decipher SciFi : the show about how and why

Spaaaaace Clouds in space…? Microsoft Azure Space and Azure Orbital. Making space cheaper and more accessible with satcomm as a service. VR The new Oculus Quest. Past predictions. Pulling the VR market in the direction of affordability? Pandemic winter VR. Hating Facebook while embracing their VR product. Getting better at not getting sick. Experiences of unreality. Conferencing Virtual chewing noises. Missing irl conference-going. It’s like a vacation for adult nerds! Food Food preservation. Preserved dairy variations by latitude. Jerky! Appreciating controlled rot. Earthworm jerky. Roasted grasshoppers! About Chapulines: Wikipedia Zebra vs Horses: Animal Domestication by CGP Grey: YouTube Support the show!

AI everything Creating a thinking, feeling artificial intelligence to do really important things for humanity like… sorting through your e-mail. N-dimensional AI chess. Rapid takeoff scenarios. Personal Assistants Natural language processing developments. The rise of proactive digital personal assistants. Predictive local, personal information. Digital relationship Virtual aural closeness. Presence and audio AR. Developments in form factor, interface, and functionality. Understanding the acoustics of spaces, materials, and your biology. Room mapping. Love, infinite attention, and generosity. The Forehead Feeling the heartbreak, right in the forehead. Her forehead scene: YouTube Support the show!

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Forgetability The valley of forgetability (The Core) between science-respecting sci-fi (e.g. Arrival) and totally bonkers nonsense (e.g. Jupiter Ascending). Space shuttle Landing the “flying brick.” Bird navigation Magnetite beaks. The possibility of quantum eyeball magnetic navigation HUDs. Corvid appreciation. Why birds don’t all fly into our windows and our eyeballs. Pacemakers Keeping your heart on-rhythm. Not as immediate a death sentence as portrayed. Earth’s outer core The absurd energies in the spinning of Earth’s core - a ball of iron the size of Mars, spinning a thousand miles an hour That’s a whole lot of energy. If it doesn’t sound like much, let’s convert it to megatons: it’s the equivalent energy of five trillion one megaton bombs going off. Phil Plait on the spinning outer core Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy Review of The Core: BadAstronomy.com Support the show!

Clouds in episode image from “Storm Clouds” by Albert Bierstadt/The White House Historical Association CC-O @ Wikipedia Waffles Belgian Waffle formula Tasty waffles! Stank waffles! With lots of syrup! Solving food problems with casseroles. Gravy! VR Marveling at the Oculus Quest two 25% price drop from the last generation. Hating Facebook. Realizing the separateness of AR and VR development, even within companies working on both at the same time (Facebook). Can/will AR and VR converge and become ubiquitous? WFH Working from home. Surprisingly long hikes and arachnid attacks. Tiny child legs and tiny child wills. Venus Life on venus? The dense, deep, permanent nature of the Venusian cloud layer. The possible effect on drake equation. Looking forward to balloon probes in the Venusian atmosphere. Ocean data Ocean-floor data centers. The cost of infrastructure and cooling vs the cost of real estate. The value of removing humans from the environment because we’re so loud and clumsy and moist. Review: We do not recommend the $299 Oculus Quest 2 as your next VR system: Ars Technica Oculus Quest 2: Oculus.com Phosphine gas in the cloud decks of Venus: Nature Astronomy Chemical that shouldn’t be there spotted in Venus’ atmosphere: Ars Technica Microsoft declares its underwater data center test was a success: Ars Technica Support the show!

Happy 5-year anniversary whoooooo 🥳🎉 Subluminal interstellar travel Accelerating for half of the ride, and braking for the other half. The advantage of avoiding squishy human cargo for high acceleration. The difference between the Alucard and the Alcubierre drive technologies (hint: a miserable pile of secrets). Special floaty physics, magnets on your feet, and fake karate. Exoplanets Exploring the growing options for Earth-like life in the solar-system. Kepler 22b. Where did the megafauna go? Exogestation - growing babies on alien soil. Meat stuff Sourcing and preparing rat meat. Snails. Face/Off and changing your identity. Exoplanet Exploration - Planets Beyond our Solar System: NASA Support the show!

