Category: Blog Posts

Hey Somethings!

As having the honor of posting our first blog of 2023, I wanted to lay out some of the things we were happy about for ’22 and what we’re hoping to accomplish in ’23!

We had a great year for 2022!  Great episodes, fantastic guests, we re-launched our Patreon, got out to PAX Unplugged, and even got a mention on G4!

In 2023, we’re going to get back to streaming on Twitch, we want to grow our Instagram followers (and our Twitter followers.. provided.. you know.. it doesn’t burn itself to the ground by then…), get out to some more conventions (currently working on Shore Leave Con), and get even more guests on (we already have some great ones lined up for the first few months of the year so far)!

We also want to do a bigger and better job of promoting our side-hustles.. SO.. that being said….

You want some T Shirts?  Check out PCR’s Teepublic shop, and the Somethingcast Teepublic shop!

How about some custom-etched glassware?  Check out Scratch the Surface!

Vinyl for your belongings?  Hatton has you covered at Really Shameless! (He’s working on updating the site but you can email him at reallyshameless@gmail.com and check out his Insta gallery)

You can also check out Hatton’s writings over here and here!

– PCR

This is the last ‘official’ blog before we go on our usual December hiatus, and we’ll usually put up a Seasons Greetings card or something before the year is out, but the way the dates fell left it to me. Rob gave his thanks two weeks ago to all of you, and I think it goes without saying that I also thank each and every one of you for sticking with us over the years.  This summer marks a Decade of Something, which isn’t our official title for it.. but that’s what I’m voting for.

Anyway, the past year, Rob and I revisited some topics, we tried out another ‘Meta’ episode where there was something else going on while we talked, we reviewed a surprising number of horror movies, and tried to figure out what shows make ‘The End’ work, because it is Rob has a closer finger on the pulse of what makes a good choice there. (Behind the curtain, notoriously my picks get listened to the least) We are in a constant conversation about what we can do and what we may want to do and it is so fantastic to have a partner in this that, unless there is a damn good reason not to do something, is willing to live by improv rules and ‘Yes, and…’ with me.

So, to keep this brief, thank you all for being part of the journey. As someone who has always tried to have some outward facing creative thing going on, it’s because there is amazing, uncut, pure, columbian-grade seratonin that runs through your blood when someone tells you that you made them snort with laughter or made them so pissed off about how wrong you are they needed to charge in and correct you even though you still stand by that Gremlins 2 isn’t a good movie even if it is for a good reason.

Thanks for being part of the ride and watch this space for some extra episodes coming soon.

To you and yours, sláinte. We’ll see you at the Christmas Party.
– Hatton

Hey all, PCR here!

We’re closing in on the end of yet another year and, as always, I wanted to thank you.  Those who listen, those who buy our merch, those who became Patrons.. if it wasn’t for you all, James and I would just be two guys talking to each other.

As in years past, we’ll be taking December off for the holidays, but we’ll still have content!  While we’ll be putting a pause on our Patreon content and billing as well as our blogs, we are compiling our favorite episodes of 2022!

Every Tuesday and Friday, we’re going to re-release one of our favorites from the past year and.. who knows.. we might even drop something new along the way, and.. if you’re looking for some swag, we’ll have some new shirts up before the Holidays as well!

It’s been a great year for us, and we’re looking to do even bigger and better things for 2023!

– PCR

I had written about half of a blog about a bunch of video games, but you know what – I’ve done that a lot. So, just to sum up ‘Hatton plays a lot of video games’. There, there you go.

So what will we discuss instead? How about how annoyed I am at video games…

More to the point, I am regularly annoyed at the genres companies put on their games, because they are almost always deeply flawed. My problem is one that has existed for almost as long as gaming has, and that is the definition of genres.

First, I should say, that it is really easy to fall into the ‘super snobby niche’ issues you used to see a lot in music. ‘We’re a doom thrash ice metal blendcore band, but we don’t get into any of the vapor house thunder pudding, that shit’s lame’ You see, when you get into that sort of nerdery, you are saying words that everyone hears as ‘..so you play metal?’

I’m talking about how every game is now every genre to assure when you search for that genre… every game appears. Want a puzzle game? Elden Ring has boxes on crates and hidden keys! PUZZLE! Rogue-like? Well, the new COD features 4 different kinds of bullets that appear randomly.. ROGUE-LIKE! Roleplaying game? In Gotham Knights, you are playing the role of Nightwing! ROLEPLAYING! Need a special skill to get one area? METROIDVANIA!

It’s infuriating and it makes trying to find something new and interesting impossible.

And sadly, there is no way to put this genie back in the bottle without getting into that super niche snobbery, “Yes, I too am a fan of open world voxel non-narrative survival craft games.” and “Single screen retro arcade platform action bubble bouncing dragon games.” But, it would be nice if gaming companies would just put the big definer up front instead of assuming all of their games are all things for all people.

