In this week’s Space Debris Podcast Nick & James catch up on some casual matters: what we’re playing, both in VR and flat games. Feeling overwhelmed and fatigued by all the space and AI news has led us to taking a break from it, for the most part, this week.

Also discussed is Twitch streaming, dgtlhrt is thinking about streaming some casual gameplay and weekend VR sessions. Nick tells us his experience streaming Pop One and gaining a small audience, but any audience is a good audience!

We play a new game, where someone has to write a sentence that ends with a band name, but the real game is the other person makes a few guesses as to which band name the person will use, the sentence really doesn’t matter!

One of the bands picked, happened to be Blink 182, which led to a discussion of the ticket pricing fiasco for their reunion tour and dgtlhrt having a panic attack with 2 tickets costing $6,000+ in his cart in Ticketmaster.

We then discuss a bunch of upcoming tours, from Theo Von to Andrew Callaghan Channel 5 News. Look at a similar ticket pricing issue for Theo’s Boston 5th and 6th show added verse the 1st shows initially announced. We look to comedian Louis C.K. who seems to have a solution to Ticketmaster by building a connection directly to his audience, simple solution that has allowed CK to release countless specials, shows, a new movie (Fourth of July), and now even another comic’s special (Bobby Kelly). We hope to see more people using this direct to fanbase method by other artists in the future.

We start off with a “screwed in kid” and hugely beloved comedian Yannis Pappas unknowingly providing us with a new introduction! Shout out to an amazing comedian and podcaster, check out his podcast: Long Days with Yannis Pappas (and join his Patreon!)

Quickly we take a look at a First Edition Pokemon Venusaur card which Kaz sent out a few weeks ago to be graded. He finally got it back and it’s off the charts at a respectable 2.5 grade (out of 10). We discuss the process of getting something officially graded and the current state of card collectibles, including the old Marvel Hologram cards. Kaz mentions one of the most pricey Pokemon cards to be the Black Orchid which we look further into.

This leads us to seeing if AI can generate Pokemon cards, which not surprisingly, it can! And it does a damn good job at it. We try 2 different AI generators to see their output and compare, then play with the idea of creating a new playing card set generated entirely by AI! Why not!?

We take a quick look at the website haveibeentrained.com, which will allow you to search the repositories certain AIs are using. We find Vive Report and confirm dgtlhrt is forever in the AI hive mind, unless of course he deletes the files from his host. Try searching for yourself, but don’t be scared if you find anything, it’s simply the internet scraped.

While recounting past AI stories to Kaz, BillDance points out the day we’re recording happens to be Elon Musk’s AI Day and we look at the humanoid robots he’ll be demoing during the presentation. Soon enough, we’re asking AI to generate humanoid robot versions of Elon Musk, how could we resist!?

We end things by looking at some of the new and very impressive “Small Homes” or “Modular Homes”, which dgtlhrt seems pretty set on purchasing eventually. We discuss how they are fireproof/ almost everything-proof, and how we might see these popping up in post-disaster areas, for instance Florida after the horrid damage from Hurricane Ian.

This episode covers some of the latest “Space news for dummies” as well as some interesting AI news and general discussion.

We start off light, taking a look at some photos from comedian Bill Burr’s sold-out set at Fenway Park! Dgtlhrt was there and was able to snag a few photos from the “turf” and compares the in-person experience to the VR experience being in Fenway Park in VR thanks to MLB Homerun Derby VR. As well as Bill_dance giving a quick review of an Imagine Dragons concert he received discounted (free) tickets to.

We then begin exploring space news! We look at new photos from the James Webb Space Telescope. One in particular, odd wave-like patterns around WR140, which dgtlhrt believes to resemble a “thumbprint”, thusly dubbed “Thumbprint of God”. We look at how different audio frequencies can affect sand particles and create amazing fractal patterns, and make assumptions that possibly there’s a frequency near WR140 creating the pattern of peculiarly shaped rings expanding out around it, aside from the most likely cause being the delicate dance this pair of stars do and the effects of their proximity every 7.94 years.

