2025.10.07: Reading By Color

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Morning to you, wherever you are, because it is Morning Subway!

For October 7th, 2020!

Five

picks is Bernie Burns sitting right over there.

She's happy to see me.

It's Ashley Burns, headaches, everybody.

I am happy to see you.

I'm happy to see me.

I'm happy to see you.

I'm happy to see you.

You know, it's like...

You know you're in like the right relationship when you walk into a room and I just go,

it's just nice to see you.

Immediate tangent, right out of the gate.

I didn't even get to a topic.

I don't even know.

Can you tangent without a topic?

Or is it, are you just starting a topic?

There's like a whole, I stopped reading comics and I never really was much of a fantastic for reader, but there's this whole thing where Sue Storm,

I don't know if she is married to Reed Richards.

I guess I always thought they were married.

Are they living in sin?

I thought they were married.

But there's this whole like sub-thing where she's like

got kind of, she has feelings for

the sub-war.

I love Wonder Woman.

Namer.

Namor.

Oh, really?

Namor?

Rudo.

Namor, she has feelings for him.

And it's like, it's very out in the open.

Like, they discuss it all the time in the comic, which is actually really progressive, I think, for a comic.

I just can't stop thinking of this guy and the way he rules Atlantis.

Is this the Atlantis guy?

It's actually, it's probably a bunch of male comic writers writing the way a woman talks about it.

But when I, as a guy who navigates female feelings all the time, it seems pretty well written to me.

Like she can't explain why she likes him.

He's like some kind of like independent guy and she feels kind of bad for him, but he's also kind of a rebel and also mixed in with the fact that he's really, really good looking.

So he's a hot bad boy, but also kind of a mess.

But like in a, he's got like a sad trajectory too.

Like he needs to be fixed as well.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

I can fix him.

Yeah.

No, no, that's the, you're right.

That's actually, that's a, that's a fairly common

trope.

And not just with male writers, but with women writers writing about women as well.

Before the comic book narratives come after me and say, how did you not know about the subplot?

I knew that that existed.

I didn't know how like in the foreground it was.

Like there's entire scenes about it where you read like four or five pages.

And for some reason, I'm being served these on a regular basis, which makes me worry about the algorithm that's serving me this content.

What else is going on in my house?

That, like, goes, hey, we should feed him the name or subplot, like, you know, for Fantastic Four.

He needs to know about the hot Atlantic bad boy.

Let's get them ready because somebody's over there scrolling something else next to me on a phone that's always nearby my GPS location.

It's true.

You know what, though, is it's this is a real thing.

So, you ordered a phone case on Amazon.

I just got served an eBay ad for that same phone case.

Yes.

That makes sense.

On my laptop.

And it's really weird.

And it's, I don't know that we've, we haven't like talked about the name brand of this case out loud or anything, but somehow it knew.

And it's that stupid thing too, where, you know, if you buy something, like, let's say on Amazon.

You buy a fridge, right?

Like a mini fridge for your drinks or something.

But then, right.

And that's like, you don't need a lot of mini fridges in your house, right?

You buy one and you're done.

But then you start getting ads like, oh, did you like this mini fridge?

Well, consider this mini fridge.

And you're like, how about I don't need any more fridges?

Could you like, there's some ways that these stupid algorithms are so smart and like they

figure out exactly what you're looking for, but they can't figure out when you've already got it and to give up.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're like the friend who goes to the party and you're like, hey, you took, you went one sentence too far in this conversation.

You told one too many stories from our past, that kind of thing.

Right.

The TMI line is right behind you.

You were awesome right up until you weren't.

That's the way the algorithms work is that they work really well.

And then when they hit the edges, you're like, yeah, why are you serving me ads for a product that you know I already bought?

Right.

Like you're messing up here.

I think, though, it's.

This is a waste of your time and mine.

That's the thing about automation, though.

It's just like a numbers game at some point, right?

It's like, yeah, we'll get like.

60% of them wrong, but if we get 60% of them wrong, that means we got 40% right.

And it didn't matter.

It's like spam, right?

Spam was an early example of that.

Let me send out 12 billion emails because it doesn't cost me anything.

