Tag: 2023

Have you ever seen patterns where there weren’t any?  Have you ever found some truth in the noise and were certain you could change the world? What if you also were a wacky scientist who can only act by breathing heavy?  Oh, and also the world might be ending.. maybe..

So, none of these questions are impossible in the world of Knowing or KNOW1NG if you pay attention to the advertisements, a Nic Cage vehicle that can’t help but zig zag across the map all higgildy-piggildy and lets you hang along for the ride.

Settle in as the Somethings dissect a movie that sits somewhere between 2012 and an Asylum version of 2012.

Ok, here we go… (but read in a Nic Cage voice)

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The Wheel is back.  The Wheel? You ask. Yes, the completely real creation of Swedish technology that determines what we are doing on any given episode.

..and this time it brought a guest!

Imagine the Somethings each get just one chance to pitch something, while the top CEO with all of the big spending dollars is forced to listen to them. One of them will get bankrolled to have their idea go to market. The other.. well, the other got that free elevator ride.

This week’s CEO Mogul Du Jour is the fantabulous Vanessa Guerrero.  You may have seen her on G4, or know her from Game Grumps – or maybe you have checked out her podcast Popcorn & Pixels (and if not, you should!)

Who is going to the top floor? Only one way to find out…

Ok, here we girl from ipanima…

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Audio Blog

Hey all – Hatton here.

Well, the world is talking about the dying gasp that is Twit… ahem.. X. So I thought I would run through a few ideas I’ve had recently that would be better names we could use instead of X to X-eeting.. Skexeet… Xavier-eeting people– better names for Twitter and why.

First let’s work with the assumption that we MUST change Twitter. We can invent some farfetched reason like we have a small peepee and can’t help but cram our greedy fingers into everything, or that we’re doing our best to sink the ship to try and recoup our lost millions somehow. Off the top of head. Fact is, doesn’t matter why.. we’re changing that blue bird of happiness.

Let’s start simple.

What if we called them Shawties?

The caveat is that you can only use them on someone’s birthday.

You’re welcome.

We could go fancy, and try to bring us back to a posher time and refer to them as Missives. A word originating in mid 1500s France – instead of our Tweetdeck being laden with the sale of plummeting NFTs and the dumbfuck opinions of anyone with a phone.. well now we can receive a missive, which will, of course, provide you with a bevvy of financial opportunities for fungible items in an exciting speculative market and give you the regular thoughts of the assinity of the proletariat as they send missives hither and yon.

Another short idea – we could just call it Reddit.. by next year that name will likely be just as available.

Next, I’d like to reach back just a little while ago on the internet, a trend you still see today although not as much. When the land grab for domains got hot, a lot of start ups couldn’t get normal uncopyrightable words, so they made their own. JOOMLA, XOBNO, HULU, SKYPE or they removed expensive vowels: BUTLR, FLICKR, GRINDR, SCRIBD.. hell, even Twitter was almost TWTTR — but now that we’re assuredly changing the way we TWT, why not go all in. No vowels. Not even in your missives. What will we call these.. I don’t care, I just don’t want vowels, so lets go with DPSHT.

Finally, since X is here til the Chapter 11 filings, we can praise Elon for one thing. Someone that works his puppet thoughts realized that with the advent of horrible short form video (a rant for another day) a shorter name saves people time. By X-ing, you’re saving yourself a fraction of a fraction of a second over Tweeeeeeeeeeeting, each time you say it. Efficiency is the name of the game, so we’re going to go one finally step further.

Instead of X’ing… instead of Tweeting… the best thing we can do is just not talk about them at all. Send a text message instead. Except on birthdays. Then we Shawty.

What is a ‘pop’?

In professional wrestling terms, it’s the moment the crowd goes nuts. Maybe they’re cheering – maybe they’re booing, but there is a moment in a movie where the audience is so emotionally invested they can’t help but be there.

We’re talking about those moments.. but not alone! We are joined by long time SomethingFriend, Tim Stevens. You may know Tim from his time writing for any number of fantastic websites about the world of comics and pop culture. These days you can find him on TheSpool.net as well as The Wealth of Geeks. He’s also one bad shut yo mouth.

You ready to laugh? Ready to cheer? Ready to catch the ball to win the big game? Prepared to listen to a podcast you can’t help, but scream at?

Ok, here we OOOOoooh!

