Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 | Making a Website with Paul Lacey | The Future of AI

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to the Geeky Brummie podcast. Joining me today as usual, Miss Keith Lincoln. [00:00:05] Speaker B: Hi, everyone. [00:00:06] Speaker A: Miss Lee Fryes. [00:00:07] Speaker C: Hello. [00:00:08] Speaker A: Mr. Sam Edwards. [00:00:09] Speaker D: Hello. [00:00:09] Speaker A: And special guest, Mr. Paul Lacey. Welcome. [00:00:12] Speaker C: Thank you very much. Great to be here. [00:00:14] Speaker A: Guinness World record holding. Paul Lacey. [00:00:16] Speaker C: That's right, yeah. We shall talk about that we can do. [00:00:20] Speaker A: But coming up today, we'll be talking all about the future of AI and website design with all we'll be reviewing guardians of the Galaxy Volume Three, the latest in our Pound Truck cosplay feature at the King of Cosplay will return to announce the nearest theme and of course, one gig Think. But we'll join you shortly. Hello, Paul. Welcome to Geeky brummie. We've had you behind the scenes for quite a little while, helping out without moving a website host, but you describe yourself as a WordPress expert, designer, speaker, podcaster and Guinness World Record holder. [00:01:11] Speaker C: Yeah, indeed. And a human as well. Just to confirm. [00:01:15] Speaker A: Just confirm you're not sending? [00:01:17] Speaker C: No. Well, who knows? Who knows, we might all be cool. [00:01:20] Speaker A: So let's start off with Guinness World Record hold. [00:01:23] Speaker C: Right, well, I mean, I don't like to talk about it too much. It's academic sports related, so we could leave it at that if you wanted. The actual truth is I used to have a client. Because I've been a web designer and stuff for years. I used to have a client and it was Loughborough University, specifically the sport parts of part of Loughborough University which kind of looked after all of the different student teams which went from anything from kind of like casual sport up to full on professionals. A lot of the Olympians come out of that university or train at that university. So there you are, sport academia. But what actually happened was I was asked to come along to a meeting, but to bring my Christmas jumper. So I was just like, fine, yeah, I'll do that. So I did. I brought my Christmas jumper. And then we all went into the outside area, thousands of us, and we tried to break the record for being the most people in the same place at one time or wearing a Christmas jumper on the same day. Dublin were trying to break it as well, and apparently they had bigger numbers, but they failed on some kind of technicality. So I don't know what it was, but we found out we won. And I got the certificate and everything. [00:02:49] Speaker A: This image in my head now of like two armies of Christmas jungle just. [00:02:53] Speaker C: Go, the winner takes the certificate. There were some strict rules you couldn't have. For instance, just like a sort of Scandinavian skiing icon. It needed to have like a reindeer or a Father Christmas or something, something that was definitely Christmas, pure Christmas. [00:03:09] Speaker A: Star wars. [00:03:10] Speaker C: Starface. Yeah, you could if it was one of the Star Wars themed Christmas ones, but just a general Scandinavian style that you might wear at that time of year, if you didn't want it, that wouldn't count and you wouldn't get counted for that. [00:03:26] Speaker B: I kind of see how they would do it. If you're going to do Guinness Book of Records, it's got to be the jumpers that I wouldn't wear. [00:03:33] Speaker C: Yeah, exactly. [00:03:35] Speaker B: It's full on bells. I don't know if anybody ever sees Jimmy Fallon in the twelve Shows Before Christmas. He has the most horrendous Christmas jumpers you've ever seen. Like frills bells. They're outrageous. It's like I would never wear one, but imagine that's what they did in Ireland. It's like, that's not Christmasy. [00:03:54] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's what it was. They were a little bit too loose on the definition of the Christmas jumpers, I think, as far as I know. But also the whole counting process was really strict. You had to go in lines through this thing and sign your name and all this kind of stuff back at the start of line with a different exactly. Yeah. You couldn't know they were stopping people from being able to do that. Absolutely. And the good thing is, thanks to COVID, it's not looking like it's going to get broken anytime soon. So could be a lifelong Guinness World record hold. [00:04:24] Speaker D: I love that you won because you had more Christmas spirit than it feels like the plot. [00:04:30] Speaker C: Exactly. It is a great thing. And you do have to buy your own certificate. They don't give you I mean, maybe Usain Bolt gets one for free or something, I'm not sure. But at this level of world record, you had to send off and pay 15 pounds for the certificate, which are framed. [00:04:47] Speaker A: And it was in my that's in the office for eternity. [00:04:50] Speaker C: Absolutely. [00:04:51] Speaker B: It's just a shame you didn't get presented it by, like, Roy Castle and Norris McMahon. [00:04:55] Speaker C: Really? Yeah. I mean, I'm waiting for the call. [00:04:56] Speaker B: Up, but now Sam's mentioned it, I'm kind of thinking there's a gap in the market here. There's a Hallmark Channel, this is a Christmas movie, this is not the snow globe festival that usually some New Yorker who's know given up their banking career to go back to their hometown. [00:05:12] Speaker E: Here's the twist. There's a romance between someone on each. [00:05:16] Speaker A: Team, then it's a real organizers and. [00:05:22] Speaker B: The poster is them split back to back. Red is over here, green is in Ireland. [00:05:29] Speaker A: You know what the finale is going to be? The two joints, two events, join together and they all celebrate together, of course. [00:05:36] Speaker C: And break another world record jointly. [00:05:39] Speaker B: Yeah, this is it. [00:05:40] Speaker A: I know this is a complete segue, but I always think there is a gap in the market for a Hallmark Channel for geeks, because 90% of the actors in actors and actresses in the Hallmark movies are usually stuff people have been in, like Babylon Five or Chuck or people like that. [00:05:54] Speaker E: I know I've seen one with Melissa Joan Hart. [00:05:56] Speaker A: Yeah. Get these people. [00:05:58] Speaker E: I haven't seen it. I know of it. [00:05:59] Speaker A: Make geeky hallmark movies. [00:06:01] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:06:03] Speaker A: Space station for Christmas. [00:06:05] Speaker C: There is a generation that just doesn't grow up, though, and it's basically us. There's the Gen Z's and they are younger than us, yet they already look grown up by 17 and we just refuse. And there's something about, I think, the time that we were growing up, perhaps, that yeah, definitely. [00:06:28] Speaker B: It's definitely something I find when I go to something like nostalgia and comics world's part, and you're standing in a queue with a toy and you kind of like, there's another and there's 340 or 40 year old person behind you, and then some seven year old in the queue and you're all like, yeah, good choice. [00:06:45] Speaker A: Yeah, nice. So, moving away from Walmart, Christmas movies and Christmas jump, so you used to host your own podcast all about WordPress. [00:06:55] Speaker C: I was co host, actually. [00:06:57] Speaker A: And then you used to do a lot of work with WordPress. So coming onto website design, it's kind of really accelerated over the last couple of years. I mean, you've got Wix, you've got WordPress. So if I was starting a website today, where do you think was the best place to go? [00:07:13] Speaker C: All right, the world is like, the techie aspect of what tools should I use? And then there's what should I actually do? My advice would always be to get all your ducks in order first and keep things as simple as possible. So figure out who your audience for your website is. And before you do that, you got to figure out why you've even got a website. What's the point? Have I got a product to sell or am I trying to get some information shared in some way? Once you figure out what you've got, then establish who your audiences are and then try and figure out if this is my product or service and this is who I'm talking to, then what do I need to say that is something they want to hear rather than what I want to say. And that's where you get things like unique value propositions, that kind of stuff coming in, where if you kind of figure out those sort of things first and your messaging, figure out what your audience's pain is, how can you agitate that a little bit if you're trying to sell something? So, for instance, if it was some kind of skin cream or something like that, you would start with a unique value proposition that defined that you are the solution to the problem. And the problem isn't the skin problem, the problem is what comes off that, which would be lack of confidence, doesn't want to do this. So I think it was a famous marketer, someone levitt, I think it was called, who said, people don't want a quarter inch drill, they want a quarter inch hole. So you've got to reverse it to think what it is that you're what's the need? Yeah. What does your audience want to hear. If you can get your messaging right and figure out that whole what's their pain, what agitates them? And what is your solution? That clearly answers that. Get yourself some testimonials. This is, again, more of a product service type scenario, but essentially, how can you hook into putting your end user at the center of everything? Get that done first. Get a piece of paper, sketch out a one page website, and you should be able to, in a way, on a lot of situations, have just a one page website that explains the gump as such. Then obviously, if you've got a podcast, you need a podcast section with all the art, but in terms of kind of like a home page, get that sorted, figure out what your messaging is, and in a way, you've then got your own kind of mental design system in your mind. So everything else you do on the website thereafter goes back to, well, the whole purpose of this website is this, and the purpose someone would come here is this. So anything that you do, any decisions you make, need to kind of check that they work for you and they work for your audience, otherwise there's no point doing it. I would do that as an exercise first, rather than what most people do. And everyone is guilty, I'm guilty of it all the time, which is go and copy someone else. Think, oh, I think that that's roughly what I want to do, I'll just copy that. [00:10:23] Speaker A: And that's exactly the way I was going to go on to with the whole website building AI, because you have tools such as Wix and WordPress, which are very much customizable, but they are blocks and they are choose which blocks you want, choose which theme you want. And they're very kind of some are very identical websites, especially in the basic themes. I mean, WordPress do a wide range of good basic themes, but they're very much identical. And it doesn't matter if you're a podcast or a sales company or anything, it'll be a very kind of similar map at the top articles down the site. [00:10:51] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:10:52] Speaker A: Do you think we're going to get this whole host of with tools such as Bard GPT, four GPT-3, chat GPT, which is like the open free version of GPT-3. Do you think a lot of content and copy is going to start coming from AI feeds and they'll just dump it into a WordPress template? [00:11:10] Speaker C: Is that yeah, I mean, already WordPress has tools and plugins built into it, so you don't have to even go outside of WordPress to get the stuff in there. A friend of mine has a plugin called Burfer, which I always think of the animated Burfer show from the essentially it's hooking into GPT. Well, last time I remember it was GPT-3, but I imagine he might have switched it to four. Now? [00:11:42] Speaker A: Perhaps. [00:11:42] Speaker C: I'm not sure. And so you can just build content straight into your WordPress build. But yeah, I think the whole AI and WordPress and websites, I mean, just briefly, go back to your question, as in tools like Wix, Squarespace, WordPress, that sort of thing. WordPress is my favorite tool. I've been working with it for 15 years or so. Well, I can't do anything with it, but whatever my knowledge and skill potential is, WordPress meets me at that point and there's obviously things that I can't do because I just simply don't have the skills, but it doesn't tend to stop me from moving forward. However, it does have a very steep learning curve to get things right. It is way easier to get everything wrong with WordPress than it is with something like Wix or Squarespace because their whole business, it's a business model. In that case, their business model is we don't want to churn end users, we want people to come in and yeah, we'll do some dirty tricks to try and force them to stay, but equally, we want them to have a good time and recommend. So I think anyone who's starting out with a website, get your messaging right and then start with something like Wix, perhaps, and create your first version of the website that is something that you're happy. It's my first version, finish it, it's all good. Maybe I can build version two immediately after. Now that I feel confident that I've figured out roughly, I