Flying Cars, AI Questions & World of Kylia

Welcome to

User Friendly 2.0 with host Bill Sikkens,

Technology Architect.

And this is User Friendly 2.0.

Welcome to this week's show.

We're going to be having James Sherwood with The Vault in our next segment

covering a card game that we saw at Rose City Comic-Con.

It's going to be kind of a fun interview.

He is back.

He's been away a little bit

dealing with, you know, life and all that kind of stuff.

So it's going to be kind of fun to get this going again.

World of Kalia is the game that we're going to be covering there,

which I got a chance to look at to and was a lot of fun.

So got that coming up. Bill.

Gretchen, welcome to this week's show.

What's new in your lives?

Not much really.

Yeah, I'm working on getting unveiled villains.

Ready?

Yeah. And, I know that's coming right up.

And I'm going to give a little bit of a spoiler alert here.

I got a chance to look at the poster you're putting together, and it's cool.

It's creepy, but it's cool.

But so is the second book.

It definitely.

Let's just say everybody that's been in our audience to test read

has looked at this and gone, this is creepy.

And no, that's not really what I was planning for.

But, you know, hey, it's a good story and he holds your interest and stuff,

and it's not like the whole thing is creepy,

but there are some segments

where you're describing the villains and boy, talk about,

well, they're not villains if they aren't creepy.

This is true.

This is true.

I don't disagree with you, but boy, yeah,

we don't want bland villains that are like, yeah.

Oh, he's so terrible.

So, yeah, you know, and then fall asleep.

Yeah. No, we don't want that. That would be.

That would be bad.

So, you know, it's interesting

a couple of things that we've gotten some feedback on.

And I'm just going to touch upon this.

Well maybe do it a little bit more formally as number one

we announced this last week, but the show is on YouTube

now, a user friendly productions, our channel name.

You can get to it through our website

by going to our website and clicking the YouTube link.

But what we're doing is

this is something that's been asked for for a while, and I got some questions

in from last week going, you know, what is what is it that you're doing?

Well, we all have done this show

It started out on the radio.

We still are of course on the air.

And a lot of you are listening to us probably on on air.

Obviously we do our podcast too and stream that, but the thing of it is,

is that is not by nature designed to really have a video component,

The real reason

I wanted to get us in a video version is so that you can have captions,

and this is something that's been requested.

We do have that with the audio version,

but if you're listening on a device that doesn't have a screen,

you know, like your radio, it would be awfully hard to view captions.

In fact, it would be impossible if you could come up with way to do it.

Let us know, because I'd love to feature it.

But the one thing that YouTube has is we've put a visualizer together

and some stuff.

So it does have a video component, but it does have that feature.

So if you want to listen but want to have captions like closed

captioning is what I'm talking about, you will have that option.

You do need to turn it on.

They're not there by default, but it is an added feature for what you can do.

And the other thing of it is, is comments.

We welcome your comments.

Now, one of the reasons why we've always had the comments come in

through the website on the ask a question link is because, again,

the original way that this show was done was on air exclusively.

And you know, we've obviously adjusted with the technology,

but we started from there and it doesn't give really a real time way

to be able to submit comments, even listening to the podcast.

There's different platforms we're on, all of them.

Most of them, I'm going to say most. There's got to be one out there.

Maybe we're not, but the point of it

is, is even being able to post comments that way is somewhat difficult.

You still have to go back to the website and all that kind of thing.

So YouTube has its system built in for that,

and that's another thing I'm hoping everybody will use.

Please post your comments, subscribe.

Like all the stuff that YouTube you know, have creators pray for every time.

I'm not going to bug you with that so much.

It does help get it out there, but the point of it is more.

I'm hoping that this can be a way that you, as our listeners,

can, in a real time fashion, be able to interact with the show.

We welcome what you send in and that's how we do our programing.

So, you know, that's one thing that's kind of cool to be able to offer that.

Now, the second thing that I've been asked

is to point out is that this show is produced by humanoids,

I guess humans, right? Can I say humanoid?

I mean, none of us are in Android bodies yet, but with the way

sci fi is going, that might be, you know, year or two down the road.

But the point of it is, is we do not produce with AI.

So Gretchen does most of our research.

The rest of us do some.

All three of us are real people that are doing real commentaries.

And this kind of thing is

becoming a little bit less than norm.

So, you know, if the question comes out there, do we use AI at all?

Yeah, in some ways we do.

I mean, we spell check to there are things like that.

But what we don't do is have it right.

Scripts, we don't have it, you know, right.

The news or anything like that. We do our own research.

Sometimes I'll go into AI and go, can you get me some verifications

on these stories? And I'll go and verify that and that type of thing.

So from that standpoint there's some things like that.

But this is all human done.