“Banana” image used in featured image with our brains by nicubunu CC-0 Josh, recently Made a strong showing on the recent Saving Private Ryan episode over at LSG Media. Real human stuff in between the dick and fart jokes. Teledildonics Tales of coupled internet-connected sex toys are way up! Hooray for free and open source teledildonics at buttplug.io. Nuclear things Making long-lived diamond nuclear batteries from spent nuclear fuel. The banana equivalent dose of radiation. The trouble with battery-tech press releases. Eating enough grapes to give you superpowers. Buttplug archaeology. Tongue twisters. Forever-vibrating mummies and the Silurian hypothesis. Simulations The major leap in tech in the new MS Flight Simulator. Taking the fun out of games by making them rigorous simulations. The value of process simulations when the real thing is expensive or dangerous. Going all Ender’s Game on actual military simulations with Close Combat. Buying military might with lots of money. Tabletop RPGs Missing the humans-at-a-table element during the pandemic. Appreciating how much fun we had with Liam in our Mirror RPG playthrough (parts I, II, and III). And catching Josh 100% on the hook to GM for the podcast again in the future! Hooray! Saving Private Ryan w/ Josh: LSG Media The X-Files Podcast /w Josh: LSG Media Buttplug: an open-source standards and software project for controlling intimate hardware: Buttplug.io Strapped Into A Sinking Helicopter (with U.S. Marines) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube Support the show!

Production Costly! The costs of vising the wreck twelve times for research and footage, not to mention the cost of the film production overall. The extreme profitability of this film and James Cameron in general. Classism First, second, and third class on the same ship. Titans of industry. Runaway capitalism. The class divide and point of view before The Great War. The modern “royalty” by virtue of their wealth. Technology The pace of technological development in industries, especially intercontinental travel by steamship. Comparing the early 1900s to other periods of technological progress like the 1980s and 1990. Noting the nature of the automobiles in the film: literally the design of a “horseless carriage.” The cutting-edge wireless technology aboard the ship. The ship Three engines! Of two varieties. Steam-driven piston engines and steam-driven a turbine. Note: you cannot reverse a turbine. Peak power: 46,000 horsepower. 600 tons of coal daily. An anecdote about Mr. Diesel. A collection of small problems The nature of many disasters, probably including Titanic: a series of small problems, adding up to a catastrophic failure under the rigt (wrong) circumstances. Rich people hogging the Marconi wireless. Out of date lifeboat regulations. Loading lifeboats (badly). The reality of “women and children first.” Avoiding chaos until it’s too late. Judgements The inquiries from shortly after the event, and the great surprise you may experience when realizing that the company men consistently pushed blame back up the chain of command. Modern evidence changing our conception over time. Actually ultimately coming to the consensus that this particular ship on this particular voyage was mostly operated in a way that was totally normal in almost all respects and simply got very unlucky. All told, it does seem that Titanic was really really well-engineered and did remarkably well under the circumstances. [4K,60Fps,Colorized] Titanic, First and Last Voyage, April 1912 AI Recovery, added sound: YouTube RMS Titanic Survivors True Accounts of The Sinking: YouTube RMS Titanic: Fascinating Engineering Facts by the Engingeering Guy: YouTube Titanic - Alternate Ending: YouTube Support the show!

Fawkes mask in post image Multipainkiller Studio CC-BY Prosthetics Proactive prostheses in our future? Recognizing that we routinely do this with major joints, and with for a full cyberpunk limb-improvement future. Big brother etc Machine learning facial recognition. Fawkes machine learning facial image “cloaking.” The possible value of poisoned data sets. Placing individual bricks in the wall that is our ability be private and protect our data. Google correlating diarrhea. Emulation Finding a use for an old PlayStation Portable. RetroArch. The difficulty of old games and the power of limiting your options. Our website Our first outside code contribution! And just thanks to Elad Avron and Hugh Fisher 😄! Fawkes Image 'Cloaking' for Personal Privacy: Chicago.edu Fawkes: Protecting Personal Privacy against Unauthorized Deep Learning Models (USENIX Security 2020): YouTube Support the show!

