It’s, it’s great. It’s a great, great musical. If you get an opportunity to see it. I would say this is the this was the least best performance that We had, if I had to rank all four of them, Well, the first two were both at Herbert with the same cast, right. So it’s pretty much the same performance. But I would say our first one was the best followed by the one in Denver. And then finally, this one here, and it was more along the lines of they had some technical issues from time to time, right? The guy running the board wasn’t bringing the mics up fast enough. The vocal performances just simply weren’t as good. You know. There were a couple of very strong performers, the one that played the lead Kira, and the one that played the the heavyset Sister, I can’t remember. It’s not Calliope. It’s one of the other ones but anyway, she had she had really good vocal range too. So there were a couple of really good performances, but the rest of them Maria and they were okay. It was fun for the show worked out. But Kira was interesting. Yeah, I mean, Where is everybody? Everyone’s gone. But interestingly enough, the woman that played the actress that played Kira, you know, you would expect it to be this set. See thin blonde, you know like Olivia Newton john and it has been for the last you know, three times I’ve seen it. They you know, the, you know, attractive thin blonde to be Karen. In this case they kind of not not a heavyset she wasn’t fat, but she was a little thick. I got a picture with her at the end. I’ll get to that in a minute but it was like wow, I mean, I wasn’t it didn’t disappoint me that she wasn’t bonus skinny. In fact, most of the cast was of a decent size not fat just like regular people size not Oh my god, they’re all sticks. There was one girl that was way too thin. Playing one of the sisters and the gay guys were on the thin side, but you know, that’s just being gay. I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know. Anyway. So so we got there we go. So here’s one thing I want to share anybody who might be going to one of these dinner dinner and show sort of things, the tickets when we bought the ticket said The the the ticket time was 12 to two. Right? Well, as it turned out, you start seeding for food at 12. The show starts at two. Right? So we didn’t know. And the website their website was, it was a fun show, but their website sucks. So you couldn’t really determine where you’re supposed to be there early in the curtain goes up at 12. So you want to be there at 11 to feed I found that the box office was open at 11. So it’s like so we’re supposed to show up, but what do we do? And you can’t call until 11, which is probably to Lake is the box office close to all up, whatever. So we decided to hedge our bets and get there by you know, around 1130 1140. We got there and of course, we found out then that they seat for food at 12. And then two hours later the show goes on now it doesn’t take two hours to eat folks. Even when it’s you know Bring on the appetizer then bring out the entree. So, at least here, they include this little appetizer and appetizer. It’s either a broccoli and cheddar soup or a little salad. And then they give you one entree. And then they have upgrades for everything right standard upsell. So if you want the lemming young, you can get that for 20 bucks more than your ticket if you want. Sword fish tacos, you could get that for 20 bucks more. Dessert was extra drinks were extra. You got water if you want it, but if you wanted soda or something or whatever, that a full bar, which I thought was kind of nice. There was a full bar out in the lobby. So if you want to get there early and have a couple cocktails before you go in to eat can do that. And for us, of course, you know my wife’s an introvert, I’m not but when she’s in a public situation, she needs me to be you know, more attentive and be closer to her. So we ended up having a table of six people right there was only three of us So my wife is always a little bit neurotic about, you know, who’s going to be sitting at our table who’s going to be sitting next to who? Blah, blah, blah. I think Chad when Chad listens to the show, he’ll understand. But we ended up having two people join us an older, a much older couple. Join us at the table. They were okay. They didn’t bother us. We didn’t bother them. It was interesting though, the way the three of us were sitting, you know, my son’s kind of a big boy. And he was sitting on the inside on one side and they sit, they both sat next to him on that side of the table. They could have sat across from each other, but whatever. So that caused all sorts of weird problems with him getting out and getting out to go to the bathroom and big data tables are pretty close together. But anyway, so the waitstaff was really nice, very friendly. We had a good time, there was no problems, they kept the drinks flowing. Everything was was good there, but two hours for the meal was way too long. So I would say if you’re I would, I would do your research ahead of time and don’t