This is this has been something that we as a production team have done on our own.

Bill, you edit without the use of AI.

I mean, you do that yourself too, right?

Yes. Yeah.

So, shaking your head won't come through on an audio platform, so I.

You know, I just want to throw this out there.

We're going to get a header for the show for a while, promoting the,

YouTube and all of that kind of stuff.

But it's just a situation that we get asked this a lot, and I just wanted

to put it out there and be very point blank on what we do and what we don't do.

So what we don't do is use it for production.

We don't use it for research.

We in the sense of writing stories and that type of thing.

I might use it kind of like as an advanced search engine to look things up.

And sometimes we might use it for things like grammar checking

and that kind of stuff, but that really is the extent of it.

And everything else here,

good, bad or otherwise, comes from us as a production team.

And that is something that I think is

a point of pride now, because these days that isn't always the case anymore.

And it is we, you know, a big part of why we do this

is because we love doing it and shoving that off

to somebody else, or something like an AI model just doesn't make sense.

Plus, you don't always know that what's going on is, is completely accurate.

You know, and I'm a proponent, I'm not against AI.

I mean, I think it's amazing what it can do, but it has to be looked at as a tool,

and you have to check what you're getting back from it.

And if you're using it for something, that's fine.

But where people get into trouble is where they go to the AI and say, hey, do this.

And then there's no further interaction. I wouldn't even do that.

I've got some great employees and my technology company

that have worked with me for years.

I still check their work and they still check mine.

We would never do anything different.

And to have a computer program where you're going to hand that off to

and not, you know, not have that degree of supervision just doesn't make sense.

And that's where a lot of these problems are coming from, you know,

so I've been asked by AI not to tell anybody

about the planned world takeover, so I won't.

But outside of that, no.

But in all seriousness, we're human produced and we're proud of it.

And we'll continue to do that. So anyway.

All right. What do we have in the news this week?

Well, obviously a topic that's really spot on.

Explosive document claims that AI is not what we think.

So what is it that we think?

Well there you are, right.

So interesting story that came out.

This was published by Futurism.

This was written by Frank Landy Moore.

And again I apologize if I mispronounced names,

but I want to make sure credit gets out where credit is due.

So the headline in this is really bigger than the finding.

This is about understanding AI's internal workings.

It does not purport evidence that AI is conscious

or secretly something else, or whatever the case may be.

So a little bit of clickbait there, but the center idea is encouraging.

I think some patterns inside AI that look confusing,

kind of like a jumble, have a clear explanation.

And researchers have gone into this, and they argue

that better investigative tools reveal more understandable structure.

So what's going on here is their deep diving into what is actually happening.

When an AI does what an AI does, right.

And the understanding of this will give researchers better ways

to investigate failures, test potential fixes, bug fixing, all that kind of stuff.

And while it's not a safety guarantee, it is definitely something

that starts to kind of look behind the curtain a little bit.

So there's a full essay connected to this.

The researcher was Nick Cammarata.

Again, I apologize if I pronounce the name, but look it up.

The original essays out there, if you're interested in this futurism,

again, covered the article and it's a good place to start with that.

All right.

Disney announces sequel to solo A Star Wars Story.

Yeah, this is going to be kind of cool I think.

Now the interesting thing is the original solo, A Star Wars

Story was actually considered to be a flop.

I know, which

that's a Disney was going around saying,

yeah, that was something that Jeremy complained about.

Yeah, the numbers said it too. Unfortunately.

I mean, as far as that goes now, as far as it being a good movie, I've watched it.

My opinion, I enjoyed it.

I don't know, Gretchen, did you guys see it when it came out or or ever?

Yes, it was great.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was fun.

And Peter Mayhew was really happy.

He didn't have to roll around in the mud.

Yeah, yeah, it was nice.

See the movie for details. But anyway. Yeah.

Pyramid, who of course

played Chewbacca and he's in a fur suit and ended up in a mud puddle.

But he had passed the baton.

And after looking at that, Peter probably was very happy about that

for not having to do that scene. But anyway.

Yeah, but but yeah, so it's interesting to see what's going on here.

However, there are some changes at Disney.

If you haven't heard, Dave Filoni is at the head of the company now,

and we're already seeing directions that seem to be going back to

originally, how George Lucas kind of had envisioned things, which is kind of cool.

So doing a sequel for this, I actually can see them,

you know, picking up and going, hey, even though it might not have done

so well at the box office, let's figure that out.

Let's do a sequel, let's make it better.

And that's what they're doing.

So we'll cover this when it comes out.

I don't have a release date on it yet, but I think it's something that done well.

Could be a lot of fun.

All right, the Dream with Us design challenge

asks students to dream of innovations for the future.

Can you explain what this is?

