Mail-merge-based spam is so hawt! Just send emails galore to however happens to produce something and hope they bite. Not annoying at all.
Am I a bad person? I just want one day without spammers trying to guilt-trip me into buying stuff I don’t need.
I have two podcasts and two radio stations. So unsolicited mail is to be expected. I have little problems with that, until the the people sending the mail continue try to solicit for a response even when I do not respond at all.
The final mail that made me snap
My response
Hello
I have decided to answer your barrage of mails. I don’t really think much of your services to be honest, but I will give you an answer based on experience and understanding of the subject matter at hand.
So, the question of the day is this: does search engine optimization really work? The short answer is no; it does not.
Allow me to build my reasoning here. I have two podcasts, one called “IT-säkerhetspodden” and the one you’re asking about “Flashback, tracks from the past”. They have very different strategies and results. Allow me to elaborate:
IT-säkerhetspodden
It was started in 2018 by me and a friend. It’s in Swedish and covers the area of IT-security. When it started, it had only two other competitors in the same area in Sweden. We hit it off to a good start already from the get-go. A few years in, I was able to get approximate listening from the biggest competitors. Then I compared to ours: we were 10% larger than the best performing competitor. In short: we were the largest IT-security podcast in Sweden. This is no longer true, as we are a bit behind in curve. We have yet to transition to the video format, and that is a problem today for an audio only podcast. But we can pretty much do whatever we want, with no significant loss of listenership. The SEO-angle? Pretty lack-luster. We have not even cared about SEO. No transcripts, no key words, no key word tracking and no description following any SEO strategies. A basic presence on social media (LinkedIn, Facebook and X/Bluesky). No titles optimized for anything at all. A dry website that only 6% of our listeners use. We live on the big podcast directories (Apple, Google, and Spotify). We still perform like the 1% largest podcasts in the world. This is because the curve is exponential. At 1000 unique listeners per one episode and week, we are that big. It says so little about anything except the overwhelming number of podcasts in the world get NO listeners. This is the sad truth. And no SEO in the world can change that.
Flashback, tracks from the past
Started in 2020 and has the format of playing chiptune- and demo scene music with short form narration by me. It covers demo parties (think digital arts festivals) and old games from the past. It has enormous competition. There are a lot of old CGM, chiptune and demo scene podcasts and stations sharing the small number of listeners that are available. Check terraplayer.com and see for yourself. It’s also a narrow (“drainpipe”) instead of a broad (“lake”) of a format, so to speak. It has had a dismal listening from starts as it competes with a narrow format in a totally saturated environment. And the scene has been set in its way for so long that it just isn’t viable to compete as most listeners already got their favorite spots since the early 2000s (long before podcasts, and when it was called “on demand audio). Yeah, I remember that. I started a now long-gone scientific show in 1997 (!) before there were broadband. So, to no surprise: it has almost no listeners. One month of all episode-listening, compares unfavorably with one (!) day of listening for one episode of my other podcast. I decided (unwisely, I know now!) to go full SEO gung-ho on this! I am a software developer by hobby, not trade. So, I read up on the problem and added all things you must have consistent tags, keyword tracking, transcription, the two worldwide supporter chapter namespaces in use and all relevant Podcasting 2.0 attributes needed for full SEO immersion. I started tracking key word usage with PEOSEO.com.
I am now months down the line and the uptick in listening, visibility and usage have been small. Noticeable, yes, but not worth the days and months of development and hard research has not been worth it. I am grateful for the experience, though. It was good to understand that SEO only works to improve an already well-performing podcast or website.
Here are two observations from me:
You should not compete
Another old curmudgeon by the name of Troed Troedsson taught me this lesson in his book “Don’t panic”.
If you want the listeners and then money, do not go into markets that are heavily saturated. That’s a lost cause. Sorry, no exceptions! If it works, it is because the conditions change. What was unpopular yesterday, can be popular tomorrow and vise-versa. This just how it works. No need to sugarcoat it or trying to sell a panacea for it. SEO can do nothing here. It’s not possible.
You must adapt
A very nice podcast that made an interview with me. They have video. Video is nice!
Today, video-based podcasts are more or less a requirement. If you still have only audio, you are not in the leader quadrant if I may say so. This was not so when I started. But the changes are there all right. Then there is AI and AI-requirements. If you leverage AI today, you can improve your chances somewhat. That’s just the rule of today. There are no ways around this.
Then again, who cares?
I and my friend have earned a pretty good amount from IT-säkerhetspodden during the years. We have interviewed the Swedish CEOs of IBM and Microsoft about AI years before it became the topic of the hour. We have talked with intelligence officers, IT-security gurus, and other people in the market. No SEO needed for that. I bought a subscription from Yoast for the site and learned to optimize the show notes for SEO. It did nothing for the visibility of the podcast and never showed a readable increase in the listening. It cost a lot of money and was irritating as hell for someone proud of being able to express himself with texts and articles.
And Flashback, tracks from the past is a lost cause. Who cares? I certainly do not. I have loved nighttime radio since I religiously watched “midnight caller” in the 80s. And now I present chiptune music and talk briefly about various demo scene topics for a small audience. Fine by me. I sure wanted more listeners, so I did the SEO dance and learned that all the promises were just a pocket full of mumbles, for so are promises. And I really come to expect that all I can do is to enjoy the process not some sort of pipe dream of “stardom” that cannot be the reason to do anything today. Timing is everything. And the time of demo/chiptune is not now. It was 25 years ago. This much is clear. I will continue working the recording desk for as long as I enjoy it, without expecting the non-existing chance of become some sort of influencer. What a stupid goal that is, anyway. The other pod can’t really give me that either. I seek no fame and not becoming some sort of brand name in myself. So, yeah, that’s the whole thing. The last leg of this journey comes here…
“Slkmediaagency” and the spam angle (UCE)
Right, this is the least funny part of the discussion. But we must go there. I’m in my 50s, so I have seen the whole modern IT-era unfold. Back in the 90s, I was a consultant and system administrator. I so the early era of spam. Hormel, the creator the Spam brand of compressed meat, did not like having their name associated with the annoyance that was unsolicited mail. They even had a page on their website stating that their product was Spam with a capital “S”. Unsolicited mail was spam with a non-capital “s”. If the purveyor of the least popular “food” you can eat wants nothing to do with you, maybe it’s time to listen.
Sanford Wallace, legendary spammer from days past.
Later, the spamming industry struck back with a new term called “opt out”., It simply meant “you receive our spam and tell us to stop” (unsubscribe). What a dick-move that turned out to be. But here we are now everyone thinks it should be the norm. And it is.
So why am I even complaining? Well, I get a lot of emails from people selling stuff to my podcasts and radio stations. I answer politely to people trying to get their music on them by noting we have no possibilities to play commercial music. Then there are all the “we can develop your website”-spams. I don’t ever respond. Most people use social media today, so websites are strictly window-dressing or maybe hobbyist projects. And then there is you. If you wonder why I haven’t responded, now you know. But you continued spamming harder with follow ups, while not knowing how easy they could be understood as mass-emails. My name is “Erik Zalitis” and my demo scener handle is “DJ Daemon”. So, my first name is NOT “DJ”. You are calling me that, which makes me understand that you are just trying to automatically spam as many people as possible, hoping someone will respond. And I do, with the only response I can give you: “Please stop spamming. I’m not interested!”.
You should have taken the hint when I dd not respond to the first five or so emails with incessant nagging from you.
I could have been rude, but I do not do that. I only observe that your aberrant behavior highly correlates with “dark tetrad” traits. I will leave the discussion with that and ask you to just go away now.
In this day and age, when we try to redefine everything, it should still be known what part of him that was good and evil. If you can’t see which is which, I got bad news for you…
I’m going to release a new podcast episode of Flashback, tracks from the past in a few weeks from now. It will dig deeper in the concept of evil in videogames. I already have made such an episode in the past, but wish to focus more on organizations that grow corrupted even when they had the best of intentions. But I have not yet started, so I don’t know how to navigate those waters yet. However I have already decided on the last story of it: a fictitious organization that may could have existed in real life. One that started out with the best of intentions, but then became truly evil.
Here is a concept of it from my private notes (translated to English)
As I understand it, the idea was good from the start. Benevolent, even. And it actually still is today. Built on a strong sense of security and doing what is right to protect and to rectify and to form an opinion against society’s greatest injustices. The whole thing was started by a person who himself was exposed to the injustices that he has now come to want to protect others from. There is nothing but goodness in this, as I see it. With little information and nothing to go on, the obvious conclusion is that this is the right thing to do, even if it is controversial. But right from the start it was criticized and the responses from the organizers of the of organization were unprofessional and appealed to emotions and went to direct attacks on those who spoke against it. Angry words from those who set themselves up as a guarantor of a safer society. And those who complained did not get a substantive answer but the answers more implied “how can you think like this” or “are you on the enemy’s side?”. The criticism came because all ideas that are new are controversial. This type of activity takes time to become habitus (accepted by the public). But the answers from the organization are, in my eyes, a number of red flags. They feel more like demagogy than rational responses to the criticism that all new paradigms must always undergo. It was based on making the followers angry and despairing at those who dared to criticize, rather than actually explaining why the criticism is unjustified. An “us against them” mentality in general.
But we have to go back a few years when there were indications of the people the founder had strong bonds with. The reports cited links and direct references to local authoritarian organizations of the type that want everyone to see them as dangerous and very committed to drastic solutions. “Strong men who solve their problems”, one might say. And these men had logos with very strong and simple messages. These people are no longer visible in the organization. But the question is, have they disappeared, or are they still in the background? This is unclear to me. If I hadn’t known about this, I would have probably actually supported them. Which feels hard now, when I know that they may actually have other intentions than those they state. But this may be a misjudgment on my part. It may turn out that this will work out well. They have managed to change parts of society’s rules as they stand now and it actually looks good. Despite this, the given question is what happens next. The questions are whether those who may be in the background have a different idea of where “the ship should sail” than the one stated as the purpose of the whole thing. And if so, are these purposes as legitimate as those we were promised at the start?
So many thoughts and so many times it has started well but ended in disaster. The Italian mafia was started by citizens who wanted to protect other citizens. However, that was not the outcome of this. Where did it go wrong? Were they started by them with dishonest intentions, or was the organization taken over by opportunists who were there at the beginning and who stood on the sidelines without seeming to want a position in it? Maybe they bided their time… Maybe it wasn’t even intended that way. At a later point, the lust for power took over. This is an interesting thought and I think of the saying “Those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it”. This is unclear and maybe I’m worrying unnecessarily. But the fact is that it doesn’t concern me and it doesn’t concern most others either. So why is it even a problem? Maybe it isn’t. But I find it hard to see that this type of situation doesn’t have a big risk of going off the rails and doing things that the founders perhaps didn’t understand could happen.
Everything is up in the air and its activities are about to become totally accepted and then maybe it will stay there and continue to do good for society. But this is a risky path to take and the outcome of an unstable business that is very vulnerable to control and influence from those who see opportunities. It is clear to me that the correct approach is to wait and see, but not make any assumptions until more information is available. And there I stop my thoughts and move on to more relevant tasks this Friday at the end of May 2026.
Where is the podcast connection, then?
Let me show you where I started this discussion in 2021:
The episode is called “It’s good to be bad” and talks about villains that have a reason to be what they are and may not even see themselves as evil at all.
“So Tina Turner may not need another hero, but we need more villains! Interesting villains, and the retro games sometimes deliver the goods. Who wants another mustache twirling bozo who just wants to tie your wife to the railroad tracks? A proper villain has to have a reason to be who he or she is or we don’t want them. And here we celebrate some of the … ok… sorry for the misuse of the term.. “good” ones.”
— DJ DAemon
So meet the villains of this episode:
Andrew “I’m right – damn the consequences” Ryan – Bioshock 1. Donkey “But Mario is the evil one” Kong – The Donkey Kong series. Sarah “I will bathe in your blood, but I’m the victim here” Kerrigan – Starcraft 1 and 2. Robo “He’s just like Hitler” Hitler – Castle Wolfestein. Wallace “Long, intellectual rant on why all is perfect and you suck” Breen – Halflife 1 and 2. Shodan “I’m god, now you curl up and die” – System Shock 1 and 2. (Ghost/Zombie/Whatever) Pirate “The incel of piracy” LeChuck – The Monkey Island series.
A few of my notes from the podcast:
“Look, I don't care much for evil for evil's sake. It's a boring and useless trope. And it fits for lesser bosses and the occasional end boss when the focus is not the evil and the villain. But a good villain needs a rationale, a drive, a motivation. Some are into greed, some are corrupted and unleash hidden flaws when life goes bad for them. Some have ulterior motives and no idea as to why everyone hates them. And some would have been good if only insert plot element here would not have happened. So today we go under the sea, into the jungle and among the stars and into the blood drenched walls of a certain castle. And we wade through the corpses and destroy the landscape to find the nature of evil wherever it may be."
— DJ Daemon
Quote Bubble
“Would you kindly consider a bit of wisdom from yours truly? A man choose, but the slave of an idea has to obey. In Bioshock, you come to an underwater city built on the idea of total freedom. A dream of independence where the artist may create, the businessman will earn and the scientist is unfeathered by pesky rules and limitations to his experiments. The city of Rapture was created by Andrew Ryan who had the biggest of dreams, but as the city fell apart he could not accept it was a mistake. Thus he keeps the now insane population locked up in the city that is a complete battle zone. And Orion is an anagram of Ayn Rand, the objectivist, ideologist and author. The evil within Ryan you might ask? Well, mainly sacrificing everything and everyone for a pipe dream."
— DJ Daemon
Quote Bubble
“And that concludes the whole list. We have the boring and uninteresting villains that could've been something with a proper backstory or at least some reason for them to be put into the game. But there are too many to mention here, so all I can say is we're looking at you, Professor Elvin Atom Bender from Impossible Mission. Inky, Pinky, Blinky and Clyde, know the ghosts from Pac-Man. Sinister from Sinister. And Spider Mastermind, the end boss from Doom."