wait to the day You have to call and find out what the actual arrangements are. If the if the website is not adequate to tell you what you need to do, and when you need to be there, we would have had probably a little bit more fun and we’ve got an hour later, we could have gotten gotten there at one o’clock eaten and then had to show it to would have probably been a better deal. Anyway, and then when we came out so the show was over, and it was a good time, of course. And when we came out, the staff was out in the lobby. Hey, Javier, what’s up, man? That established city on the lobby was like, wow, that’s normally they don’t the staff, you know, the cast members don’t come out to the lobby. They’re usually waiting for the next performance. They had another performance I think it 577 was their next performance I think so they had some time. But we went out and they were all just standing out. They’re all approachable, right? They didn’t have handlers or anything just small theater. And it was really cool. We got to go see Calliope the the skinny one with the glasses. Brian’s favorite. He Oh, he loves that. Character she’s price What a fun character. I would dress and dragged to play that if I were if I were still acting and I was going to do a performance because that’s like the greatest, the greatest part in that show. So we got to talk to her and we talked to the heavyset one, the other sister. And we talked to Sonny yo the lead guy, we got to talk to Karen I got my picture with Kara. Liz Pharaoh was her name I looked her up. And we got to see I got a picture of my wife with the three game uses right the three guys lot of fun it was it was neat. And yeah, we love We love it. We love going to musical theater, so let’s good stuff. So that was yesterday. We didn’t we got home I don’t know about 435 o’clock, something like that. Not like going on after that. I started I started to feel kind of bad. My wife got some sort of like a 24 hour flu or something on Friday. She was white. I mean, she slept like 16 hours and she was still tired when she got up. But after you know, after about 24 hours, she was like, right back up and I’m like, Wow. Okay. So I think I may have gotten a touch of that. my sinuses are filling up and you can probably hear him a little nasal Lee. But the ear and the ear of course has been weeping like shit. So it’s nonsense. So I went back to the gym for the first time in a week. I went to the gym this morning. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through. I took it easy on the elliptical, but I was on the elliptical. I’m watching the boys on on Amazon Prime while I’m on the elliptical, right. So I like to pick a show. And I don’t watch it outside the gym. Right? I have a gym show so I have something to look forward to. I did it with deadly class. I did it with a whole bunch of other shows that I only watch these while I’m at the gym, and the boys is fantastic. I am on episode six. And I recommend I really recommend it. It’s good stuff. It’s, it’s a little dark is a little twisted. It’s not necessarily something you’ve never seen before. I mean, there’s elements of it that are of course, you know, the storylines a little different. But superheroes are all are all corporate, they’re all owned essentially by a big corporation. And the the, the best of the superheroes are called the seven there’s seven of them, obviously. And they are they are the ears and mouth of this corporation. And it’s interesting because they they have their own. All all of the superheroes are fucked up, right? I mean, Oh, perfect. You came from my observation of the boys. Alright, cool. Well, I’ll tell you, I’ll talk about So essentially, the story the main story arc revolves around this young girl pretty hot named starlight That’s her that’s her superhero name. And she’s being inducted into the seven that she comes from like Ohio or something Bible Belt. And so she’s this sweet demure you know, little blonde wants to make it big as a superhero. And so she gets, you know, drafted or whatever by this. This void industries right it’s void right isn’t a void industries. Anyway, so she gets concert and then all the sudden she finds out that this is a business that these guys are not the greatest people superheroes are not the greatest people. In fact, some of them can be outright shit heads and a lot of self serving going on. In the meantime, the so so she’s shown her indoctrination to this group and how she’s growing. And her part of the organization is one of the storylines. The other one involves this, this young guy whose girlfriend is literally exploded by bit Essentially, all of these characters all of the characters in this show are are almost parodies of the real superheroes right? So let’s run through the list. Superman is homeland or in this and by the way, this is the guy that played Sheriff Lucas buck and Banshee took me like five episodes to figure that out. But if you love Banshee and I can’t recommend Banshee enough either if you haven’t seen Banshee must must watch not with the