So this is for students in grades six through 12.

And the idea to dream of creative innovations for the future of aviation.

This is being sponsored by NASA.

The site is nasa.gov.

Let me try that again. Nasa.gov.

Dream with us and you can pull it up.

Went live on the 23rd so it's open right now.

There's an information session coming up on October 27th.

It's virtual that you can sign up for registration deadline being December 8th.

And they're also looking for judges.

So if you're interested in judging, go there and you can sign up.

That might be kind of something kind of fun for us to do.

I'll look into that and see, see what the case may be.

But anyway, so yeah, this is something that's kind of cool for the kids

and something that you can actually directly interact with with NASA.

Check it out again nasa.gov. Dream with us.

President Zelensky says Ukraine bombed

Russia data centers to take out social media bots dividing the West.

All right. So interesting story.

Been covered by a lot of outlets.

We're going to go with the one from The Independent.

Just because I had to choose one to deal with from this.

But in the war with Ukraine and the monsters aka Russia,

Ukraine is kind of this year, you know, David Goliath story

really starting to get the upper hand and is making some progress, fortunately.

So what happened is, is data centers in both countries

had kind of been something that was not included in targets.

Back in I think it was early September or late

August, Russia decided to start bombing Ukrainian data centers.

Now, when this happened, Ukraine had a set up

because this was anticipated or years ago that this was going to happen,

that a lot of their information

is backed up in Western countries and that type of thing.

And while it did create some problems with internet outages

and that type of thing, they really, you know, were able to get back online.

So when that became a line for battle on the front line, Ukraine

responded by bombing three of Russia's data centers for a company called Yandex.

The index is considered to be like Russia's Google,

although it's

kind of a combination of Google and some aspects of Amazon and some other things.

They run a lot of apps for taxi services and financial accounts and on and on.

So in doing this, all of that went down and created a certain amount of chaos

for people that use these systems.

It's going to take a long time to fix.

Two of the three data centers contained Russian supercomputers

that were being used to train AI models, so that's been knocked out.

The index to this day is not disclosed.

Whether or not these computers were damaged

or if they're going to be able to recover them,

but they're certainly offline at the moment.

Well, what's happened with this?

And we've had a lot of questions coming in about this too,

is that it seems like a lot

of the high intense comments, negative comments, things that would

ramp people up that have been on social media have minimized.

And while there's research being done on this,

and there isn't direct evidence yet to be able to say that a led to be,

it certainly would be a lot of questions if it didn't.

And so President Zelensky of Ukraine

has said that doing this is taking out a lot of the bots

that have been causing problems and dividing the West.

So one of the ways that Russia has been attacking

kind of in a hybrid situation is by trying to create division

within the West for supporters of Ukraine, trying to get people to not support

Ukraine, you know, and that kind of a thing.

And doing this through social media is actually a smart way of doing that.

I have to give it to him that that is a way that would work.

Now, one of the differences,

because Russia has what they call a sovereign internet system, they don't.

It's modeled after like North Korea and China, where they don't have a lot of

outside influence.

It also means that they don't have a lot of redundancy.

So taking these things out is taking this stuff offline.

The debate that's brewing right now in engineering circles is

is it, as Zelensky says, that it's taking out the bots, or is it because

it's taking out their ability to search and then use the bots,

or a combination thereof, because he is the searching engine too.

So it'll be interesting to see where this goes to.

First of all, see

if there's evidence that this is the case beyond circumstantial evidence.

That is, data center stopped working, bots stopped happening.

But, you know, maybe it was the phase of the moon.

You never know until you can prove it,

even though it's very convincing that those two are connected.

It's not a fact yet.

But at the end of the day, you know, from what President Zelensky

is talking about here, this is something that

will be of a benefit because we don't need any more division.

We just don't.

So not having this be the case would be kind of interesting.

It will follow this.

And as soon as there's some traction and some different definition on what

actually happened here that we can document, we'll talk about it.

All right.

Well, Elon Musk says uploading a credit card photo.

Let's rock shop for you.

So, Gretchen, which of you have tried this

or have both of you and how did it go?

I didn't know I looked.

Do I look stupid?

Because, I mean, I may not

be, you know, a fashion model, but not that stupid.

So, you know whether Mr. Musk says this works or not.

Can you imagine?

Basically what's going on here is you're giving an AI

your financial information and saying, hey, this is what I want, go shop for me.

What could possibly go wrong?

And, I stand a go

tell, tell people not to do this. Yes.

Yeah, I would advise against.

But it's not just me even visas a advising against doing this.

So this is an article on Yahoo Finance.

Danny Santana wrote this talking about what's going on here.

And basically it's kind of what the headline says.

You can have grok do your shopping for me, Musk wrote.