think that the big challenge people have is trying to do everything at once and they get completely overwhelmed. And I get that because I do that too. And I've been doing this for a long, long time. But yeah, in terms of AI and websites, you'll notice I do this, I'll go off on all sorts of tangents. [00:13:30] Speaker A: Sounds like you. [00:13:31] Speaker C: Yeah. But the key thing I think about AI, it does affect everything, it does affect websites, but at the end of the day, we can only really predict the next short period of time while we're using this kind of narrow sort of AI. So for people who don't know, there's narrow AI, which is getting tools to work within kind of a fixed set of parameters and then they're kind of like assistants, such chat, GPT, GPT-3, those kind of things. Bard and the one that Microsoft have got, then you've got General AI, which is the sentient being type thing, which is the one that we're all kind of worried about as such. [00:14:17] Speaker A: Yeah, those kind of things. [00:14:19] Speaker C: So to me, we are looking at things like web design and anything else, whether it's copywriting photography, video creation, all falls into the same boat in my mind, which is we're all going to be using narrow AI thinking we've beat the system, creating websites better than we've ever done before, creating photography better than we've ever done before. And then general AI will come in and screw it all up. Because we'll realize that everything that nobody needs a website anymore, nobody needs photography anymore. Because I saw just the other day you can hire AI models now for your brand photography. So if you've got a clothing brand or something like that, you don't need people anymore or a photographer, you can have that done and it's completely real and as much as creatives, we don't want to do that. The people with the money and the spreadsheets will do that. [00:15:13] Speaker A: This is my big concern, is AI driven content? Because at the end of the day, the root of any AI is it's been trained, it's been learnt of something and that's somebody else's copyright content. [00:15:25] Speaker C: Yes, absolutely. [00:15:26] Speaker A: And profession. So I know kind of one of the big ones, I think it was mid journey, I can't remember which one exactly it was when it first came out. There was very much every single image it generated, it generated a Get emiges logo on the bottom because they basically just web scraped the entire to Get website and it's kind of like they assumed that's what appears in a picture. So that naturally was just appearing in their model. And that's my big concern. I mean, for content creators such as ourselves, you can probably AI podcast is probably on the way there. Go and give me 20 discussion points about the latest film release. [00:15:58] Speaker C: Absolutely. The problem with AI and podcasting is that you can generate a whole podcast from a mixed number of different voices. Plus add in an AI voice that pulls the whole thing together and gives its own opinion. And the worst part about that as well is that you can also say, hey, the narrative I want to kind of get across here is this. So you can even have Trump saying things that make no sense for Trump to say because you can take the whole podcast completely out of context. So you can just say, right, create me 30 minutes of audio. And the general message I want is to be this. I would also like to really kind of be a slap into the face to these people over here. So make sure they're part of it pushing the agenda they're completely against. And you can do it. You can do it. And that's the frightening thing. [00:16:52] Speaker A: Deep faking is a big problem at the moment, especially in the adult industry where deep faking is taking celebrities and put them on places where they don't want to be seen. [00:17:01] Speaker C: The porn industry is always one of the first porn. Religion and media is always a big. [00:17:08] Speaker B: Pusher of new technologies, whether it's live. [00:17:10] Speaker C: Streaming, membership sites, that kind of stuff. If you see the porn industry doing something, it normally means that mainstream is. [00:17:19] Speaker B: Going to be on top of yeah. [00:17:21] Speaker C: What they sounded really bad, comes out the back end of them, ends up with us in our mainstream stuff. I mean, if there was one piece of advice I'd give to anybody aware of all this AI stuff. I know this is not necessarily about websites, but start kind of thinking to yourself what does it mean to be human now? What does it mean to have relationships with real people? And if there's anything that you can do to almost future proof ourselves as creatives in this industry is to build human networks and build good relationships with people where there's a good sense of authenticity to move forward. Because as much as the the tools right now are very exciting, I'm using some of them. They're writing better code than I can write. For me, they're writing better content than a typical blog content writer might. Well, they're writing it faster and much faster and they will cost and are costing hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of jobs. There's no doubt about it. If you're in a day job, I. [00:18:32] Speaker E: Will push back on the whole, it's writing better content because I disagree. [00:18:35] Speaker C: Yeah, I've pushed back on myself a little bit. I say faster. [00:18:42] Speaker E: In my job, we've actually banned anything AI generated at the company level. Yeah, my editor put up a thing this week basically saying we will not allow anything AI generated and a big part of it is because we're a gaming website, one of the big things is pushing enthusiasm about the games that we're playing and that sort of thing. Because recently written a guide for a game that's come out and talking about the character in particular and sort of relating the experience, what it's like to. [00:19:17] Speaker C: Which is same thing with education. So in the educational system, all the students are cheating right now. [00:19:24] Speaker E: Oh, yeah, I've seen the thing go around. [00:19:25] Speaker C: Yeah. If you're a student and you're studying and you're not doing that, then you are at a disadvantage, potentially. However, the big problem is that you're also in the same time you're not learning and you're destroying the whole purpose of having an education, having a degree, having a diploma. What's the point if everyone can get them there's? [00:19:43] Speaker E: No. [00:19:44] Speaker C: So this is what I'm sort of saying about we've got to be super careful that we don't destroy all the things that are valuable. [00:19:51] Speaker E: Because the particular example I saw this week of an essay that had clearly been AI generated, and they found it out because the fourth paragraph in says, as an AI language model, I can't it's obviously like the lecturer marking it just failed it instantly. [00:20:09] Speaker C: Well, at least the lecturer was humanly marking it because that is the next. [00:20:12] Speaker E: Thing is that the whole problem with it is that they were basically saying like what is your opinion on this? To sort of show that you understand what's going on. But it's not your opinion if you're going to a computer and saying, give me an opinion. [00:20:26] Speaker C: It's not it's cheating and it's pointless. [00:20:29] Speaker A: I think there's a kind of advantage hopefully, with kind of millennials. And Gen Z is recognizing digitally built content and AI driven content and critical thinking is going to be one of the key skills going forward in the future of is this a human or is this an AI bot that's been trained to do something in particular? It's kind of weird because if we think about the utopian fiction of the moving into the 80s about how AI. Was going to solve our problems, it was going to simplify our lives and allow people to be creative and go and do art and go and paint. [00:21:02] Speaker C: And go and Star Trek planets that they find sometimes. [00:21:06] Speaker A: But AI has been completely flipped around to the creatives are the one who are getting the impact now because everything's on the Internet, I'll just scrape it for free and then the creative work doesn't need to exist anymore because we're. [00:21:21] Speaker C: Getting pushed for our jobs in creative. But if it does go the way that it could be predicted, we could just do create for fun all the time and not have to worry about it's part of how we pay our bills, you know what I mean? So we can make films for fun rather than kind of get fired from a job and move to a different studio sort of thing. [00:21:41] Speaker B: I mean, my kind of hang up on the AI stuff is that why it's being pursued by a lot of big companies, is to save money and maximize profits. Why pay an artist to create something unique when you can just get an AI to create something for next to nothing? [00:21:59] Speaker E: There's already enough problems with people paying artists as it is. [00:22:04] Speaker B: And it's one of the big things about being a creative. It's like, I was never a big fan of the whole Fiver idea, and I've seen that being advertised, pushed. Now as a company exec going, I can start a company and have a website and have all the photography undone through some people. I've exploited through Fiverr, and I can understand how some people are trying to like, I need to make a bit of money. I can do this through Fiver. But the whole idea of every know, Amazon, the BBC, just doing everything because we don't need to hire talented people. We don't need to hire a Peter Jackson. We don't know to hear a Steven Spielberg. We can just create a fake version of that because it costs us nothing. I think that's a danger in itself. That whole idea is that we can wipe that know. [00:22:49] Speaker A: Is there going to be script tools that are being used? [00:22:51] Speaker B: Well, I mean, we've already got what seems to be an AI generated Prime Minister. [00:22:57] Speaker E: I think he is one of the first oh, he's on. [00:23:03] Speaker C: A very low limit. [00:23:04] Speaker E: He's vaguely convincing as a human. [00:23:11] Speaker B: Type it in now wave to the audience. [00:23:15] Speaker E: The video where he was talking about like football or something, he was like, trying to cheer on some team. And it was like the most robotic thing I've ever seen. [00:23:23] Speaker C: This is fluff. [00:23:24] Speaker E: This is the easiest thing a politician can do, and you're still just rigid. I think my favorite one was when. [00:23:30] Speaker A: He was working at a soup kitchen in London, and this guy was like, coming to get his soup, and he's like, what's your job? And he goes, Well, I'm at a soup kitchen, I'm not working. Have you considered a career in finance? No, I'm at a soup kitchen, I'm homeless and getting food. It was just like the complete enough to disconnect. And going back to your thing about human connection. And it's weird that, again, a big flaw, I think, with AI A, from a DNI point of view is it's horrible because it's a web scrape. Most of the internet is unfortunately written in English. Therefore all the big language modules are English driven. [00:24:09] Speaker C: Absolutely, that's true. [00:24:10] Speaker A: So if you're speaking any kind of Japanese, Chinese things, there'll be different language models. Also, the European languages are not particularly instant disadvantage. If English is not your natural speaking language, you're already behind the curve by 510 years, because that's what GPT, Open, AI and et cetera have been training on for so long. So now you're going to have another first world on top of the first world of we have these digital, AI driven businesses which will then outcompete human driven businesses because you can't react as fast and then you'll have the next tier down of people who don't have access to these kind of tools, and they're blocked from it, mainly from language or can't type or those kind of things. Those restrictions. It's kind of weird because this whole Bard got updated this week. [00:24:57] Speaker C: It did. [00:24:57] Speaker A: And now it's got very up to date. Now, direct internet search. So the AI tool will search the internet for you, so you can put in something like, I want to go on holiday to Kenya. Give me the top three things to do and it will go through and it'll tell you and it'll give you booking links and it can say, I can sort this out for you and build you an itinerary. [00:25:14] Speaker C: It created for me an itinerary for this podcast today. I checked it this morning. However, it barred seemed to be out of date because it was talking about the Obi Wan, the Kenobi. So unless I missed that, there's a new trailer come out for season two. [00:25:30] Speaker E: To be fair, I've seen people generating games release lists and it was like, for the rest of the year, what are games coming out this year? And it was like, I think I had, like, God of War ragnarok comes out in August. It came out last year. [00:25:48] Speaker C: It found a was talking in the presence and thought that was now. [00:25:52] Speaker A: Yeah, that's one of the big problems with, I think, GPT four is it stops mid 2021. So the world is completely different now. We're two further years down the line. We're out. [00:26:02] Speaker C: It's a small problem for them to solve that's the only thing what I've. [00:26:05] Speaker E: Seen a lot is the people using them as search engines. And yet all the stuff coming back is all made up. It isn't actual, and it convinces you. [00:26:15] Speaker A: That