Then we jump into AI, thanks to an awesome tweet by the renown Daniel Eckler. Reviewing a Twitter thread where Daniel shows off other tweets that exhibit AI projects and their mind-blowing results! From game development, to art, to brainstorming, to pretty much anything you can think of, using a handful of AI software such as DALL-E and DALL-E 2, Midjourney, GAN as well as many other AI tools and software. Most all of this amazing progress coming from the wonderful people & work being done at OpenAI.

Huge shout-out and thanks to @daniel_eckler! Fantastic work!

We have a little fun with the wacky site thispersondoesnotexist.com, which features only images of people who literally do not exist and are all created by AI. We come across a handful of oddities, and are able to relate one image in particular to a recent historic finding from ancient Roman ruins.

We also look at an AI story where a user in the Midjourney Discord submitted an AI generated artwork to a state fair’s Fine Art competition and actually won 1st place! Pretty wild, and you can bet the rest of the artists that submitted pieces were none too pleased with the outcome.

We move on to having a bit of fun test “prompts” using craiyon.com, seeing what “Space Debris” and “Podcast” terms generate.

AI truly shows the future is now, it’s both exciting and scary and we plan to keep an eye on AI as progress continues and we see more and more of these amazing projects!

There is a new audio “outro” for the podcast which we generated using an AI voice generator, see if you can hear/spot it!

Would it make more sense to send drugs into space rather than golden records? We think yes!

Talk about Space Debris falling in Australia and Philippines.

We fall down a rabbit hole about gold mining the streets of New York, and end up discussing past experiences with panning for gold and using metal detectors as a hobby.

We then check out the incredible Bear Soongyoong and her genius cat storylines, at least that’s what we hear from “Headquarters”! We watch and marvel at masterfully done cat massage videos.

We show off our TikTok MLB Homerun Derby VR gameplay vid which got quite a few views (for us, at least.)

Earth has been spinning faster than ever……. Not good! Enjoy your 23 hour 59 minute and 59.99841 second days!

Hi, How Are You? We fall into a discussion about Daniel Johnston, a personal fav of dgtlhrt, we highly recommend you check him out! We also note Ahh! Real Monsters seems to pay him homage in their Krumm character.

We hype the Walk About Min Golf VR Labyrinth DLC!

Then we check out a few odd alien videos which leads to us mentioning VR dev legends Survios new Aliens VR game announcement and discussion!

A mysterious orb discovered in Mexico… real, hoax? Likely hoax!

We end with a discussion of old Vice vs new Disney Vice, David Choe and Thumbs Up from 2012.

This week, as we celebrate Independence Day, we look at the Large Hadron Collider which is set to run a world record amount of energy on July 5th, 2022. We talk through the lighthearted “Mandela Effects” that we’ve already encountered, some say due to the LHC run from 2012. Of course, the internet is on edge waiting to see if this RUN 3 of the LHC brings yet another new branch to the timeline, or maybe nudges us back to our “Main Timeline”? No one knows, but we have fun speculating!

Along the way, we talk comedy, alt comedy in particular, from Tom Green classics to the Stella shorts then from the Whitest kids you Know to the Mighty Boosh and Old Greg (which we got claimed for so if you notice a 20 second gap, that’s Old Greg!)

We also discuss Oak Ridge, the home of the “Manhattan Project” which BillDance happens to live fairly close to, we all learn to our surprise! We dance around a few legendary instances in “conspiratorial history”, again all in good fun.

Tons more covered in this episode, even dgtlhrt showing off a Rock Juniper Bonsai tree named “Nebsy” to the new Nike Go Flyease shoe (which we already ordered a pair to check out for a future pod!) We’re talking about anything & everything ‘round here! Enjoy the Space Debris!

This week we catch up after a mini-break as we all got caught up with life and were finally able to pod again! Just a general Father’s Day chat, checking in on the boys and seeing what’s new.

We watch a news story about a man using medieval spear to engage a burglar, very successfully! “I’m a Christian man and don’t want to take a life, but I wanted him to know that his life was mine to take, and I let him have it”.

From there we hit some random topics until we get to the main event, the other worldly mystery of the “Door on Mars”. We discuss what the “Door” could possibly be, as well as look at a few other interesting oddities on the ol’ Red Planet (Mars). 