I ask grok to research the most fun Lego

Star Wars kits for young kids and order them as easy as that.

So you're giving the bot the the model here, grok your credit card

information and just saying go out and order this for me.

Well,

yeah.

You know, maybe that's easy for him to do because he's got so much money.

It's possible matter. Yeah.

And just a commerce, which is what this is called, is slowly gaining momentum.

But I don't know.

I still

am concerned about asking my chat assistant that he has access

to my accounts on Amazon to reorder something, much less something like this.

So, you know, but let's put it out this way and not,

you know, come up with a totally we wouldn't do a type thing.

Have you done it? Go to our website. Let us know if it worked.

Well I want to hear that too. And I will talk about it.

If you went out and this did something for you and that's great.

It's just not something I'm willing to try.

So I'd love to get some feedback on that.

All right.

And more Elon Musk news.

Did Tesla really just unveil a flying car.

So this has been all over the place

trying to figure out what's actually going on here.

In my opinion, I would say the answer to this is no.

It's the concept of one though.

So what's going on here is a new version of Tesla's Roadster

electric sports car now has thrusters and other things

that apparently allow it to hover and turn mid-air.

They've unveiled this in Texas.

But when you start digging into this, it's

looking like it has actually thrusters that are pushing it off of a track.

There's some different things going on here.

Did it hover?

Maybe, it went up a steep ramp, spun in the air and landed using air jets.

Okay.

Whether or not that actually is the case, and like I said,

I've had some difficulty actually documenting this one way or the other.

It's definitely not something that you're going to be seeing at your dealership

anytime soon without a lot of changes being made to it.

and all you have to do is go make a deposit of $500,000, and it's

not guaranteed that you'll get the car that's in the terms and conditions.

I think those terms and conditions.

Oh, okay.

I throw shade at Tesla's

Tesla with safe and affordable flying car.

So explain what that means.

Well, I mean, you know, I leave a tie.

Kia Tesla's flying car already has competition.

And you said I kids for the people who brought you

a bookshelf in an argument about how to assemble it.

Yeah, yeah.

So I can't Taiwan answer Tesla's big rival with a playful new

ad featuring little Abo.

And I never can pronounce these words correctly because they're Swedish.

20 cars and a bathtub arranged to suggest the stunt ramp.

It's pitch safe and affordable.

The four piece settle set you back $12.99.

Finally, a car collection I can afford, although I may have to finance the towel.

This comes from Ikea.

The technology.

Tesla has thrusters and advanced engineering.

IKEA's version runs on imagination, and somebody's making room noises.

So anyway.

So yeah, what they've done here is

they've created a set of toy cars and using a towel as a ramp,

they've made this work, which, after reading the press release

on the flying car, in my opinion,

might be just about as much of a flying car as what Tesla debuted.

But yeah, we'll have to do the research on it.

I'm not saying it's not.

So you have the added benefit that you can also use

the launch pad to dry off after you take a shower.

So multiple use.

Yeah.

I Neo Drawer

Dynamics debuts a 13ft tall humanoid robot.

So yes.

Being reported by Gadget Review here.

This is something that

if we talk about sci fi meeting real life,

this was debuted in Beijing,

and it's basically a four meter tall

robot waiting at about 1.2 tons,

and it can lift the lot.

It's a hydraulic bet. It's this huge thing.

41 degree active degrees of freedom, 39 joints.

The claims being here that

this can really do a lot.

And I don't know, Bill, you might know about a little bit about this.

There's been Asian cartoons that are giant robots fighting.

I know Jeremy watched some of this, and I could see this being used

for that purpose.

Probably.

I mean, granted, they'd have to bring the price down

quite a bit so that it's more affordable for.

Oh, you know, it's only money, right?

How much does this thing cost?

I didn't even see that in the press release.

Maybe Elon will tell grok to buy it for him.

Yeah, that's that's cool.

So yeah, let's, let's see if that works out.

Or maybe we'll just tell grok to buy it for him.

Forget forget the, the credit card owner.

But anyway, so the thing of it is, though, is I will have to say this.

Looking at, technology like this, we're poking fun at it a little bit.

But at the end of the day, there are uses for this.

I mean, you know, there could be cool work at height and, you know,

looks cool and, you know, walking down the street and then pressing everybody

that be kind of a cool use for it, but I'm not sure it'd be worth the price.

But hey, you know, and again,

like I say as we're covering this, I've been trying to go through the article

here, the press release, I don't see a, retail price on it.

One probably hasn't been published yet.

I can only imagine

with the next generation of game consoles being over $1,000.

I don't know how much would a 13ft tall, fully working, articulated robot go for?

I mean, I probably a little more.

You would 1.5 million. 1.5.

Yeah, I could see it being at that price.