X is such a delightful place these days. A goes between being a weird hodge-podge of different ideas to becoming a total dumpster fire. It seems to follow some logic that kind of resembles what your viewing patterns are, but can just as likely show you all kinds of different memes, opinions and information. It often veers into racist, obnoxious and fake news and stuff that looks more of a psyop than actually useful informaton. … And I’m loving it.
Here is a totally unstructured set of memes I found on X during the last 6 months. Enjoy the madness that is X, people. Try not to think about it, and you will be fine! With no further ado, here it goes…
The Internet landscape explained in one picture
As a producer/podcaster/broadcaster I can relate to this. People that create something have to wade through loads of products that may or may not help us “mining” the listeners for their attention. SEO-tools, new plugins and the next cool DAW. The overestablishment of creators has led to a total eco-system of crazy stuff sold with the promise of making us stand out. And to what avail? No-one is listening anyhow. But hey, if you’re in the business for a shovel, have I got a deal for you!
Some people don’t want a Fox-Waifu
This is very understandable. I totally agree. What will the world look like when women feel inferor because they don’t have long telescopic ears, a wet nose optimized for hunting and a bushy tail? And what can women do when society requires them to forage for rodents in big hole, pounce on prey or raid the chicken coop?
X runs the AI ragged
Right! On X, everyone asks poor Grok “is this real” even when the picture shows big foot in lingerine in a parking lot. I totally get if he feels tired and wonders if humanity should be allowed to breed. Poor guy!
Are we back to 2020 (Let’s hope not!)
In 2020, this was how we felt. It was horrible. But many still work from home and probably are about to go full Jack Nicholson in the Shining. All work and no play makes us all go bananas!
Finally explained RIGHT!
I’ve seen this meme so many times. It tries to explain societal policies like “should we help the poor” or “let people handle their lives themselves”. But what always irked me was that all pictures showed a bunch of freeloaders trying to see the game without the paying entrance fee. And now… Finally … someone explains the obvious problem with the picture and what it represents. Thank you, dear sirs!
I’m not contesting this
Can’t we have cool code names for war, like many software products. I want the next world war to be code named “Burnt badger” or call it “Nuked Naarwahl” or something.
Elon and Ayn sitting in a tree k-i-s-s-i-n-g
Elon Must seems to fit in Ayn Rands “Atlas Shrugged”. Seriosuly, he would do just fine as a hero in her book. That’s the book that reveres dark tetrad behavior more than anything. Yeah, seems about what you expect from her… and from him.
Will I respawn or not?
If god has me as a playable character, what is wrong with his specs? And why can he not even play correctly? He has lost every battle based on social skills so far. Nah, this is not good. Are the are the angels with him on a raid? Does satan play as well? Many questions, but no answers. Maybe in the afterlife DLC.
But think about the kittens!!!!!
If it hurts cats, count me out. Also, it’s not stellar that it hurts humanity.
Is god Nietzsche, then?
My first girlfriend suggested this little aphorism:
God is dead, says Nietzsche.
Nietzsche is dead, says god.
Nietzsche is god, says the dead.
This leaves me with the question: what does the undead say? And what does the fox say?
Remember: the only way to win is NOT to play
I remember War Games that I saw as a child. It had an AI (or AGI? or super intelligence?) that tried to figure out if it could win a world war. And it came close to figure that out for real. Maybe there is a story for Trump, Xi-ping and Putin there?
And this is why we can’t have nice things (with AI)
I cannot think of a better way to explain the problem with AI than this. It understands its task or does not, but always acts like it totally gets it. I know some people like that. But then again, those people does not consume whole nuclear power plants to function.
The honey badger… Nature’s arsehole
The honey badger is the worst animal ever. It just totally fails to have any redeeming point whatsoever. If reincarnation works, I would get most dictators and serial killers would become Honey badger in their next life.
This genre has a pretty long rap sheet…
I’m into 60s music. Like classic rock and old Jazz from the old school era. I also, weirdly enough, like chiptune music. But rap. I cannot stand it. In the olden days it was about injustice and the hard life for African Americans. This I could understand, respect and even like. But today it seems to be tough guy-attitude mixed with horrible sampled loops and some sort semblence of rhythm. To quote ABBa’s legendary audio engineer, Michael B. Tretow, “Skare där va musik????”.
Ask not what he did in the oval office
George Carlin may have lived a bit wild, but JFK was a full on hedonist. I will not delve into that more, but he would have impressed Jeffrey Epstein. JFK may have been a good president, but a good man, he was not! George Carlin is brutal in his effective argumentation. It was most certainly not directed at JFK as Carlin entered his “FM”-era much later when he started going form “safe” to “risque” subjects in his shows.
’twas another time
Seen this meme a lot. Three old stuff that is getting popular and a fourth that you hoped would not. But there we are. Art deco is hot, people! Super hawwwwt!
Chuck Norris – the only man who could kill death
Ok, I admit, although with a heavy heart that the man is no more. But he most certainly did not walk gently into that good night. He probably raged, raged and raged against the the dying of the lime-light.
How it feel to live in Sweden today
I try to avoid getting political. But this is a joke comes with a very real background. When Sweden and Finland joined NATO, Russia threatened us with nukes. That was like the only thing you heard from them during that time. Putin, if you nuke us, what good will it do you to occupy the wasteland of Stockholm afterwards? Seems like a stupid thing to do.
Wasn’t he kinda a dick himself?
Seems like the man himself was not without his problems. And neither was mr. Deckard.
The rationalist’s journey is a lonely one
If you act like that, you will have no friends. But you will at least know in your heart that you built your reasoning well. And that makes you ready to battle all what is wrong on the Internet, one irrational Reddit user at the time. Once more into the fray!
Yo, Joe! Praise the Commodore and pass the ammo!
Kudos to the guy on the top of the image. Unless he is AI-slop. Then no. But this is a true (?) rendition of the classic loader screen of GI Joe from the C64 (bottom of the image). Cool!
Thinning lines…
Reddit! Are you reading this? Maybe get out off your neckbeard mancaves and offer some help instead of “helpful advice” from the “Yo’ mama” school of rethoric excellence.
I don’t wanna set the world on fire!
Would it be fun to play Fallout in real life? This observer says “No”, it wouldn’t. But then again, how would we know, without even trying? Might be fun to listen to 40s Jazz and blasting raiders in central Stockholm. Problem is that one might not even get to experience the fun of catastrophical scarcity.
Wise guy, huh?
Sure! We all want to be like him. But can we? Or are we all going to behave like the sad little nerds we are and cry mommy when someone “begs to differ” on the Internet. Not clear, I’m afraid.
Not the philosopher we deserve, but the philosopher we got
Philosophy is stupid! Just some old people shouting assertions at everyone. “You fool! Live as I say you should, not as I lived my life”. Many were rich old morons that didn’t have to live like the people they taught to live on hay so they would get pie in the sky when they die. Then there is the dude! The dude is awesome! Be like the dude!
… But that’s, like, just my opinion dude.
Don’t make any plans, folks!
So far, so good. Half a year to go, what could possibly go wrong?
Seven sins of politics – now in color!
You know this diagram of political views. Lefties to the left, righties to the right and pretty much everyone else in the middle . This is weird, but most people, the way this scale is made, land in the middle of it all. But that’s no way to make a political career. So the edge lords get elected and adhere to their respective ideologies. And now you know which sins to select. Nice! Mine is mostly Sloth and some greed. Because why not?
Told’ya so!
Interesting, no? Back in the day, I preached this logic to everyone and the people in my workplace said things like “let’s go to the cafeteria and listen to Erik’s new conspiracy theories”. But who is laughing now? No one. No one is laughing now. Every nation does this to every other nation. And yes, that is why we can’t save nice things on the Internet.
Nah, that’s Orion….
I have no idea what to say… Sorry. Words elude me.
Stuck in the middle…
What did I say about not being political? Well, here I go again. But actually, can we try not to be swayed but all this deranged “love … or .. hate” of false dichotomy? Nah, never! What would the debates on the Internet be about then? They would actually be interesting, enlightning and, you know, totally boring. And we can’t have that!
So correlation does not imply causation… But is it correlated?
Every now and then AI-slop can be interesting. Enough said!
I hope no one invents a religion with a name based on science….
Nah, no one would ever be that daft. Can’t happen in the best of worlds (that we all live in)
Warning labels are so morons won’t sue… I guess…
I would like to know who this is useful information for. Or rather, please don’t tell me. I don’t.
But she loved me! (That was until my credit cared was declined)
I have seen the AI girlfriends on the Internet and if they were real poeple, they would probably sort under some kind of diagnosis. And I really hope the price of a good graphics card soon goes under the GDP of Tanzania.
My liver begs to differ
In this day and age, its easy to want to soothe your soul with some “sudden comfort”. But you shouldn’t. You know drugs are bad, mmmkay?
Wonder what a sequel to this would look like?
Not to comment on the man himself, but this is not a joke. Biff Tannen, as seen in the second installment of the franchise, is meant to be him. This has been confirmed. And that is interesting.
Great words from a great man
In these days, it’s nice to remember wise words from a great man. Not everyday you find that on the Internet.
When Internet fails in five years from now… Well, now you know how it happened
It’s in Swedish and says “I can vibe code – then the software giants will fall on market”. Yes, and so will the Internet.
Doesn’t matter: everyone already knows everything about everyone
As of lately, Discord wanted you to do this. And tomorrow, it will be someone else for some other reason. But then again, every device and app spies on you. So just complain when you are alone in your apartment and someone will consider what you just said. Unclear if that is really a good thing.
Old man is bitter
SkyNet is an AGI or even superintelligence. Still dumb as a brick, though
What would an AGI or a superintelligence makes out of humanity? Hate, love, serve, control, help, annhilate … or maybe observe us and then say “screw this… I’m out” ?
My parents raised no fool
That Hitler guy, the more I read about him, the less I like him. Really nasty person. Someone should stop him.
Lands of confusion… But this time without Ronald Reagan or Genesis
We’re back in January of 2026 and this is what it looked like. Maybe one day, it will look better. Because worse than this, it can’t get. Right? Right?
If we’re going to play Fallout in real life soon, might as well get the feeling for it
Maaaaaaaaybe ….
Yes, this story we must tell our kids
This I remember. Try to run anything that hasn’t passed through five different malware scanners and three firewalls today. It just isn’t safe. Then again, what is safe on the Internet today?
Hah! As if! Vibe coders couldn’t hit their left foot with that
Another scared comment about the dangers of inflicting code you have never seen, nor understand on the Internet.
I remember when it was ok to just be a big nerd
I might just go into early retirement now.
It makes my security work easier
Back in the day we called everything either “Virus” or “Antivirus”, so I don’t really see what has changed.
Sure, but will it still work afterwards? The computer that is.
The man was still walking the earth and beating up the flowers in the park when I saved this picture. And I believe he could have inserted the USB strick with the power of a thousand sledge hammers. But, would that have been a good thing? Unsure. But the hole in the wall behind the computer afterwards would have been impressive. And the computer would have been found in a neighboring country.
All we know from the pre-war history is in small fragments
The history has been passed down orally between the generations. All we know, is that this was, what we call in in layman’s terms “a bad idea”.
Top rationality or the road to nowhere?
Most people are, as I wrote earlier, in the middle. But all idelogies and thought leaders are falling off the edges. So there…
Please don’t nuke here
In between China, Russia and US – who would be the better one to occupy us? No one, I say. Sweden has done pretty well on its own so far. And our king whould issue a stern protest and then retract it, if this happened. And we can’t have that, can we?
Glitzy graphics that makes you remember the 80s. Or something like that. Also me. Also a relic of the past.
I have been podcasting since 2018 and have interviewed many people in the IT-security industry. And some on my retro computing podcast. But in May of 2026, the turn had come to me as I was invited on the Crimeycade podcast. This is an interesting videobased podcast/livestream hosted by “Mad Conservative Crimefighter” in Illinois. He is involved in the Arcade machine retro scene and interviews people from various parts of the retro gaming scene.
This time it was my turn as I am active in the demo scene and retro computer scene in Sweden. We spoke for almost one and a half hour about everything from the Amiga, C64 and the fear of an AI planet.
Here is a transcription of the episode. It’s not perfect, but should be good to understand the story.
I’m bald!!! When did thay happen? I used to have some hair back in the day.
The introduction
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (00:00.546) Welcome to the Crimeycade Podcast. I am the Mad Conservative CrimeFighter, Stephen Lucas, 91 Nintendo Campus Challenge National Champion, 2021 Galbi Ghost Arcade Gamer of the Year. And it’s Sunday. I’m doing a podcast after having such a wild day yesterday, back the last two days.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (00:27.864) Friday night was set up of a wrestling show.
which extended into Saturday and then hightailing it over to Jacksonville to make an appearance at my 35th high school class reunion. Then hightailing it back to Springfield to do at the wrestling show and
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (00:58.004) I’m so sore. I’m barely moving and but since I can talk and I don’t have to move, I can do a podcast. But why am I doing it, doing another one on a Sunday afternoon, especially when it’s Mother’s Day? Well, you
I will be introducing my guest in a moment, I have to share a few of my usual announcements. And I got to pull my slideshow up again. There we go. Thursday, my guest was old school Gamer Magazine representative, editor Ryan Berger. And.
About a more than an hour with him and found, learned about, or at least reflected on the past Midwest gaming classic, the magazine and finding out that he was a wrestling promoter for eight years and never expected to find that one out. If you haven’t given that one a listen, go to my Facebook, go to Facebook or Twitch and give that a listen to.
You’ll be posting on YouTube in a few days.
And if you’re listening on Facebook.com, follow me on Twitch at rap underscore sheet. If you’re watching me on Twitch, follow me, Facebook.com slash Kravikate. And the past episodes will be on YouTube, tiny.cc slash PWCI. And with every podcast I do, I have to give, I have to do a Beezer slide, because that has not reached the Galpin Ghost Arcade floor.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (02:54.366) as of yet. However, the online arcade tournaments are still going on. The main gamer league, the games involved currently active are Sidearms, Exeron, and Beezer.