And if I get one, I get one.

You know what I mean?

It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter that I got 11 billion wrong, right?

Right.

I may as well.

Cause hey, that one is an upside.

Right.

It doesn't matter because I don't see the negative results from getting all that stuff wrong at all.

But

so we're, you know, I'm doing, I'm not scrolling for Atlantic Bad Boys.

You know what, you know exactly what I'm doing with my time these days.

You're doing your book.

i i i like it you've moved i don't understand explain the philosophy behind this to me you have moved all of your ebooks to our media server yeah yeah so as part of this sort of

digitization of blu-rays and creating our own sort of um digitized movie collection uh i'm also going through the process of backing up uh all of my audiobooks and all of my ebooks all of my like Kindle books.

And this is kind of a laborious process because no one wants you to do that, right?

They just want you to like have like have this Kindle and you can download the things onto your Kindle.

But God help you if you ever want to move them to any other thing or consume them in any other way.

And so I've been, what I've been doing is backing up all the Kindle books.

We're running a Jellyfin server right now, which is like one of those, you know, there's a couple of, there's like Plex and there's MB and there's a couple of different sort of like home media servers.

We're running Jellyfin right now and there's a plugin you can get for it called Bookshelf.

And so I installed this plugin and I moved all my audiobooks and my e-books to this so I can access them in the same way that we watch a movie.

It only works here in the house for us for now.

I think there's things you can get.

to make it work elsewhere, but I just wanted to back those up in the same way that we're backing up like our movies so that like we have them and we know that we have them and that we can access them.

And you know, someone can't just like shut a store or a library down and now it's all gone for us.

So that's what I'm doing.

And so I'm in the process of making it pretty.

Where there we go.

Get on track.

I'm going to say you're way too good looking to be talking about this stuff the way you are.

You're way too pretty to be talking about GitHub plugins for your open source media server.

Look, this is something that me and Namor have been working on.

Background, not foreground, background.

Keep it in the background.

Where like I'm going through and it's in some ways it's really frustrating because I'm realizing like series that I didn't finish or a lot like Murderbot where there's one cover that's just not right.

And so I'm going through and thankfully with this server, I can change the covers on that stuff.

And so I'm doing it.

And I'm making sure that all my, all my series of things have the same types of covers and making sure that they're all like in like nice order.

And so that's consuming an unreasonable amount of my time.

I could be like reading books, but instead I'm organizing them.

It's like, have you ever like watched someone organize a bookshelf and then they go back and they organize it like three different times?

Yeah.

And you're like, you could be, you could spend that time reading.

Yeah, nothing says to me that I don't read the books I own more than someone who color organizes

their books on their bookshelf.

It looks awesome in Pinterest photos, but if you went to go find anything in there i need to remember what color the spine of murder pot is no thank you but you say that but some people can absolutely go right to that one because they know what that book looks like they've spent so much time with it in their hands that they can absolutely go oh that's the run it's got a black spine with red text and they can go straight to it uh or people run like maybe some amazing excel spreadsheet where they have like what order everything is in so they go and consult the index like

or they have one of those cool like a library card things you know those like the old school drawers full of cards that will tell you where a book is stored yeah and that's part of their reorganization card catalog as they have to reorganize their card catalog to go color based instead dewey decimal system

for those of you listening out there a lot of times if you're in a relationship and your partner sends you a text like hey are you around i really need to talk to you This is important.

And I'm like, okay, go talk to her.

I don't worry about it.

I'm not about to have the talk.

Most people in a relationship would worry about that kind of text because I'll go find her and I'll walk in the room.

I go, hey, what's up?

She's going, hey, we have a problem.

You have the now discontinued RC Bray reading of The Martian.

We need to get that off your phone before they change it in the cloud.

It's what's really important.

And I'm like, okay, here's my phone.

That one is a particular case.

And that's, I read this story, and it's one of the things that started me on this journey is it was someone was talking about how they had the old RC Bray audiobook of the Martian, which you can't get anymore.

It was a rights issue.

So they re-recorded The Martian with Will Wheaton.