So that kind of a thing. So anyway.

All right.

Well that's our news for this week.

Next week we're going to be talking about subscriptions.

Not that this is a new topic for us, but HP has come up with a,

interesting take on this.

I will just leave it at that.

That people are not responding to positively to.

We're also going to be updating you on what's

actually going on with the PS5 and all of that kind of stuff.

And again, at the end of the day,

subscriptions are getting a little bit out of control.

I will tell you that the governments are starting to get involved in this.

A representative in New York is proposing a law to kind of ring in this

in a little bit.

So we're going to be talking about that too.

Again, that'll be coming up next week here on User Friendly next segment.

We are going to be talking

card games and welcoming back James Sherwood from the vault.

I'll be back after the break.

This is user friendly 2.0.

Check us out at User Friendly Dot show.

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Check out our different shows even look back now

what going on 14 years which is a little bit amazing.

So all right, over the course of this fall, we're going to be doing some

features on a couple of different things.

We are going to be featuring Bill, your

Deming and talking about that a little bit more and some things like that.

After that, we're going to be featuring your new book, Gretchen in October,

or actually would be November for Unveiled Villains.

And then we are going to be doing our Season of Giving,

and we'll be announcing who that is when we get a little bit closer to it.

So we got all of that coming up, which is going to be really kind of cool today.

We're going to be doing something a little bit different in this segment,

and we're going to be bringing James Sherwood with the vault back.

He has been a little bit away and not even a little bit

a lot away for a couple of months now working on some family stuff

and just life happens, you know, these type of things.

But he is back.

He's going to be giving us a review on a game called World of Kalia.

This is something that we saw

at the Rose city Comic-Con, which was really kind of cool.

And he's going to deep dive into that and talk a little bit about that.

So, he has a really cool guest, by the way, on that.

Me so we'll have that coming up here in just a second.

But before we jump into that, I don't know, card games.

Bill, do you think it seems like the tabletop card

games have start have started researching in popularity lately?

Have you noticed that or is it just me?

Oh, there have been popular for a few years now, but with Magic The Gathering,

Pokémon against humanity.

Yeah.

You know, I and I know Park, you know, Pokemon and all that.

It just seems like it rose city this year a lot, and last year a little bit.

And some of the other things.

There seems to be a lot of indie developers making these games now,

which that I think is what I'm asking is, have you seen this

as a kind of a new thing, or is it just I'm just noticing it?

Oh, no, that's kind of a it's been noticing it more, but

it is kind of a new boom that is occurring.

I'm glad to see it.

I think it's kind of cool.

And, you know, we all support any developers anyway, but

it's kind of fun to see this type of thing coming up.

So cool.

All right, let's go ahead and jump into the vault.

Welcome to the vault.

Well, we dig into anything related to games, gaming or having a good time.

I'm your vault keeper, James Sherwood.

Now it's time to break into some fun.

Welcome back to the vault.

This is James Sherwood.

It's been a while.

With me today is Bill skins.

Welcome, Bill. Always a pleasure to be here.

So today we're going to be touching on a game

They're about to release their second season.

It's an independent game developer called IQ pictures

and the game is World of Kalia Ascendant.

It is a first person, which I thought was interesting.

Trading card game. Okay.

It is. It started as a

a not as a game, but as a

comic book, anime and story world

that people wanted to be able

to create characters for.

And they started taking some characters

and turn them into avatars for this game.

I got to meet with Chase, who was the creator of the game at Rose city.

Comic-Con had a lot of really good information on it,

but it's kind of a neat, a neat take.

They've having it be based on stories and comic books.

There's a lot of law and a lot of interesting pieces

that are picked out by that.

Second season is on preorder now. So,

you just search for World of Kalia and you can find it there.

It is a first person trading card game.

So does first person mean?

Well, rather than controlling

an army, you control a person.

Okay, so I am Bob,

and rather than playing

zombies and skeletons and all these other things,

I get new equipment, I get new skills,

I get new racial traits, I get things like that

so that I am the one actually doing the combat.

Okay.

You look at most of them,

you look at Laura Karna, you look at Magic The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!

It's you controlling resources.

And this is instead, you are the resource making

tactical choices for yourself.

Okay?

It has a very interesting mechanic

and that it doesn't have resources.

Okay, so Magic the gathering, you have your mana in Larkana,

you have ink, Pokemon.

You have energies in this one.

As Chase told me several times,

they wanted to come at it from almost a go fishing angle.

So you draw a lot of cards.

You have to have copies of the card in order to be able to play it,

so it's anywhere from 1 to 4 copies needed.

If it's a one copy card, when you have one,

you can put it down on your deck or down on your playfield.

If it's a three copy card, you have to wait until

you have three of them and you play them all as the stack.