So, until that gets fixed, I’ll be over here enjoying my Tunic a game that is not Souls-Like, and is a love letter to Zelda… so obviously, a Metroidvania game. (It’s also brilliant and you should play it)

I was talking with a friend of mine the other day, and as we were talking about some of the cool things on the internet we’ve found, I realized that there may just be some folks out there that aren’t aware of the trove of weird crap that’s out there.  Now, I understand, those of us of a certain internet vintage are aware – but as we’ve all sort of fallen into the world of social media or Discord, it’s easy to forget that there is an entire universe of just cool crap out on the internet – out there and collected for our use!

So I thought I’d give you a few places you may have never visited, or possibly forgot existed.  Enjoy!

OLD TIMEY RADIO – Let me start with this one, because it is legitimately one of my favorite things on the internet. Back pre-television, radio programs and dramas were the talk of the town. Gunsmoke, Dimension X, General Hospital, the Outer Limits, Sherlock Holmes.. and legitimately hundreds more. Collected and curated, of course some are lost to the history of time, but I spent months just enjoying some of the precursors to modern entertainment – doubly fantastic because of how inappropriate the ads are!  Seriously, a must-check-out.

WORDLE CLONES – Yes.. we all got addicted to Wordle and because of it, we made some dude a millionaire. Go us.  Did you know there are like a gazillion games like this now?  Some are amazing. Some are impossible. Some are stupid. I’ve tried more of them than I care to admit.

WORLD CAMS – Sometimes, you just want to watch another part of the world. Specifically, sometimes I want to have a live-stream of cats on my screen.  Before there was Twitch, before there was MFC, you could just sit and relax and watch the zoo from your desk… and you still can, and it is wonderful.

GEOCITIES – Did you know you can download all of Geocities?  Like.. the whole thing. The place where people built their own website on their own street to talk about how much they loved that one character from HollyOaks, and it is a Torrent file that is shockingly small at 600 or so Gigs.  (A lot of that is because people hotlinked images instead of saving them, so there are ALOT of dead links) — but if you don’t want to have a piece of old internet real estate, you can go visit people that have put the archive of, I repeat, THE WHOLE GEOCITIES.

And lastly…

There are some parts of the internet, the old backwoods of the internet, that are still there.  Zombo.com is still live, and welcome to it. He-Man is still singing 4-Non-Blondes. JODI, one of the strangest websites I’ve ever spent a significant amount of time on – is still live, I still have no idea what it is. NotPron, a game that is, in fact, not pron – is a puzzle game that still gets updates!

Where do you still go visit online? Any cool secrets you’ve found? Let us know in all the usual places.

It feels like I was watching this scene only yesterday

On November 16th, 2021, G4TV was officially relaunched as both a cable channel and a twitch channel.. and I couldn’t have been happier.

Less than 12 months later, the returned G4 is no more.

The fall of the old G4 felt more ‘out with a whimper’…. non-stop airings of Ninja Warrior and Cops, the shows themselves feeling fewer and further between.. but THIS, this version felt different, and yet.. familiar.  Back were shows like X-Play and AOTS.. new shows like Invitation to Party, Ask Donna and Name Your Price joined the ranks, yet still had that ‘old school G4’ feel about their pedigree.  New hosts joined the ranks of returning hosts Kevin Pereira and Adam Sessler, the latter of the two being more ‘occasional host’, but having them on board always felt to me that it was giving the relaunch a legitimacy; a passing of the torch until the newer hosts found their comfortable footing.

And find their footing they did.  Watching AOTS and Vibe Check felt like putting on a forgotten but favorite sweater you had nearly forgotten about… all comfort and familiar while feeling new.  Invitation to Party was just brilliant.  B. Dave Walters brought his A game and, as the consummate DM that he is, brought the A+ game out of the players.   Ask Donna showed Will Neff at his best.  God of Work was a labor of love from Jirard and that passion showed in the sketches.

It wasn’t without rough spots though.  Some shows didn’t stick around…  Boosted, which focused more on the eSports side of things, left the ‘show’ and became a YouTube exclusive.

And then there was “The Frosk Incident”.

Indiana Black, better known as Froskurinn or Frosk, did a segment on X-Play (which, you can watch here..) where she talked about sexism in gaming… and things went off the rails.

Let me be perfectly clear.

Everything she said is 100% correct.

Everything.

Gaming and the gaming industry has a sexism and misogyny problem that, unfortunately, is not going away.  Can it be minimized?  Shunned into the darkness? Yes, but only if WE minimize it and shun it when we see it.

