Decipher SciFi: the show about how and why
Latest Episodes
Isolated BS: 3D tracking, Doom on EVERYTHING, and game juice
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 subscr
X-Men: superhero evolution, wolverines, and what lightning does to everything else
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
Isolated BS: social engineering, spotted dick, and proper beaver representation
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 speec
Sonic: the console wars, allocoprophagy, and tiny blue Godzilla
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
Isolated BS: art restoration, ahistorical viking grooming, and preposterone
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
Watchmen - Tulsa, nostalgia, and victorian spacesuits
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. Spaceshi
Isolated BS: tasty Pi, robot vacuums, and our saddest failure
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
Upload: living forever, digital personhood, and hacking your own reality
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. Hackin
Isolated BS: hip thrusts, Dragons, and linguistic POV
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. G
Underwater: deep drilling, nitrogen narcosis, and astronaut helium voice
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 dri