The SomethingSomethingCast

Hey Somethings!

A few weeks ago, Hatton posted some games still to come in 2022 that he’s looking forward to and, although my ‘wish list’ goes beyond the end of the calendar year, here’s a list of games I’m really chomping at the bit to get when they release…

Need For Speed : Unbound

We’re going big right out of the gate.  While some of the NFS games feel like they never get out of second gear, I’ve always been a sucker for them.. and with Unbound hitting on Dec. 2nd, I won’t have to rev the engine too much longer.  Cell-shaded graphics, comic book-like overlays and effects, Criterion.. my clutch foot is tingling with anticipation.

Sons of the Forest

The original “The Forest” game was one of the most fun AND terrifying games I’ve played in recent memory, and the ending is setting the bar high for what the sequel will bring.  It’s been pushed back until Feb ’23, but based on how awesome the first one was, I’m willing to have patience to get this one in my games library.

Bloodlines 2

The OG Bloodlines was brilliant IMO.  It gave you the feel of the TTRPG which, for an atmospheric game world like VtM with it’s many and varied Clans, is no small task.. so when Bloodlines 2 was announced, I was over the moon.  I had tried Bloodhunt (a VtM licensed Battle Royale game) but it didn’t feed the beast in the way I hoped.  With Bloodlines 2 “still in development” after a much postponed 2021 release date, I just hope I don’t end up in torpor before the release.

Warhammer 40k MMO

A pipe dream, I know.. but for YEARS (ever since I stopped playing WoW after Mists of Pandaria..) I’ve been praying… Praying to the Emperor of Man, Khorne, Kaela Mensha Khaine… I didn’t care WHO brought me one.. but I wanted one.  And no, I’m not talking about ‘Eternal Crusade’ or ‘Dark Millennium’.  A GOOD,  FUN, well  thought  out  MMO.  Is  that  too  much  to  ask?  I  guess  so…

What games are YOU looking forward to?  Hit us up on our socials and let us know!

– PCR

Are you a Keaton fan? What about a Clooney fan? Do you like your Gotham neon and campy or dark and totally not Chicago?

Well, the Somethings know a bit about Martha’s Baby Boy and they are going to settle in and discuss who the best Bat that ever donned the cowl.  Let’s be clear, some of their decisions may surprise you… and each other.

So, Mr. Wayne, sit near the fire and enjoy the warmth as the Somethings watch the world burn.

Ok, BIFF here we KA-POW! go!

Full Episode

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.

First, they were nostalgia. Then, they were growing up. After that, they were figuring things out. Now… well, now it’s really just gone all to hell, hasn’t it?!

The kids of Hawkins have gone on another of their wacky adventures this past year and the Somethings weren’t going to miss out on a chance to get to talk about Vecna, the Hellfire Club, and whether or not this season’s finale did anything to motivate us towards seeing the end.

So, buckle in, we’re turning this one up to Eleven…. which is the funniest thing I’ll write all day. It’s time for THE END – STRANGER THINGS : SEASON 4!

Full Episode

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

Three people went off into the Burkettsville woods, and weren’t heard from again… this isn’t their story.
A bunch of other people went off into the woods to take a tour about the people that were never heard from again, which does kind of infer they were heard from again, albeit unintentionally, and now there are tour groups for them and they are apparently cult icons to weiros and documentarians…. this is sort of their story….

Two podcasters decided to sit down and watch Blair Witch 2: Book of Shadows and tell you what they thought – this is most certainly their story.

So settle in and throw your map into the river – it’s Something in Review: Blair Witch 2

Ok, here we g-g-g-g-hoooost!

Full Episode

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.

The again for The Wheel, the machine that tells us what we’re doing and how – and boy howdy does it hit us with the big’uns tonight.

In this corner – hailing from deepest darkest Ohio…
In this corner – the European with the meanest bite…
In this corner – a milkdud from the internet…
In this corner – from the wetlands of Scotland…
In this corner – from the mountains of America…
In this corner – from my former field of goats…
In this corner – from that one street nobody drove down…
In this corner – from Planet Arrakhis…
In this corner – from Montauk…. no, seriously… Montauk
In this corner – from the SomethingSomethingcast Studio…

Ok, LET’S GET READY TO RUMMMBLLLE!

Full Episode

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.

Not all horror movies are created equal… you see, some movies are amazing because they are frigging amazing. Some are amazing because they are bad. Some are just……. bad.

We’re talking about all of them, because none of those headers quite describes ‘lame’.  What is a lame movie? Is it stupid? Does it have a single factor that makes it worse than another? Is it just boring?  Hatton and PCR get into it about what precisely makes a piece of entertainment lame and then tell you their choices.

Join us as we start SomethingSpooktober with a horrorpalooza for the ages!

Ok, here we boo!

Full Episode