So kind of a neat twist on it.

And you have enough cards in the beginning, and you're drawing

enough cards to really make it

a feasible system.

Okay. All right.

So I'm just trying to think now,

I'm hardly an expert on card games like this, but I've played some of them.

I don't think I've ever heard of a first person

neither before.

And that's one of the things that made this.

It kind of caught my eye and made it fun.

I got to play a demo game while we were at the convention.

It adds an element

of investment into it, right?

I mean, yeah, that makes sense now.

I also heard that this isn't completely absent.

You do get to roll dice, right? You do.

So how it works is

when it's your turn, you can attack.

So you play cards, your cards give you different

abilities and different bonuses, and then you decide to attack, and

and you can either punch them in the face or you can throw a rock at them.

And then, of course, as you gain abilities, you gain different weapons and things.

So what you do is you roll a 20 sided die,

the other person rolls a 20 sided die for a melee attack

to see if you can close the distance with them.

If you can close the distance,

then you roll for the attack and then you roll for damage.

Okay, if it's arranged, attack.

It works a little bit differently.

Its roll once to see if you hit them and then roll again

for damage.

But you get that randomness from having dice.

And if you're like me, it means you get to collect more pretty d20.

Well, I mean, there's always that.

And that's the primary reason, of course, but it also seems like it's

an interesting blend of two different things that would work well together.

It is, and it was very surprising for me.

It took me about five minutes to catch on the entire time.

Playing an entire game with them.

It has a neat set of randomness.

There is still resource management and that you have cards

that you have to burn or or discard or things like that,

but it makes it a much more streamlined, much easier gaming system.

That's just a lot of fun.

And being able to roll the dice adds

that extra little bit of,

that extra little bit of randomness for that extra little bit of chance.

The way it's designed is your melee attacks are going to do a lot more damage.

If it lands.

Your ranged attacks do quite a bit less damage,

but you don't get a reprisal attack

like if you miss on a melee, so they do a good job.

Anyone who's actually been in a fight take a martial arts gun

picked on on the playground, or whatever the case may be.

It's not just I do something, I stop, you do something.

So this is you're playing off

of each other's turns and you're you're playing all the way through,

rather than sitting there twiddling your thumbs, waiting

for the other person to finish playing cards.

No, that's that's cool. So what do you need to get play on this?

So what's your entry?

So entry. If we're looking at

the equipment

you need, you need a deck of 80 cards.

You need something to track life.

You start with 70 life.

And you will gain

or lose life based on taking damage or healing and things like that.

And then you need one to 1 to 3, 20 side to dice.

Okay?

That's all you need.

That doesn't sound too intense.

It's not.

And price wise, a starter deck runs 25 to $30.

That comes with 80 cards.

I believe it comes with two dice.

It's set up for a play style.

You can play a tank, you can play a healer,

you can play support, you can play this multi-player.

So you could have 3 or 4 people at one table playing.

And and it works just fine, right?

Booster packs are 15 cards.

They run around $6 a booster.

When I say they run around right now, season one's on sale.

Season two is preorder, so it's like $25 for a starter deck

from season one, $30 for a starter deck from season two.

Okay,

so boosters are

anywhere from 5 to $6 a piece depending,

and it's 15 random cards.

The other neat idea that they did

is they created what's called Armory packs,

and an Armory pack is 40 cards,

that is, four copies, each of ten cards apiece.

Okay. And it runs around $10.

And one of the reasons they did that is you can go in on it with your friends

so that you have the possibility for multiple people to get complete

sets of a card, or is the most you need to play any particular card.

Okay.

So you can trade with your friends out of that one pack and say,

hey, we've got this one card that's a two to play.

Each of us get one.

I really want this four card set.

You can have these other ones.

Really makes it

an easy to get into into game.

The other thing they do is they have, they allow proxies and things like that.

For those of you who aren't up on all of the lingo,

proxy is you can actually print copies of the card

on cardstock at home, cut them out and play with them.

Oh, really?

Okay, that is a no no in some games I know.

So, in a lot of games it is.

But they want to keep it manageable.

They want to keep it fun and they want to keep it going for the fans.

Okay, okay.

Now that makes total sense.

So let's talk about the esthetics of it a little bit. What do you think.

Did they take some time putting it together.

Does it look nice or is it do you feel like you're in an industrial warehouse?

Not quite an industrial warehouse.

The artwork is actually very good.

They have if you go to their website,

they have a number of people listed as artistic developers,

so it easily on par with something like a magic The Gathering.

There are a couple of different artistic styles in it, but it does

tend to track that fantasy,

kind of anime style artwork in it.

They spent quite a bit of time coming up with unique flavor text for it.