kids though. So he has homeland who’s essentially Superman. They have a maid maid is Wonder Woman. They’ve got the deep which is Aqua man, they’ve got a train which is the flash essentially right? They’ve got they got a handful of these in there and they’re all superheroes you know, just under a different name right. Now Elisabeth Shue right from adventures in babysitting, Cobra Kai etc etc. hollow man show is sort of, I don’t know what you would call her she, she is their handlers. You know, she represents the organization. She represents the company. And she makes sure that they’re in the right place saying the right thing at the right time maintaining the corporate image with the superheroes, right? So you’ve got, you’ve got all of these little storylines going on for each of the superheroes and what sort of nonsense they’re up to. But the kid a train, the flash one, literally runs straight through this guy’s girlfriend splatters are all over the road. And essentially, the kid is like, you know, you fucking killed my girlfriend, you know, co CEO, the suits perfect. I call him soups, not superheroes. So, he is he wants somebody to pay for the death of his girlfriend, right? He got off scot free, right. He’s super Hero, a train superhero. He, you know, they offered him 40 grand to, you know, look the other way and to you know, stop talking about it essentially. And so his goal is to essentially fuck over the superheroes because they’re not being held responsible. And so he ends up teaming up with these mercenary guys, I don’t want to give too much the plot away. But that’s sort of that’s a real main, that’s a real main plot going on. And there’s a couple there’s a couple of various other little subplots going on too. But the show is, the show is very grown up. It’s not it’s not it doesn’t feel like these goofy ass Marvel superheroes. Doesn’t feel like DC superheroes. It’s its own thing. And I like that because quite frankly, I’m not I am not a Marvel fan. I do not care about these Marvel superhero shows. I don’t I don’t care much about the DC ones coupled with standing right. But I like this. If you don’t like superhero movies, you will probably like this. I think there’s what eight episodes hobby for the season and they’re working on Season Two Thank God. But I like it. I like it a lot. They don’t pull any punches. It’s all again it’s very adult. You don’t want to watch with your kids Yeah, I really enjoy the show. It’s not deadly class which has been my my favorite surprise over the last year but it’s it’s pretty good. It’s definitely better than what was that umbrella Academy is better than that for sure. But yeah, it’s really fun and I liked the character so eight Okay, yeah, thank you, honey. So I’ve got six seven and eight to watch I’m almost done which is too bad got to watch something else but the boys excellent show on amazon prime. What are you talking about turbo going to have an age sex and language check. Did you know everybody in here there’s nobody new in here. So funny. Anyway, so turbo turbo to XS on here as well. So yeah, good show. I’m definitely in for the long haul unless they totally ruin it, but I’m having a good time with it. Highly recommended. What else? I’ve been watching I’ve been watching. Oh, I watched them some documentaries. So I have this on my keep list. I feel like I’ve got this on my keep list. Let’s see here. They’re talking about the documentaries I watched. I must have Yeah, it was to talk about the cola one. Yeah, okay. So I guess I’m all tied up there. So let’s see. I watched the latest of the William Shatner in search of knock off called the unexplained This is this was a this is pretty good. It was you know, miracle survivors. People who jump out of planes that chute don’t open yet somehow they live when they hit the ground at some woman, a Tibetan flight or something like that the plane goes down kills like all 50 people aboard except for her. No Elizabeth she was Am I say Cobra Kai man Karate Kid. Sorry. Yeah. Well, she’ll be in Cobra Kai next season. Don’t worry. I Travis she was in karate kid. She’ll be in Cobra Kai next season fucking. Travis always got to correct brother. Let’s see. So I watched that that was pretty good. I think it was anything else that just stands out. Oh, I introduced my son to house too. So he’d seen the original house movie with William cat. And we were talking about the house movies where we were playing Overwatch and Brian it for me that he has not seen house to and I thought he had so we we took a couple hours yesterday we sat down and watched house too. And he enjoyed that. Some of the effects of not aged well, but some of them actually have which is pretty good. There’s one or two effects that look really bad but it all in all for like 1986 you know, they they made some good use of maths. They did some good puppet puppetry. Working they’re pretty good and the movies funny as hell if you if you haven’t watched the house series, it’s really interesting this house series since I’m sort of stuck in traffic here. So