Cats are nice! Even when they destroy equipment.
Mr. Driller is the latest game to close that closed at 4 a.m. this morning, of course. And now I’ve been joined by one of my feline friends.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (03:27.488) cat.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (03:29.154) this girl right here. This turkey decided to crash the stream and now she’s trying to kill the podcast by walking across the keyboard. Great. You.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (03:47.564) What are you trying to pull, little girl? She thinks now she’s trying to be the star of the show now. That’s what she is. And she keeps walking back and forth because she’s not outside or and she wants to be outside. And she had her time outside a while ago, but now she wants me to let her out again and not be in front of this dog on computer. So.
Currently on the main gaming league season 67. I am ranked 8th tied for 8th And you are not doing this girl Anyway
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (04:28.908) She’s 18 years old. She’s an elderly cat and she wants to be get all the attention in the world while she’s still around. All right. Well, I’ve already done this, so take that off. All right. My guess at this time, as I mentioned, why am I doing on Sunday? Well, my podcast interviews guests all around the world, not just in the United States.
Yes, I’ve had guests from Canada, a neighbor to the north, but I’ve also gone over to Australia and United Kingdom.
Now I’m going into a new country and it’s over. You know, I’ll say this. There’s a game out of this country that I played quite a bit during my college years and somewhat post college years. There’s a game called Northern Lights, Abramod that ran at Ludd or Luleå University in Sweden.
Come to find out that that that game has gone down, has gone offline and probably permanently after 31 years. Yes. Louay University, I can’t pronounce it. It’s Ludd. Yes. Ran on one of their servers there and that server went down and apparently they didn’t have everything backed up. I don’t know what happened there, but.
Time to start the discussion
Yeah, you gotta back up your data in case the server goes down because, you you’re always running backups because you’re it’s a college server. There’s a bunch of students. It’s like everything’s they put everything on the cloud these days anyway. I guess at this time is a Coder Amiga enthusiast, I think. He’s very interested in the.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (06:38.69) gaming music and chiptunes, kind of the 8-bit, 16-bit music, and runs an online radio station as Sweden. Introducing our guest tonight, Erik Saladis.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (06:56.206) Zalitis is my name. Hello, hello, welcome. Zalitis, Zalitis.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (07:02.702) Yes, almost almost I have to pronounce so many names at my workplace because I Do IT help desk? Yeah, and they names Show up on the tickets and then I have to decipher how to pronounce them
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (07:21.496) Yeah, all is a challenge though, right?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (07:24.45) Yes, you’re also known as DJ
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (07:29.516) Demon? Daemon, think it’s- I don’t know actually. I think it’s- I say daemon, but it’s kinda- I think it’s more daemon actually.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (07:37.046) Yes. Welcome in. And there’s no lag time, surprisingly.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (07:42.798) Well, I got fiber connections, but it’s a long journey to the United States.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (07:49.07) Yes. So give us the 411. You run the radio station, but how did you get into gaming?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (07:58.306)
Me and my brothers from an era long gone…
Well, I was a kid back then in the 80s and then we had all the cool little home computer era computers like Texas Instrument, the VIC-20, the Atari, the Commodore 64 and my father was a journalist. He was working that as a side hobby thing. So he was reviewing computers for a small newspaper. So he got home a lot of really cool machines like BBC Micro, like the TI-94.
four we also had like the Vectrex if you remember that one and then many of them were beautiful failures stuff that were cool but never really hit the big market but then there were the C64 the C64 was something totally different that was where the cool kids what we had
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (08:46.178) Yes, I have a Commodore 64 that’s been sitting in storage for quite a number of years because I don’t have room to set it out with all the other stuff I got. I had an Atari 2600, or no, 1200 XL as well. But the PC games, the modern PC has pretty much dominated and the consoles, and now I’m on an arcade kick.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (09:10.732) Yeah, but that’s kind of what we saw. I believe the PC and the Mac took over in the 92 and that killed off Atari and later Commodore Amiga. So that was kind of this shift over from the olden days with their home computers and stuff.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (09:27.116) Although, lately, I’ve kind of seen that the C64 Mini has been put out and loaded up with a bunch of games, kind of like those, gosh, the NES classic, the Super Nintendo classic, so there’s a Commodore 64 classic now.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (09:47.67) Yeah, I know, I know. Those are cool actually. They make sure that people that don’t want to buy their old equipment and kind of dig up stuff that barely works from the cellar or something, they kind of enjoy their old time experience. So I totally, I’m totally into that. Really nice.
The Amiga revolution gets started
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (10:05.294) So, Commodore Amiga. Yeah. It’s got more of a niche computer, back in the 90s, it was the workhorse for video production and music. there’s gaming. think it dominated the market before the PCs took over. But because PCs were not so good at. Yeah.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (10:28.846) graphics and stuff. Just think about it like this, when the Commodore Amiga came out, that was 1985, it was revolutionary because before that you had like CJ and EJ, the PC gaming graphics mode that were like a few colors, very bad, very low resolution and the games looked really cheap. When Amiga came out, it had like…
almost VGA graphics from start which was brand new and it also had a sampler an 8-bit Sampler called Paula which was something awesome because suddenly you didn’t have the chip tune sounds you actually had real samplers in the mid 80s No, the PC if you wanted that you had to pay a lot of money and it wasn’t standardized by then So the Amiga took off but it wasn’t until 1987 when the Amiga 500 came out that the whole thing just exploded
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (11:22.894) Yes. I know back then I was a part of gosh, there was a Commodore computer club that I was participated in and got to look at all that technology as I was growing up. Also went to school to learn computers, although it was the PC side of the thing because the PCs were more for the business community.
So that was its niche. I know Atari ST came out to compete with Amiga, but I believe the Amiga kind of won the war on that one.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (12:04.268) Yes it did because the Atari and Amiga we were kinda, I shouldn’t say war but it was like Amiga and Atari users kinda pointed fingers at each other and said no my computer is better but to be fairly, to be fair I would say the Amiga was leaps and bounds the better computer. The Atari had the same CPU but it was overclocked one megahertz so some games actually ran faster on the Atari so it wasn’t clear that the Amiga always won.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (12:32.566) I kind of remember also Jack Trammell jumped ship from Commodore to Atari.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (12:38.766) He was forced out. That’s a nasty story I can tell you.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (12:41.018) Yeah, let’s hear it.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (12:46.682) Okay, I don’t have all the details, but the thing was that Commodore were doing badly and he took a lot of loans from a loan shark company if you want to and that meant that when they wanted control over the company eventually he was forced out and then he went from Commodore to Atari that’s correct, but he was with the whole Commodore company so his
It was his ship when the C64 came out. And he said, this is a computer for the masses, not for the classes. And that was kind of his contribution to the whole thing.
… And the Atari
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (13:22.306) And then they proceeded to destroy the video game division at Atari and
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (13:26.958) Okay, I did not know that.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (13:30.848) Well, there’s a lagging. So. 70, 800 came out after he took over, but his primary focus was the eight bits and the. St. Computer lines, the video game division kind of got. Shafted by about 1990. Which is why there’s so many Atari prototypes floating around.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (14:00.494) But this can be said about the Commodore as well, because both Commodore and Atari were financially struggling, but Commodore was always worse. Because it was so badly managed. I don’t know about Atari, but in the 90s the PC were coming out with VGA becoming more standard, you get more like sound cards and stuff, which meant that the games were competing in a way that both Atari and Amiga were suffering.
So at that time it made sense, they had problems kinda competing with the PC and both failed.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (14:35.662) That’s interesting. Why didn’t I remember all this crap?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (14:39.9) I don’t know why I do.
… The birth of a gamer
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (14:42.63) Okay, so you got your first game you touched your first games Gosh what year was that? Or was the first video game you’ve ever played I guess
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (14:56.974) I believe that was Space Invaders, but it was called TI Invaders because that was on the Texas Instrument 94 and I could guess that was 93, 83, 83, 84 or something. I’m not sure.
… Did we even have arcade games in Sweden?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (15:11.298) Face of Eris was my jam as well. You never… Yeah. Although you pretty much… You’re starting to get into this with the computers, but you didn’t really touch the arcade games.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (15:25.71) Not that much. In America I guess you had a lot of them. In Sweden here in Stockholm we didn’t have that many. We have a big park here called Grönalund which has had stuff like that. But most of the time it was like where we lived in our suburban area we didn’t have anything like that. Most kids had a Nintendo NES or we had C64s or VIC-20s or 128s. That’s kind of how I remember it at least.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (15:54.254) Yeah. And plus you also TVs were a little are different in Europe. You have pals. Yeah, it is.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (16:03.212) Yeah, pal, yeah.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (16:07.111) See, not the same color twice. I’m just kidding.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (16:14.444) And now I got trouble winding cats in the background. That’s it. So, yeah, the computer, anything that got put out, they had to put up different versions for different sides of the pod. Yes. Because the TVs don’t work the same way. No.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (16:32.142) Now that was a problem. Also you had to think that Japan and other markets had even more weird standards. France had something called SECAM. And in Russia, in Soviet Union, it was SECAM-OST. So yeah, there were very much problems. There no standardized set of rules, so to speak.
… The gaming scene in Sweden
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (16:51.502) So just out of what is the gaming scene in Sweden like?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (16:59.02) if you mean the retro or the current.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (17:02.122) How it was back then and how it is now.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (17:07.084) Okay, I can’t talk much about the current scene because I don’t play that much. I play some games with some friends, but back in the day, it was pretty elitist. You were pretty nerdy to be there and it was also intrinsically linked with something we call the demo scene where people were making art, music, cool so-called demos with scrolling text and nice graphics. It was also connected to the cracker scene where they cracked computer games. It was one large
set of teens, we were all in our teens and twenties when this happened, that did various things. But it wasn’t like everybody was playing games. This came later. It was mostly a very nerdy things for the jungling so to speak. And the games could be super hard. You could play games for hours just to win because I mean if you play them perfectly they could be over in 30 minutes. But in reality
you played for hours and hours and hours and hours because the game for short so they kind of padded the game by making them extremely hard so if you were good gamer back then then you were good
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (18:14.414) You’re a marathon in games. Yes. A lot of games in the 90s, they do have an ending. If you play all the levels start to finish and you get play the entire game through in about less than a half an hour. Yes. And once for one CC. Where any are kids in Sweden?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (18:16.59) Yeah
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (18:39.212) Yes, I said we had some arcade stations, what you call them, where you inserted coins, but they were mostly at entertainment centers, what you call it. Like I said, Grönalun, maybe Skansen and stuff like that. Maybe in the inner city, but back in suburbia, where I lived, I don’t think we had any actually. I can’t remember that. It was not a big thing in Sweden.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (19:01.068) What did the Swedes really get into back then?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (19:09.036) Yeah, well, I think we were much more out playing football on the street and stuff like that. Soccer. Soccer. Yeah, so not football, soccer. And maybe stuff like that. And we were kind of more active. And I remember the kids, the cool kids next to where I lived, they had a Commodore 128. So when we played, we played games like summer games, winter games, Impossible Mission, GI Joe and all that. Really nice. It was fun to play with other people with.
We had each a joystick and we were sitting around the same computer because there were no network connections to speak of.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (19:48.022) Not for a while. Now I did touch upon this a little earlier. You told me offline that you’ve never heard of it or played it. Northern Lightsaber Mud, which is basically back then during the college years, we had these mainframes and may not necessarily have video games on this to play on the computers or.
maybe have the money to plonk down quarters at the arcade because we’re going to college. So people would use Telnet to connect to MUDs.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (20:24.462) This I remember yeah, but I was in eighties. was a kid. I didn’t have a phone line Dedicated or a modem my father didn’t like that because it cost a lot of money But but when I in 90s moved away from from home, then I got a modem and then yeah I started playing stuff like that, but that was later, but that’s still a thing I mean mother multi use Dunions. They were awesome. I really liked that
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (20:51.47) For me it was like the mid 90s where I was playing them all the way to the early 2000s so I wasn’t in college yet and I didn’t get to telnet into anything until the 90s so I didn’t came aware of them until then although
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (21:10.388) but you should play sorry
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (21:12.984) Did you play in your DS back?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (21:14.674) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We had some Amiga doors. They were kinda mini-MUDs that were multi-user, but they weren’t like connected that you played at the same time. They were more like someone connected you played around and someone else did. One very famous we had here, it was called Hack’n’Slash for the Amiga. I had spent a lot of time. Then we have the regular MUDs, the ones you’re talking to. What are they called? NetHack or something, if I remember correctly. I played them when I…
got a telnet and broadband connection in the late 90s. Before that it kinda wasn’t a thing, for me at least.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (21:51.288) from the M.E.G.s it did evolve, I mean, back then it was like text and ASCII graphics and stuff, but nowadays we have live service games.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (21:58.135) Yes.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (22:06.286) We have second life. Isn’t that kind of the same thought, isn’t it?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (22:12.11) Between that there was like EverQuest and Gosh It’s all little can of worms in this influence and Disasters There’s a good there’s a fun side in the dark side
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (22:17.102) Yeah, but
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (22:30.786) Yeah, I guess that’s true with pretty much everything on the internet, isn’t it so?
Ericade.radio – how it got started
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (22:36.59) So tell me about the radio station, how did you
It looks like reading the description online and the history written out This is the second iteration of Eric Kade radio
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (22:55.808) Ericade. It’s Eric and Arcade.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (22:58.934) Yes, kind like I have Crime Fighter and Arcade merged together.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (23:06.158) crimeycade crime fighter arcade yes yes so you had to i guess how do you put together an online radio station and acquire all of these eight bit tracks 16 bit tracks and chiptunes
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (23:11.57) Crimeycade. Crimeycade.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (23:29.07) Well, back in the day, when I started in the 90s, it was a radio station for real on a real frequency, 88.9 MHz. So we had kind of competitions. We weren’t only, we were mostly running other kind of music, but we had competitions where people could compose for the radio station and we put them on the air. But that wasn’t the first real Ericade radio. The first one was in 2005 and then I had a BBS.