Fear of mutation Our recent X-Men. Irl post-war nuclear anxieties. More mutant panic and more mutant supremacy bad guys. Irradiating Earth Not enough to make superpowers, but we sure did irradiate a lot. The clear mark of human civilization in the geological record. Past discussions of the Silurian Hypothesis. Neanderthal interactions 2010 Neanderthal DNA news and the possibility of this informing the film. Extincting things more by accident than on purpose in pre-agricultural times. Consistent neanderthal pronunciation consistency issues. The plan(s) Causing global nuclear war so you can… rule over the ashes? At least the Magneto version of the plan didn’t destroy infrastructure. Powers The energy levels required for useful destructive resonance as a superpower. Brown-noting your enemies in combat. Once more determining that functional immortality is the best power that w actually want. Submarining Fitting nuclear submarines in your megayacht. Ice floes vs icebergs vs glaciers. Where to get the best ice for your drinks. How I Boarded a US NAVY NUCLEAR SUBMARINE in the Arctic (ICEX 2020) by Smarter Every Day: YouTube Boarding a US NAVY NUCLEAR SUBMARINE in the Arctic by Smarter Every Day: YouTube What if We Nuke a City? by Kurtzgesagt: YouTube Support the show!

3D tracking Removing the manual work of 3d tracking in video production. CamTrackAR. Smartphone camera software processing innovations. Making creative tools more widely available. Grousing about Adobe’s overwhelming market-share and user-hostile subscription model. Hoping for a shift. Weather AI Dark Sky, the honestly best of all weather apps, was bought by Apple and have shut down their Android app. It is a sad day. Open government weather data APIs enabling innovation. Machine learning weather models. Hyper-local extrapolation and push notifications. Weather forecasting/reporting as a demonstration of probabilities. Website search We took the bullet for our website visitors and implemented a site search on DecipherMedia.tv in JavaScript! The result: we still do not enjoy JavaScript. But we do have search! Future functionality improvements. Here is our internal documentation. And a reminder that our whole site is open source and available on GitLab! Doom on everything Our continuing fascination in seeing Doom on more things. And the less it makes sense, the better! Doom on Windows 95 in Minecraft, because why not. Game feel Game feel the book. Creating a satisfying input/response loop when all you’re really doing is mashing buttons. Vlambeer on mobile game “juice.” The relative difficulty of providing good “feel” on mobile games with a uniformly smooth display as an input device. Putting overtime into the design of basic repetitive game mechanics, e.g. Mario or God of War. New frontiers in game feel. Game programming for kids A wonderful, simple, directly productive introduction to core concepts: Scratch! Proud parent moments. Jesus news Apparently The Passion is getting a sequel? The wackiness of ecclesiastical minutiae. Discovering more schisms in Christianity. CamTrackAR: Apple App Store DecipherMedia Site Search: DecipherMedia.tv You Can Now Play DOOM on a Windows 95 PC Inside Minecraft: InterestingEngineering.com Game Feel: GameFeel.com Vlambeer - 'The art of screenshake': YouTube Game Feel: Why Your Death Animation Sucks: YouTube Scratch - Imagine, Program, Share: MIT.edu Support the show!