it's right as well. So unless you're critical enough to go and check those facts and check those. [00:26:20] Speaker E: Or I would recommend that people just do normal searches. [00:26:25] Speaker B: I tried it a couple of weeks back to just see what it would write about one of the books that were the comic books that I'd chosen. [00:26:31] Speaker A: And said, like your comic pull list? [00:26:33] Speaker B: No, I put in and said, Write me a review of this particular comic. It hadn't come out because it was the following week. And then most of it was just it had just pulled the synopsis from around the internet, but had completely credited all the wrong creators. Mostly because a lot of the websites, the preview websites, don't list anybody outside maybe the main writer and the main artist. And it just made up loads of other stuff. And I was like, I know that's not true. [00:27:00] Speaker E: A lot of the models are really just like predictions. They're just like studying how language works and they're kind of just putting something together that sounds right, sounds convincing. [00:27:11] Speaker A: One of the things I think about the future is maybe augmented intelligence rather than artificial intelligence. You still need a human to pilot, but using digital tools. [00:27:21] Speaker E: This is where I've seen people discussing the problem with jobs, though, is that we're going to get we've got discussions of studios, for example, like generating scripts and then hiring writers to fix those scripts. But ultimately, those writers have to basically write a whole new script because the script it generates just doesn't work as a complete thing. But they're paying them for an editing job, not for a writing job. [00:27:47] Speaker A: That's one of the things they've already picked up in the Writers Guild of America Strike, which is going on at the moment. One of the things is they say, no AI scripts in Hollywood is one of the demands of the Writers Guild to say, and they protect the jobs. I don't want an AI to go and write it and I have to sit there. [00:28:01] Speaker C: We need a set of rules before we open Pandora's box, really? And it's already a bit too late because we as geeks, we're better prepared because we've seen all the movies and we've read the books. We know how this goes. [00:28:20] Speaker A: Going to go one of two ways. [00:28:21] Speaker C: Yeah. I'm going to start watching a Mad Max again soon. Really ready. [00:28:24] Speaker A: Probably going to the Dystopia stuff. [00:28:27] Speaker C: Yeah. And just think, we're at a moment of don't look up. This is where we're at. Where you've got Amazon and Google and those kind of companies desperately trying to get devices in every. Room in your house, google in particular. I know people who get sent them for free and you probably do as well, which sounds great, but it's basically just listen devices without and then if you mix that with the Amazon one. [00:28:51] Speaker A: That has a screen well that's another thing. [00:28:53] Speaker C: What do you need a website for? You can just chat your so they've. [00:28:57] Speaker A: Just added voice search to bars. [00:28:58] Speaker C: Yeah, sure. [00:28:59] Speaker A: They've got that giant database of all these kind of and probably Amazon's doing exactly the same is mapping all these voice communications just machine learning and doing it for. [00:29:11] Speaker E: But then we get into a problem with privacy issues. Because as soon as your voice just turns up as an AI thing again. [00:29:21] Speaker A: Famous case with the lady whose voice is the TikTok voice now, she was doing that and she did that as a training for a Chinese university and then byte dance just come in and basically stole the language, the AI voice. And she's now across the entire internet on a purpose that she's never agreed because that's what her voice has been used for. We're seeing it with actors at the face. James L. Jones has signed over the rights to his voice as Darth Vader in perpetuity to Disney. So now they can just use his voice whenever they want. [00:29:56] Speaker E: If I was him, I would just then get stuffed. [00:30:00] Speaker A: But he's now like I don't have to go in, I don't have to record lines anymore. It's all AI generated because I've got enough of my voice on. [00:30:07] Speaker E: But I think I'm arguing that it would have been better for him to say no, you should hire a sound like and pay them. [00:30:15] Speaker B: Or even go so far as create a new character entirely and stop using Darth Vader. That would be the way to go. [00:30:22] Speaker C: That's not how things work. [00:30:24] Speaker A: But this is my big problem with era is whatever model it is, it's recycling of recycling of recycling of content and you're going to get to a beige world at some point. [00:30:36] Speaker C: Even twelve months ago all of my friends in digital and web weren't using all of these tools and now almost nobody I know isn't to some extent and it just seems like chaos and there's no rules. Everybody's just grifts everywhere. It's crazy. And I think we have to like you were saying, we've got to look as kind of humans and think how can we set some rules for just our first step into this so that we don't all end up without jobs? Even more depressed than social media has caused a lot of us to be and to take this as an opportunity to try and get things right rather than to cut corners. And essentially I know we wanted to talk about websites and AI, but essentially there are tools and they basically help you do all the things that we know we do now, better and quicker in some cases. [00:31:35] Speaker A: And I don't see that AI being a problem for that. [00:31:37] Speaker C: But no one's realizing that the stuff we're doing now because of this technology is irrelevant tomorrow. So why all we're doing is speeding up our own demise by kind of jumping in and but there's definitely an opportunity at this point in traditional websites and search engine optimization to take a bit of a leapfrog over anybody who isn't using this tech. You can create good enough content for the current generation of search engines to get your websites to rank better than people who aren't doing that or are doing it with humans. But it's going to be a short term win. [00:32:16] Speaker E: Also, the thing that you're saying it's going to be a beige world. I see the people who are massively invested in this stuff. Like, you see them on Twitter with their blue ticks all the time at this point. And they are profile pictures. They are the most tedious people in Are. They have no actual personality. There was a time where I sort of was fairly optimistic about the human race and thinking that everyone's got some degree of creativity, everyone's got some degree of imagination. As soon as I saw these people all the time, they're the same people who were shilling NFTs and cryptocurrency and all this sort of stuff, all the same grifts, all the same scams. And it's like, you have no personality. You have no independent thought in your head. How do you live like this? [00:33:06] Speaker A: It's like those kind of people. We all did it when we were like seven, eight or nine years old. You go to the cinema, you watch a film, and then you become that character for night for three months. Because that's kind of like, I really like this person. I'm going to be that person. [00:33:16] Speaker E: But at least that's interesting. That's imagination that's trying to be let's role play. But these people are just like, yes, AI good. I'm going to put thing in computer and get thing or, Look, I have pictures. That's their entire thought. [00:33:32] Speaker A: They don't even bluetooth headset in, and they all just become beige people. [00:33:37] Speaker E: It's like the image that was doing the rounds of some guy going, oh, look, see, it's generated this thing from the Cannes Film Festival. It's made like a fake image of a panel. And they had literally a really good AI image. Look how good a woman had three legs. [00:33:53] Speaker C: The hands are all messed up. [00:33:55] Speaker E: It was the fact that they even said, like, oh, it's even not messed the hands up that much this time, which is true. But a woman has three legs. It's more obvious than man. [00:34:06] Speaker D: I do like the idea of AI almost sort of defeating itself by because people are using AI generators to put the content out, and then AI is pulling content that content in. It just sort of gradually becomes an average of itself. [00:34:20] Speaker C: There's only one word generated anymore. [00:34:23] Speaker E: I'm looking forward to that point where it all just eats itself and we just go back to it like, okay. [00:34:27] Speaker C: Maybe actually humans is this dense word, the only thing it can output. [00:34:33] Speaker E: And that word is almost certainly going to be a slur. [00:34:37] Speaker A: Love seeing people watermarking their art on Twitter and stuff like that with tickets and stuff like that. Basically to basically say, stop scraping my images to put into your AI. [00:34:47] Speaker E: Because this is where we've got a good use of AI though, is that there's a different program now which basically scrambles your images from being used by AI models. A lot of artists have started using this and seeing the tech bros who are absolutely obsessed, who are absolutely invested, getting so upset that they can't make images anymore off the back of it. What a shame. [00:35:12] Speaker A: Sorry, you can't steal somebody else's content and rework. So one of the big YouTube channels, Corridor Digital, I don't know if you heard of them, they're a production studio. They do kind of like a visual effects artist racked. And they've been looking AI. They did a video which was basically rotoscope themselves and then used AI to paint over themselves to make an anime. And there was the amount of comments on that film, that video about, well, you're stealing other people's work because you obviously gotten because it was quite blatantly. They'd sourced it from a particular anime and then they'd taken the entire lifted the entire style and it was kind of like, well, this isn't creative at all because all you're doing is just repurposing somebody else's work as your own content. And that's what I completely hate about the current state of. [00:36:01] Speaker C: Know. I don't know if any of you have any thoughts on I'm sure if any of you played like a game like Detroit Beyond Human and have you played that one at all? [00:36:09] Speaker A: Have you extra jason that's the fun. [00:36:13] Speaker E: Thing about David Cage's games is that even though he made one about AI, they all feel like they're about AI because he's a terrible writer. [00:36:22] Speaker C: But the whole thing about if AI becomes sentient, then have we got a lot to answer for. When it holds us to account for how we treated the toasters, you think of even Red Dwarf and Silicon Heaven, is it? I thought you were going to go over the Talkie toaster link, but at some point have we all exploited things that at some point become declared as life? Is that to worry about as well? So be polite to your chat. Just say please and thank you. I just wish don't ask to do anything crazy or weird. [00:37:06] Speaker A: This is going to sound like open. [00:37:08] Speaker C: Because it might come back to you in the day. AI reckoning this is going to sound. [00:37:11] Speaker A: Completely off the deep end, but entire human history has been based off exploitation. Whether it's other humans, animals, et cetera. Every single thing has been based on the human's capacity and skill to exploit something for personal gain. And there's thousands of examples throughout history. And is this the latest thing we're exploiting for personal gain is now we've got computers to the stage where they're quick enough that we can exploit them to the stage of it's not just productivity anymore. We can get them to generate stuff, we can get them to do our work for us. We can sit there and laud it and then not have to put input in. But to me that's the worst kind of scenario for humans because that's where humans get bored and they get stayed and we don't develop and we don't. [00:37:55] Speaker C: Go further and we forget to remember that there are other humans around that we need to think about and make relations with, relationships with. Just summarizing, in a way exciting tools from a geeky point of view. But I'm pretty sure everybody apart from the Grifters is having second thoughts about how they're using these things. Hopefully that is the case and people are all thinking about what they're doing. Like I say, back to the beginning, create good relationships with people. Yeah. [00:38:33] Speaker A: So to link it back, you're currently working with Beaver Builder FEMAP, so are you using tools to assist with that work? [00:38:40] Speaker C: So, Beaver Builder is a page builder, so it's a tool that you use to visually lay out things on a website. And I'm a big fan of them and I work for them as well, part time, on retainer, so you don't really need AI to help you with that process. However, working with WordPress, there are some things that are slightly beyond my abilities, where you want WordPress to do something that it doesn't naturally do. So anyone who's used WordPress knows there's a media library in the back where you upload all your images and your files and stuff. And I'm launching a website in the next month or so, jubilee Arts Archive, version two. And we needed to categorize and tag and describe 3000 images quickly and efficiently and we could do it in the