And

as far as I understand, Will Wheaton does a great job, but like some people really want the RC Bray version and that's the version that you have.

So someone said they had They had this version.

It went missing from their Audible library for some reason.

And so they contacted Audible Support and Audible said, oh, here you go.

Here's a code to re-download it.

What they were able to re-download was the Will Wheaton version.

Yeah.

They had lost the RC Brave version.

And now they couldn't get it back.

Yeah.

Right.

So I immediately went into a panic mode: like, oh, God, what else could they change?

Are they going to change the narrator for fourth wing or some shit?

I don't know.

And are they going to re-record Burgerbot with Alexander Skarsgaard?

Actually, I don't think I'd mind that, but not the point.

But you want to have options.

Yes.

And I want to like, I want to know that I have my thing, even if someone somewhere changes other things.

Hey, there's a, in relation to all this stuff, because this journey started for us when they turned off, what, three months ago, uh, on the Xbox Microsoft platforms that they're no longer going to be selling movies and TV.

So it split our library because we were all in on that.

And then we knew going forward, we were going to be split.

So we thought, you know what, let's not split.

It's going to cost us some money to rebuy some of these like used Blu-rays and stuff, but build this media server and have our own.

But now it's like, it's in line with a lot of our other strategies we've got looking forward, which is also we have this box that has all this media that's important to us.

And at any point in time, we can just disconnect it from the cloud, right?

Which is, I think it's becoming a more important thing all the time.

Hank Green just put out a

video for Vlog Brothers, which talks about ghost towns, physical ghost towns, and how we're getting digital ghost towns now.

Hank's brain.

I love the way it works.

And it's a great video and you should go watch it.

But it's like, we're getting there, right?

And it's like it plays into our strategy with going back, what we've been talking about with Rooster Teeth and having our pocket of the internet, you know, to what we were talking about at the time that was to fight and shitification, but really looking forward was talking about just the changing landscape.

of the digital world and how we can't really predict what's going to happen with it.

So it's better to just put things in place where we know we can navigate them a little better than if we didn't have them.

That's a weird way to talk about a gigantic website that we re-bought from Warner Brothers, but it's what we did.

And it's like, boy, I feel better about that decision every single day, don't you?

Yeah, absolutely.

Especially, you know, when we've got the news stories, like G4 just

disappeared.

Like, and, and I, I didn't even know until you told me I didn't know G4 disappeared.

That was a really important thing for both you and for me.

And now, like, I was like, well, damn, I guess I assumed that it would, the library would be there.

I was on Attack of the Show and I don't have that now and I'll never be able to get it.

By the way, there is a develop, literally as we're sitting down to record this, there is a weird developing story in the gaming world, especially with Xbox, where people are now on forums starting to surface emails.

Take this with a grain of salt.

This is the level at which we're talking about this.

These are forum posts of people posting about notifications they got via email.

So that everything about that sounds like a scam or a hoax.

One of 12 billion.

But what is developing right now that people are talking about is that Xbox is appears or someone is sending out scam emails that Xbox is grandfathering people into the Game Pass subscription as long as they're on an auto recurring subscription.

So like if you're already a subscriber and you have auto renew on, then you keep what, the old price?

Ironically, I would assume if this is happening, it's in response to all the people who canceled, but all the people who canceled are not eligible to cancel.

Because they're now un-grandfathered.

You know what, though?

I don't, I don't know.

Maybe that's a region-specific thing because I saw the same thing you did.

That it was, let me see if I can find the exact terminology that

people used in the posts.

All the official notifications that I've got, and my Xbox account is a U.S.

market Xbox account.

Everything I've gotten says my price is going up.

Yeah, so this is what someone posted said,

at this time, these increases will only affect new purchases and will not affect your current subscription for the market in which you reside, as long as you're on an auto-recording plan.

But I checked my email and that's not at all what I got.

I don't see it either in some of the posts that I'm seeing about this.

They're in a lot of different languages.

There was a language I couldn't even recognize what it was.

That was really strange.

I couldn't even take a guess what it was.

It seemed like a weird like English alphabet interpretation of like Russian language or something like that.