Comic book movies X-Men as the dawn of comic book blockbuster cinema. The un-comicbook-ness of previous Marvel adaptations like Blade and Punisher. X-Men as the gateway drug to the language of comic book storytelling. Perfect casting Patrick Steward and Huge Jackedman. Superhero physique Belgian Blue musclecow Roby GFDL Blockbuster budgets and making getting swole your full-time job. Kumail Nanjiani and Rob Mcelhenney being honest. Muscle cows and muscle dogs Look, it’s not that hard. All you need to do is lift weights six days a week, stop drinking alcohol, don’t eat anything after 7pm, don’t eat any carbs or sugar at all, in fact just don’t eat anything you like, get the personal trainer from Magic Mike, sleep nine hours a night, run three miles a day, and have a studio pay for the whole thing over a six to seven month span. I don’t know why everyone’s not doing this. It’s a super realistic lifestyle and an appropriate body image to compare oneself to. #hollywood -@robmcelhenney Mutation Mutations: usually do nothing or are bad. But also sometimes are good! Exploring the high variance in mutations in the world of X-Men. Picking the best X-Men power: raw force production vs longevity. Wolverines The honey badger of the north! What happens when everything else gets his by lightning Lichtenberg figures. Making puberty even more awkward. New-mutant death rates. Norwegian reindeer mass lightning death. How Lightning Can Kill 300 Reindeer With One Strike: Wired The Ultimate Warrior Being Crazy: YouTube Support the show!

Hacking The reality of most hacking: social engineering. Hackers vs Sneakers. The 90s as the best period for hacking in fiction, back when people understood even less how computers worked. A review of Hacking in media. Free Software Free as in speech, free as in beer, etc. Freedom-respecting social network alternatives and the dream of critical mass. Mastodon. How the USGS uses Twitter data to track earthquakes. The impossibility of competing with YouTube. Appreciating Free software and open source and collaboration. Unicode things hooray Ranting about a user experience failure with Instacart. Text encoding, Unicode, emoji, and non-Latin writing systems. Emoji standardization. Lesbian emoji activism and the new beaver emoji! Tattoos Stephen Wolfram and Arrival Heptapod logogram creation. Ravens. Figuring out how to spell “Bomberman” in Heptatpod. RPGs Dungeons and Dragons is fun! The positives and negatives of play-by-post. A review of our (Chris’) failure with Decipher RPG. A desire to try again! Liam Ginty. Monster Care Squad: A Ghibli-inspired tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle world of Ald-Amura Percent! “Percent” is literally just latin for “per hundred” and Christopher was this many years old when he realized this! And then we learn about per mille and per myriad and have to promise not to start using them. Spotted dick A rewarding pun-tastic etymological romp. Also it was really tasty! Attribution “Six dice of various colours” used in episode image - by Diacritica CC-BY-SA-3.0 Decipher RPG Mirror illustration commissioned for Decipher Media by Amber Lee Jones Monster Care Squad: A Ghibli-inspired tabletop adventure of healing Monsters and solving local problems in the gentle world of Ald-Amura: Kickstarter Hackers: social engineering, Kevin Mitnick, and hacking before the internet w/ Brian Epstein: Decipher SciFi Splatmoji - Quickly look up and input emoji and/or emoticons/kaomoji on your GNU/Linux desktop via pop-up menu.: GitHub.com Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #1: Decipher SciFi Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #2: Decipher SciFi Decipher RPG - Mirror Pilot #3 (the finale!): Decipher SciFi The hilarious, extremely convincing proposal to make a beaver emoji.: Slate Support the show!

Cashing in Sanic. 8-bit nostalgia. Remember the Mario movie? Imagining other possible Genesis-era ports. Chris is eagerly awaiting the film adaptation of Pigskin Footbrawl. Console wars Sega licensing sports for title recognizability. Sega finding a mascot in Sonic and dominating the console space, momentarily. Sega does what Nintendon’t Sega, an intellectual Sonic Unused Sega mascot candidates, including extra-mustachey Teddy Roosevelt! Sonic character design history. Consistency in appearance and attitude over decades and how to undo it all in your first draft of your movie. Don’t forget creepy-ass original movie sonic with his creepy human teeth. VFX responsibilities and character re-renderings. Tiny blue Godzilla. Release the butthole cut! -Christopher Speed Sonic’s smagic speed powers. Comic book power levels where they expand to fit the plot. The speed of sound and relationship with atmospheric density. Creating “frozen time” action scenes. Setting the bar at Quicksilver. Sometimes, you can only care about the science as much as the movie does. Supersonic vs hypersonic vs ultrasonic and the mixing of and Latin. Running loops. Hedgehogs A long-term human domestication collaborator. The lovable version of a porcupine. Spikey defense mechanisms. Covering yourself in other animals’ poop for fun and profit. Allocoprophagy. Sonic the Hedgehog: The Animated Series Theme Song: YouTube Human Loop the Loop with Damien Walters: YouTube Console Wars by Blake J. Harris: AmazoniTunes SCIENTIFICALLY ACCURATE ™: SONIC THE HEDGEHOG: YouTube Support the show!