Okay, so rather than it just being a card saying, oh, you get plus two to attack,

it'll have little bits of of flavor,

little bits of story and law on the.

Okay, okay, cool.

That's what we mean by flavor text.

One of the other things, and I can't tell you how much I value this.

As somebody who wears glasses and is getting older, it is very easy to read.

The cards are laid out very smoothly.

The, symbols are easy to interpret.

It's just

a pleasure to actually pick up the cards.

The cards themselves are good quality.

They're a nice cardboard or a nice.

Not cardboard.

The heavy weighted

cardstock, that's the word I wanted, right?

Good quality.

Yeah, they're good quality. They feel good.

They shuffle. Well, I'm not going to shuffle mine.

They're going to go into card sleeves in order to play with it.

Again, an entire game.

One of the things that that I really like about it.

For anyone who's played Modern Gathering,

I've seen games take 2 to 3 hours to go through this one.

A long game is 20 to 30 minutes. Okay.

So that's actually that's kind of cool to you.

You know, you sit down and you don't you don't have to go quite as long.

So that sounds cool all the way around. And you know, it's interesting.

I can tell as I get a little older myself, even though I've decided to stop aging

this year.

But when I was still doing that, I was noticing some of these things too.

And our gaming group for tabletop, you know, 20 years ago

you didn't see this, but now everybody's pulling out

magnifying glasses and, lights and various other things.

So I can see that being somewhat important.

It is. And and it's it's easy to read.

I mean, the text is not huge, but it's nice pleasing fonts and things like that.

One other thing that I really liked,

because if I'm dumping 25 or 30 bucks, I want to know what I'm getting.

Sure.

Of course, one thing that they did with their starter decks is right on the side.

So it lists the character that it's designed around right on the side.

It has criteria.

I've got one here in front of me.

Complexity, aggro, combo, survivability

and utility are the five categories

and it lists right on it how strong it is in each category.

Okay, cool.

So if I want to, using

another game as an example, we'll use Magic The Gathering again.

If I buy a

starter deck, I have no idea what's in that deck.

I have no idea how it's going to play.

I have no idea what its strengths and weaknesses are.

So there's all this time where I have to go in and I have to read,

and I have to study, and I have to play tested a bunch in order

to come up with it.

This tells you right out of the box if you want to be a tank,

this is the one for you.

You pick high survivability, right?

If you want to have a lot of of support and a lot of equipment

that's going to play a part, you pick something with high utility.

Now all the way around.

This sounds like a amazing game.

I like the idea that they're making it a little more open to people.

You know, once upon a time, gaming was something that everybody could do,

and it seems like these days it's getting so expensive in some ways

that it excludes stuff and where you can,

you know, have a thing

where you can actually print your own cards when you need to,

that kind of stuff that that to me just lowers the barrier to entry.

I mean, you know, try printing your own stuff in Warhammer.

I made that suggestion once about 20 years ago.

I still haven't

been allowed back in the city where this gaming group was, much less.

Yeah,

well, and you tie it in,

looking at some of these games and the,

You look at the, the people that are getting into them

and Pokemon is a is a great example.

It is getting so expensive

and so difficult to find packs because people are scalping them.

Right.

This is one that's a new one that's coming out

that they're intentionally keeping down in.

The scalpers are going to stay down because of the proxy cards.

Yeah.

So right now it's 30 bucks to get into, and it's probably

still going to be 30 bucks to get into

five years from now.

Hopefully it's still going strong then and has several seasons out.

I know it's just it it is a shame sometimes when it gets to a point from

actually being able to play the game to, you know, some of these other things.

I know I got a big box of stuff at a garage sale a number of years ago

and had some magic cards, and one of them happened to be one called a Black Lotus.

And I didn't know anything about magic and was using the thing as a bookmark

for several years until somebody thought that I had completely lost my mind.

And then when they told me what it was worth, I thought I

they might have been right.

But the thing of it is, is that takes that system from not being something

you're using for fun anymore to something that, you know,

you look out on a shelf and or even scared to do that.

So it does change the,

I don't know, just change what it's about.

Well, and that ties in for just about any game, not just a trading card game.

I want a game that I can play.

I want a game that I can have fun with my friends.

I want a

easy example.

Dungeons and Dragons.

I look back at the books I had when I was.

10 or 12 advanced mentions in Dragons, right?

I had bookmarks, pages, dog eared and, you know, notes

written in margins and all sorts of stuff because all of us shared the same books.

Go in with your friends, everybody chips in five bucks and you buy a buy

a new book, and then everybody has their notations in it.

And I look at the modern books that I have, and I couldn't imagine doing that

50 bucks a pop.

Yeah.

It's like, wait a minute.

This is a different

I want something that gets

the happy lived in look rather than

having fun with it.

It's not, you know, the artwork has its place.