So I had people upload hundreds and hundreds of track music tunes or chip tunes, what you want to call it. So I had a real big repository of stuff. But when I came back in 2020 and made a real radio station, the one I have now, then I relied heavily on stuff I found on the internet. So I had thousands and thousands of songs. Then I started using ModArchive, if you know that, ModArchive.org, I think it is. And that has all track music you ever wanted.
Mostly Amiga, but also modern PC.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (24:30.776) How do you curate all that music and then arrange it, just kind of decide what to play on day-to-day basis?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (24:38.382) I actually do it once per week and what I do is simply that I try to see what’s new or if I want to make a podcast because I also use the podcast to like add new music to the station so I play it on the podcast then it goes on the station
Sometimes it’s a genre like rock classic music or something but most of the time it’s just what’s the newest one if Modark have have brand new songs that an artist had released in the last two days I’m listening on it and if I feel it too one it must fit the station two it must be good So I work like that and I kind of work sometimes by the highest rating tunes or high lighted tunes where the editorials have said this is a good
And also I let the listeners say, hey, I got something cool here. I also scrape a lot of stuff coming out on the demo scene, which means that there’s a lot of things to consider, but it’s manually curated. I actually go through each song and see if it fits.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (25:40.322) How often do you get dinged for… I know YouTube’s notorious for this. Twitch has flagged some tunes as well for bizarre reasons. Dealing with copyright and copyright claims and all that crap.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (25:55.086) Yeah
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (25:59.552) Yeah, sometimes actually yes. thing is that thing misfires more than it gets it right. It can say this is like Spain’s song from Euro, whatever, whatever, but no, it isn’t. It just says that. Sometimes, yes, it is. Sometimes you can set something on that someone have copyrighted song and then it does correctly and I have to remove it. This happens occasionally because here’s the thing. The demo scene is very sloppy when it comes to adherence to a copy.
They are notoriously putting everything on for any reason and nobody seems to care But I try to be at least smart about it some stuff like old game music is on the station It’s technically copyrighted, but nobody cares. Whereas putting something brand new on is stupid that that’s should you shouldn’t do So I try to be smart about it I really copied right notices and I also have a lot of problem with Spotify that removes the whole episode if it finds just one infringement So yeah, that’s a problem
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (26:59.18) I know Twitch just mutes the segment that it gets flagged, although I don’t know why. Out Run soundtrack for that. The first tune got flagged recently. was like, you didn’t flag it before. Now you’re flagging it now.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (27:14.862) Yeah, I know. It seems like it’s misfires a lot, but Spotify is worse because it’s fires even when YouTube says cool. So I don’t know. I don’t know. It’s kind of something you have to live with. And most the worst thing you can have is a copyright strike because then you get like if you have three of these, the channel is toast. Then you just remove the channel. I have never had that bad. But also when it came to Alastair Brimble, which we feature on the station, I actually
mailed him and said, is it okay we host your music? And he said, yeah, okay, fine.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (27:50.414) So… go ahead. So what… can name,
Those magic tracks from the past…
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (27:52.832) I don’t know.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (27:58.956) break it down by five. Your top five favorite gaming tracks or chiptune tracks that you play on your station.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (28:07.084) Well of course I have a number of them. When it comes to gaming tracks I absolutely love Utopia, the gaming music for Utopia. Giana Sisters all remixes awesome. Dragon’s Lair has a number of them so that’s the gaming music that I can remember right now. are many others but others is like there’s a song called My Wolf 2 which I love so much. It’s an Amiga 4 track module made by a France French artist called Arpeggiator of chrysis and it’s just awesome it’s really a magic tool we have Hymn to Aurora which has some kind of role-playing almost medieval slate to it or you say so there are a number they think that’s five right something around that
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (28:51.83) Yeah, fair enough.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (28:53.73) Yeah
Flashback, track from the past…
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (28:56.494) So tell us about the podcast. So it’s pretty much segments in between tracks you play on the radio. of, I think, when you are on the air broadcasting in between the tracks, I know there’s several archived episodes on your YouTube channel, which I had it on, had it showing a little bit ago.
Kind of tell us about the podcast, kind of the, some of the games, or kind of the, some of the content you covered.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (29:33.12) Yeah, Flashback Tracks from the past is the name of the podcast and the idea is it’s a radio show first so it has music and short speeches and the speeches are generally about gaming history, demo scene stuff and other things and generally all tunes you hear on the podcast is new. It’s the first time you hear them before they get onto the station. So that’s kind of a thing. Otherwise, it would just be the station music with my speech. I try to make it a little bit smarter.
As of recently, we have covered live broadcasts from revision in Zarbuchen in Germany, where me and a friend broadcast and that became a podcast episode of five hours of music and speech and interviews and stuff. And also I have reviewed old games like utopia, sci-fi trading company and other games such as Bioshock even actually, which is pretty recent. And that’s kind of the thing. It’s a short format with just mostly one to two minutes of speech and
mostly music.
The games I remember
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (30:33.294) Yeah. So some of the games you play that you remember from over the years, what are, I guess, some of the games that you really love over the years?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (30:47.288)
They pretty much used the same package styling for all their games. Epyx probably just had one marketing guy.
There are many. If you’re gonna look at games like the C64, the Epyx Summer, Winter and World games comes to mind. They’re super simple, but they’re fun to play with friends. That’s kinda the whole idea with them. I also love Sci-Fi Trading Company, which is a game like Star Trek or something. It’s not that well known. Then there are games like Paradroid, where you try to liberate a ship of crazy AIs that have taken over. You have Spy Hunter, you must have heard about
That one, right?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (31:17.774)
Cutting through the robots with your brand new “999”. It’s all fun until it explodes in your face.
Yes, I’m pulling up Paradroid. I want to see this thing.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (31:22.048) It’s awesome. What a game that was. I don’t know if it was popular, but it was very I like games that are kind of Something extra and they often do not get as popular as they should so I don’t know how well known that was But it was such a game. Yeah, that’s the one
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (31:39.022) hairdroid let me get it’s a lot here up here how do you play this
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (31:42.702) Yeah, that’s the one That’s What you do is you have an influence device you are a human being floating in a device that can take over other robots and what you see there is to take over sequence you try to take over a robot and the number is like how advanced the robot is zero zero one is yours, that’s the
primitive one that you start with and you can’t jump to the highest numbers because they are very hard to take over they have many more cables in this attack view so you have to be smart and you have to jump from robot to robot because you don’t control them forever after a while you fail and then you lose control so you have to kind of jump and all the time like either take over a robot or shoot it down so it’s kind of smart that way you can’t just take over everything and stick with the
most advanced robot, because it will fail as well.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (32:38.016) I see that that four seven six number. Yeah versus seven forty two so
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (32:44.588) Yeah, you can see the 742 have more capabilities to defend itself, but you were able to take it over anyway, or whoever’s playing that. So that’s a thing, you can’t jump too much, because if you have like a hundred and you try to take over a nine hundred, that’s not gonna work. That’s too high jump, so you have to be smart about it. And each robot has their own weapon systems, and you can’t shoot all the robots, because then you will fail, because then your own will explode after a while, so you must, like…
balance between taking over a robot or shooting one.
Commentary: here is how I commented on Paradroid from my podcast Flashback, tracks from the past (episode 21. Look at you, hacker!)
“Sir, sir, the robots are revolting! Yeah, I know, they totally are. A little bit of work on their aesthetics could’ve fixed that, but there we are. You are a human brain connected to some sort of device that Hack 5 could’ve fought up in an alternate future. It’s primitive, but certainly very and extremely useful. When you enter the ship with the robots that now kill humans on sight, you’re underpowered and without any access to things. But a good hacker wouldn’t want to have it any other way. The robots have numbers between 100 to 999. The higher number, the better robot. As soon as you can, you must hijack a robot and hack it. Doing so starts a mini-game with you and the robot on opposite sides of the screen. where you connect cables in a way that get power over to the robot side. Or maybe it’s hackish data, what do I know? The robot has its own cables, the higher number the more cables. The one that gets more power over to the other side wins. If you lose, the robot you control burns out. And if you don’t control the robot, it’s game over. If you win, then you pwn the robot. It’s now yours to control. It wants robots when controlled, cut through anything, but you can only control them for a limited time. So you jump between defense droids, maintenance drones and… drink trays on wheels. I’m not kidding here. This game is hard for real, but the Amiga version was for some reason much easier. The verdict? Well, it’s hacking in a way that one day may actually become realistic. That will be a weird time. Tough, but a very nice game. Replayability is so-so. It gets 7 out of 10 Calce’s.”
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (33:16.97) Where’s some of the other games you were into?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (33:20.27) Yeah, there was a platform called SEUCK or shoot ’em up construction kit, which was actually a You know that one
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (33:27.703) yeah.
Yes, as I… I… I got that. I made a game called Battle for Nintendo Power where you’re basically playing to recover all your Nintendo games because I guess your video parents took it away. They gave them to some, I guess, villainous evil characters and you’re like…
battling bullies and I don’t know, motorcycle games or whatever and then you had to find the homework first device key to unlock your Nintendo and be able to play it again. So yeah.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (34:11.993) Seuck was a great game creator. It created very advanced games really. There were some really nice ones. There were also a lot of really crap games because anyone could create a game. I and my brother made one called Eric on the Run and it was very bad. Alas, I don’t have it anymore, but it’s kind of, it was fun for a few hours creating sprites and logic and enemies and background graphics and stuff. It was highly automated, a really good one.
It was a bit limited because it was a shoot them up which means it scrolls upwards. Sideway scrollers could not be made by it for example so it was kind of limited exactly what you could do. But you can see it’s highly advanced for a C64.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (34:58.21) Yes, and plus you have to like keep track of all the pixels and or at least You had to build your backgrounds
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (35:07.463) You can load some presets, but generally if you want it to be good, yeah, you had to
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (35:13.358) Yeah, and that took… You pretty much can’t really stop once you start on a game because then you forget… Forget stuff. Over time, I’m going to advance past this and actual… See, here we go. Yeah. This is where they’re building the map.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (35:31.914) Yes, exactly. So you can put them on the map block by block. It’s pretty easy to learn. It’s not like super hard. It’s a very intuitive interface, which says something because yeah, this is I think it’s called slap and tickle. I think that that’s that’s a clone of it. Sorry.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (35:50.222) It’s one of the games that was included on the disc.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (35:54.47) Yes, yes it is. I recognize this one so well. I played it so many times. It’s actually a very clever little clone.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (36:03.382) I know somebody did a version of Tiger Helly on this, which is an arcade game. Yeah. Although at some point the game will loop. doesn’t take long for this game, for any of these games to loop. I made my game much longer because I just did a remix of previous levels and made it appear that the levels were different. They’re just kind of
broken up into different, I guess, the pieces of the level were just put together in a different order and for a quasi unique level.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (36:43.692) Yeah, yeah, yeah. Given how primitive the C64 is by today’s standard, that you could do this was amazing. But again, a lot of people didn’t put much effort in it, so a lot of Zouik games are not good, but there are some really nice ones.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (37:01.558) Although here’s I gotta show you this and you probably heard about it. Games are still getting made for the C64. Yes, somebody did a port of. me see if this gets up here. Here we go. Mario, how do you know? Yes, somebody did a perfect port of this game. For.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (37:18.648) Mario Brothers
I have it.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (37:26.846) It’s awesome! It has some lag, there are some levels where the C64 is not able to cope with it, but it’s minor. As a major rule this works, and you know what Nintendo thought of it?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (37:40.076) Nintendo probably wasn’t
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (37:42.924) No, it’s gone from any site you can find it. you search for it can probably find it, but the main ones, I don’t think it’s on CSDB or anything. So they pretty much killed it with their lawyers.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (37:56.652) Did not know that. Now prior to this, I know this game was…
They ported… Here’s a clone of Mario Bros.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (38:11.418) Yeah, Giana Sisters, absolutely. Yes, yes. That was kind of ix-nayed by the Nintendo gurus as well. They had to stop selling it.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (38:22.798) I know that some hackers went in and changed the sprites to Mario ones and made it kinda quasi Super Mario.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (38:34.454) But to be honest with you, the problem with Giana Sisters wasn’t that it was a total rip-off. It’s just the first level is very reminiscent of what Mario first level looked like. The whole game has very different approach to different stuff. So it isn’t a total rip-off. It’s a stupid thing that they did that. The game could have fared much better if they kind of found their own way already from start.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (39:00.952) There’s a lot of side scrolling platformer games over the years. I don’t know how many the Nintendo decided to complain about, but that were kind of somewhat clones of this. Clones of Mario Bros.
Are everyone in Rapture this cynical? Yes, yes they are.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (39:17.086) But that’s the thing, if it works it gets copied. They say “all art is grift”.
Commentary later on from me:
“On the 100th episode of the CrimeyCade podcast I was interviewed by their host “Mad Conservative crimefighter”. There I stated that “all art is grift”. Then I explained it as all artists steal from each other. But that’s not exactly what the word grift should be used to say. The statement more means that much of the art is used to con other people. Think like NFTs, propaganda and so on. I would probably have explained it more correctly if I had choosen my words better. But I actually meant what I said. Many clones were meant to be a big cashgrab for people that thought this was the cool thing right now. And the list goes on…”
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (39:22.252) Yes, all art is grift. Grifted, scammed. Grift is. Maybe maybe you’re saying maybe the word, maybe you’re saying the different word I’m hearing G.R. I. F.T. Stolen. OK. gosh. Comments in the chat that I’m catching up on here.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (39:28.386) Yeah
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (39:38.818) Is that one?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (39:48.238) Ah, here we go. Podcast on Sunday. Interesting. Yes, this happens to be episode 100 of my podcast and also my streamer, anniversary. So.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (39:59.864) Congratulations!
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (40:01.536) Yes.