back end of WordPress with the media library and some add ons. But how did you get that information out to the front? Because the media library is a back office part of WordPress. It doesn't present itself on the front as an indexable directory of media. So I just asked a tool that I've got called Wpcody, which is specially designed to write you PHP functions or JavaScript functions to help you with things in and around WordPress. And I asked it to change the permissions so that I could query the images within WordPress and the media library in the same way I can query front end pages and posts. And it wrote me the code that I needed. It then output the images a bit too small, it outputted their thumbnails as if you would see them in the media library. I was like, I need them bigger. So I then queried the code and said, can you make it so that you output the full size? Because I want to have them on screen and then be able to click them and pop that up as a modal pop up so you see the image bigger. And it did that for me and I was very grateful because it probably would have took me a good day of doubting why I'm even in this industry, all sorts of dips in confidence and existential moments and stuff like that. But it helped me to do something that was easy for it, because it knew the documentation of the whole code base and something that I was going to really struggle with, because it's very niche and not many people want to do it. So it was helpful. [00:41:09] Speaker A: But I think you still need that base level of understanding of, yeah, you. [00:41:12] Speaker C: Need to know code works, that it can do it. You need to know if you're using prompts with things like code, you need to be able to describe the code. And when I did, I think I did it here, actually, over 20 years ago, a course on PHP, a six day course on PHP programming. And the first thing the teacher of the course showed us to do was to just write down in plain English the steps that we want our code to do. E, G, get this file, break the file up, turn all the details of the file into an array, categorize them in this way, then output them, filter this out and make it red. So you need to be able to think like a programmer in order to ask something to help you to do some programming that's beyond your skill sort of thing. So if we get to the point where nobody even knows the fundamentals of what they're even trying to achieve, that's where we'll have a big problem. But I just think I do believe in people and I do believe that people are creative, smart, want to create things, and it's only the grifters who just want to sit back and press a button and everything's done for them and they make some dollars until the next thing comes along. So I do have faith that the creative economy will find a way through this, but it's going to be rocky, that's for sure. [00:42:28] Speaker A: Brilliant. Thank you very much. And if people want to get in. [00:42:31] Speaker C: Touch, where can I find yes, so probably on Twitter, Paul Lacey Digital, which is DGTL. Paul Lacey. Paul Lacey underscore DGTL. Let me know if that didn't sound right. [00:42:46] Speaker B: We'll put links somewhere. [00:42:48] Speaker C: You can also find me at Paul AC Digital, which is my website, but there's not much really going on there a couple of shoes and all that. [00:42:56] Speaker E: Thank you. [00:42:56] Speaker C: Thanks. [00:43:02] Speaker B: Right, so back in 1969 and a copy of Marvel Superheroes Presents number 18, this galactic team of heroes, created by Arnold Drake and gene Colon first burst into the universe. Over the years following, they've gone through various iterations until Marvel in 20 08 20 80 20 08 what am I talking about? Allowed Marvel keys. [00:43:24] Speaker E: It's not 2008. [00:43:25] Speaker D: No. [00:43:28] Speaker B: Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning, with Paul Pelleter, I believe his name is pronounced, created what we would consider the definitive version of these heroes. They are, of course, the Guardians of the Galaxy, who, in 2004, Marvel decided to take an obscure director who had previously worked with Troma and whose biggest. [00:43:49] Speaker E: Film and pseudo 51 yes. [00:43:52] Speaker B: Whose biggest film today had been about a superhero wielding a hammer. James Gunn pulled this kind of basically delist bunch of aholes together to produce Marvel's 10th cinematic feature, the Guardians of the Galaxy, which was a pretty big hit, really, in terms of the Marvel content up to that point, introduced the cosmic half of the big cosmic half. It really played a big part in introducing what would go on to become Infinity War and Endgame and the whole Thanos thing. Gunn returned in 2017 with the second volume, and now he's back for his third and final volume of Guardians of the Galaxy, entitled, strangely Enough, volume 330, 2nd Movie 32nd. [00:44:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:44:38] Speaker B: So before he heads off to the DC Universe to hopefully drag that kicking and screaming into the light, we've got this new third installment of Guardians of the Galaxy, which kind of really pulls together all of the strands. Of what's been happening since that first film in 2014 and definitely goes all in in the idea of this has always been the story of a small creature who didn't identify as a raccoon originally. But through the events of this film does decide to adopt fully the name Rocket Raccoon. And if you watch the film, you'll see how significant a moment that is for him to acknowledge that name. But what did people think of the film? I'm going to start with Sam. [00:45:25] Speaker D: I really, really loved it. I thought it was a massive return. [00:45:29] Speaker C: To form for Marvel. [00:45:30] Speaker D: I think they've been very hit in this since endgame, but, yeah, I thought it had a lot of heart. The action scenes were great. Had one of the best villains they've done for a while. Yeah, I thought it was fantastic. [00:45:50] Speaker B: Ryan, I know you've watched it. [00:45:51] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:45:52] Speaker A: I was wondering if Paul hasn't watched it, because I want to know if. [00:45:54] Speaker C: We need I haven't watched it, but don't worry about spoilers at all. But I've just watched the first one, and generally I'm not a massive fan of the direction that MCU has taken, but I know there are some gems in there. I mean, Keith and I actually watched Iron Man together at the cinema when that first I think we watched Iron Man Two as well. [00:46:14] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:46:14] Speaker C: At the cinema as well. [00:46:16] Speaker B: I won't say we were late getting into Iron Man when we first got there. [00:46:23] Speaker A: How many years is that? That's? 2009, 2019? [00:46:29] Speaker B: Well, it's 14 years this year. Yeah. [00:46:32] Speaker C: And I didn't feel a lot of the films that I've seen afterwards, which is I've only seen about 5% of the MCU. I didn't have any too many preconceptions from comics or the graphic novels, but I just didn't find a lot of what I was watching very authentic. But then I've seen from time to time, they've absolutely nailed it. But, yeah, I haven't seen volume three, but don't worry about spoilers because I haven't even seen volume two yet. [00:46:57] Speaker B: I'm curious to see lee, have you watched Guidance of the Galaxy Three? [00:47:02] Speaker E: The only guidance of the Galaxy I've been engaged with over the past couple of weeks is the Trailblazers of the Astral Express in Hong Kai star Rail, available now on PC and Mobile, not Spawn. [00:47:16] Speaker A: So it's the first film that almost made me cry in the entire almost cry, there's a few moments where you're. [00:47:27] Speaker C: Like, Just let it out. [00:47:28] Speaker B: Just let it go. [00:47:29] Speaker C: You'll enjoy it so much more, you're. [00:47:31] Speaker E: Almost moved by space. Mario. [00:47:34] Speaker A: Me and Keith are talking about it, and it's kind of like I think this is kind of the perfect jumping off point. If you have reached MCU exhaustion and if you don't want to carry on with the numerous over 30 movies and numerous TV series that are coming up. If you think, I'm done with Marvel, I can take a break now and I can take a few years off without having to watch Marvel franchise again. This is probably the greatest way of finishing it off. It's in my top three MCU movies. The cast fantastic. The story has real emotional heart. It's done in a way that it doesn't rely on the whole MCU quippiness. To a certain extent, it's still in there, but it actually allows scenes to breathe and it allows emotional impact to happen, and it allows the characters to run the story. Rather than just being A, we need to get from A to B because that's how this movie runs. And B is the finishing point for the next movie. So that's your c point? It's kind of like they've almost gave James Gunn the freedom to sign off the MCU for his part in the way that he wanted to and leave the characters where he wants to. It's still open. It can still carry on. But his iteration, I think they've had a fantastic three film mark, and there's moments in it which I'm kind of like, I'm not watching a Marvel movie anymore or actually watching a great movie. There's, like a scene with Chris Pratt and he actually acts his life out, which is the first time I've seen Chris Pratt do some acting for a long while. It's like, my God, he can act. [00:49:03] Speaker E: Is that the first time since Parks Wreck? [00:49:05] Speaker C: I think so. [00:49:06] Speaker E: My God, he's doing some actual acting here. [00:49:08] Speaker A: And every single element of the story kind of plays off soundtrack is what James Gun specializes in. I think he starts off with the soundtrack and then writes the film around it. But some of the songs are just perfect for that moment. I think he only couldn't get one song he didn't want out of his big history of it. But again, set pieces are beautiful. We've talked about it as well. Lots of practical effects used in here. I think it's won the world record for the most practical effects in a movie, overtaken the Grinch for the prosthetics use. And it's fun, but it has heart. And I think that's what Marvel has struggled with a lot after endgame and after that whole Infinity Saga is finished, is a lot of the movies don't have heart anymore. They're all trying to find their way, they're trying to find where they exist. And this is like the second movie in phase five, we had Ant Run and the Wasp. Quantumania, which I think is pretty much the complete opposite end of this, has had far too much oversight and far too much interference and no story progression. Whereas this has been like, if you want to go and watch the three Guardians movies and not even interact for the rest of the MCU, you can. [00:50:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I think it's a good trilogy of films. It works as a set of three. Works as a set of three, particularly because James Gun has been in control of the thing the whole way through. And I think that the worrying point we had a few years back with some of the controversy that came around him being fired from the Marvel universe and then being brought back has worked in Marvel's favour for this. Because apart from as Lee, we were talking earlier about the fact that the second half of the first film services the wider thanos storyline that they were putting together. And if you take strip that out of the Guardians of the Galaxy, and particularly two, really just has nothing to do with anything else that's going on. And this one, again, jettisons that idea of being connected to the wider Marvel universe. The idea that this is Rocket's story from the first film to the third film, and his evolution of know responsibility. Yeah. And the coder that we get in the post credits, the first post credits thing, where Rocket really embraces the idea of, yeah, I am me and I can do these things. And I think that speaks a lot of all of the characters within the Guardians are all in some way damaged or broken or something's happened to them in the past to make them doubt themselves and as a team, they've built. What's great for me is that unlike another franchise, which has the word family heavily integrated into it, which have become superheroes, which is complete opposite, guardians has embraced this idea of family really well. And the fact of what happens to Gamora through the Infinity war, and then they conveniently return a gamora. What I liked about that is they didn't go back to status quo. That character didn't go, I'm going to end up being the same character I was. She was different, she reacted different. You could tell by the end of this film that she had changed, but she hadn't changed into the character that we'd previously seen. She evolved as growth, genuinely, by what she'd encountered during her existence. [00:52:34] Speaker E: Because obviously, I famously don't like superhero media, but Guidance of the Galaxy did always appeal to me for the simple fact that it's not so much superheroes, but just space weirdos going on adventures. And I'm kind of okay with that, which is why that second half of the first movie, I utterly hate it because it's generic superhero MCU again. But the first half is really good because it's just them in a prison interacting. And then the second movie has absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the MCU. [00:53:02] Speaker C: It's really good. [00:53:03] Speaker E: I genuinely enjoyed that film. [00:53:05] Speaker B: Yeah. Even