Millhouse isolation Enabled introversion. Social anxiety and human avoidance: online ordering abd contactless food delivery. Masks Hoping for normalization of mask-wearing to confine your illness ot yourself. The popularization of medical masks for the lay population in China around the “Manchurian plague.” Masks failing to combat person-recognition (or probably even facial recognition 😥). Viking grooming That one time we did a viking episode with The other Lee. Our best historical understanding of Viking grooming standards, and how that very much differs from out contemporary depictions. BUT! The contemporary depictions are really fun so it’s ok. 👌 Corvids The problem-solvingest birds. Ravens and other corvids and their respective quality as tattoo-subject candidates. Planning ravens on the chest/shoulders. Maybe a jackdaw sleeve? Nazis For real, fuck those guys. Cultural appropriation. Butt stuff Welcome to the Decipher Media colorectal new update. Christopher’s incoming bidet. Fiber supplmentation and chasing the ghost poop dragon. Young men living on Mountain Dew and waffles. Demodex never poop and then explode with poop and die Christopher Fitness Testosterone levels over time. Testosterone replacement therapy. Dancing - fun for the whole family! Strength nostalgia. VR Gaming Again with the motion sickness. Our website The site is now open source! Go take a look if you’re into Jekyll or Ruby or Gitlab or generally just podcasting the hard way. Art restoration The unqalified Spanish art resotrers are at it again! And don’t forget the OG: [Monkey Jesus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecce_Homo_%28Mart%C3%ADnez_and_Gim%C3%A9nez,_Borja%29). Hanlon’s razor. Upcoming As per our Colossus Roundtable: watch Person of Interest! Masking For a Friend: 99pi.org Our open source website code: Gitlab.com The Life and Times of Mr C by Andy P and Emily RG: Batch25Comics Support the show!

Tulsa Massacre The Black Wall Street Massacre. Detecting buried remains with ground-penetrating radar. Ozymandias Doing splodey blue-balls on a city vs dropping a squid. “Saving” humanity. Narcissism. Super-genius space-prison escape plans. Spaceships vs submarines. Catapults, trebuchets, and escape velocity. Dr Manhattan Ol’ bluey. Creating life. Exploring the universe when you can be everywhere and everywhen at once. How and why would anyone want to blue themselves this way? The Dr Manhattan formula from human to complete lack of concern for humanity. Nostalgia Chemical VR. An alternative route to Alzheimer’s treatment. Watchmen - Adapting The Unadaptable by kaptainkristian: YouTube Watchmen (2009 Film): iTunesPrime Video Support the show!

Computing Not the sweet and sour delicious dessert, but the computing devices. Kodi, Smart Mirrors, retro arcade machines, and low-power cheap servers in the closet. Apple moving to ARM. The next generation of game consoles. SSDs. Raspberry Pi4 model B Michael Henzler / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA 4.0 YouTube Chapter-markers. Auto-generated subtitles and “free” transcription. Memeseeks The sad story of The Memeseeks Box. Learning how to frame what may be your “failures.” The original Memeseeks Box logo art Nicholas Lowe, used with permission Robot vacuums Both a cleaning tool and a defense against madness in the presence of eldritch horrors. “Because they’re made of metal, and robots are strong.” Using the Roomba as a parenting tool. Deebot Ozmo. Plastic Rain It’s everywhere. Referring to our Wall-E episode with heaping portions of appreciation and concern for plastics. Big tech Withholding the sale of facial recognition tech from police. Bezos the nigh-trillionaire being able to afford his own ISS. Christopher & Colbert Meseeks illustration by Nick Low. Used with permission. “Cartoon Room House” used in episode image background, by mixrobastudio/pixabay/CC-0 Old Glory Robot Insurance by SNL: YouTube Plastic Rain Is the New Acid Rain: Wired Support the show!