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In an ironic twist, we End the month, not with The End… but… The Beginning!

Now, this may confuse some of you – but it really shouldn’t, it isn’t that hard of a concept – previously we would talk about the last episodes of shows, and guess what, now we’re going to talk about the beginning of them. The End will still be around when it is relevant, but we have some great ideas for this new take on what we were doing.

We’re starting with a show that made millions look to the sky and wonder, ‘…weather balloon?’ – The X-Files.  And, as you will hear, there is no possible way we could have done an episode on The X-Files without the resident X-pert on X-Things, the Scully to Hatton’s Mulder, making her Somethingcast debut Brittany!

So – does the start of the X-Files still smoke or is it just a cover up?  Find out on the debut of The Beginning: X-Files

The Truth’s Ok, here we go!

Full Episode

Audio Blog

Lets take a moment and look at the internet.

With the Five Nights At Freddie’s movie coming out soon, with a couple other animatronic monster movies in its wake (The Banana Splits, Willy’s Wonderland) we can find certain internet pop culture moments getting their big budget day in the sun. A game made famous, primarily, streamer content isn’t the first time a ‘meme’ made big bucks. You only need look back at Slenderman, a creation of the Something Awful forum, the Netflix game show ‘Is It Cake?’, and ‘Shit my Dad Says!’ a sitcom based on a series of tweets.

What if though, the movie world was pilfering from the internet in 2001 instead? What old memes could we have seen?

HAMSTER DANCE: THE MOVIE – Before the Emoji Movie, we had an animated gif of a dancing hamster to a tune from Robin Hood. If Hollywood had been aware then, perhaps we could be living with that stupid song stuck in our head for the rest of our lives.
Here… enjoy it

MR T ATE MY BALLS – Out of any meme I remember very clearly in my early internetting, this is the one that is shockingly forgotten. Why was there a cartoon of Mr. T saying ‘I Pity The Fool Who Don’t Like Balls’? Look, I don’t know, everyone just got online and we were just figuring things out. That said, in an alternate timeline there is a movie about a man on the hunt for balls that nobody can stop.. that man.. well, you get it.

HOMESTARRUNNER PRESENTS: STRONG-BAD’S MOVIE FOR REALLY COOL GUYS, NOT YOU – Let’s finish up on the movie that I kinda still want. The Brothers Chap, braintrust to the Homestar Runner Universe are literally everyone’s friend that did cartoons, but not the annoying one that just did dots… like legitimate cartoons that made you laugh, had you quoting, and had an entire legion of people sitting every week waiting for StrongBad’s new email. I’d watch this tv show now. Hell, I’d Kickstart this movie. I’d try the MetaVerse if I was told Homestar was there.

Shockingly, the Brothers Chap worked with Disney for years based on their internet fame, and somehow the Mouse still doesn’t own Trogdor.. so there is still hope. No matter what, it’s Dot Com!

What internet memes that circulated on Geocities are still ripe for the entertainment plucking? Sound off in all the places.

The Wheel has brought us together again – and on this completely real wheel that spins and dictates our topic, what do we get this week?

Why, conveniently it follows in our X’iversary with us pitting two teams of the mightiest mutants against each other. That’s right, the Somethings are picking their X-TEAM and you get to decide who the winner is.

Will it be Hatton’s Big Brain Drama Factory? Or Rob’s Crunchy Family Throwdown?  These are not official names, but we will be optioning the movie rights.  Until then, settle in and pick which team you think X gon give it to on The Wheel: Vs. X-Men

Ok, here we go, bub.

Full Episode

Audio Blog

Hey Somethings, PCR here.

So, I recently ended up watching “The Meg” and, I went into it wanting to like it more than I did.  Afterwards, I was left sitting there thinking about many of the shark movies I’ve seen, and, with Shark Week approaching, I decided to touch on 3 of them specifically.  Let’s start with the one I already mentioned..

The Meg

The concept of “how” was actually pretty original… there’s a section of ocean BELOW the deepest section of the Mariana Trench, separated by super, super cold water.  They find things down there that have never been discovered, and inadvertently bring something back up through it.  The movie does give you some twists, but honestly, they’re not anything we haven’t seen from other shark movies.. just… bigger.  The CGI wasn’t the worst I’ve seen, but, the story hinged on the fact that the shark was the size of a skyscraper.  Once that sinks in, you’re really just in it to hear Jason Statham say “megalodon” over and over.