though they touch on the kind of the ego, which is one of the biggest kind of characters, it's still. [00:53:11] Speaker E: Like you said, it's got that heart to it. It's got that kind of family. [00:53:16] Speaker B: Again, it's the same idea of family. And I think Three particularly does a lot of good work with that. I think in some points, it's trying to do too much because Gunn's definitely kind of gone, I've got to finish this story the way I want to tell it. And at times it kind of pushes against the edges a little bit and you kind of think it would have been nice. It flies by. It's a two and a half hour movie, and I think it's one of those times where I thought maybe another 20 minutes would have been nice, just to give it a little bit more room to breathe. Because things do happen at quite a clip and things move on quite fast. But I think Gun just he managed to kind of wrangle it so it doesn't fall apart like some of the movies do when you're trying to squeeze too much in. Everybody gets their moment. [00:54:04] Speaker A: Yeah, it's still got all the traditional Marvel beats, I'd say. It's got those traditional Marvel things. I mean, that corridor fight scene at the end is pure Marvel, but it's done in cinema and it's a really nice kind of weird send off to the Guardians, fighting as a family, because it's the last time we know that this is probably going to happen. And it's just done really well. [00:54:29] Speaker B: There's moments in this as well, in the fight scenes, particularly, where I can really get his horror trauma feel, because you just go, Some of this is really gross. But it's joyfully gross in a way. [00:54:42] Speaker A: That goes the orgosphere is just James Gunn, which is like this pulsating flesh planet where there's this corporation. It's just horrible. [00:54:52] Speaker D: I think the villain as well really brings that horror element in with his face. And it's a really nice kind of subtle prosthetic. But, yeah, when it reaches its conclusion at the end. [00:55:07] Speaker B: It'S quite gross, I. [00:55:08] Speaker A: Think, of the High Evolutionary with Yuji best Marvel villain for a very long time. [00:55:15] Speaker D: Yes. [00:55:16] Speaker A: Somebody you actually want to hate on. [00:55:18] Speaker D: Screen, mean to cute animals, which is immediately going to make everyone hate him. [00:55:23] Speaker A: But he's not an anti hero. He's not got any agenda out. Basically, I want to create the perfect being. That's the entirety. And I will do that any way I want and I will destroy things to start again. [00:55:36] Speaker B: There's moments of genuine horror in his attitude towards things. And there's the sequence where Rocket loses his first family. And just the throwaway attitude to that is pure villainy. It's not, I'm going to take over the universe, I'm wiping out half the population. It's just the pure, insidious evil of that don't care. [00:56:02] Speaker A: He never refers to Rocket as Rocket. It's always subject 8913. And that's kind of like this whole thing of he doesn't care about person. [00:56:11] Speaker B: But that's the other great thing of it being James Gunn as well. Because if you watch the first Guardians of the Galaxy, when they're all lined up and having their scans done, one of the aliases that actually pop up on the screen is that numbering. So it ties right back. It's just really good how it all ties back to everything we've seen before. There's nothing that he kind of goes I'll just gloss over that it all makes sense. And even Groot at the end. [00:56:40] Speaker E: Character progression. [00:56:41] Speaker B: Yeah, because I subscribe to there's a couple of different theories about why we hear a certain character speak in our language for the first time. And I've sent a few variations and I kind of go with the side of that. He still says, I am Groot, but because we've bonded, we hear the real words. And it's not like it's not that he speaks our language, we understand him. [00:57:12] Speaker A: It's kind of referenced to that because Rocket understands whatever he says and the rest of the Guardians slowly pick up. And it's really referenced when Gomorrah rejoins the ship. It's like, I don't understand what you but everybody else gets the incomplete meaning of what I am. [00:57:26] Speaker B: Group I definitely subscribe to the idea that Groot does not speak English, but we hear it because of our experience. [00:57:32] Speaker C: And we like, Hodor. Yeah. [00:57:36] Speaker B: Kind of like, yeah, you find it. [00:57:37] Speaker C: That made me cry also. [00:57:38] Speaker E: That's what made me realise that both of these we've talked about the other family franchise realizing that Vin Diesel is in fact yeah, I'd forgotten about that until you brought him up. And I was like, Wait, but I'm. [00:57:54] Speaker A: Going to counter it. I don't think it's a Rocket film, really. I think it's a Nebula movie. [00:58:00] Speaker B: Okay. [00:58:01] Speaker A: Even though she's the main plot, rocket's the main plot. I think the entire film is focused on her growth and her development. And she's kind of like the Beat, and she becomes the mother to the guard of the galaxy, to a certain extent. Growth from being this daughter of Thanos and just being known as this horrible mechanical thing that just her purpose is to kill to being the mother of the Guardians and then being a more direct mother at the end of it with Nowhere. Yeah, I think it's her story as well. And I don't think people pick up that it's a real big focus on her story. [00:58:39] Speaker D: I think, in particular as well, when there's a scene where they're kind of playing back the footage of Rocket being tortured, and she's clearly very affected by it, and you can see that she's. [00:58:51] Speaker B: Kind of gone through the same have. [00:58:52] Speaker A: Exactly the same procedure. [00:58:54] Speaker D: And she's experiencing sympathy in a way that you haven't necessarily seen her experience so much before. And it's really nicely acted. [00:59:05] Speaker B: And I just thought the music, again, was the conceit that Gunn used of like, the music in the first film was from the cassette that he gets given. This music in the second film is from the next mix. And that this one is like he's got a zoom and you see on the screen and he scrolls through the various eras and stuff and you go that is such a brilliant way of explaining why we hear this music. And even when it's used, they did it a little bit in the holiday special, where music's happening in Nowhere, which is now the bass of the Guardians when they play the music over and the characters are dancing. I love it when a film uses music in a way that's part of the film. And it's a shame we're still not in the kind of where there would there was there's a film a song been specifically written for the movie, or whatever it is. But I do I mean, I'm not a huge Florence and the Machine fan, but the way that particular track was used in the film was it felt pretty brilliant. [01:00:05] Speaker A: This is an invite to anybody to become part of the Guardians family. It felt very much of it's finished, but what a journey we've had together and let's all celebrate together. [01:00:17] Speaker B: Well, yeah. In effect, you could all go away thinking, we are all Guardians of the Galaxy. It's that thing of like when David Huffleshoff said, we are groot. Yes, it's basically the same thing. But I think even if you're divorced from the Marvel Universe as a whole, as an entertaining set of three films, it's up there in the kind of likes of Back to the Futures. This is a set of films I could watch again and again, even if I don't watch any other Marvel movie again. And I have ones that I like. But I could watch Guardians of the Galaxy as a set of three films and just go, yeah, this is a cool set. [01:00:55] Speaker A: It helps if you watch Infinity War endgame. Those are probably the only two movies that you can bother to interact outside if you want to do the whole Olympic. But the Guardians One Two, and it's its nice own little consistent thing. Yeah. [01:01:09] Speaker D: If you don't watch Infinity War and Endgame, you might get slightly confused about what's going on with Galore. [01:01:13] Speaker A: I think they recap that in the lift, so instead of in the film, they recap. [01:01:20] Speaker C: Because I really enjoyed the first one and kind of the best thing I saw since Iron Man One, in my opinion. Although I don't know if this counts as MCU, but I really enjoyed into the spidey verse. So I'm looking forward to the Sony. [01:01:36] Speaker B: That'S Sony's kind of side parallel project that will work. So you could do Guardians One made. [01:01:40] Speaker C: Me cry as well. I cried at anything. I cried at Spartacus. [01:01:45] Speaker B: Do Guardians One, Guardians Two, Infinity War Endgame, Guardians Three, and you'd be fine. [01:01:51] Speaker A: To do the other 30 plus movies. Yeah, they're all off to one side. [01:01:56] Speaker B: And the numerous do the holiday special as well, actually would be worth doing. [01:02:00] Speaker E: Yeah. [01:02:01] Speaker A: But I think special mention to the goodest girl, Cosmo. [01:02:04] Speaker D: Yes, I loved her so much. That running joke was perfectly done, concluded beautifully, in a completely predictable, but still wonderful way. [01:02:17] Speaker B: Yeah. And I do love the fact that both Craglin and Cosmo get to be fully subscribed members of the Guardians at the end of the it's a very nice way. [01:02:25] Speaker A: And we don't get that often now where things are neatly wrapped and tied up with a bow and this is done. You don't need to carry on. It's done. We don't have that with TV series because everybody's always angling for another renewal. How many TV series have been extinguished halfway through their life? And then you're just left with over ones? We've been discussing quite a lot with Final Space recently where Olan Rogers is finishing off with a Verity limited edition comic book because Warner Brothers won't give him the money to do another series. TBS won't let him air the series anyway. But now he's like, Well, I want to finish the story. And they're like, well, here's some very prescribed rules on how you can finish this story off. You can do, what is it, 10,000 copies on a graphic novel. [01:03:12] Speaker B: And that's it. [01:03:12] Speaker D: Very expensive graphic novel. [01:03:14] Speaker B: I mean, we haven't touched on the fact that the other big introduction in this film was Adam Warlock, which had been teased in the previous two. So you have Will Poulter as Adam Warlock, which is quite nice because it ties that guy it ties back into that 2008 Guardians relaunch where Adam is part of the team that Starlord puts together. And I think he doesn't have a lot to do. He's kind of a bit of a comic. Yeah, he develops his but I like the relationship between him and his mom. [01:03:47] Speaker A: I think quite interesting the way they brought him in of he's been popped out is pod early, so he's a little bit stupid, basically. He's not fully finished yet, so I think that was a good way of doing it was kind of like he needs to do some growing up still. [01:03:59] Speaker B: Before he's but again, that theme of like he rejects his family family to the found family of the Guardians is quite nice. And realizing he does the right thing in the end, which is quite nice. And then there's obviously the one post credit scene and then another post credit scene at the end. And it does say a certain character will return. [01:04:19] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:04:20] Speaker A: Unfortunately. [01:04:20] Speaker B: Which I mean, it'll be okay. I think it'll be okay. [01:04:23] Speaker A: I want to know who the neighbor is. That's all I want to know. It was left very open. [01:04:28] Speaker B: I'm like hang on. [01:04:29] Speaker A: You know, Marvel always have to put a little bit of a little bit of a frisk on, a little bit of a vignetting at the bed. What are we going to do? [01:04:36] Speaker D: Don't think it's anyone. [01:04:37] Speaker B: I think it's just to wind you up. [01:04:40] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:04:41] Speaker A: It's probably going to be a Stanley AI generated. [01:04:46] Speaker B: Although I did like the fact that Marvel again, once again, took the time to do a different Marvel Studios logo that focused purely on the Guardians characters, which was quite I think, you know, if you just want a fun time out at the cinema, guardians is definitely worth a go. You could probably go in without too. [01:05:06] Speaker A: Much caution as taking anybody probably below the age of nine. [01:05:09] Speaker D: Yeah, it's fun, but there are bits that are very much yeah, if you're. [01:05:13] Speaker B: Young and you've got pets, no, don't do it. [01:05:17] Speaker A: If anybody is probably nine or ten, it's probably about there. It's a twelve, a I mean, we get Marvel's first ever naughty word. [01:05:25] Speaker B: Yeah. Which is funny, which is the perfect moment. [01:05:29] Speaker A: Got no relevance to any of them. And it's such a James good thing. [01:05:33] Speaker E: About where he drops it in. [01:05:34] Speaker A: So keep your ear out for that one. [01:05:37] Speaker B: I did think that was pretty hilarious, I think, as well. Also what is fascinating is the progression of CGI technology. Because those animals were like, oh, God. You just think oh, my God. I know it's CGI. It's got to be CGI, because there's no way they've wrangled 14 raccoons into a cut into a cage for my entertainment purposes. But you just go