That being said, the trolls came out of the woodwork.  Online harassment and sexist comments blew up on not only Frosk’s, but G4’s socials by those ‘offended’ by her comments.

It was called a “rant”.  A “meltdown”.  “Maybe, in 2022, we be a bit nicer, a bit more self reflective, and we enjoy the fact that people are working hard to make free content for you.   If you don’t like it, don’t watch” was how she ended the segment.. but all mouthbreathers heard was “IF YOU DON’T LIKE IT, DON’T WATCH!” and that became their rallying cry.

Was Frosk the reason for G4’s demise?  Not at all.  Inept management at Comcast not knowing what to do with their talent was the reason for G4’s second demise.. but not if you frequent the internet.  a never-ending number of YouTube videos, blogs, TikToks, articles and the like blame Frosk for G4’s collapse without at all realizing that by blaming her, they’re behaving in exactly the same sexist and misogynistic way she called out in her segment.   It’s unfortunate and wrong, yet not unexpected.  “Fandoms” have become louder and louder in their entitled toxicity against things they don’t like, and this was no exception.

What destroyed G4 was Comcast.  If any proof was needed, consider that more than half of the hosts/writers/producers and creators found out about G4 being cancelled from articles about the cancellation being tweeted out.   How shitty does a company have to be to have employees find out via Tweet they no longer have a job?  And not even BY Tweet.. but reading an article.

Will I miss G4?  100 percent. I loved the content they created.  Hell, we even got mentioned on Vibe Check (no.. really!  The story of how and why is for another day…).

My sincere hope is that the amazing people from G4, on both sides of the camera, reconnect in some way in the near future.. be it Twitch, YouTube.. whatever.  The cast and crew are far too talented to NOT be working with each other.

G4 may be gone again, but it will not be forgotten.

– PCR

Does that say ‘Predictive Algorithms’?

Yes it does. You see, when you are an old internet hand like myself, you’ve seen a few generations of how material is fed to you.  Traditionally, forums, bulletin board systems, usenet, even LiveJournal would feed you data in a very organized fashion… by date and time. You stopped reading at 6pm last night, so now you can go look and read everything up until that point… and then you’re done. Do that once or twice a day and you have a source of balanced internet…

Then someone had the great idea that if you show people things out of order – they don’t know when to stop reading…. and it worked. Hell, if you throw in the occasional thing they have already seen, you can get them to stay even longer because that means you can feed them more advertising. Then, someone thought, what if we shorten the amount of content so they can absorb EVEN MORE!  So now long form posts turned into Tweets. Youtube videos turned into Vines. Vines turned into Tiktoks. I, personally, find no joy in them, but if someone shows me something very funny.. I can even get caught in scrolling through 10 or 20 before I realize I am not enjoying it.

The sad thing is, you can’t put this genie back in the bottle. Video sites predict which videos you want to see, and knows the right time to show you a video you saw already and liked so you watch it again. News sites show you the information that you interact with, using the old Howard Stern truism ‘The people that like him listen an hour, the people that hate him listen for two’ — so it feeds you opposition to enhance your engagement.

What’s your point, Hatton? 

Would you believe it’s simply that this is a perfect place to bitch about how the modern internet is built on giant companies feeding you unending redundant oppositional information in an attempt to keep you angrily watching advertisements and it makes me nostalgic for days where I could just see what’s happened since 6pm last night? And that this whole thing was spawned off the fact that Youtube won’t allow me to NOT watch ‘Shorts’ which are just another variety of staccato 30 second lipsync videos and it’s driving me nuts?

That’s my point. I’m old and grumpy and miss the old wild west internet…. and if you do too, please sign our guest book below and join the Something Podcast Webring brought to you by Angelfire.

Yes, I know…  “Sports???”

We don’t delve into Sports here very often (if really at all) as Hatton isn’t much of a sports person (no judgement, just stating facts), but I myself have been a Steelers fan since Bradshaw.. through the good and the bad.. and when it comes to the current season… I have thoughts….

Currently the Steelers are 1-3… 0-2 at home (terrible), 1-2 on the road, and 0-1 in their Division.  The Patriots and Raiders are just as bad with only the Texans worse currently.

Recently, the Steelers named Kenny Pickett as the starter after a very dubious start to the season by Mitch Trubisky.  Is Pickett the answer?  In the short term, he kind of has to be as Trubisky isn’t and never was going to be the answer.  The unfortunate thing is the team just came out of 18 years of Big Ben (which, not-so-coincidentally is 18 years of non-losing seasons), and that is a tough act to follow.  An act that almost never happens without some bumps in the road.