Self-driving cars Garbage in/garbage out with ML training. Whether or not you allow the user to protect the driver at the expense of the pedestrian, those deicisions are still being made. The advantage of rolling blacked-out rooms on the commute. Hacking autonomous vehicles. Economics Job competition in “knowledge work” when people live functionally infinitely and tirelessly on electricity. Loopholes for the wealthy. Brain scanning Electrical mapping of the brain. Desctructive neural scanning. Do we even have any other options for mapping our brain structure? Brain damage and resuscitation. Digital personhood Creating immortal and infinite digital slaves. Multiple instantiation of persons. Hormonal simulation. Physical, mental, and emotional growth when your life is “virtual.” Living longer and learning not to be the horrible old racist grandpa. Sense of self over time when uploaded. What virtual conditions could be so bad that it’s not worth “living” anymore? Waiting for democratized afforable versions of necessary technologies. “ROM hacking” your reality. VR Sharding (not sharting) your virtual worlds. Manipulating and filtering memories into re-experience. VR suit options: piezoelectric, pneumatic, and TENS. The Teslasuit literally shocked me by CNET: YouTube Support the show!

Fitness Standing desks are great and all, but the real flexibility innovation is not sitting in a car for hours every day. Inventing the “standing car.” Hip adductors like steel bands. Gaming Just Dance.Video game bodily control abstractions. DDR. GTA V. Video game scale and budget madness. GTA 2 demo nostalgia with co-bff Joe. John Carmack Polymath went from game engines to cars to actual rockets to VR to AGI, and we wish him great luck on that last one. Doom nostalgia. Dragon mission Yay! Space! Dramatically lowering the cost of space travel. Fancy new flight suits. Are touch screens a good idea? Space travel automation expectations. Language and POV Enjoying the early fight and chase scenes in Extraction. The use of language and subtitles for storytelling. Video. The Hunt For Red October - Learning to Love the Soviets by Patrick Willems: YouTube Masters of Doom by David Kushner: AmazoniTunes Upload - for the next episode!: Prime Video Weekly Free Games: Epic Games Store Starting Strength by Makr Rippetoe: Amazon Support the show!

Deep water drilling It’s expensive! And if oil is ever expensive enough to justify the cost of drilling in Challenger Deep then by golly you start investing in alternative power instead. Semi-submersible deep-water drilling platforms. Drillships. We drill kinda deep in the ocean but like, not actually deep. Record drill depths and the vast gulf from there to the Mariana Trench. The ocean: scarier than space Gravity meets Aliens. Pressures and temperatures that are more deadly than getting spaced out of an airlock. The deepest hole humans have ever drilled was barely deeper than Challenger Deep is under the surface of the ocean. Living deep undersea Nitrogen narcosis: it’s bad for you! Atmospheric mixture issues under pressure. Sealab I, II, and III. Aquanatical research. Sperm whales get the bends. Oh no your suit some kind of exploded. Monsters of the deep. Deep sea gigantism. Construction Engineering against 16,000 psi and freezing temperatures. Concrete strengths and saltwater issues. Misc Exothermic implosions - they’re like explosions, but backwards! Pistol shrimp. Long-range radio communications through water. ELF. Past discussions on the matter. Dumb infrared. Astronaut Scott Carpenter Speaks to President Johnson from a Helium-Atmosphere Decompression Chamber: YouTube Mom's Spaghetti by Eminem: YouTube Underwater Alternate Ending: YouTube Support the show!