these house movies, a lot of people don’t know this house movies were produced by Sean s. Cunningham, who was the producer of Friday the 13th, the original few Friday the 13th movies. And so he’d come up with this, this idea for a house this sort of weird temporal time warping house. And in the first film, William Katt, greatest American hero, right. He and his wife and his son lived in this house and the sun disappears one day. They don’t know if he was kidnapped or what happened to him, but he’s just gone. Of course, the loss of the kid breaks the two of them up. The aunt, his aunt still lives in that house, and then she ends up killing herself. And the house reverts to him and so he He decides to go back to the house. He’s a writer. He’s an author of four books. And he’s working on a Vietnam book now his own personal experience in Vietnam. And so he goes to the to the house to get away Do a little writing, only to find out that the house is the house is still alive the houses who really took his kid and there’s a whole bunch of shit going on in that house. It’s, it’s very, it’s a very dark comedy horror stuff. Some really neat special effects in there some interesting work that they did in that and it’s fun it’s got George went in it right from Cheers. It’s God’s Of course, William Katt. A couple of other actors you would definitely know this will be hot blonde that plays his neighbor tries to pawn her kid off on Tanya. And so the second movie when it came out we were kind of hoping it was more of the same right I was talking to chat about this we’re like oh house to it. And the set the name of his house to the second story that it second story. But in this case has nothing to do with the original house or William cat or anybody else. It’s a literally a different story about a weird ass house. which at first and it took a lot more of a comedic turn to it. Now what’s really great in there is the guy that played the vampires live in handy man and Fright Night. I’ve seen him in a couple of things and he always has he always plays a fun character but you know, I don’t even know what happened and I mean, he had a couple of good runs and then he was out. But he’s in there lots of airtime in there and and Bill Maher is in there. Oddly enough, that’s weird. He’s like some asshole record producer and the chick that was married to john Ritter. Holy crap. Her name just slipped right out of my head. The Hell’s her name? Somebody helped me out here. Murder john Ritter hot redhead. At least used to be did a cameo on are a small part on modern family a couple seasons back. Wow, this is just slipping right out of my head trauma. So look it up for us in a minute. He’s good at that. Amy yard yard. Dr. Bullock, Dr. Beck, I think is her name. Yeah, that sounds right. Anyway, she’s like 18 in this movie. And I was telling my son Hey, you might know her, you know, he never did. He didn’t pick her up because obviously she was in the mask too, by the way is Peggy Brant the reporter. So for those of you may know the mask but not house to or Modern Family. So anyway, so it was really fun to see to see that with him and share those because there’s a lot of good one liners and quotable is in there. So that’s always good. Let me see I had a couple other things on my keep list here. I can’t believe traffic’s just terrible. So I’m going to give I’m going to give a plug out so I’ll tell you an interesting little story. My uncle I I have I have I haven’t one and two uncles. And I was close to. I was close to my Uncle Tom, Uncle Tommy. Tommy was young. Now. Now remember my mom was 15 when she had me so she was she was young little tramp. Now I’m just teasing. I was just a one night stand nonsense thing. But so she had two brothers and a sister. And the sister was older. The the brother, one of the brothers was older and then the other brother was younger and an Uncle Tom. Tom. So Tommy was like, I don’t know. 14 1314 so when I was like five or six Uncle Tom was not much older than me, right? Yeah, Uncle Tom has a cabin to get somebody got the job. But we you know, we play games and shit together and he was cool to hang out with and you know, he was he was just a neat guy to hang out with and, you know, he tends to A shining me so we were kind of close. And I spent a lot of time with my cousins at my aunt’s house, right. You may have heard me talk about my cousins April and sunny. They’re the ones that couldn’t have a TV but we’re allowed to have a video game Atari 2600. That’s the that’s the house that I go over to on a Saturday night. I had to spend all day at church the next day. Yeah, that’s the same house. Same people. But my other uncle I did not get close to. It was never I was never that close to him. His name was Ron. And uncle Ron was in a band. Uncle Ron was a rock, kind of a rock star. And he was now listening ever made it big. He did. They did record an album. I think it got a little bit of playing Seattle. I don’t think he really got out of Seattle. It didn’t quite work out but they were talented. I remember