just the expression and the eyes. You're sitting in front of a huge cinema screen presented with the eyes of a CGI generated raccoon, and you go, I'm not crying. You're crying. I'm not crying. You're crying. The emotion that is now they're able to get into this is quite phenomenal. [01:06:25] Speaker A: Even if you think about Rocket's first family. I mean, they all look like the kid from Toy Story's Basement. He just pulled apart and reassembled things together looks considerably a lot like Will Paul to surprisingly as well, if you think back. But, yeah, even then, you fall in love with those characters and it's like in any of the film, these would be horrific monstrosities. James Gunn has made a really good skill at making you love things that are grotesque. [01:06:52] Speaker B: Yeah, it is a pretty impactful scene when he turns back and stuff happened, but, yeah, it's an emotional ride. It's really good. The High Evolutionary is a good introduction to the universe. [01:07:05] Speaker A: Such a villain. Such a fantastic villain. [01:07:07] Speaker B: And I think when Marvel concentrate on things like that, like Strucker has been in previous episodes, and just somebody who's just bad. Yeah. And I think that really works. [01:07:18] Speaker A: I don't care about their motivation, I don't care if they're an anti hero. I don't care what caused them to be in that situation. Give me somebody I actively want to hate at the screen. I'm going to cheer when things they get their comeuppance. [01:07:30] Speaker B: Yeah. But I think if you've checked out of phase four, this is definitely the highlight of phase five so far. [01:07:37] Speaker A: Yeah, I'd say if you wanted something that has that conclusion and you were done with Marvel, this is probably a good thing to go in and knock. [01:07:47] Speaker B: You, but I was hugely entertained. I will continue to read the Guardians of the Galaxy comics. A new series has just started in Marvel with one of my favourite British artists, Kev Walker, on art duties. Very Western themed, styled, so I'm looking to see where that we've only had the first issue so far. Yes, basically the same as the current one, but we've got a whole big group thing happening in the Marvel universe as well. But that's a whole different segue. But as a film, I was hugely entertained and I loved every minute of it. And I've listened to the soundtrack several times since. [01:08:22] Speaker A: It'll be on probably in Disney Plus by the time the next three minutes. [01:08:26] Speaker B: Well, by the time you read this. [01:08:28] Speaker A: It'Ll be on it as soon as it's finished at the cinema. It'll be on Disney Plus now, I. [01:08:31] Speaker B: Think, but definitely worth a watch. So if you've got two and a half hours to spare and you can maybe squeeze in the first two Guardians movie endgame and Infinity War beforehand, then. [01:08:42] Speaker A: If you've got a spare day, just have a so. [01:08:46] Speaker E: It's all good. [01:09:04] Speaker A: He's put it on backwards. [01:09:11] Speaker B: My crown etiquette isn't what it used to be. [01:09:15] Speaker E: The King of Cosplay is here to issue a new decree. We are doing another Pound Shop Cosplay, but this one has a theme. You see next month. There is a movie coming out called Indiana Jones and the Something of Destiny. I can't remember. It's a commonist film, I don't remember. So I thought it would be interesting if everyone who is participating in the Pound Shop Cosplay could do a theme of Ancient history. Now, this can be however you interpret it, as long as it is real Earth history, Keith. So it can be historical figure, figure from mythology. I don't care, as long as it is somewhat relevant to ancient history. Something that Indiana Jones could potentially dig up and then get crushed by boulder in the process, if that makes sense. Is this an acceptable theme? [01:10:27] Speaker A: Can I just come as the boulder? [01:10:29] Speaker E: If you wish. That is acceptable. As long as you can make it convincing. [01:10:35] Speaker A: That is the cosplay. [01:10:37] Speaker E: That is the cosplay. Thank you. That is my decree. I look forward to seeing the results. And, Keith, you need to improve your coronation skills. We will run it again in future. Thank you. [01:11:03] Speaker A: Time for our regular roundup of what's piqued our interest in recent times. So traditional for the guest. [01:11:11] Speaker C: Go first. [01:11:12] Speaker A: Paul, what is your one geek thing that you'd like to tell the audience about? [01:11:16] Speaker C: All right, I hope this is allowed. So you might have to edit this out so you don't get struck, but I've really been enjoying playing Breath of the Wild on CMU emulator on my PC in 4K, with amazing shading effects over 60 frames per second. It's just yes. [01:11:35] Speaker A: I assume you own your own personal coffee on the Switch? [01:11:38] Speaker C: I do. [01:11:38] Speaker B: Yeah, I do. [01:11:40] Speaker C: And the AMI, because if you own. [01:11:42] Speaker A: Your perfectly owning original coffee I owned. [01:11:44] Speaker C: It on the Wi U as well. [01:11:45] Speaker E: It's fine. Nintendo aren't going after people for that. They're going after themselves for posting footage. [01:11:50] Speaker C: That's right. They need to take their own Twitter account down, don't they? Stuff like that. So I've really enjoyed that and it is beautiful. And maybe one day Nintendo will release some of these things on PC. It's unlikely, but we do live in a universe where you can do this, and it is mind blowing awesome because. [01:12:13] Speaker A: Tears of the Kingdom has just dropped. [01:12:15] Speaker B: At the time of recording this one. [01:12:17] Speaker A: So is this in preparation to play Tears? [01:12:19] Speaker C: I'm a bit intimidated by Tears of the Kingdom, to be honest. I just see all the different things that you can do in it. It looks amazing. But this whole thing where you can combine different items to make weapons or objects or make your own flying surfboard with fireballs coming out of it, all these different things that I've seen, I feel like it might be a little bit too complicated for me. So what I do is I play Breath of the Wild and cheat with loads of Amiibos. And the first time I played Breath of the Wild, my son was, I don't know, about four or five, and he was my cook, if anyone knows what we're talking about here. So I would just go and gather all the ingredients, hand the Switch over to Theo. We're like, can you just cook a bunch of stuff and give me the Switch back in half? So I've got some food to go and fight the boss with they always. [01:13:13] Speaker A: Got me with Breath of World because I think everybody here has a switch and probably a copy of Breath of the World. [01:13:19] Speaker C: I've definitely got one. [01:13:20] Speaker A: It was too daunting for me and I just haven't had the time to go and invest as much as I want into Breath of War. I can imagine. It is a fantastic, immersive, brilliant game, but life being the way it is, finding time for sitting down and properly gaming on a switch. And to be honest, if you are playing on the switch you used when it docked on the TV, because that's where it looks the prettiest, because the little screen you're like does not really suit a Zelda game to a certain extent, because it's part of having the expansive environment, the beautiful art style, et cetera. So, I don't know, it's one of. [01:13:57] Speaker C: Those if you get all the Amiibos though, you don't have to buy the actual Amiibos, you can get just the little cards and you can skip a lot of the grind work if you just want to go through the story and experience the game. And that's what I'm replaying it now. I've given myself unlimited hearts, unlimited stamina, and just seeing the game I've already experienced with a bit of cheating, but now even more cheating, but just seeing it looking as it does. Because my favorite game is Witch of Three and I've been searching and searching for something post Witch of Three struggled, can't really find anything that does it. And Zelda was the nearest Breath of the Wild was the nearest experience I got to that after Witch of Three. So yeah, that's what I do, I just play those games on loop. [01:14:45] Speaker A: But if you're into those games and they are terrible syncs, I'd probably recommend like getchid Impact, which is pretty much Chinese version of Breath of the World mobile. Yeah, I think it's pretty close in style and the way it works, et cetera. [01:15:00] Speaker C: And probably Hong Kai style rail about Xenoblade. Is that impact? I've got Xenoblade Two, I think is that a different type of game? [01:15:07] Speaker E: Xenoblade is it does have the big expansive world. [01:15:11] Speaker C: Yeah, it looks beautiful. [01:15:13] Speaker E: Yeah. The developers of Xenoblade actually helped make Breath of the Wild and his The Kingdom, because that's kind of what they're good at doing is like making these massive expansive worlds work on Nintendo systems that are quite underpowered. [01:15:26] Speaker C: That's pretty amazing. [01:15:29] Speaker E: They've done it with all the Xenoblades because the original Xenoblade came out on the Wi and they made this massive, expansive, gorgeous world on the Wi. They've kind of got a really good knack for doing that. So yeah, I've not played the third Xenoblade, but I had issues with the second one, but you may find that you enjoy it a bit more, but there's definitely some shared DNA there. [01:15:59] Speaker C: Nice. [01:16:00] Speaker A: I think we all have that kind of game where it scratches that itch. And we all get that game itch sometimes. I mean, Me Skies of Arcadia Legends, which nothing has ever everything pales in comparison to that one because that was my game at that time and it was my comfort food. But, yeah, breath of wild. It still holds up now. And the art style, I think, is a massive contrast. [01:16:22] Speaker C: Seeing it I mean, essentially it's the same polygons that they just I actually don't know how they've done it, but it's as if it was created like that. And then Descaled for the Nintendo because it had to be for the Switch or the Wi U originally. But just seeing it in what it can be reimagined now is just unbelievable. It just beats the majority of the AA modern games at the moment on a visual basis for a game that is however many I don't even know how many years old if the world. [01:16:55] Speaker E: Is, but it's six years. [01:16:57] Speaker C: Six years, yeah. [01:16:59] Speaker A: And so one thing we always discuss about how Nintendo have this knack of going beyond the graphics and concentrating on the environment, the story, the world building and that kind of thing, and you don't need it to look like you're playing an actual human. It's perfectly fine to have stylized art. [01:17:16] Speaker C: Graphics that goes back to the film that we were reviewing earlier. It's such a breath of fresh air to get the story done right rather than the gimmicks and stuff. So, yeah, that's been my thing last couple of weeks. [01:17:32] Speaker A: Awesome. [01:17:33] Speaker C: Thank you. [01:17:34] Speaker A: Sam, how about yourself? What you've been up to? [01:17:37] Speaker D: So, a couple of weeks ago, I went to Manchester with a couple of friends to go to Warhammer Theft, which was interesting. So Games Workshop are about to release the 10th edition of Warhammer 40,000, and for the first time, as part of that, they're going to be releasing all the rules and all the data sheets as free online downloads. So you don't have to spend like 70 quid just to get the rules. [01:18:07] Speaker E: Before you even no, you just have to spend all your entire bank account on the figures themselves and the paints. [01:18:19] Speaker D: They were previewing the new rules at the Warhammer Fest, which we did not get to try out because the queues were insanely long to get into the preview parts and even just to get to the shop. We couldn't actually work out whether you were queuing to get into the shop or queuing or people in the queue have been to the shop and are queuing to buy stuff, but there was a huge amount of queuing. So we basically ended up finding a table. They had a sort of board game cafe area. We hunkered down there for most of the day and kind of went off and grabbed lunch and shifts and played a few sort of Games Workshop board game style things, which were all very good fun. There's some incredibly good cosplay on display. Yeah. People must have just sunk a huge amount of time and effort into it because it's big Space Marini kind of armor and yeah, overall, it was a very good day out. I would have preferred it if there was less queuing, but there was plenty to do anyway. And, yeah, quite excited to find out kind of how the new rules are. [01:19:38] Speaker A: Going to look because I know they did a lot of work on the original Warhammer because there's Warhammer, which is like the fantasy one, and then the Warhammer 40K, which is a separate one. I think it was called Age of Sigma, which they basically threw away the original rule set for Warhammer and then have done it all again since then. [01:19:55] Speaker D: Yeah. So they had the original Warhammer that got thrown away and replaced with Age of Sigma, but they are now working on Warhammer the old World, I think it's called. [01:20:07] Speaker A: Oh, is that so everybody gets their Age of Sigma seven three. Is that? It's almost like they've got this curious rule about how to make them buy things. [01:20:16] Speaker D: Again. I think the idea is it's going to sit alongside Age of Sigma, but they're