I really honestly couldn't figure out what language it was.

Interesting.

Yeah, mine says this

says that starting

November 4th, the one-month subscription price will be $29.99 plus taxes unless you cancel up to two days prior to your next scheduled payment date.

So mine says that mine is going to go up.

Mine says not grandfathers.

So either this is a, they've now got a change in plan based on the response, right?

They're trying to like walk it back a little bit, but like, no, this was a plan all along, dog.

Here's how grain of salt this is.

This is a 21-minute old post on Reddit that I'm reading.

Oh, yes, it's okay.

Easily could be disproved.

Well, but before we finish this podcast, it could be.

Well, brain assault.

Let's let's put a pin in that as something to keep an eye on anyway.

Could be developing.

Lots of things are developing.

Hey, I did see something though that was interesting, which is something I've always wondered about, which is how do these CAPTCHA images of like identify all the squares that have a bicycle in it or a train or the traffic light.

Yeah, or whatever.

Crosswalks.

And people really like sweat the edges, like if it bleeds from one image into another.

I absolutely do.

What do you do about that?

That was the question was like, what are they really checking for?

And apparently, what they're really checking for is

how you're identifying these things and how you click on them.

Because a machine would go through pixel by pixel and line by line to do it.

So next time you do that on a CAPTCHA, select them in direct order and see what happens and see if it rejects it for you.

Because that's what people were saying in the comments.

It's less about what you actually click on and the manner in which you click on things.

You know, I once heard that, remember the like click to prove you're not a robot, just the checkbox?

Yeah, that was a problem.

I always heard that it worked on a similar principle, which was at the time it was based on mouse movement, that a machine or a bot would have like way too precise of mouse movement to move to that box, click on the box, and then move away from it.

And that there's like just these teeny, tiny irregularities in how a person moves a mouse and those jitters or whatever were enough to determine that it wasn't a bot.

Right, right.

Like a machine that gets asked, are you a human?

It wants to lie.

Just goes, yeah, of course I'm human immediately.

A human would like.

It's like, it's like, I'm a human being.

What is it to you?

I got to go process trauma.

They go for a walk.

They go outside.

They think about their wife falling in love with an

Atlantean prince.

They're going to process all that stuff.

Speaking of subscriptions and developments, Bernie, this is a big one, not for us, but for people in the U.S.

is I guess it's official now that Disney's shutting down Hulu.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Was that what it was?

They're going to be integrating Hulu basically into Disney Plus, which for the rest of the world is how, I mean, we've, that's how we've been consuming it.

Uh, we shut down our Hulu subscription ages ago because where we are in the UK, it's been, it's been all the Disney and Hulu content.

And you know what?

It's actually great.

I mean, it's, it's a little bit weird at first when you like load up Disney Plus and you see like the Kardashians,

but it's, it's how the rest of the world has done it.

So I guess they're, they're like, why do we have two different streaming services?

Let's just bonk them together and uh there you go so this kind of plays into some other things tying all these things together it feels like every episode of this podcast is like a seinfeld episode where it all like comes together at the end but like going back to like the jimmy kimmel thing when everybody canceled disney their disney subscriptions that had a big impact like you absolutely did i mean some of the reports were up to like what four billion dollars or something like that yeah i don't know how vetted those uh reports were but yes but then disney did the thing and they said hey we're you know abc is putting jimmy kimmel back on the air and then it was clear it was sinclair and the other one, whatever it was, were saying, well, we're not putting him back on the air.

And then they quietly, like a couple days later, okay, he's going to go back on the air.

But a lot of response from people was,

doesn't matter, I'm not uncanceling my Disney subscription.

And there'd be a lot of reasons why a person could decide whether or not to cancel a subscription.

But it does kind of to me play into the overall thing of

somebody does something.

We want to affect change.

There's an action that's taken.

All of that is great.

But then when you get the result you want,

there is a cycle on the internet of there's zero forgiveness.

Like, I'm not going to reinstate my Disney subscription.

It's like, I get that, but was that the

step too far?

Was that the straw that broke the camel's back?

Or were you trying to affect change?

