49 - Hairy Delicious Moose Bacon

This week Jay and Wally attempt to trap and contain the incite of Elaine Stryker, the master of podcasting and the master of making uncomfortable jokes about male genitalia. After their initial attempt at casting pods with Elaine fails harder than an Alien tie in video game, the duo finally get their wish and release a barrage of swears and hilarity that could make Hellboy blush! Which is hard to do since he is already red, if you're into having people explain jokes to you.

Is Man of Steel good? Should you be boycotting PAX? Does this font size make me look fat? Most of these questions and more will be answered on this week's Broke Nerdcast!

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Broke Nerdcast Shownotes: Episode 2 Cuts the Cable!

Jay and Wally discuss the new trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, the Avengers,  a few unnecessary reboots, and how you can tell if you're being an a-hole in a movie theater.

After that, join the duo as they ramble about streaming services and how long they have gone without cable and weather or not its right for you.

It is a lot more interesting than it sounds, I promise.

Mentioned links:
Wally's Trials: Evolution Review
CoasterRadio.com
The Dark Knight Rises Trailer
Talkin' Toons With Rob Paulsen
Netflix
Hulu

This show is rated PG-13

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E3 Special Report: Strange Things Afoot On the 360

So the big three have fired their collective shots across each others bow in this year’s E3 and I’ve learned something very important about myself.  I must not be a gamer anymore.

Let me clarify:  I love playing video games, but I don’t seem to be nearly as excited and genuinely dislike some of the more beloved franchises on each of the consoles.

Yesterday morning, Microsoft held their pre-E3 shin dig and announced new User Interface changes for the 360 to make the experience more in line with what we all thought we were getting when Kinect came out and everything will be controlled with gestures and voice if we so please.  The highlight of this part of the conference was “Xbox Bing” that allows you to search the Xbox universe using only your voice.  For example, if I were to say, “Xbox Bing Sesame Street”, everything related to “Sesame Street” would appear for me to peruse.

Also announced was a new app for using YouTube.  This is a great new addition to the social networking apps already available and in fact might become my favorite social networking app yet if it wasn’t for the data caps that are poised to start making me change the way I consume media, but I’ll get into that in more detail at a later date. 

 I really wish that the other apps would be updated to allow us to be able to see Twitpics or follow links since I feel that they are useless without that functionality.

Also announced was live television streaming to the Xbox, which looks interesting.

Microsoft also announced a few diversionary apps that make use of the Kinect technology that were made available immediately.  I downloaded a couple of them and played around with “Kinect Me” and “Buddy Creator”.   

“Kinect Me” (or is it “Me Kinect”?) is an app that would create an avatar by scanning your face and body and creating an avatar with your face and clothes.  It takes pictures of your doppelganger to share.  It works fairly well and it allows you to get some achievements, but it has a few shortcomings.  First thing that’s apparent is that there is not a way to edit your body type and thus, I looked nothing like myself.  I am a pretty big guy and the Avatar was skinnier than anyone I know, but at least I know what I’d look like if I were to lose an amazing amount of weight and bone density.  The second issue is the fact that you really can’t do anything with this thing except share it on Kinectshare.com, so there really isn’t a point.

“Buddy Creator” is a pretty exciting app, but it’s not because of its content, but because of the possibilities opened with the technology.  What it does is scan the front and back of an object, in my case a few plush animals I borrowed from my daughter, and inserts the object in the game space.  You create a personality for the character and provide a voice and it takes you to a rather lame game where you follow on screen directions asking you to do simple gestures.  The issues with this app is that after doing the gesturing, there really doesn’t seem to be much else you can do with the character but watch it do the bizarre action animations based on the role the app gives it.  For example, I scanned an Elmo plush and the app assigned it to a “clown” personality and this apparently means that he will walk around and poop balloons and  confetti.  The on-stage demo of this app showed 1:1 body tracking and I never could find where I could do this or where I would be able to hear my voice over work be used and I was REALLY looking forward to hearing that.  If anyone knows if there is something I’m missing, then please tell me as I love this idea, but the execution seems slapped together.  It’s pretty awesome to be able to use your own things in the game space as it was shown in the early Kinect trailers.  An interesting side bar is that I tried to scan my daughter into the game, but she came out as a deformed monster baby with my arm jutting out of her armpit.  The results were so disturbing; especially with the “Ninja” character profile, I had to delete her entirely.

There was a huge Kinect push this year from Microsoft for all of the other games announced with some really intuitive control schemes being planned for core games, like head tracking in “Forza 4” that allows you to look into turns, audible calling in “Madden 12”, and weapons training in “Ghost Recon” that looked rather impressive.

Of course there was a focus on casual games and this is why I made my previous statement.  I am not looking forward to anything but the casual games like “Kinect Sports: Second Season”, “Dance Central 2”, “Disneyland” and the like.  I mean, sure, I want to play “Halo 4” and the update of the original “Combat Evolved”, but there wasn’t much excitement behind it.