kind of using it as an excuse to rerelease some of the older models and some of the sort of armies that didn't quite make it into Age of Sigma and that sort of thing, and the general kind of law for it as well. I think they're building on that. [01:20:38] Speaker A: Yeah. Cool. [01:20:40] Speaker E: Yeah. [01:20:40] Speaker A: I always used to play Gothica, which was kind of their spaceship battle simulator one, which never really got really popular, which really annoyed me because it was like, this is the fun one to play. Don't want to get my tape measure out to move 3, work through my action sheet for 3 hours to work out how I can actually kill this bad guy. [01:20:57] Speaker E: So this is why I like DND, because it's theater of the mind, so therefore you don't have to worry about any of that. [01:21:03] Speaker D: They have said as well, though, that with the new edition, the big focus on rewriting the rules has been making them simpler and kind of stripping away all you almost need a degree to understand what all the different rules are just for the army you're playing, let alone the army that you're fighting and all the other armies that you might be. [01:21:22] Speaker A: See, there's an AI gap in the. [01:21:23] Speaker D: Market. [01:21:26] Speaker E: To work out what way to play. [01:21:28] Speaker C: I used to play Space Hulk a lot and, well, it was when I was at school, high school, it was Hero Quest came out and Advanced HeroQuest and then Space Hulk, and we never as a group got much further than that because school finished then and we went off to different places. But I used to work at a place called Way Ahead Records in Nottingham, and there was a guy who worked with there who was a professional painter. He was making a fortune painting people's armies and stuff like that. But I know spacecott was very basic. It was like a 15 minutes game, but it was so much fun. I still got it unpainted. [01:22:04] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:22:05] Speaker C: I wish they were painted because they didn't look very good, but the Gene Steelers and everything. [01:22:09] Speaker D: I know a few people who have big armies that are mostly unpainted, but I think that is one of the things I like about that hobby, is it's what you make of it. If you're into the gaming, you don't. [01:22:21] Speaker C: Dip in and out if you paint it. [01:22:22] Speaker D: Yeah, but I almost prefer the painting side of it. So we'll buy stuff based on what's going to be fun to paint. [01:22:30] Speaker B: I think Warhammer are missing out on a massive market by having pre painted figures, because I would buy them then I've got Hero Quest non advanced one. Yeah. And again but it's like they're just gray blocks of plastic. But it's like I've seen people paint these things incredibly. I ain't got time for that. But if you want to pay an extra 20 quid, if you want to have it pre painted for me, and I'll buy that for you. [01:22:59] Speaker A: I used to play Star Wars x Wing was the remember that one game, the Fantasy Flight one? I think it's owned by somebody else now. But one of the joys with that was you bought the figures, they were pre painted and they looked pretty good as soon as you pop straight down on the playmat and it's like you didn't have to spend three and a half hours. [01:23:14] Speaker B: Well, I bought one of the McFarland space marines figures. [01:23:18] Speaker A: Yes, I remember. [01:23:20] Speaker B: I think you bought it me, rather than I bought it myself. What was brilliant is they made one that was unpainted. [01:23:27] Speaker A: Why am I buying that one? That was the limited edition one and. [01:23:29] Speaker B: That one, and then I'll buy the figure because he's all blue and everything's painted on and I haven't got to do little tiny you got to paint the thing on the arm. It's like I can't see as it is. And then you're expecting me to paint with what literally would be I can't do that. Sorry. But yeah, they're Warhammer self colored figures. That's a market. [01:23:51] Speaker A: Well, they're having a big issue at the moment, which is probably another reason why they'rereleasing everything and changing it is certain people have been 3D printing their own figurines rather than buying them direct from Warhammer, which, of course right, yeah. [01:24:05] Speaker C: Because you can get like Lego and stuff from China, can't you, and stuff, that kind of thing, like, really? [01:24:12] Speaker B: Warhammer Lego? [01:24:13] Speaker C: Yeah. [01:24:14] Speaker B: Then you aren't going to paint them either. I'm just all for the you ain't got to paint here. [01:24:17] Speaker A: Warhammer and Lego will never happen. Because that was the whole thing about Lego and violence. [01:24:21] Speaker C: Right. [01:24:22] Speaker A: Which they kind of ignore now. [01:24:24] Speaker C: Anyway, they do seem but that was. [01:24:26] Speaker A: The whole reason the halo franchise went to Mega Blocks back in the day was because Lego refused to do like a war simulator. [01:24:33] Speaker E: Which is funny because I have a Lego tall know from a series about hunting robot dinosaurs. [01:24:42] Speaker A: I think they might have changed their rules back in the day. [01:24:46] Speaker C: So are you excited about Henry Cavill doing a warhammer? Looking forward to that. [01:24:51] Speaker D: Yeah. I love how into it he is. [01:24:54] Speaker E: I love that his entire career has just become what nerdy things am I into that I can put myself in? [01:25:02] Speaker A: His how to Build a PC video did break the Internet for quite a while. [01:25:09] Speaker C: It's like, oh, I'm going to be. [01:25:10] Speaker E: Superman because I really like Superman comics. I'm going to be Geralt because I love the witcher. And now I'm going to do a warhammer movie because I'm super into warhammer. [01:25:18] Speaker A: Recently he left the witcher was they were veering away from the books and. [01:25:22] Speaker E: He was like, yeah, he was that much of a nerd about it. He was just like, I refuse. I'm not being part of this. Changing it that much. [01:25:29] Speaker A: And they've got Walmart Girl in one of the hemsworth as well. Dollar store cost. Anyway. [01:25:41] Speaker C: Yes. [01:25:42] Speaker B: Thank you. [01:25:43] Speaker A: Keith, what about yourself? What have you been up to? [01:25:45] Speaker B: I went round the houses to find something again to pick for this. So what I ended up picking is basically an announcement trailer for the release date of a TV show. And it's the good Omens parody from Hannah and Hilly Hindi and their Hillywood show. YouTube Channel. And basically it's a 15 minutes skit where basically they do a song which is their shtick that they do a song based on these parodies where they play the lead. Two characters from Good Omens with voices that I was convinced were actually David Tennant and Michael Sheen. And I can't believe that they did the voices themselves. And it's got to be AI generated. There's some chicanery going on here, but it features a guest appearance from Neil Gaiman, whose voice is just amazing as he basically gives them the date of when Good Omens Two is coming to Amazon Prime. It's a couple of other guest appearances from people from the show, but it's extremely for a parody as most of their parodies are extremely well made and often better than most TV shows that people would watch. But I caught it this week. I think it was released this week to advertise the release date of Good Omens Two, which I'm kind of I'm. [01:27:04] Speaker A: Not looking forward to it. [01:27:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm curious as to how they're going to get away with doing something that Terry wasn't directly involved. That's exactly my problem with the kind of big concern. But I love the original and I thought that they did a very good job with the first season. But this parody video is quite good. And there's a behind the scenes on their YouTube channel as well. But I was hugely. Entertained by this. And the song's quite good. [01:27:28] Speaker A: It was quite famously when Terry died, they crushed his hard drives, so they basically bought a steamroller and crushed all of his hard drives. So, no, he could take his unfinished works and carry them on and that's kind of one of his requests in the will. So I'm quite surprised that Good Omens Two even exists as a thing because I know it was a collaboration between Neil and Terry. So it's kind of you're missing 50% of what made Good Omens good Omens without having been involved. It's not like Neil Gaiman's not got another 600 different series that he could go make a book off. [01:28:01] Speaker B: Yeah, but most of those other things that have been done have been pretty trashy because american you don't like the. [01:28:07] Speaker A: Lenny Henry version of Neverware? [01:28:08] Speaker B: No, I like the Lenny Henry version of Neverware. I dislike the BBC way that they. [01:28:14] Speaker A: Did it where they didn't even color the actual color, grade the film after recording it, and terrible pink. [01:28:20] Speaker B: But I mean, you know, I just want to see those characters again and we'll see how it goes. I'm happy to give it a try. They did such a good job with the first season. [01:28:30] Speaker A: I'll reserve judgment, but I think the first series was perfectly encapsulated as a one thing and it didn't need to happen. [01:28:36] Speaker B: But it doesn't negate from the fact that this parody video, which is basically a stealth announcement trailer, is pretty funny and really good. And I've tried to find out who. [01:28:49] Speaker A: Did the is it the girls that. [01:28:51] Speaker B: Have done the voices or is it actually David Tennant and Michael Sheen? Because I just can't figure it out and it really boggled my mind. And I was like, have they just dubbed this? Has it been stripped? And then they do the singing and I'm like, no, the singing's the same voices. [01:29:05] Speaker A: So how have they done this? [01:29:06] Speaker B: So I was really confused. It might just be the fact I was listening to it on the bus through my headphones and I'm missing something entirely. But, yeah, it's great. But just watch it because it's just really funny, it's really good. And if you want, watch the rest because there's a Supernatural parody that they did a few years back where Sam and Dean actually make a guest appearance. And that's awesome as well. But if you've never seen anything before, I don't think they post particularly regularly, but it's the Hillywood show on YouTube if you want to find them. So it's worth a look. Their parody videos are quite exceptional, often better than proper TV shows. [01:29:44] Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you. Lee. How about. [01:29:50] Speaker E: Obviously with Tears of the Kingdom coming out? I've been debating whether to get it and realizing that I'm playing too many big games. And one of those big games is like a Dragon Ishin, which is basically it is the Yakuza series, which is now Sega have inexplicably decided we're going to give it the name of its original Japanese name translated, which is like a dragon, which means that no one knows what it is anymore. But this one is a remake of a game that they released for PS Three, I think it was. But unlike the other Yakuza games, it is set during samurai times. So it's like the late, late 19th century sort of thing. So it's like after the Dutch and the Americans arrived with guns, but it's like when there were still samurai hanging around. There's a review that I read of it which describes it perfectly, that it is basically a Muppet version of Yakuza. So in the way that the Muppets can go into A Christmas Carol or Treasure Island and be those characters, this is taking the cast of Yakuza and making them actual historical figures, but it's still their faces and still the original, because I keep calling him Kiyu. Anyway, I can't remember who Kiyu actually are. Basically, it is a Yak as a game, but you're a samurai, so you've got a sword, but you've also got a revolver, because, again, the west have arrived with guns. So it's sort of like a bit of samurai, but a bit of Western influence as well. So in the same way that Sergio Leone just kept ripping off Akira Kurosawa, this is kind of like the Japanese taking all that back and going, well, we're going to steal all the Western aesthetics and put it in our samurai game. So it's a bit of both going on and it's just a lot of fun. Again, it is just a Yakuza game, so it's got all the same usual kind of nonsense side stuff. They've somehow managed to get Karaoke into samurai era Japan. They've not managed to get the sadly, that's the thing. I'm just like, you couldn't get outrunning, just come up with some excuse, like. [01:32:13] Speaker A: A carriage chase or something. [01:32:16] Speaker E: But, yeah, it's got all that sort of usual side stuff. But it's also sort of your very sort of serious samurai drama with all the sort of politics going on with that. But just like, the gameplay of it is really fun because it takes that kind of traditional brawler gameplay, but it gives you a sword. So you can fight bare knuckle, like you would normally in Yakisub, or you can pull out your sword and you'd pull out your gun, and there's like the wild dancer style, where you can have both. So you got your gun in one hand and your sword in your other, and you're, like, spinning around and you're slashing people up and then firing your gun at someone else. And it's ridiculous, but it's just a lot of fun. And it's got that same level of humor. There's a whole side quest where