Tracy happens to be from the United Kingdom, it’s daytime. It’s late, early evening. Kind of a couple hours ahead of you. OK. Yes. All right. Where was I? Some of the other games you played. Actually, I should pull up Utopia because you.
Utopia – creation of a nation
Utopia – the creation of a nation. Not pictured: hordes of evil bugs that will eat you alive.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (40:27.892) Yeah, absolutely. Utopia was interesting because it was the first prototype of something that later became RTS or Real Time Strategy. It plays like a little bit like Dune did, the original Dune game if you remember, but it had a very different slant. Think about it as Dune meets Sim City meets some sort of civilization-esque. That’s not the right game.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (40:53.87) No, this is for the Intellivision. I know if you’ve heard of it.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (40:57.87) No, I don’t know what that is. That is not the right one.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (41:01.25) Yeah, I’ll find it. What?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (41:03.314) Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It was a very interesting game, but it was kinda too early to really make it. There you go, that’s the one.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (41:16.6) So how do you play this one?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (41:18.062) It’s basically the same thing as all kind of RTSs. You build a base in this case as a city. You build research, you build living quarters, you build hangars and stuff and you build power, you make sure you get mining resources and if you look up at the rightmost corner it says QOL 46. QOL means quality of life. 46 means he is not doing good. It should be close to 100. When it starts sinking people
starts being angry, crime rates goes up and the game can actually end that game way because you can get assassinated. So you need to kind of keep that up while making sure you have a balanced budget that you have to go to war with the insects that inhabit the planet. So it is kind of unforgiving. You have to work real time and not turn based or anything.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (42:14.722) You know, it kind of reminds me of Sim City. A little bit.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (42:20.716) Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. It is a marriage between SimCity and maybe Dune. Or maybe some sort of Red Alert-ish experience, but this was before Red Alert came out.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (42:31.148) or maybe the game called Civilization.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (42:33.476) Yes, yes, that’s also very true.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (42:36.686) Um, all right,
Building a civilization to stand the test of time
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (42:43.214) What other games do you really enjoy? I do you like these world builder games?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (42:48.718)
The smug face of someone who made Gandhi the biggest war criminal in the game
Absolutely, I love world builders. Civilization, you just mentioned that. That was on the Amiga. It was on the PC, of course. And I have followed Civilization from 1 to 7. The 7 was the latest one that came out. My favorites are 2 and 5. But the first one was really good. Because when you started playing it, you felt, this is too hard. I have no idea what’s going on here. And like 16 hours later, it’s like, oh my god, the Babylonians are stealing my stuff. And you were kind of…
You were so immersed in the game, so time just flew by and it was eventually like late in the night and you were still playing. That just sucked you in.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (43:28.256) I did play this one all the way through. Typically I played the Americans.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (43:34.102) Yeah, yeah, They’re kind of like well-rounded, jack-of-all-trades kind of. They’re very easy to work either way with, whereas some civilizations are specialized and have some clear disadvantages and clear advantages. So it depends on if you want to play any game, anything goes, or if you want to specialize.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (43:54.318) Yep, Tracy says it’s 2020, 24-2 here.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (44:01.036) Yes, this is yes, because you know when I typically on the air she’s in bed although she’s gotten up way or middle of night to come on my podcast like crazy But she’s coming to America in two weeks, so Let’s see Well, this is kind of going through the evolution of the civilization. What was the other title you mentioned?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (44:20.044) Nice.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (44:32.168) Pull that up.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (44:34.19) No, we talked about, we talked about, what do say? Utopia, but-
Simcity
Burning! It’s burning! You know, someone got bored and let it all burn.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (44:40.558) Yeah, we got utopia. I’ll throw up Sim City
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (44:44.435) Yeah, SimCity, that’s also very good. It was on the C64 as well, I can tell you.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (44:49.646) Yes, I had that on this yeah, I played that so we’re playing this on PC I played this on the PC first because others were They got the cover 64 version at some point But you’re pretty much laying out these maps and then yes, they Kind of develop grow on their own
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (45:14.338) The idea is that you zone the area, like you say, this is how they build cities in real life. They say this zone should be residential, this zone should be commercial, and then they build stuff if the city works. So it can be very interesting, but it can get very boring as well. But when you play that everything is just working, you’re like incrementally just adding stuff and nothing really happens. So later on, they create a disaster. So you could say like, I want an earthquake or something.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (45:26.69) Yes.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (45:43.682) then you could spice the game up a bit.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (45:48.174) You have to deal with nuclear fallout. Yes, Godzilla plane crashes tornadoes. I’ll say, though, the original Simsey, I enjoyed playing when it went to 3D and then they added other stuff like. Water, had water lines and and other stuff, it got to be.
A little bit too complicated.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (46:20.522) Yeah, that’s the problem with all games or programs they come to a sweet spot when everything is working then they just try to add stuff and it gets more convoluted it gets bad it gets buggy or whatever it’s like sometimes you have to just say sorry
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (46:36.834) this jump in this ahead so you can see how it evolves that’s for the audience who’s never played this game I bet a lot of them have
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (46:45.986) Yeah, yeah.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (46:48.332) So I’ll show the 3D model because SimCity 2000. receiving to a spot where it’s gameplay. Okay. I’ll turn off CC. Yeah, this is where things got a, there’s a bit of a major learning curve on this one, I think.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (47:08.44) could be to play it well. mean, just the basics I think is easy to learn. But I remember the game kind of helped you with tickers running telling you what’s up and what you needed to know and stuff. it took a while to get it well. And I know some people were crazy with it. It’s like, I played it for 15 hours and now it’s getting boring. I’m like 15 hours. What the heck? Yeah.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (47:34.606) I mean, it’s a simulation game. It’s not like you’re playing the you’re going for the world record like Tim McVeigh trying to score a billion points on Nibbler over two days. Which somebody in Italy has that has that score now because he went 50 hours.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (47:57.026) Yeah, yeah, you get nothing out of playing SimCity for 15 hours, can tell you as much. It’s a fun game, but it’s like after a while it’s like, yeah, well you have to take another thing and later games came with scenarios so you can say like, yeah, we have a failing city, can you save it? And economy is kind of bad and what do you do?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (48:16.0) Is there any other sandbox like games? Because this is, think, an OG. Well, actually, SimCity didn’t come first. There was a game on the Colecovision that was similar to SimCity.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (48:30.284) I can guess, I can guess.
The sandbox of fun
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (48:32.396) Yeah, but, How into sandbox games are you?
What a standup guy. Political smear-campigns, assasinations and all the money you can get on his Swisss bank account.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (48:38.25) Much actually, I love the kind of thing that you try stuff and see what gets you anywhere. One later series which is modern but has been for quite a while is of course, what’s that called, Tropico. Have you played that?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (48:52.95) Never heard of it, how do spell it?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (48:55.104) Tropico, like you are a generalismo. You know, a dictator on a little island somewhere in… Yes! Yeah, it’s pretty new, but it’s been around since the 90s, I think. I played it for ages. And that’s a sandbox simulator because it’s fun. It has some kind of really irreverent humor where you’re trying to do dumb stuff like sometimes you can oppress your people, they protest or you can align with the Soviet Union or the United States and…
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (49:03.598) Well, that’s number six in this.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (49:24.748) You can play the game anywhere you want to. can also steal money for your Swiss bank account. The game is…
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (49:33.57) This is probably the better. The evolution of the game anyway. The first generation, yeah, these are fully 3D animated characters on in the.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (49:35.394) Yeah
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (49:38.807) Yeah.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (49:44.578) Yeah, this is probably a little bit too modern for the rest of the discussion.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (49:50.35) 2001 close enough
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (49:52.686) Yeah, I guess it’s okay. I mean the cutoff point should be what 2000 or something,
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (49:59.31) Yeah, this is 2001. yeah, we’re in the time frame.
The SIMS
All the best plans of men and mice. Don’t use fireworks inside!
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (50:03.502) Somewhere and then we also had to mention. I know we’re a little bit too late here, but like Sims that is something
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (50:13.058) Yeah, I never got into The Sims. I just kinda like see the game, see it, see gameplay of it like ehhhh
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (50:22.318) The thing is, it could be both boring and fun, depending on how you play the game. I think the first one was fun, but the later ones, I didn’t care for them. It was like, they just made a dollhouse of it. And it was fun when they wasn’t kind of overbearing. Later games where you were supposed to buy DLC of the DLC of the DLC to get pets, dating options, ski resorts or whatever. It’s kind of like, no.
And so it was fun in the beginning and you should know that The Sims is built on a C64 game called Little Computer People.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (50:57.91) oooo
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (51:00.994) You should, it’s very interesting.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (51:04.558) Now the commercials were interesting though. I will say that because they’re marketed as an interactive soap opera.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (51:13.378) Yes, yes, it could be that. And it was kind of smart. I mean, you do did stupid things just to see what happened. I remember trying to launch fireworks inside the house. I thought they have not thought about that, but they had the whole thing caught fire. The whole living room caught fire.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (51:32.45) Yeah, here it is. And this was by Activision. Interesting.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (51:35.776) Yes, where Sims from Electronic Arts. Yes, this is the one. Generally this dude just walks around and does stuff, but sometimes you chat with him and you can help him with stuff and I can’t think you can play cards with him and stuff.
Modern era gaming – not my strong point
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (51:50.83) Alright. Any gaming feats that you’ve done in the past? did you ever participate in a competitive gaming scene? Scorchacing? Or… been collecting? Or…
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (52:10.72) Not much actually, I’m more like a single gamer so to speak. But I have played with and against friends, with everything from Spy, what do call it, Starcraft, played Red Alert series and stuff. But generally when you start playing on more commercial gaming servers, the people you play against, even on the noob level, they are too good for you. It’s not fun because they always beat you. I’m not really into that, but I played some at least, some games.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (52:43.158) Any games you’re out, any games you’re, I guess, campaigning on currently.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (52:50.892)
The game is cheap and the bugs are free!
Well, what I’m playing right now, but this is modern time mind you it’s called jump space and I also play something called SWAT Commander I think it’s called those are competitive games where Sorry, they’re not not competitive. They are I say when you cooperate I think they call them right, so you and your number of friends you man a spaceship and you fight robots and stuff and you try to collect stuff and you raid air bases and
It’s very fun actually but it’s in some sort of preview state so every week there is some new interesting feature or bug or game level tuning and stuff but it’s actually very very nice. It can get a little bit too repetitive sometimes.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (53:37.122) This right here is jump space. Yes.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (53:38.569) That is the correct one.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (53:44.834) So what you think of the live service games currently? Because the last few years, there’s been new live service games that come on that try to compete with games like Fortnite and Player Unknown Battlegrounds, and they don’t even last a month.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (54:03.884) No, I can’t talk much about it. Unless I don’t play that kind of games I know about them. Of course I do but it’s more like I think many games today and I’m not specifically saying something have way too much like pay to win schemes and you have to pay it to get stuff and I don’t like that also they are Microtransactions that’s the thing. Yes
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (54:24.238) Transaction
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (54:28.782) Yes. I also saw news. I don’t know if you ever played wizardry. Thoughts on Atari acquiring the old IPs like wizardry.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (54:41.378) Don’t know much about that. I’m sorry, this is too new stuff for me, but it’s cool that Atari is still left. Atari is still out there somehow. But I think that’s a brand name in name only. Whatever it once stood for is gone. So I’m sorry, I cannot comment on that.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (54:57.998)
Understanding people? Nah! Try controlling them instead…
Alright, is there any… So your gaming collection, if you have one, or I don’t know how big… Any grails in your collection, or is there a grail you’re seeking to have?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (55:13.774) To be honest with you, I don’t know what you mean in those achievement stuff, right?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (55:19.66) Like a game title that you’d like to get your hands on that has eluded you or maybe you got something rare in your collection now.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (55:29.176) don’t really have anything rare. And Janrej, I know this can be cool, but I’m so much of a casual gamer, so I don’t really seek those. But I know what you mean. That’s for other people, I would guess. So I have only the common stuff.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (55:43.946) Okay. Any famous gamers you’ve had on your show?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (55:49.644) not gamers per se, we only had a few interviews but we had a lot of cool demo sceneers that have done games like we have a guy called Harakit we interviewed do you know what those boxes? He invented it, that’s what he built so we talked about it he’s the original guy who created it and we interviewed him on the podcast so that we’ve had we also talked with a Finnish
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (56:03.0) Dustbox, yeah
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (56:08.768) He’s the designer.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (56:19.47) I can’t remember, think name was Oilheap or something. He was an old games programmer in the old days with some games to his name.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (56:30.216) I do recall that one of most famous games to ever come out of Finland is a game called Angry Birds.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (56:37.271) Yeah, not that, not that, sorry. Yeah, I know, I know, that’s a weird one. It’s basically like some kind of scorched earth, isn’t it?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (56:47.266) You’re trying to get your eggs back from a bunch of pigs. You, I guess, can’t… I don’t know what infatuation they have with eggs. I don’t think pigs eat eggs. They grain. Mostly.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (56:51.213) Yeah
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (57:00.878) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s just the graphic stuff, I guess. mean, lot of gaming, like, things that goat simulator, what’s up with the goat? I don’t know.