Like, do we have an obligation when someone makes a mistake and there's pushback against that mistake and they correct course, do we not have an obligation to then reward them for changing course?

Does that make sense?

Right, the carrot and the stick, or are we just doing the stick?

Yeah, if it's just, yeah, if it's just the stocks and pillory and that's it, you know what I mean?

And this is weird to talk about because it's corporation, right?

But do we believe in people reforming their behavior and do we have any obligation to reward that when they do?

I don't know that there's ever like an obligation, especially when it's like just a choice about how a person spends their money.

Like in this particular scenario, I do agree that I think forgiveness is important, and I think forgiveness is

a skill that we're not practicing a lot on the internet.

It's really easy to hold a grudge.

And I say that as someone who is very good at holding a grudge.

She's amazing at it.

Amazing.

You know, but so there's never an obligation when it's really just this financial transaction.

If you decide, you know, like, I'm not going back, then you're not going back.

But I do agree that if you never

do go back, then the message that you're sending the corporation is different than the message that you maybe think that you're sending.

And a lot of, of, this goes back to what I think was a really pivotal, important moment in internet history, which is when the Fine Brothers were trying to copyright and trademark the term React for their series of shows they were making for their YouTube channel.

And the same week.

Sony tried to trademark the term let's play.

I've talked about this many times, but I think it's a really important moment in internet history because the Fine Brothers made an arguably not great apology video, but they made an apology apology video.

And Sony did nothing, you know, to both pushback.

But nobody remembers the Sony thing because as soon as the apology video came out for the Fine Brothers, it was blood in the water.

Like anytime there's any kind of, let's take it away from corporations, take it to like,

you know, influencers.

There's always a blow up, right?

Some kind of blow up, something happens, people get really mad.

And then the people who address it then become the focus of it more than anyone else, right?

When they, when they address the concerns, and then people have something they can talk about.

And when you see these apology videos, Ashley, what is always the first comment on any apology video?

Not enough.

Not good enough.

That's always the thing, not good enough.

And if we live in a world where apologies and people who address people's concerns, if the response is always not good enough, then you eventually just train people to not address those things, right?

It's a little different when it's a corporate with bottom line, right?

They're just trying to save the money in this case.

Obligation is not the right word.

Is it more sensible for us all long term to have, to accept apologies and accept when people people change course that's all I'm saying yeah I think uh let's just let's just say for today apologies are important apologies are important right right yeah and you shouldn't make the apology of course you shouldn't address it so that you can like get back what you lost right that shouldn't that shouldn't be the goal of it either right right part of like part of an apology is acknowledging that like apologies are apologies but they're not restitution yeah yeah and there's a difference i just feel like uh but it's an acknowledgement of wrong done and responsibility taken it would be very easy to fall into the trap of saying, what's the point of apologizing in a world without forgiveness?

Are you waiting for my apology video about my feelings with Neymar?

That's right.

What is Seuss Storm?

Not good enough.

Get out, bitch.

Hope you can breathe underwater.

All right, Ashley, who do we have to thank for forgiving us today?

All right, I want to say a big thank you to Mitchell Goodwin and Red Code Only for sponsoring this episode of our show.

Red Code Only.

At patreon.com/slash morning somewhere and roosterteeth.com.

What does that mean, do you think?

Should we be careful about some of these names we read out?

Red code only.

Um, maybe a British.

Oh, yeah, I'm sorry.

No, it's code red only.

Code red only.

So,

how did you come up with that?

Red, code red only.

So, I'm just gonna assume they're a really big Mountain Dew fan.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

They're upset about the discontinued uh code red flavor.

There's so many, there's too many flavors of Mountain Dew now.

It's weird.

Okay, so uh, today's drop is a drop contest.

So, the drop at the beginning of today's episode, uh, it will not be in the transcripts until the contest is over.

But the first person who can say in the Rooster Teeth comments for this, you get a code for a free t-shirt and get it.

So that's today's at my discretion, yak, yak, yak, and all that stuff.

Etc., etc.

All right, that does it for us today, October the 7th, 2025.

We will be back to talk to you tomorrow.

We hope you will be here as well.

Bye, everybody.