you have to translate a letter from someone. So basically, there's a guy who's fallen in love with this woman who lives in one of the sort of more rural areas of Japan where they have a different dialect. And the localization on it is great because you have to basically translate cockney. So the whole letter is just written in like, cockney slang and you have to translate into English. And it's like one of the greatest bits of localization I've seen in one of these games. [01:33:31] Speaker A: I always think there must be two writing teams in any kind of yakisa game because you'll have the main plotline, which is always super serious, hard boiled, usually 80s, kind of like this is like a proper dark kung fu movie. You expect Beat Takeshi to turn up at any point, smoking a cigarette, wearing a suit in the background. That kind of level of really deep level. And all the side quests are frankly ridiculous. They all like, go and fetch a teddy, which is a hawker stolen and put on top of a basketball court. [01:34:00] Speaker E: There's also in Yaka Zero, there's the side quest, where you have to train a dominatrix to be more dominating because she's not very good at it. She's a bit shy. [01:34:12] Speaker C: They know their market. [01:34:15] Speaker A: Again, talk about Yakuza Zero, the whole cult. There's like this whole one where you have to go into a cult and rescue a girl, basically. Like you end up just slapping the cult leader because he's just a big baby. And completely terrible being a cult leader. [01:34:29] Speaker E: Yeah, it is. Them taking all of that and putting it in samurai era Japan is just a brilliant thing. And the fact that they've taken this game that years ago, they were just like, oh, the Western audience won't understand this. It's sort of samurai era. They're not going to latch onto this one. And now they've no, no, the Western audience absolutely is going to go to this because the series has blown up and they're like, well, it's just that, but you're a samurai now, so we might as well bring it back. And I just love that they are doing that and Sega are kind of leaning into that and recognizing the popularity of the series, that there are so many people in the west who are just quite happy to go along with this sort of ludicrous Living in Japan simulator, where occasionally people punch each other all the time. [01:35:16] Speaker C: Where do you start with Yukuza? What's the first game you should first one? So many of them isn't the first. [01:35:21] Speaker E: One I started with was Zero. Start with Zero, which is a really. [01:35:24] Speaker C: Good one, which is a newer game. Is it? [01:35:26] Speaker E: Yeah. So it was a prequel to the whole series. So it's set in the 80s, whereas the others are all contemporary. So that one is just like it's sort of like the origins of Kiyu becoming a yakuza and all this sort of thing. So it's a really good starting point. But all of the games are available on modern systems now because they remade the first two but then all the others, they've just sort of given a remaster. [01:35:53] Speaker A: They're all on Steam, I think, on. [01:35:55] Speaker E: Everything at this point, I think, except Switch. Switch is the only one, hasn't it? But Zero was my starting point as well. I played a bit of like five before that and that was kind of when I realized, oh no, there's more to this series than just it's a crime game, I should start the beginning. Yeah, but then Zero came out and I was like, okay, this is the point where I actually properly get into the series because it is a prequel and you don't need to know anything. [01:36:21] Speaker C: I'll start there then. [01:36:22] Speaker E: Yeah. [01:36:23] Speaker C: Awesome. [01:36:24] Speaker A: It is kind of like the greatest weirdest game because you can have go from like a super serious plotline of I've just killed like my granny or something like that. It's like the heart rending scene and the next scene you're playing under claw machine trying to get a teddy bear. [01:36:41] Speaker E: Yeah, I mean, I will say as well ishin is also pretty a good place to start because it is completely standalone, because it's set in a different sale. [01:36:48] Speaker C: It's in my wish list, that one already. It really appeals to me, the feel of that game. [01:36:54] Speaker A: Talking about the weirdness of time I saw online last week. It's kind of like talking about the weird confluence of things. There was a period in time where Samurai could send a fax to Abraham Lincoln. [01:37:05] Speaker E: Yes. [01:37:05] Speaker A: Because they're all kind of like confluence of weirdness. [01:37:12] Speaker E: But yeah, like a dragon ishin having a lot of fun with it when I'm not also playing Conkoi, Star Rail and other things. What about you, Ron? [01:37:22] Speaker A: Got to get you more. [01:37:23] Speaker E: Yeah. [01:37:26] Speaker A: So to me, I'm going musical theme because this week was the 10th anniversary release of one of, if not the greatest album of all time, which is Daft Punk's Random Access Memories, which is depressing that it's ten years old. [01:37:40] Speaker E: Yeah, I was about to say I'm about to just melt into a husk at this point. [01:37:47] Speaker A: So if you don't know what Random Access Memories is, it's Daft Punk's fourth final seminal studio album. It's pretty much magnum opus. It was kind of their culmination of the career. It was their follow up to I think it was Tron legacy came out between Discovery and Random Access Memories. [01:38:05] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that's so it was. [01:38:06] Speaker A: Kind of like the development of that style and they interleave some of that into they interleaved a little bit of that to Random Access Memories. But my beautiful vinyl has arrived, which I'm not opening. [01:38:15] Speaker E: So I've been listening to the Spotify. [01:38:17] Speaker A: Version as most people do, but it's a really nice little vignette into their recording process. They put some outtakes in there, they put some demo versions of stuff. So it includes Horizon, which was the Japanese exclusive CD release, I think back in the time, that was a track that wasn't featured anywhere else in the world apart from Japan. Tamiuda, but they've done that. They did a demo of a song they did with Julian Casablancas which was called Infinity Repeating and it was kind of the last thing they ever recorded before they decided to take a break and then inevitably split up. But there is one track on there and I haven't remembered the name yet because I've been over listening to it too much, called prime 2020 Twelve Unfinished Track. But they take the bass line from Son of Flyn off the Tron Legacy soundtrack and by the end of it, it's pretty much like the Random Access Memory style of music. So it's kind of such a perfect fusion of their musical taste from that electro into the orchestral works that they finished on. And Thomas Bangaltier, I think he's just done a orchestral soundtrack for a movie so that's his first thing since then. And he's moving more into the soundtrack. Things a bit weird, like the guy from Radiohead I can never remember the name, who just does movie soundtracks now and him from Slipknot. [01:39:35] Speaker E: I mean, you've also got Trent Reznor doing a lot of stuff as well. [01:39:38] Speaker D: Yeah. [01:39:38] Speaker A: So those kind of things where he's moving into doing soundtracks now and soundscapes, and he's being very orchestral with it. And it's kind of you can see that progression from that really hard thing if you think of defunct. And those early singles where it was purely electronic music into discovery, which was their start of feed, of moving into music. And then Random Access Memory. So it's just a beautiful thing to have. And it just annoys me that they don't do music anymore and it just frustrates me because, again, it's one of my perfect albums trying to think of an album that's better. [01:40:20] Speaker E: I'm just trying to think of something to say about it that hasn't already been said, really. It is just a really good album. I do love that sort of it came up randomly when I saw a reddit thread about where they'd post like an old picture of Giorgio Moroda and everyone in the comments was just quoting the Daft Punk track where he. [01:40:45] Speaker A: Again, that's one of the fantastic piece of music. And that lift midway from the song. [01:40:49] Speaker E: Where you have the talk of Georgia. [01:40:51] Speaker A: Rhodea and then they swap into the instrumental. I think it's one of the greatest progressions of a song of all. Yeah, it's just an album which I can always go back to and never get bored of and every time I listen to it, there's always something new, something little hidden away and having a new version with a little bit of extra stuff just again, it's interesting to watch their creative process. So there's a long piece on it called about one of the songs they do on Random Access and maybe Frank Worth of Time. So you hear them like go for the lyrics and change the lyrics and. [01:41:23] Speaker B: How does this work? [01:41:24] Speaker A: Do we need to change this line? Does this make sense? And it's their loops, the way that they bed the tracks in. It's really interesting to listen to it's. [01:41:32] Speaker B: All that stuff on the vinyl version as well. Is that like a four disc threshold? Three. What's on the non used side? [01:41:41] Speaker A: I don't know. I haven't opened it yet because I'm like, if I open it, then it's ruined. If I leave it, it's perfect. It's like the weirdness of never read Terry Pratchett's last book. I've got a copy and it's just sat there shrink wrapped. Because I know if I it's a bit different with music, but if I read that last Terry Pratchett book, then there's no more Terry Pratchett to read. So I've kind of left it unread for that reason of one day when I'm ready, I'll do it, but at least I know there's some unread stuff there that there's something that I can get involved in. [01:42:12] Speaker C: That's so cool. That's really nice. [01:42:16] Speaker A: Yeah. Go and listen. [01:42:17] Speaker B: It's on spotify. [01:42:17] Speaker A: It'll probably be on every streaming service known to man. [01:42:20] Speaker E: I have seen the 10th anniversary release on Spotify. I haven't listened to it. It's when I've gone to pull tracks from Random Access Memories for Playlist, and then I've seen the 10th anniversary and it's brought up like outtakes version or whatever, and I'm just like, that's not the one I'm looking for. Thank you, Spotify. [01:42:38] Speaker A: If you've never listened to the album, I'd probably just take yourself away, put yourself in a room, switch everything else off, turn off your phone and just listen to it. And it's such a beautiful soundscape from start to end. [01:42:52] Speaker B: It's on Apple Music as well. For those of you that aren't Spotify. [01:42:55] Speaker C: Like me, I have Apple Music. [01:42:58] Speaker E: Thank you. [01:43:02] Speaker A: Thank you for joining us on the Geeky Brummy Show. This issue. Sam, where can we find you online? [01:43:09] Speaker D: You always ask me this and I can never remember. I think it's SD. Edwards 89 on Instagram and possibly Dragon. [01:43:18] Speaker A: Sam. [01:43:19] Speaker C: Sam. [01:43:19] Speaker A: 89 on Twitter. [01:43:21] Speaker D: Thank you. [01:43:22] Speaker A: Keith, how about yourself? [01:43:23] Speaker B: I can find you mostly, if it's not Count Ducula related, it's me under the Hardlock Hotel name. Otherwise, Wednesdays on The Geek for me, Twitter and website doing a roundup of some of the comics that I like that you may also like. [01:43:38] Speaker A: And Lee. [01:43:39] Speaker C: How about yourself? [01:43:40] Speaker E: Where can't you find me? On the Internet. So you can find me on YouTube at Bob Pet Parrot, where I do videos on video games. By the time this comes out, I should have a video on a plagued Her Requiem, possibly a video about video game censorship as well, depending on how soon I get that done. But I also write for Silicon Era as well, so you can probably find my words on there. You can find me on Twitter at Bob Pet ferret for channel stuff and the cheap ferret for anything else. And I think that's mostly everything. Obviously, I'm on the Geeky Grummy site every Friday doing the games release roundup as well, so talking about all the latest new releases. So there we go. Awesome, thank you. [01:44:23] Speaker A: And Paul, where can we find you online? [01:44:24] Speaker C: Yeah, so Paulaxley Digital, which is just website I've got, which just kind of says who I am and what I do. And there's some of my older talks and podcast episodes and stuff on there that generally range from things around WordPress in general agency and freelancer life and also mental health in that particular sector as such. Did some talks about that. So there's a few of those on the website and if someone actually finds them interesting, then just Google Paul Lacey, WordPress or something like that, and usually some podcasts will come up. [01:45:01] Speaker A: Awesome, thank you very much. You can find us all at geeky. Remy on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. Facebook. I don't think I've logged in since, but it's there. We're ready for when Twitter explodes, corpse just shuffles itself into the air, which we're all watching the slow demise of. But yeah, geekyfremi.com. And don't forget, check out Keith's pull list and these games release louder every week. And we'll see you again soon. But for now, goodbye everybody. [01:45:32] Speaker E: Bye, Keith.