The future is now
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (57:12.652) Yes. Future goals.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (57:16.942) Well, when it comes I will try to develop the podcast as I feel that flashback tracks from the past should be something else But I don’t know what it could be I don’t know because we have a fairly small amount of listeners, which means we don’t get that many commentary Also when it comes to the radio station and the podcast I will work pretty much to get them indexed so they’re easier to find because I think we are hard to find when you look for demo scene radio
gaming podcasts and stuff like that. I try to fix that by making sure we’re easier to find. And that’s the main priority I have to make it more visible. So that’s the tactic.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (57:56.64) If it weren’t gaming music, what other music are you really into?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (58:00.482)
Here is Threeeee dawg – don’t feed the Yagoai, that’s all…
When it comes to music I’m pretty broad. I can like stuff like traditional jazz from the 20s and 30s and 40s. I mean pretty much if you think about how Fallout sounds, that is good. I also like 60s a lot, Beatles, Rolling Stones, stuff like that. And I like 70s and 80s and some 90s. When it comes to modern music I don’t know much about it to be honest. It doesn’t interest me that much, so that’s kind of where you find me.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (58:26.094) Something that’s kinda similar to chiptunes and the music you play. I don’t know why I got hooked, why I’m listening to more and more of it, but it’s something called Trance.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (58:36.271) Yeah, yeah, can get that. That’s kinda 90s sound, isn’t it?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (58:40.822) Night, yeah, and kind of similar to chip tunes and…
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (58:45.718) Yeah, but I think a lot of people that made chiptunes, or as I like to call them, tracker music, sitios, whatever, they were heavily inspired by Euro-Techno, Techno, trance, dance stuff, whatever. So it’s kind of, can see the similarity just because that’s what they listened to when they created their own music.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (59:04.654) You said you went to Germany Yeah, tell tell me about that tell tell us about the trip to Germany and Maybe some of the other countries you’ve been to
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (59:07.576) Yes I do.
The road to Saarbrücken and Revision 2026
Evil bot is such a sign of the times, isn’t he?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (59:16.3) Alright.
Yeah, well, Germany is cool because it had something called Revision 2026 and that’s a demo party where they compete in music and graphics and everything. It’s not a gaming thing per se, but it’s kind of related. And it was in a little town called Saarbrucken in Western Germany, close to the border of France. And me and a friend called Koreos, is also a co-operator, he cooperates with me in their station, Eric A. Radio. We went there to broadcast live.
So we met up with Senors, he participated in one of the competitions and came on the third place, which is not bad. And it was super cool to see many of those names you hear. Like you say everyone from like Rackon Violet, artists like like Mime Brandon and Jogge Lilljedal and Danko. You could meet them for real here. You only heard them now you can meet them. So that’s kind of why that’s so cool.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:00:19.722) What? Any other countries you’ve been to besides Germany?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:00:23.072) I’ve been to the United States twice, very nice. I was in New York City and I have been in Fort Lauderdale. I have been in Czech Republic, in Prague. I have been in Hungary. I have been in Finland. I’ve been in Denmark, Norway. Yeah, well, Germany, as I said a number of times. Poland. But I want to see, next is probably Great Britain. I have actually missed that. That would be nice.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:00:52.718) Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:00:57.336) Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Artificial intelligence – and human stupidity
As Tom Lehrer sang: “We shall all go together when we go”…
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:01:00.27) So this has also been a thing lately. AI being a heavy influence in media creation. What’s your thoughts on artificial intelligence creating music?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:01:16.718) Well, technically I can’t say we can forbid it per se, but I think it’s bad. I think it’s bad because it kind of removes… When you talk about automation, you want boring stuff, like automation stuff, like cheap factory work to be automated so we can do more creative arts. But AI today does the opposite. It takes away this thing that it means to be human, to create something that has value, meaning, that takes effort and makes it effortless.
and actually quite repetitive. My biggest grief when it comes to AI is that it creates mediocrity. It creates mediocre stuff, not bad, not good, because it can never be as creative as a human being. And that’s my big grief. And when it comes to music, it has something that a friend of mine called something like AI Rock Syndrome. It’s kind of over embellishes everything. When you listen to something that’s been created by an AI, a music song, it seems to live its own life with a lot.
and stuff that a human wouldn’t put there. that’s where it’s still bad. But even if it gets good, it kinda removes what human creativity is about. That’s what I don’t like.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:02:31.182) The only thing I… So, AI would be, as far as I’m concerned, if I use AI for anything, it’s just basically when I can’t figure out an answer to a problem, or it’s to kind of give me a crutch when my skill is not as good as somebody else’s.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:02:57.97) This I can understand, can see use for it, I don’t hate on AI or anything like that. It’s just like when I see, I’m also old so I have nothing to do with schools, but I can read reports that school kids today, they learn to write their essays on AI, they ask sh-
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:03:12.888) Yeah, that’s a that’s a should be illegal kids have been doing that and it’s like no
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:03:17.175) What? thing is you can absolutely do good stuff that way. Problem is when you get into work life you have no creativity. You don’t know how to write an essay. And I believe in this society, writing a basic essay, even if that’s just a blog post, that’s civ- that’s common knowledge. You must be able to do that. If you can’t do that, you can’t express yourself. That’s horrible.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:03:43.342) Although I know there’s a gaming news website called noclip360.com that was almost completely AI generated, but it was kind of their way of, I guess, showing up the established gaming journalism websites that, you know.
You inserted too much of your personal opinion or political stances into your work and this is this what we put up.
creates a neutral news aggregate side and shows that you can be replaced if you’re not, let’s say, putting forth your best work.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:04:31.214) That is an interesting take on it. Not entirely sure that that may not be a bad idea. Problem is when you do that you’re kind of proving that you want to improve something which I think is cool. But most do it because it’s cheap and when you see text written by AI it’s very very stereotypical. For example if you use words like “explore”, the word explore something. “This discussion, explores the situation of delving into blah blah blah”. That’s AI.
That’s so much AI. It sounds like a copy from an advert. It doesn’t sound like something a real human would be proud to put out. And another thing is like all those icons. If you have icons like emojis in every caption, that’s also a dead giveaway. That’s AI. Or if you have those very long dashes that are, I think they’re called EM something, EM dash or something, that’s also AI. So sometimes it looks cheap.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:05:09.474) Yeah.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:05:30.36) Darn cheap.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:05:32.662) Although, I made my own daggum emotes for this thing. mean, there’s icons here. like… Chat. Let me show this. See? I have icons here.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:05:43.998) Yeah, but did you know how it looks with AI? It over embellishes it. It’s everywhere. It’s instead of bullet points. There is some weird emoji. Not that I hate you on it. You can remove it. But what I’m saying is it looks cheap. It takes no effort. And also it doesn’t understand the issue. You can have a summary that doesn’t summarize right. And people learn from that. And suddenly they have not understood the message.
or they have understood some kind pre-packaged message instead of learning to think for themselves.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:06:18.22) Yeah, and sometimes I’m asking Google for help on how to fix a computer problem and most of time it tends to put me in the right direction, but sometimes it leads me astray.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:06:29.614) But I feel like if you ask it something you could get something like 80 % correct and 20 % wrong But you don’t know what’s what you don’t know right and I said I’m not gonna bother with that if it has anything more than like 1 % wrong I’m not bothering with it and here’s another thing assume that you only use chat GPT or whatever Claude You know and you write an essay mostly by them
Then those lines, those incorrect information gets put back and then crawled and the next AI puts that incorrect text up and say, yeah, this was written by a human being. So let’s go with that. And suddenly the lies become the truth and the quality of the data goes down. This is a problem we have in the future and it’s going to be horrible.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:07:15.818) Yeah, that’s a great point Now we’re getting some Yeah, we got Yeah, I’m cut biggest concern with AI is it turns it turns the universe into What was depicted? No, the Terminator movies
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:07:35.598) paperclips.
Yeah, alright. Skynet.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:07:43.394) ChatGPT is our world’s Skynet.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:07:47.626) Well, it isn’t yeah, I totally get what you’re saying thing is Skynet is not an AI today We have the distinction AI, AGI and super intelligence AI today means pretty much what chat GPT and others are. They cannot reason but it can find the most commonly held Opinions and answers to common questions and they can summarize and they can do stuff. AGI is an
AI on a human level, it’s self aware, thus it’s a living being. That is not something we can build today, but I know Elon Musk and company says we’re going to build that. So he’s committed to it. We’ll see. We’ll see what’s happening. But then we come to super intelligence. It’s off the scale.
It’s superhuman, it knows more than human intelligence itself. And what is that gonna do? Is it gonna launch nukes at us? Well, Skynet scenario in Terminator says exactly that. But we have a number of things. It could be a benevolent dictator, a nice godlike character, or simply say, I don’t wanna have anything to do with you humans, so I’m out. We don’t know, we don’t know what we’re doing. Or it could say, let’s convert Earth to paperclips, because I don’t know, sounds like a good idea.
Mr. Clippit or Clippy. You were such an annoyance back then. Good no one has invented such stupidity since.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:09:09.166) Tell us the Microsoft Word mascot!
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:08:58.413) I don’t know if I want to live in a world with a bunch of clippies
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:09:12.142) Yeah, I know. Looks like you’re writing a letter. Go away! I remember that. I remember that.
What’s up on ericade.radio?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:09:21.43) Anything you want to plug, any upcoming events with Ericade.Radio.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:09:25.902)
Happy people from the demo scene!
Yes, absolutely, but it’s not now, but in a few months in July. Ericade will broadcast live from the Edison demo party here in Stockholm, Sweden, Europe. So that’s coming up, it’s gonna be cool. Other than that, it’s just business as usual. I’m trying to cobble together the next podcast which will cover a very famous game that changed the whole gaming industry. But I won’t tell you what it is.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:09:52.482) The- okay, wait, wait, wait, wait, You’re going to cover a game that changed the video game industry. What it- sheesh, should I guess what it is? Do you know what it is? I want you- I want to see your guess, right- guesses right now. What time frame are we looking at?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:10:00.226) Yes.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:10:04.2) Yes, and if you guess right…
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:10:10.616) Yes.
We’re looking at the 90s actually.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:10:16.46) The 90s. Well, Tracy says Pac-Man, that was 1980s.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:10:20.466) That’s 80s and she’s right, that’s exactly right. Not that the game I’m covering but it’s a very, very important game. But this is the 90s.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:10:31.768) Mortal Kombat.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:10:33.438) Should be good but no, no, not good.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:10:36.47) I would say Super Mario Bros., but no, I would go with Street Fighter II.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:10:41.579) Those are very very important games, but no none of them and also those are in the 80s. We’re talking 90s now
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:10:48.642) No, Street Fighter II was 90.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:10:50.91) Okay, okay, sorry. Okay. Yeah, sorry, but that’s not one
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:10:56.462) Mmm boy could I could I guess it off the top of my head because there’s so many games over the
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:11:03.414) Think about this. Think about… Could have been, but think about it. A game that created a new genre of games. That changed everything on how a game is played and what it looks like and the style of games. And have launched a thousand ships. Number of games. Everything from the modern Fallout to pretty much everything Fortnite. Everything is kind of built on this game. Doom is the right answer! What do I win?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:11:28.109) Doom!
Come and get some!
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:11:35.586) Yes! you’re- Yeah, absolutely. Castle Wolfenstein was the first one, but Doom blew the door of its hinges. It kinda was the big one. So that’s what I’m gonna cover.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:11:38.05) Wolfenstein 3D.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:11:47.948) Yes, I played Doom back in the day quite a bit. And I know Midwest Gaming Classic, they set up an array of old Macintosh’s run in Doom. I worked together. So. Although lately I’ve seen faceball. 16 terminals running faceball. It’s kind of a similar game, but it predates Wolfenstein.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:12:17.781) Yeah, actually-
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:12:18.35) Alright. go ahead.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:12:21.515) No, no, no, no, sorry.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:12:24.278) Alright, so radio@ericade.radio. Also the past podcasts for the ericade radio network are on youtube.com slash aircade radio and the other media sites you have.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:12:45.39) Yeah, well, that’s the important ones you can find if you have a live stream on YouTube with the radio station But you can just as well listen on your media device or your on the site So that’s up to you, but it’s awesome with some nice chiptunes new ones old ones old gaming music Whatever we have it on every K radio. So I think you’re gonna enjoy it. You know what?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:13:06.816) I can throw this up here. better show this screen. Share the screen. Here’s the web page. That’s what I should have done much earlier. Here we go. There it is. There’s. Right. There we go. And. You can request music. You can find out the history of Eric Cade in more extensive narrative.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:13:15.586) Okay.
Yep, that’s the site.
Did I ever look this young? Doubtful. Probably some AI slop.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:13:33.512) yeah, that’s me, what I looked back in the day.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:13:35.854) And 97 I wish I was that young again and I’m like in my 50s now. Yeah chasing scores and Winning gaming tiles and all that but this is a pretty long history
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:13:42.485) Yes, so am I.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:13:50.21) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, she was awesome. She was the Amiga mascot. Everybody know about her because
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:14:00.174) Yes, and I just rewatched the clip and it’s like, you know what? I kind of remember seeing this before way many years ago where she shows up to the medical click and all the people who stopped to stare at her and have something bad happen.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:14:16.95) Yeah, and she’s the nurse that have to take care of them afterwards, believe. Yes, yes, I remember that. Yeah. It’s a long winded history, but I’ve written it in a kind of funny way. I think it’s quite funny to read, actually, I hope. I don’t know.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:14:22.616) Yes.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:14:32.11) Alright, well, if you ever make it back to the United States, I mean…
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:14:38.082) Yeah, absolutely. That’s, I would like that.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:14:40.63) all the way can get out because their cadence see the biggest arcade in the world which as closing in on one thousand one hundred games
I can relate to this guy’s hair style so much nowadays…
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:14:50.754) That’s awesome. Do you know about LGR? Isn’t he into stuff like that?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:14:56.142) LGR was at the Midwest Gaming Classic.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:14:59.73) Ooh nice! Yeah I watched him a lot a few years ago so yeah. Also 8-bit guy? 8-bit guy perhaps?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:15:12.469) Maybe I don’t know which one it is. They’ll jr. I am familiar with all right Eric I wanna oh he organized the Kong off In the UK apparently I think and they just had the call off You have to have Tracy tell me what how the how that turned out but anyway
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:15:12.898) Okay.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:15:25.929) Okay, okay, okay
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:15:40.342) Yes?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:15:41.76) eric what thank you for committed on the car case tonight and it’s not time for you it’s still take time for me but well thank you for coming in on the sunday and still in this extra podcast to celebrate i guess my one hundred Crimeycade.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:16:04.95) Congratulations, congratulations, really nice work. Thanks for having me.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:16:10.562) Alright, hope to see you around the arcade soon and keep on gaming.
Alright, a good night.