A quick review of the new LIDAR scans of the ancient civilization in the Amazon, checking out the news story that shows the Amazonian civilization was much, much larger and more intricate than ever expected. Thanks to LIDAR scans, scientists were able to get a much more accurate representation of how the civilization was arranged and interconnected, hinting at a much higher level of knowledge and community than previously thought.

This all leads up nicely to a huge reveal, dgtlhrt, who happened to be very aware of what Star Jelly is and has known about it for years, encountered it IN PERSON! More interestingly, this sighting lines up with the newly found Tau Herculid meteor shower, which is even more interesting as Star Jelly is often said to be a byproduct of meteor showers. We look at the photos dgtlhrt took of the Star Jelly, and discuss all known possible explanations as dgtlhrt raves about how “incredible” this all is and how he never imagined he’d actually see it in person, especially mere feet from his house!

We look through historic references of Star Jelly, and mention how a video game references its in-game currency as Star Jelly and question if this is an attempt to hide true references to Star Jelly online. Sort of like the theory that Disney named the movie “Frozen” so that when people google “Is Walt Disney Frozen” (there are rumors that Walt Disney is cryogenically frozen) all of the search results are about Elsa and Olaf rather than reports and stories about Walt Disney actually being cryogenically frozen.

If you have any experiences with Star Jelly you’d like to share, or want our photos of the Star Jelly we found, please reach out to us at spacedebrispod@gmail.com.

Dgtlhrt went to Pax this year, as he does every year, but this year he had the goal of filming a mini documentary (or Podumentary!) featuring any and all VR content shown at PAX East 2022.

We then realized we needed narration and though commentary would also be beneficial, so we decided to record a podcast where we watch the footage and in doing so create the narration and commentary that will be used on the standalone “Podumentary”.

We of course go off topic here and there, but still a very fun podcast where you can watch us try to make a “thing”.

The best part, we were able to coordinate 2 interviews! Starting with Resolution Games (Demeo, Blaston, Angry Birds VR, UltiMechs) Head of Marketing Jim Squires followed up by a quick interview with Tabor Carlton Marketing Director at LAI Games, an arcade manufacture & retailer that had the brilliant idea to create a VR game based around their actual business! Two awesome interviews with two awesome people, highly worth the watch!

And you get to enjoy Kaz and dgtlhrt as they try to re-create the last minute or 2 of audio from the LAI Games interview as the audio file was corrupted by the intense noise barraging us during the interview. Though I think we found a fun and creative solution that you'll all enjoy!

The full standalone documentary will be posted in the coming weeks, after we get all this audio edited down and do a bit of graphic and cleanup work. 

You can consider this a “Making of” the Podumentary podcast, and can expect the full standalone “Podumentary” to be posted in the coming weeks! “Podumentary” post will include links to all discussed VR games and developers, so you’ll definitely want to check it out once it’s posted!

Needless to say, we’re very excited about this and cannot thank everyone involved enough!

And we’re back! PAX East forced us to take a bit of a break, all with the aim of creating a mini Pax East VR Documentary!

We open the show catching up, which casually leads into dgtlhrt poorly retelling a Norm MacDonald story which of course leads to pulling up Jim Breuer’s original telling of the story. We then take a peak at the actual SNL bit referenced in the story, classic Norm!

We watch some rando vids, talk whatever nonsense pops up. This leads to a rabbit hole of WWE 2K22 custom match videos we find… Mostly starring celebrities. We start with Tell ‘Em Steve Dave 3 way fight which is incredible quality, and then stumble down the rabbit hole to Trailer Park Boys (Green Bastard for the win!) and further still to Ronald McDonald fighting a Ninja Turtle amongst a flurry of others.

All of this is just chilling, having fun until we get to the main event: DOUBLE UNBOXING SPECIAL! Dgtlhrt got his hands on a fresh Steam Deck from Valve, we enjoy opening this glorious product and bask in its glory.

To make it even more interesting, dgtlhrt busts out a Quest 2 he’s had in his closet since release day (October 2020), almost 2 years of it just sitting there with a plethora of accessories (Widmo VR lens inserts, VRCover foam replacement, Elite Strap) and even install the Elite strap on stream!