Jaws

This is pretty much where it all started, and, the most realistic of the 3 I’ll talk about.   Great White Shark wreaks havoc on an idyllic town’s beach.  Sure the shark is ‘big’, but still within the realm of realism.  It’s also filmed in a ‘realistic’ way.. like.. all that shit could happen.. which made it’s impact that much stronger.  Sure, other shark movies have taken concepts and paid homage to Spielberg’s classic, and it’s well earned.

Deep Blue Sea

This movie is kind of a guilt pleasure of mine.  It has one scene of the worst CGI scenes I’ve seen in a shark movie, but the cast is amazing.  Sam Jackson, LL Cool J, Thomas Jane, Saffron Burrows, Michael Rapaport… how can it NOT be fun?  Are there silly parts in it?  Absolutely.  Is it still a fun movie with an original twist?  To me.. yes.  Most other shark movies lean into the shark being ‘huge’, or ‘evil’.  This one made them smarter, and that made all the difference.

How about you Somethings?  What are some of YOUR favorite shark movies?  Sound off in our socials and let us know

-PCR

Audio Blog

First off, if you haven’t been paying attention to what’s been going on with our Patreon – we recently closed it down. Now, one of the things they got was an audio version of our Friday Blog on their feed.

We thought it was only fair to put that live up on the site for everyone now, so you can expect to hear from Rob and myself a little bit more over the month.

This week though, with the recent explosions of Reddit and Twitter, I thought I would talk about some of the modern problems I’m having with social media. Now, some of this comes from a guy who used to read Fidonet on local BBS’s, kept up with his Usenet feed, hung out on IRC, and made some of my longest internet friends on forums. I’m clearly not anti-social media… but…

The new crop of social media that are going to try and fill in the gap left in the financial sinkhole of Twitter and the growing corporatization of Reddit are a problem. A site like Threads, owned by Team Zuckerberg, has made it abundantly clear they don’t want you using a desktop computer, much like the restrictions they put on Instagram.. and do you know why? I assure you it isn’t because you *can’t* view the data on a computer, but that they don’t want you to.

On my computer I have adblockers, anti-trackers, and ways to make the data I receive cleaner. They don’t want that – they want, and I am in no way being hyperbolic here, camera control to make sure you’re engaging with the product, no way to stop ads, and no ability to adjust the way the data is viewed. They have that right, too, but I can say for certain I’ll never use any service like it.

Next is the content limitations. All of these companies want the ability to have high-end advertisers and you know what advertisers from big brands don’t like? …sex. For a prime example of how that story goes, go read up on a little thing called TUMBLR. If you allow sex work on your platform, you are drawing a line in the sand that you accept you won’t be getting that Pepsi sponsorship. Hell, even OnlyFans, the site that is synonymous with modern pornography, tried to ditch sex until it realized that was the entirety of its userbase.

So what do we do? Sadly, we aren’t going to go back to a world of forums when we’ve been shhown places we can talk to *everyone* since MySpace. So we will have to wade through the muck of places like Threads and Hive until a better option comes along. I hope it is something like Mastodon or Lemmy that allows people to find their tribe… but they have a long way to go and they’re facing down the diamond encrusted barrels of Google and Meta.

That said, you can find us on Threads @somethingcast, but Rob handles that stuff because it makes me feel gross.

What are you using? Sound off in all the places – and we’ll see you next week.

We did it. We hit 10 Years.

A decade of Movies. Listicles. Bad impressions. Mysteries. Special Guests.

And yet somehow, in all of that, we’ve never talked directly about Science Fiction movies… like… what? How is that? It’s weird, isn’t it? Like it feels like a big miss. We looked through the episodes and – nope – no sci-fi.  So we did it. Seemed like a great way to celebrate ten years.

This episode is broken down a little different. Mostly because I included the Patreon stuff to let you all know that we are, for now, closing down the Patreon. We thank those that joined in on it, but to put our energies into other things, some of which you’ll hear during the show, we needed to trim somewhere.  Please note – if you are Patreon Member, your payment was cancelled for July, but we wanted to make sure you got to hear the ‘full unedit’ cut of the episode.

So, thank you all for being with us for these last ten years, and lets start the next 10 right.

Ready?  Well ok, here we go… to SPACE!

Full Episode