liking the band. I think I can’t remember the name kicker. I think the name was kicker back then. Anyway, So they used to play a lot of local, the lot of local gigs. I mean, they’d be playing, you know, bars, they’d be playing, like Halloween events, things like that. They were always they were always kind of working but never really made it big, but it never, never really stopped him from being a musician. He played guitar, lead singer. But again, never really, I didn’t really know him that well. And like a lot of other people in the rock’n’roll business, he had some, some drug problems, marriage problems, kind of kind of destroyed his life to be honest with you, but he managed to get himself picked back up. And now he is back playing music. And so I thought I would, and I listened to some of it, it’s actually pretty good. You know, it’s hard to find like, what do you want to how do you say it? Like real music, everything is so processed and so you know, it’s so it’s so sterile to Hear like real instruments and real people playing and not machines and not overproduce shit. Let’s, it’s kind of cool. And you know, I know the band. I know the guy I know the lead singer of the band, I know the guitar player in the band. So for those who are interested, it’s rock and roll. It’s old, old school rock and roll style. So it’s not, don’t worry, it’s not Debbie Gibson or air supply or into that other shit that I typically listen to. It’s a little more on the rock and roll side. And it’s actually on iTunes and Google Play, you can actually go and actually listen to it right now. The name of the band is compulsive behavior. And the album’s name has helped me I’m stupid. Help me I’m stupid. And there’s I listened to like three or four tracks on it, and I gotta say, I like it. I mean, I like I like old rock and roll. And again, it doesn’t feel you know, processed and staged and manufactured. So, Alright, enough of that. Enough of my uncle’s plug. Uh, let’s see, I got a chance to play a little bit of No Man’s Sky. A little bit of No Man’s Sky in VR, which was kind of cool. Um, you know, I would have thought that the VR would have been really tacked on it would have been kind of a flimsy add on. But it turns out that maybe that’s why this update took so long as they actually were spending some damn time making the VR work. The UI doesn’t suddenly the UI is always been a little bit rough on that game, but the UI the VR UI. They didn’t just get pasted on. They did. They did a full blown integration for for the VR aspect of it. So I got to tell you, if you’ve got the means to play it and try it out in VR. I would Excuse me. Have you heard you to play Yeah, I forgot. But yeah, the VR the VR thing actually feels good it feels it doesn’t feel tacked on it doesn’t feel half baked they really spent time doing it right now the game itself is gets a little bit overcomplicated so much like the forest in VR, which is an interesting as hell experience if you haven’t had that opportunity. It’s it, it makes already tedious work a little more tedious. Does that make sense? Right so the VR components cool, but you’re already doing tedious work like gathering resources and stuff like that. The VR ball, it’s cool and it’s immersive and all that it just makes the tedium a little more tedious, but I wanted to give him credit, you know, I probably put four or five hours into the game. You know, I got off the first planet. I had the reg ship, I rebuilt the ship, I got back off the plane. I got nowhere near as far as tribes has gotten, he seems to be playing a quite a bit. But I did want to share that the VR component if you haven’t had a chance to try it out, I highly recommend giving the VR a chance. Speaking of VR, I’ve got some interesting more news of interest. I did purchase pinball effects for the quest I was looking for a new game and it was like 15 bucks for a few tables like four tables for 15 bucks not too bad. And it’s all it’s all atmospheric. Right? You know, you’re sort of in this big room and you can you don’t walk up to him which kind of teleport to the tables. And you’re looking down. You got your hands right there. It feels natural. It looks cool. What are the things that makes pinball? What are the things that makes pinball pinball is the fact that it’s a three dimensional playing field right? When you’re playing a video game. It’s a two dimensional screen and one of the things Things about VR is everything feels three dimensional. And when they really do that well, such as moss monsters is one of those games where you’re basically playing a platformer game in the guise of like a diorama and it looks really cool and there’s there’s there’s this depth of field to everything. Space Pirate trainer when you’re shooting at these these ships flying in front of you, there’s this huge sense of depth. And the, the combination of depth as well as the 3d space translates remarkably well to pinball. Because if you’ve ever played shitty pinball, like on a screen if you just play pinball effects on the PC or on the switch or