That was Eric. Eric, Gosh, now I forgot how pronounce his name again. Let me throw him back on here. How do I pronounce your name again?
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:16:31.977) That would be “Zalitis”.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:16:34.176) Zaleeetees, thank you.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:16:36.243) That’s cool, I know, no one gets it right.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:16:40.418) I’ll just call you DJ Daemon and then from now on that’ll be easier. Alright, thanks. You have a good night. Alright. That will do it for the Crimey Cave podcast tonight. Yes, Happy 100. Do want to share a few more items before I get out of here. I gotta stop sharing. Bring back the slideshow.
Erik Zalitis (DJ Daemon) (01:16:45.004) Go ahead.
And here is the outro
Upcoming stuff! Cool!
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:17:07.278) So in the next few weeks, yes, I just got out of wild wrestling show. Good grief.
my goodness. So I’m to go see my mom shortly because it’s Mother’s Day where I live and let me bring this back up although I already showed these slides. Anyway, two weeks Combo Breaker at the Schomburg Convention Center starting Friday of Memorial Day weekend going through Sunday.
I will make it up there May 22nd through the 24th. I will make it up there Run a view with Tracy who says she is going to be going up there Kind of an arcade convention not just the fighting games you can but there’s a lot of There’ll be a lot of watching other people Ballad out on the big screen and I can’t hang with those guys
My chances will be better if at the Tekken Tag Tournament, Sunday May 31st at 3pm at the Galveston Arcade, BWT returns after taking almost a year off and going after trying to find whatever happened to JP Pitts. Following that weekend, the Illinois GameCon June 6th, 2026 at
The Air State Center in Bloomington, Illinois. And also that weekend, CourseCon, Columbus, Ohio’s first video game convention. It’s been around for, gosh, 18 years. Wild.
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:19:07.566) It’s not showing up. Wow, there we go. Wonder why the chests were not showing up real quick. Missouri Game Con, Greensfelder Recreation Complex in Manchester, Missouri. And on the 25th, I’ll be there for that. Midwest Gaming Classic has been scheduled for 2027, April 23rd through 25th. Next Thursday’s guest.
as I will be the curators of Chicago a Game Space. Jonathan Kinkley and Ethan Johnson. We will talk about their museum, some of the stuff they exhibit there, and some of the early gaming. At the Midwest Gaming Classic, had the exhibit detailing Nuttington Associates and some of the early
Bally Midway Games.
at the con so and they got a location in the chicago area it’ll be a 9 pm start time on may 14th so be aware of that uh starting it later so they can both uh get in uh on time because they have a lot of stuff going on during the day that they’re busy with so they will stop in at 9 pm
Alright, happy Mother’s Day to everybody And I’m good. Yeah, my weekends winding down and I’m trying to recover so you know anyway looks like I got some work to do out and I will be reading a channel who’s gonna be Who’s writing who’s a streaming this afternoon?
Steven Lucas (Mad Conservative Crimefighter) (01:21:06.766) actually not very many of the people I typically follow but Charlie far I’ll give it to him because he is streaming moonwalker for the sake of Genesis so until next time I am the mad conservative cry better see you around the arcade soon have good night everybody.
If you want to hear the whole thing…
Intereviewer and guest. How podcasts have been made since 1832.
(Book: “Rich Dad, poor dad” by Robert T. Kiyosaki) This book keeps popping up in my social media feeds. It promises wealth to those that stop thinking like a poor person and starts thinking like a rich one. Great idea, no? Well, no.. It’s not and I will tell you why. First off: I have actually read the book in the 2000s, so I remember it vividly. Also, I couldn’t really wrap my head around how heartless it was to the author’s real dad. But let’s look into what it’s about: the author’s biological father and also his step-father. It compares the unassuming real father to the highly successful stepfather in a really nasty juxtaposition.
It notes that the real father lead a normal life and never became one of the successful people. His stepdad (“rich dad”) totally did. And Robert spends this book telling you how to think to be more like the rich dad. The book is geared towards teaching investment and handling of finances, but it totally reads like a “get rich now”-scam. He overembelishes himself and look down at “wage slaves”. He thinks that you do something wrong if you work for others and that you should work for yourself. This book has a heavy survivor bias in the way it’s written. He pretty much says “think and do as I do and you will be rich and successful”.
My lesson to you as a potential reader of such a book is simple: don’t.
I believe that the one important thing to remember is that the people that already think and act like this do not need to read a book in the subjectmatter. They will, however, probably write one. And if you are a person who thinks you need this book to be a success, you are not the right person to do this anyway and you will fail.
It’s biological, not psychical. The person who thinks like this and looks down on other that “are losers and failures” sort under a very specific geometrical shape… Ladies, and gentlemen, I give you:
There are other books, that tell you this in more clear ways:
I have read this book as well. It talks about success through being a total arse. But I’m not sure the author is so much recommending it as just there to observe the behavior of the corporate world. It reads like a modern version the “the prince”. So this might be the one to get, actually. It is advisable not to fall for the rosy dream of acting the way the “successful” people do to get what you want. Remember what I said: if you can play this game, you don’t need this book. If you can’t play the game, the book will not help. You will hurt yourself that way. And worse, you may end up hurting others.
Be happy you’re not wired up biologically as a dark tetra! It’s not a good thing. They tend to yield short term success, while totally failing in the long run. If you are like me, you value small victories and a long-term comittment to live in accordance to your values. It can be a good life, but don’t expect “getting all the babes and bitches” and the “bling”. It’s not for you and not for me.
There are so much dreams sold to you that makes being a “dark tetra” (psychopath, sociopath, narcissist, machiavelian or sadist) look like a power move, that you will look at your meager life and think “I want to succeed”. But what do you want? Love? Money? Achievements? Fame? All those are fleeting values. Nature only cares that you procreate and then you are disposable. But we humans seek other values in life like friends, lovers, a comfortable life, doing what you believe in or maybe simply piece of mind.
I have so much more I want to write in this article, but I feel I got the message out and that’s enough for now. See you later. Then I will probably have something insightful to say about broadcast audio compression or Commodore retro computer.
Thanks for all the replies. I will shortly update this page, but have to add this after your suggestions and my ideas:
Why do I call it a “chiptune” station?
To add: CVGM
To add: keygen-fm.ru
To add: www.radio-paralax.de
Delve into the live-coverage angle of the respective station.
Ponder if “demoscene” is a better term than “chiptune” for a general purpose station.
There are a number of chiptune radio stations service the demo scene and I have tried to go through the most common ones and try to understand their strengths, weaknesses and general positions. I don’t claim to be an authority on this matter, so if you find anything wrong or disagree with me, please add a comment or send me an email.
I have looked at some of the most well-known stations and compared them, just to get a feeling of the “elbow angle” (that one, important point(-s) of beauty) so to speak. That is the strong points of each station and also where the stations feel lacking.
HYPR Demoscene Radio
hypr.website
The website is modern and responsive and has station just recently arrived on the scene. It has a login feature and easy to see comments. It leverages its playlist so that’s the first thing you see. The clear “in your face”-value of the station is apparent. And it invites you to request tunes. Doing so is clear and easy and the direct approach of the playlist makes it look fresh and updated. Requests are generally directly played with little waiting time. The underlying features are fairly close with few clicks, meaning that the request system is pretty much its selling point. That is more than anything its clear “elbow angle”. Hypr lives for the request feature. It has a pretty comprehensive database of songs and artists with basic facts and also tags for demoparties. There are a few weaknesses and one of it is that it clearly allows you to request up to four songs with the same artist. This is probably not a good thing in my opinion.
Size: 1-4 listeners at the same time. Brand recognition: Unknown. Probably relatively unknown as of yet. Song database: unknown, seems pretty large. Elbow angle: modern site, “challenger station” approach, very capable request system, well-built infographics system with good tagging. DJs: None.
Pros: modern website, direct approach, strong focus on easy requests. Cons: no easy way to see what is newly added on the station, request focuses a bit too much on the artists. The songs can be found, but may be a little bit more work.
Slay radio
slay.radio
A staple of the community and has a clear focus on what it’s doing, that is, C64 remixes. Old and respected. It’s probably the one of its kind, as I don’t know of any chiptune station focusing on just remixes. It has a long-standing tradition of live shows, doubling as podcast episodes and a vibrant community on Discord and is linked to the Arok demo party. It also holds a number of competitions for remixers that are also keen listeners. The website is good looking, but badly structured. It holds old news as its primary focus. And playlists and requests are hidden in menus. The request feature is not automatic, but seems to send a mail to the orgas. The website feel stale and hides its features well. The basics like stars, types, comments and other data is fairly easy to spot and makes sure you can see what is playing and interact with it.
Size: 60-90 listeners at the same time. Brand recognition: strong, well-known and liked Song database: unknown, seems pretty small. Elbow angle: strong listenership, community presence, true station audio processing. DJs: Slaygon and Ziona (live shows only, not on playlist).
Pros: a unique “signal”, strong listening (relative), popular, vibrant community, much activity, podcast like show list. Cons: stale website, hidden features in menus that no-one can easily find, not easy to use song card functionality.
The grand daddy of it all. That “original gangster” of stations. It’s true legend that seems to always have been there. The website is really badly maintained. It looks horrible on small screens and gives a very stale impression. It’s not directly clear how to begin listening, even though it can be found with a little bit of effort. The site is extremely stale except for the comment section. It has a very well built database with a lot of good information. It seems to build its selectivity on voting patterns. A lot of the songs have fairly low ratings and still seem to be played, meaning the curation of songs may suffer at times. It has data what has just been added and seems to actively add new tracks on a regular basis. No clear sign of any selectivity of newly added tracks. It probably relies on voting to make sure low quality tracks does not get too much airtime. Some artists seem to just send everything they got in large batches. This probably leads to a clear ingress bias of tracks. Not sure this is a disadvantage at all. But it says something.
Size: unknown, probably medium to large. Brand recognition: unprecedented. Song database: unknown, probably extremely large Elbow angle: great library, strong listenership, legendary reputation. DJs: None.
Pros: extreme brand recognition, long history in the scene, heavy focus on voting to achieve selectivity, clear signs of good activity, old and well positioned. Cons: very badly maintained website, stale information, unclear where to find all features of the website, old and badly optimized web presence.
Scenesat is an instrumental part of the demo scene that is the power of most demo scene streaming capabilities. It broadcasts, records and archives all major demo scene events. It’s by and large the work of scener Ziphoid and has a radio station of its own. And also a number of active podcastlike shows that seems to rely on CUE-files of chapters rather than the more common RSS-feeds. The website feels old and is badly maintained. A lot of the features are hidden under menus and can be tricky to see that they even exists. The stream is direct and “in your face”, but just provides basic information. A very primitve webplayer comes with few features. But it has next song, previous song and timing. It’s clear the station is not really the focus of the site.
Size: unknown. Brand recognition: well-known and respected. Song database: unknown. Elbow angle: does important community service for the demo scene, provides a lot of services and is highly respected. DJs: Subi and Ziphoid (???)
Pros: good brand recognition, has a lot of diverse services for the demo scene Cons: undermaintained website, little metadata for the station.
As far as I know, it was founded in the 2000s by a Finnish scener. It once had a forum, but it seems to have disappeared or ceased operating. There is no clear signs of any developement or additions of songs. The minimalist approach and clear “old school computer terminal” approach is appealing and informative. It can both display what is playing, what’s up next and a few of the most recently played tracks. To the best of my understanding, the station has been abandoned and does not have any known future plans. Please correct me, if I’m wrong.
Size: unknown. Brand recognition: well-known but unclear popularity. Song database: unknown. Elbow angle: Tried and true with a striking familiarity. DJs: None.
The website sticks out as it is clearly it one of the most informative stations when it comes to news, backgrounds of the team and other information. It also comes with forum that has not been updated since 2014 (!). The news are still updated and the station has recently announced its participation in a demo scene event. The site is modern, works with mobil phones and has a well setup information system. But some of the data is hidden in submenues. It also has far more listeners at the same time than any of the other stations I have gone through except SlayRadio. One problem is that it is in German and the other is that going to the submenues causes the stream to cut out. It also comes with some sort of live shows, but I get the feeling most of them are on hiatus.
It does have some sort of video streams on a semi-regular basis.
Audio profiling
My feeling was that it seemed to be heavily processed, but that turned out to be incorrect. The station seems to be running without any levelling at all. The reason for the heavy dynamic audio compression was the tune that just played. It pushed the integrated LUFS -9 dB LUFS. The next tune was much softer. After listening a while, I understood that it relies on whatever song is playing to control the sound shaping. In reality, this is probably not a problem. But it does mean that every song comes with its own dynamic profile. This means that one song may feel too loud and the next too weak. Modern music is pushed very hard, whereas older tunes may have a much lower levels. I think this is probably just fine as they seem to play mostly remixes.
Size: 40-50 listeners. Brand recognition: Wellknown. Song database: Elbow angle: active in the gaming/streaming community, DJs: None.
Pros: modern and well-built website, many different streaming formats and bitrates Cons: player cuts out when navigating the site
As I am the operator of this station, I cannot write an unbiased analysis, but I will try to be a correct as I can. Ericade started in 2020 in its current incarnation and has slowly built brand recognition. It was started as a true radio station and not a mere web-based playlist player. It thus has a built in capability of live shows, voice tracking and regular shows that is underutilized at this time. It has a very modern website that is a clearly lacking in interactivity. It has no login features or commentary features. It’s very easy to listen to on many different medias such as streaming, Youtube, Twitch and with any media player. It has a very comprehensive API with a lot of available statistics. The music database is very small compared to the competition. The database is well featured, but lacking in information about the demo parties which the songs come from. Of the list of stations, it’s along with SlayRadio the only one with true radio station audio processing. This leads to an unprecedented audio levelling. The request features are acceptable but a bit underwhelming and also a bit hidden in the menus. Starring and song cards are well implemented but are pretty basic compared to other stations. The big problem with the profiling is that it’s mostly understood as an Amiga-only station, so people are generally unaware of the fact that it plays a lot other music. The playlists are well curated, but clearly lack the shear number of tracks other stations have. Has an active podcast and a relatively unknown re-broadcast station. It has strong branding with professional station ids that often run with comic or referential messages at regular intervals. Also supports its own API, shoutcast(v2), Icecast and AzuraCast endpoints for integration with radio catalogs across the world. Connected with the Edison demo party in Sweden.