This wraps up the Xbox conference, for me anyways, as I really have no opinion about all of the stuff I don’t think I’ll ever play.  I’ll try to get my thoughts on Sony’s Conference (the Vita), and Nintendo (Wii U) tomorrow, but until then…party on dudes.

P.S. Next year, hire less over the top actors M$.  They made the games look dumb.

You Do Hulu?

I haven’t had cable television since 1999.  My family went without for about a month in the late 90’s, so as a working man in my household, I decided to sign up for satellite service.  It was glorious when it wasn’t raining …so, you know, the winter.

 After the WCW was purchased and completely dismantled by what was the WWF, I decided that it wasn’t worth paying for any more, so I got rid of it.

I was at a point in my life where entertainment was easy to come by.  Video games, the newfangled DVDs, and over the air TV got me through until the weekend, when I would go to the theater and watch one or more movies.

The digital age beckoned and with it the promise of crystal clear television reception with the help of HD tuners.  For whatever reason, these tuners never worked well with any of the televisions I owned, even the new Vizio 1080p HDTV that I currently use, so I was pretty much out of luck when it came to network television.

As a reaction, my wife and I subscribed to the Blockbuster rental service and we were able to see as many movies as we wanted to as long as we drove to Blockbuster and got them.

Being broke necessitated that a change be made.  Blockbuster had decided to raise the rates on the rental subscriptions, so we decided to try out the lower cost option of Netflix.  

Netflix proved to be good enough for the price and we went exclusively with them for our DVD rentals.

A few months later, Netflix became an app on the Xbox 360 so that I could stream some videos directly to my TV without having to wait for the physical disk to get to me.

 

This pleased me greatly.

At first there wasn’t too much content and it wasn’t a very intuitive experience, but with each Xbox update, the app was improved.

During this whole time frame, there has been a supplemental experience that I was using to see the latest network and cable TV that I wasn’t getting through Netflix, and that was Hulu.

At the peak of me using the computer based site, I was using Hulu frequently to catch up on “The Simpsons”, “Ghost Hunters”, and “Hell’s Kitchen”.  Ever since the inclusion of “Hulu Plus”, I decided not to use it any more as the frequency of the commercials had gotten pretty bad and the backlog of episodes available to basic users had shrunk.

When Microsoft allowed Xbox users to try out the “Plus” app for free, I jumped at the chance and was excited to dig into my old shows again.

The problem with this idea is that when I searched for “Ghost Hunters”, it advised me that I could only watch it at a computer.

What?  Why the heck would you split up the content available for your product?  The idea that I would be paying extra so that I could use a gimped version of Hulu on my TV is absolutely ludicrous to me.

I figured that this was some sort of fluke, so I continued searching.

“Hell’s Kitchen”, online only.

“The Simpsons”, online only.

Wow.  What is wrong with these people at Hulu?  Why can’t I watch the content that I want to watch WHERE I want to watch?  I’m sure that this has to do with the licensing and it wouldn’t be that big of an issue if they told you about it before signing up.  

What kind of pitch meeting could that have been?

-“Hey, I have an idea on how to make more money off of this Hulu thing!”

-“Great, give it to me!”

-“Alright, now picture this: Have customers pay a monthly fee to watch our content on their TVs!”

-“Genius! We can develop the apps in a few weeks!  We just have to get all of the shows to…”

-“Oh, no…not ALL of the shows!  Just the programs that are available online for free anyway from other sources.”

-“Ok…I guess that would work and I suppose we won’t have commercials, so we have to…”

-“Oh, no, there would be commercials…”

-“sigh”

That’s right.  Not only can I not watch all of the shows available, but we also have to sit through commercials.  Even broadcast television allows you to skip commercials nowadays, but here we are paying extra to watch these shows, most of which are already free online in other places, network TV you can get over the air, or available on Netflix sans commercials.

The worst part of the whole thing is the fact that it’s about the same price as a subscription to Netflix.  So you get less content, more restrictions, and commercials for the same cost as your closest competitor. 

Remarkable.

To be fair, there are a lot of good points with Hulu as well.  The picture quality is top notch, the sorting is easy to understand, and you get a lot of shows the day after broadcast.  

These good qualities are unfortunately underscored with the fact that there are only a few shows WORTH the expense of seeing it the day after, like “Bones”, and “Glee” (shush, I like it).  

I would have mentioned “The Daily Show” and “Colbert Report” as I was enjoying them quite a bit while I was under the free trial; however, when I tried to watch “The Daily Show” this morning, all I got was ,”Available Online Only”.

Sigh.

NOTE: In Hulu's defense, The Daily Show eventually allowed me to stream it once more.