whatever. It looks cool. It’s it’s got a three dimensional perspective, but it doesn’t feel 3d. You don’t feel the space in the play field. The Wii Are fixes that. So it really, when you say immersive, blah, blah, blah, all these little buzzwords and whatnot. This is actually true when, when you’re looking down at this table, you feel you’re looking at a table, not a flat screen, simulating a three dimensional table. best way I can put it. Now without it’s false, though. The add on packs are expensive, which I’m not a huge fan of. I mean, I understand it’s a little more work to be done there. But the packs are a little expensive, and the configuration of how you look down at the table. So you want to be seated, right? I mean, pinball is one of the few games in VR, you can actually sit down to play. Well, if you’re sitting down to play, you have to like look at your crotch to see the table. So I’ve been trying to play with the camera angles a little bit and trying to reset my Oculus view. And I got a view that it’s more or less comfortable, but I think there’s a little bit of work that can be done. There. But but it’s still It’s a neat experience. If you haven’t had an opportunity to play it if somebody you know, has VR and they have access to the pinball, give it a try. It’s pretty neat. Let’s see, oh, I did make another interesting experiments complete with the quest. So as I mentioned before, I think one of the downsides of the quest is, well, the good side is its own self contained, portable VR system, right? Of course, the downside of that is it’s also not that powerful. I mean, it’s it’s basically mobile device technology. So you don’t you don’t expect there to be, you know, second, sorry, I’m trying to navigate some traffic here. You can’t expect you to play everything that a high end PC with the rift can play. So you’ve got this sort of subset of games that you Play on the rift that you would also play on I’m sorry, the on the quest you can play that would also be on the Rift, some of their cross by etc, etc. We talked about that one of the things that would really make the quest awesome would be what if you could play other VR stuff on the quest? Because let’s be honest, if you’re What if you could stream a VR game from your PC which obviously it can support your Rift, you can certainly support the the VR game, what have you can stream the game to the quest? So the question is nothing more than a receiver without work, so I decided to try it and find out. So a lot of what I buy is on Steam, right, so I’ve got a lot of steam VR games. Now steam VR does not work obviously, as a solution for the Oculus. But if you could stream it all of these games And I already own space pirate trainer in death. All of these games, some of which aren’t even available on the quest, but some are I’d have to rebuy. What if that worked? So there was a big there was a big to do. Somebody came up, there’s a guy that wrote this piece of software called Virtual Desktop. It lets you use your PCs desktop and VR, right? Pretty simple. Puts big giant screens in front of you and you can move the screens around and you can you can kind of do some some decent basic workflow browsing and things like that. Well, he thought, What the hell, I will make a I will make a streaming tool that will intercept steam VR games and just shovel the output to the quest. How hard can that be? And he did it. And it worked. In fact, that works so well. That Oculus kicked his, you know, took his tool out of the store his virtual desktop tool out of the store until he removed the ability to stream steam VR, right? They got to protect their walled garden right? They don’t want you playing the copy of Space Pirate trainer you already have. They don’t want you playing a copy of moss that you got on sale during a steam event. They want you paying full price through the Oculus store each and every time even if you already own the game. Listen, I would call them shit head bastards for doing that. But this is the way it is exclusivity. All the store nonsense. I mean to say that Oculus is the only one doing it would be a complete, you know, misstatement. So, but you can’t keep a good guy down right. So he released the the steam VR module as a standalone thing outside of the Oculus store. And so now you can download that separately, as long as you own a copy of virtual desktop, just 20 bucks, best 20 bucks will spend. As long as you have that, then this streamer will essentially intercept steam VR and send it to your quest wirelessly, of course. So now actually, in some ways, it’s actually better. Because all the games you were playing tethered like in death, for example, which is a great game, which I can’t believe hasn’t been ported to the quest yet. That game requires you to turn and move around a lot which tangles you in the wires moves you outside the view of your sensors. The Quest would be perfect for in depth. It’s not available, but you can stream it for Steam VR, and it is wireless and portable, but not as profitable as the quest is