Tonight on GeekNights, we talk about the modern marvel that is video chat. In the news, Perplexity is using undeclared crawlers to scrape content, Samsung has a crazy Micro LED TV, real life ad block is possible, and Trump is forming the American SS.
The next GeekNights Book Club book will be The Running Man, by Richard Backman, who you may know better as Stephen King.
The first time I saw a video call was at EPCOT. My aunt wanted me to go in front of the screen and talk to a Disney employee that reserved our lunch time in the Italian restaurant at the end of the park. He was wearing a white dress shirt with suspenders and had short curly hair. Why I remembered this when I saw the episode? No idea. But throught to share.
I am catching up with podcasts and the two most recent episodes of Penn’s Sunday school talks about the behind the scenes aspects of the show Scott went to in NYC. Mentioning it here in case people were curious.
Was the Bible Verse thing the standard book test, or something else? Book Test (there’s a few versions, but Brian Brushwood’s is the best, and I learned how it’s done at Connecticon, but it’s not my secret to share) can actually be really impressive if done well.
I don’t know what a standard book test is.
The way it went is they got a ton of people from the audience. All the pains in the ass that believe that they use stooges. Then they had those people do all kinds of things to randomize the selection of which passage it would be. For example, they had people throw darts at a board which had every single book in the bible listed.
Then they revealed that the exact passage which was randomly selected was what they had written on a banner and sealed up in advance.
Ah. The standard book test is a similar but distinct mentalist trick: “Pick a random page from this book. Pick a word on that page. Tell me part of it, usually the first letter, and I’ll tell you the word.”
https://youtu.be/iPATJ1doJm8?si=gMN5AYGN4ozYQbad So it took some searching of my memory (and some old notebooks from the 1980s), but this film tracks similar to the Arnie movie. The difference being it came out a few years before it.