I love artwork and not saying anything negative about it,

but it's designed to go look out on the wall and enjoy it.

But it's not something you use for this kind of an activity.

And it seems like these crosses the bridges to that.

Although I guess with modern stuff now instead of,

you know, spending five bucks to buy a book,

you buy your book and

then you get an electronic application, then you buy all your books again,

and then you pay a monthly fee to be able to use those books.

I think I prefer the dog eared scenario a lot better.

I do too, I.

There's something about having

there's something about having that hard copy in your hands,

and the smell of the pages and the feel of the cards and all of that.

That makes it a lot better, I will admit, for

modern gaming and a lot of series,

I have taken to using some digital assistants,

but one of the reasons there is

they have gotten so complex

that you have to.

Dungeons and Dragons

segueing a little bit Advanced Dungeons and Dragons,

you had like five abilities that you needed to worry about

modern Dungeons and Dragons, you've got 30 abilities

you need to worry about, and you need reference text on every one of those.

Right, right.

It used to be rolled a hit.

Now it's rolled to do this, which does that, which ties

in with this, which does this so that you can finally roll the hit.

But on a

positive, you can just ask your AI agent to hack your player's character.

So, you know, maybe that makes up for it.

All right, so World of Kylie, am I saying that right?

Kalia? Kalia, where do you get it?

They have a website world of Kalia.

Com Kylie's

KLIA you can log on there.

You can order anything that they have available.

You can go through check prices.

It's also where you can find the proxy cards.

You can find comic books.

You can find short stories.

They did give me a short story.

I believe it was Tale of Two Daggers was the name of it.

Well written.

I enjoyed what I've read of it so far.

I haven't finished it quite yet, but they're really fleshing this out

into a whole world rather than just a couple of cards you put down on the table.

No, it sounds amazing.

Well, it's always a pleasure being here on the vault.

We're gonna have to do this more often than, you know, once a year.

Yeah, well, thank you very much

for taking some time out of your day and spending some time listening to me.

Now, Toron, thank you very much for coming on the show, Bill.

Always a pleasure.

All right.

We'll talk to you next time on the vault.

So the vault is back.

Check it out at the vault dot show.

James, thank you for joining us today.

So we've got a little bit of time left here.

And I'm going to give a quick update on something that we've been working on.

And we've talked about a little bit in the past.

We did a show earlier this year on retro game consoles.

And so I've been working on this purely in the name of science,

getting everything I have actually set up, and I've run into some problems.

I believe these would be considered first world problems that on my amplifier,

my receiver unit, it only has ten HDMI inputs and I'm out of HDMI input.

So that's a problem.

And so I'm getting these switches and stuff to be able to take

all the composite inputs and put them in and all that kind of thing.

But it's taking a map to figure out what goes where,

but I'm going to get it to work.

And I think one of the things I'd like to do is go through later this year.

And we've had a lot of questions come in on the different things

related to this and talk about things like ever drive

and some of the ways that you can get your old games to work.

You know,

I know last week we talked about the fact that it seems like

the PS5 will now play everything, so that might be your one stop.

But if you want to do it legally, there are other ways to be able to do it

and actually play on the actual hardware fairly inexpensively and make it work.

But there are some gotchas to being able to get into that and online

with this, another device that's come out that is going to be kind of cool.

It's going to be released next year if they make the date is

we know that Commodore is back, Atari is back, and they've been remaking

rereleasing some of their old consoles, but not just kind of a cheap

third party release, stuff

that actually works properly and does what it's supposed to do.

And while these are re, what would we call it, respawns, I guess

in gamer terms of the original companies, they still do hold the

the rights to be able to do it and are doing a nice job.

New components for being able to do all the things.

Well, the latest thing that's been announced that was a

little bit of a surprise is a rerelease of the Atari 800 XL,

and this was one of the Atari eight bit lines from the early 80s.

They stopped making them in 93 when Atari finally went out of business.

But it it looks like it is a unit that is going to be pretty faithful

to the original. It's the same size.

It has a mechanical keyboard in the sense that it's mechanical keys.

I have no idea if it's membrane or not,

or if they're actual switches, but if physical keyboard

it has a live cartridge slot, so it'll run your games if you have them.

It also has a USB input.

For anybody that knows what that is, and you know it's going to be a situation

where it'll be kind of another thing out there that's going to be interesting

to see how well this works.

The one thing that I just from looking at the specs question is it's

USB instead of the original SDI oh port that would have been on,

but maybe it'll make an adapter for that, because right now, as it stands,

it wouldn't work with a lot of the old peripherals,

but I'm sure there's a way that the community will figure that out.

So just another thing that's coming up. It's going to be out next year.

We'll review it when we get our hands on it.

Until next week,

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