without the PC drive again, but you get the idea. So that turned out to be Rather successful. There’s there were you know, there was a couple of hiccups in the frame rate from time to time what you would expect to see from streaming. But for the most part, it works pretty damn well, which is one of the barriers of entry to the quest that I would I want I would warn people about is you get, you get what Oculus gives you and nothing else. There’s no steam deals. There’s no buying keys off of Green Man gaming, you’re going to pay full price on Oculus store or each and every time. Well, there’s kind of an option now. It’s not the perfect high performance option, but it’s pretty good. That’s how I ended up playing No Man’s Sky, by the way, is I had a stream to the quest so pretty neat so I keep learning more and more. I’ve been working a lot with the beat saber plugin dude, the guy that’s actually got custom songs working for beat saber on there. He does a tool called beat on And it’s a little web server. It’s pretty cool. It’s pretty damn slick. It’s a little tiny web server that runs on your quest and you can, like browse on your computer on the same network, you go to your computer and you can upload songs from there, you can manage your songs. It’s actually it’s actually really slick. But what I wanted to do with that tool that I’ve been working on that being a beat mapper tools, I wanted a way to deploy maps while your play testing them to the quest. And so I did a whole bunch of weird workarounds and hacks and weird shit that didn’t work half the time. But I got a hold of the beat on our author and he was really cool. We sat for several hours and he added them he added additional functionality for me to control beat on from my tool as well as restart beats him and all these other interesting little things that that would be very difficult for me to do alone. He was very helpful and added those so big shout out to, to beat ons author for being so cool. And helping me integrate with this product. That’s one of the nice things about some of these communities. You know, there was the main community, all of the every, every all community start, like really cool. Everybody’s helping everybody out and everybody wants to see everybody succeed and then without fail, you know, after everything starts getting big a couple people get these big heads and then you got, you know, people who are, you know, their shit doesn’t smell anymore. And you know, you should be basking in my presence because I brought you main, blah, blah, blah. Yeah. So there’s a little bit of that going on in the community. But I’ve been stunned and surprised at how this whole beat saber custom song community has been very well behaved with each other. It’s cool. It’s cool. So yeah, so that’s up to date on the quest. Let’s see. What else do I have here? Ah, lots of fun from Nintendo. So they just recently had Nintendo Switch direct where Nintendo does these little 4040 minute to an hour shows where they talk about new stuff that’s coming. And we’ve had we’ve had on on hand here that it looked like Overwatch was coming to switch. Somebody leaked leaked in quotes by you air quotes leaked a case branded with Overwatch logo for the switch on Amazon. It was quickly pulled off of course, but it was it was too late. The shipping date of that case was like October 15. So everybody suspected this the switch was getting a copy of Overwatch. And sure enough it is. So it was officially announced we don’t have a whole lot of details yet. But being able to play Overwatch wherever you’re at on the go, that that that appeals like crazy to me. And there won’t be any cross play. Of course they’ll be they’ll be separate progression just like it tends to be on other platforms right? I got an Xbox and PC for Overwatch and I’ve got skins for my character on Xbox I’ve got kids skins for my characters on PC it’s a whole big mess. But that’s very cool along Of course with with Witcher three is coming out it’s all very exciting we actually got some what I would consider sort of some triple A stuff coming for switch, not just a bunch of procedurally generated eight bit pixelized indie games for the switch we’re actually getting some some high class play and that’s that’s great. Good for the system. Good for the consumers good for everybody. That there was one other game that was part of that switch equation. Oh, torch light came out. Yeah, I’ve had these these notes for a couple of weeks. torchlight two came out for the switch. It is a console version of the popular Diablo style dungeon crawler. And I listen, I tried to get into it, but it felt a little too loose. For me, I just I gotta feel like I’m doing something and I just didn’t feel like I was doing anything. But the port is solid as hell. I mean it is super clean. It is super optimized it’s really neat stuff. I listen I’m almost to my my house here. I’m gonna lose my Wi Fi soon don’t want the show to break out. This is Shane. I’m enrolled pastor see radio. We’ll see you next time. Take care, everybody.