The Steelers have always been a “Draft and Develop” sort of team, especially over the past 18 years.. bringing in talent, letting them get reps and practice in, and not just throwing them to the wolves.  I’m sure they would have loved for Trubisky to hold his own better and let Pickett grow into the role, but desperate times call for desperate measures… so the Kenny Pickett era has officially begun.  Will he be the long term answer?  Possibly, but having lived through the Bubby Brister/Kordell Stewart/Neil O’Donnell/Tommy Maddox eras… it’s difficult to get your hopes up off of his performance so far.  The team’s defense isn’t what it used to be (I mean.. when you lose Polamalu.. what defense will be?), even factoring a healthy T.J. Watt, and the offensive line has been suspect for a few years now which means Pickett is going to have to keep his head on a swivel more than normal.

My prediction?  As much as I’d love to say Pickett grows into the role super fast and the team manages to finish above .500, I fear their “Winning Season” Streak comes to an end this year as they finish 7-9 (at best) and miss the playoffs.

Did you know I have a Saints Row tattoo?

I do – and I have a rule about any of my video game tattoos, and that is I’m allowed to buy games before they go on discount if I have something grafted on my body from them.  So when a new Final Fantasy comes out, a new Portal game, Tron, Bubble Bobble, etc… I’m allowed because I’ve got them inked into my leg.

Do you know what game I don’t own? The new Saints Row game, and that’s because the reviews have been beyond ‘less than stellar’ and moved into ‘godawful bad’.  It sucks, because Saints Row is, as proven by the winged fleur de lis on my leg, one of my favorite franchises of all time, but sadly, when it comes to games that were cutting teeth on edgy sarcasm and hysterical inappropriateness.. you can never go to Steelport again.

So what’s left in 2022 if I don’t have Saints Row to look forward to anymore? Aside from the impending heat death of the universe, here are some of the games slated for 2022 releases I have interest in… it’s a crapshoot if they come out in the next three months though.

HARVESTELLA – Oh, hello there Final Fanta-Stardew Valley.  I expect you to suck hours away from me with your gorgeous seasonal landscapes and, guaranteed, untold secrets that can only be found on weird days of the year when the moon is in the proper phase because Squeenix likes its fans rabid.

GOTHAM KNIGHTS – I think people treat Arkham Knight too harshly. The driving and missle parts of the game were UTTERLY out of place, but they were kinda fun. So now, I get to play as Nightwing, Robin, Batgirl, Batwoman, Batmutt, ManBat, BatBat, and Azrael?  Hells yes, albeit there is no reason to buy this game day one. It will be a buggy mess and 6 months GOTY edition will be a much better game.

GOD OF WAR: RAGNAROK – The God of War games were never important to me — but be damned if the 2018 relaunch didn’t help me get through the opening fears of the pandemic.  My fingers hurt from killing angels and birds and boating from one part of the world to the other, which was exactly the distraction I needed. I hope this game can live up to the hype.

MARVEL’S MIDNIGHT SUNS – I kinda don’t expect this game to come out on time… and if it does, I am super concerned about it being good.  Marvel’s been doing better than its previous world of ‘MATCH 3, BUT WITH SILVER SURFER’ gimmicks… and the line-up in this game feels shockingly wide.  Turn-base Tactical Comic Game where I can play as Nico from Runaways… plug it into my veins.

So what games are left in the year that you want to see!  Let us know!

Hey all, PCR here.

So, I recently re-activated my Netflix account to catch up on some things I hadn’t seen yet, and one of those things was Season 4 of Stranger Things, and while I was a huge fan of the show when it started, the luster has worn a bit for me… to the point that Season 4 in general was…’meh’.

Don’t get me wrong, the Eddie stuff was cool, and the backstory into 1 was intriguing, I felt too disassociated from the whole thing to really care too much.

Season 3 came out in July of 2019, and Season 4 was finally released in May of 2022, nearly 20 months later.  During that time, some of the kids had Walt-ian growth spurts while others stayed looking remarkably similar.  Maybe it’s just me, and it’s taking more to ‘wow’ me as I get older, but the main thing I walked away from Season 4 with was “Wow, episodes are a lot longer…”.

My question to The Somethings is… ‘How long is too long’?  How long can shows (and movies) push between seasons (and sequels) and still have us give as much of a shit as they hope we will?

Let’s look at some other notable time delays…

Stranger Things S4 – 20 months

Westworld S4 – 25 months

Ghostbusters to GBII – 5 years

Heroes : Reborn – 5 years

GBII to GB Afterlife – 32 Years

XFiles – 14 years after original TV finale

Twin Peaks S3 – 26 years

What are some of YOUR favorite TV Shows or Movies that have had extended time between seasons/sequels?  We want to know!

ALSO!

Want to help support our show?  Our Patreon is live once more!  New tiers!  New content!  Early access!  Go check it out and help us bring you even more great stuff!

– PCR