Size: 5-10 listeners at any given time. Brand recognition: known but not totally understood. Song database: >3000 tracks. Elbow angle: strong audio, active updates, easy to access track information and clear infographic support. the website has fresh and recent data and new tunes at all times. DJs: DJ Daemon and Coreus. (Podcast/live shows only)
Pros: well maintained and technically advanced, strong station identification in the streaming audio, good live broadcast capabilities. Cons: not as wellknown as other stations, weak request system, little interactivity, small song database, unclear focus on music identity.
What you mean “retro hoarder?” I just have like 7 Commodore computers.
In 2021, I wrote an article about how I make the podcast “Flashback, tracks from the past”. But it covered how I work with demo parties and the demo top lists I make. Most of the episodes nowadays are just me playing great tracked music. I still make demo scene episodes, but the most common shows are much faster to produce and feature more music instead of stories and interviews. This is because my experience is that the listeners prefer music over story telling. So, with no further ado, here is how your typical weekly show is made.
Step 1 – Getting all the cool music
When I started, I had a stash of 1000s of Amiga tracker modules. I used it to feed my radio station and later the first episodes of the podcast. It worked until I had run through all the good tunes and needed more than that. Thankfully, I found Modarchive. The site not only saves those tracked tunes for posterity but is also curating then. Inadvertently I started pushing non-Amiga tunes into the station. This eventually forced me to accept that it would not be 100% Amiga. But as true meritocracy goes, it made sure that I got the best of the best when it comes to tracked music.
This is probably how most people got in contact with chip tunes. Remember the old cracked games, which included a key generator for the license key? It came with music, a bad conscience and loads of malware. Not really missing that era, but the music was great!
What’s tracked music? Don’t they all call it “chip tunes” nowadays? Aaaaaaaaargh!!!! We must stop doing that. Not every tracked song is a chiptune. But that’s where we are now, so I guess I must accept “chip tunes” being a blanket term for anything sounding the least bit blippety-bloppety. But I digress…
I need one hour of tracked music. That would be about 20 songs, and I happily must venture to Modarchive.
Sweet! Give me my tracker music fix now!
Modarchive has a few good sources for music thanks to the “curator” approach they have to it. I start out by looking through the highest rated songs. Those that have 10 out of 10 in the rating. I also go through the “Most revered” list, where members has voted for their all-time favorites. In 2022 I used the genre lists to create a few themed episodes going through pop, rock, novelties and classic music.
Today I rely on the weekly spotlit songs that have been selected by the administrators on the site because they’re above and beyond the normal tunes. So, I bring up the latest tunes to be selected for that honor.
Let’s get it started from here. I now load up every entry in a separate tab on my browser until I have enough candidates or my browser comes crashing down. Then it’s time to listen. This takes a while. Just because it’s supposed to be good, doesn’t mean it cuts the muster. The station and the podcast have a sound and a format that requires the songs to fit when it comes to quality, genre and style. This takes a while and is done by the patented “wham, bam, thank you ma’m”-process. That is, I click, listen and either download the song or not and then I go to the next song. To see if I got enough tunes, I load them into VLC. Don’t worry, I will never use VLC to convert the tunes. It’s only to see how many minutes of music I have. As soon as the total time exceeds one hour, it’s time for the next step.
Step 2 – cooking after the recipy
Great! A pile of tunes, what do I play them with?
VLC is a poor choice of player for tracked music. There, I said it, now I feel better. Why? Because the batch conversion features are buggy as you wouldn’t believe and it cannot play a lot of the tunes right. Sorry, the playback of Impulsetracker tunes is useless. It doesn’t support all effects, so tunes won’t sound the way they should. I learned that the hard way. It’s a great player for playing normal mp3-files, though.
An excerpt from a mail conversation between me and an orga from a popular demo party in the southern hemisphere. He clearly knows that this is a problem as well. Just so you know it isn’t just me thinking so.
My tool of choice is: OpenMPT. To be more specific, the command prompt version of it, called openmpt123.exe. I have created a script to handle batch-conversion of whatever type of tracked tune it is to a set of nice flac-files. Flac is lossless compression, so it retains the quality of the original sound. Did I say that? Since when have tracked music has ever had good sample quality? Most earlier tunes of the Amiga-era are cobbled together in the artist’s mother’s basement by nerds with Cindy Crawford posters on their walls. They know how to make great music, but recording samples is another thing altogether. Back then most samplers for the Amiga did not have any meters or indicators to allow for recording at a good recording level. The rest, as they say, is history.
Built like a tank and about cutting though modules like one as well.
The conversion script not only converts the tunes, it also normalises the levels and creates meaningful meta data.
The album field is super important. The OrginalName is the name of the file when it gets imported. The website uses the file ending to figure out what kind of format I’m playing. This song ends with .xm, so it was created in Fastracker or one of its clones.
This is what the station looks like on a friend’s webradio. Does anyone still use those, by the way? Note that ericade.radio tells the listener that it is an Amiga 4-channel module. Now you know how that works. Cool.
PlayIT Live is the broadcast automation program I use to make the station tick. It runs 24/7, creating the playlist for the two stations I have. It’s also used to create the show that later becomes the podcast episode. Now I must upload the newly created tunes to the station. This copies them to the broadcast server and adds them to the repositories. Repo-what? Yes, that’s the list of available tunes used to create the play lists and make the stations work.
Let’s look at one of the tunes on the broadcast server.
So, do you see anything missing from the picture of the tune? Yup, the artist’s name isn’t there. There is no artist field on any format of module I know of. So, it says “Trackerartist”. That’s the next 30 minutes of fun for me. That is trying to figure out who wrote the tune. Sometimes the comment/instrument-list helps. And sometimes I must go to Modarchive or Google for it. Every now and then there is an artist with such bad self-esteem they choose to remain anonymous or something like that. They then get to keep the name “Trackerartist”. The tune above is by “Psirius”, and I then update that field.
It’s super important to make sure all artists are typed in the same way, so the listings show up correctly on the station and in the podcast play list.
See! Just by listing the artist correctly, the name is lining up nice in the list of available music on the station.
So, the million-dollar question: does the music appear on the station? The beauty of the whole setup is that it totally does. I have uploaded it to the same broadcasting server that plays the 24/7 stream, meaning it will enter the station when I create a new podcast episode. Not a mistake, but the intended effect. The podcast is a structured way for me to add new music to the station regularly.
Onwards, we got even more fun in the pipeline.
Step 3 – DJ Daemon has entered the building
Meet Leisa Wolfe, the broadcasting server. I have no idea why I choose to call her that. It’s like a captain naming his ship. It has to be a woman’s name. I just really have no method of selecting one. I guess it sounded good at the time. That was like in 2020 or so. Nevermind… Anyway, what you see is the broadcast automation. And also the very same tool I use to create the podcast, which always starts as a show on the station and then later becomes a podcast. Greatness.
So, I go to the 18:00 clock, which is the Swedish way of saying 6 pm. I then remove all the tunes set to play at that time and then I disable the scheduler. PlayIT Live fears vacuum and happily fills the gap with new songs before I have the time to add my own. It’s probably a good idea to turn it back on when done, or the station eventually goes silent when it runs out of scheduled hours. Dead air is a mess, and you lose listeners that way. All DJ:s have horror stories of that.
Ok, I open the ingest group, which is where I put on the new files I just imported in the station. Then I put them in the correct order. Which is that anyway? Well, I first try to find that tune that sounds like a starter. Yes, that’s a thing for any station. You want to start your show with a bang! And there is always at least one of the tunes that sounds like it’s the perfect starter. Then I try to select fitting tunes to create variety. If two tunes are slow and beautiful, I try to select something like an up-tempo techno tune as the next one. I also try to mix styles and make the play list (or “clock” as we call it in the radio business) become varied and never become boring. This is hard to get right as I only have like 20 songs or so. But it certainly helps to make it a more compelling show even if I can’t make it perfect.
The short tunes (less than 3 minutes) are put in a section of the play list called a “medley”. This is a play order that does not get interrupted by my speech. It will become a mix of tunes that fill up the same time as one normal length tune would. I make sure to put in a jingle between one of them to “tag” the show. Then I tighten the segues. No, not that useless bike thing. That would be a “segway” and nobody cares about them anymore. A seque is a mix between two songs.
With this done, it’s time to insert the voice tracks. What? Yeah, sorry. Maybe I should explain what it is. A voice tracking software allows the DJ to talk between the songs. When he does, he only sees the end of the previous song and the start of the next. Those entries first show up as “Voice track Placeholder” because they’re empty. I then sit by the recording desk, that’s connected to the broadcast server and record every speech between the songs. Since I can record them in rapid succession, I have no need to wait for a song to play through before I record the next one.
This still takes time as I often have to make retakes to get it right. I’m no born speaker, I guess…
The playlist shows approximate times for each song, but I learned not to trust them perfectly when speaking. The last thing is to make sure to tighten the segues to get a mix without any interruptions. Now, I’m finally done with the whole show and take a backup of the list just in case PlayIT Live decides to pull the rug from under my feet. It does this every now and then. The software costs money, but the bugs are free. Since I started the station, I have sent a steady stream of bug reports to various software vendors that makes the station work (except when it doesn’t) It’s a bit of a slow Saturday morning hobby of mine.
Then I turn my focus to the broadcasting server. I start recording the station output to a wav-file to have something to create a podcast out of. PlayIT Live has some sort of mixdown feature that creates the show from the play list, but I have not yet tested if it can be used to speed the process up. All right!
The station is loud. In techno babble jargon, it’s close to -11 dB LUFS. This is the average level for the audio going to the stream encoders. There are louder stations on the Internet, but I have selected it to make a decent compromise between sounding weak and blowing out your speakers. This is however too loud for a podcast, which should be at -14 dB LUFS according to YouTube. It’s a negative scale, so -11 is louder than -14. So, I instruct the broadcast processor to calm down a bit and give me softer compression.
No, it’s not a psychedelic version of Microsoft Excel. This is the broadcast compressor (Thimeo Stereo Tool) that makes sound loud and makes sure you don’t have to adjust the volume knob between the songs. Those are the only purposes of it, really. What more do you want?
At 6 pm central European time, the station hits the fixed time marker that stops what is playing and starts the station id. “Time for another episode of Flashback, tracks from the past with your host DJ Daemon”. Then the first voice track starts playing and my voice comes on. A listener once said that I have a “rusty voice”. Really? I have no idea if it was an insult or some sort of admiration of my skills as a DJ. But there you go. I try to make my speeches short, because the listeners are here for the music, not me. The first tune now comes blaring through the speaker.
I then turn to Gimp and open my podcast template to create the cover art of the podcast.
Lemmings! I love Lemmings. Expecially nuking the lot of them when I can’t beat a level. Wait up, is he doing a mike drop???
It’s 7 pm and the station returns to playing music without my voice in between the songs. I reckon the listeners let out a collective sigh of relief. My work is not done yet. I return the broadcast processor to its normal level of smashing down the nails that are the audio levels. Then I copy the recordings of the show to the recording desk. This then gets loading into Audacity.
This is where “we fix it in post”. That is IF it can be fixed at all.
Now I cut the off the part preceding the start of the show and the ending. I also have to lop off the intro station id and replace it with a new one from my stored files. Otherwise, the podcast will start with the last part of the song playing when it starts on the show. The tail end gets a nice fade out. And I then save the whole show to an mp3- and a FLAC-file. They’re then tagged with information about the show.
Now I upload the mp3-file to the web server, and the FLAC-file goes into the ingest directory of the second station (“Best of ericade.radio”). PlayIT Live picks up the show and I manually start it on that station. This will send a call to the web site API, which creates an entry in the tune database that powers the web site. It’s not enough to make it show up. For this, I have to enter data in the missing columns of the entry in the table in the database.
Time to pull the playlist from the broadcasting server. I put it into Excel and format it. Then I put the formatted text into Ultra edit and do some search and replace to get the correct timestamps and name of the fields.
Text processing at its best! No pesky formatting.
Then I run another script that merges the FLAC-file and the picture I created in Gimp. This merged file becomes the mp4-file that YouTube needs. You cannot upload mp3-files to YouTube as they will not be accepted. This is a video with one static image and the whole show playing. You can do so true magic with ffmpeg and PowerShell.
I might have been a tad bitter, when I programmed the script.
Now I upload the file to the YouTube channel and hope for the best. YouTube checks for copyrighted music and sometimes fires off one of its many false copyright warnings. I really try to vet the files before putting them on, but there are times when some file slips through the cracks. And there are all dumb warnings that simply are not copyright infringements. It fires wildly and often gets it wrong. I use Spotify to find the songs it sometimes marks and they’re often false. Sigh.
Then comes the work to write a short copy, which is a description for the show. I then add the text to the YouTube video and test the time stamps, so you can jump between the songs and my speeches.
Maybe a bit boring with the same picture for every chapter, but it’s a radio show you see. Nothing visual going on.
Almost there after like four hours of work. I now fill the entry in the database with playlist info and data. It will not only show up on the web site, but it will also appear in the RSS feed that powers the podcast aggregators.
Does it work?
Yes, it totally does. In a few hours, all podcasting sites will follow suite and display the episode. Except Spotify that will delete it and yell at me for trying to uplöad copyrighted material. They’re worse than YouTube of getting this wrong.
Podchaser finds the episode and probably features it in double copies. There is something dearly wrong with their RSS parser. I have stopped going through the trouble of reporting this to them. The other sites have no problems with my feeds.
Are we done yet? You would think so, but not yet. Now I must spread the word on Discord servers, Facebook groups and other social media. Not forgetting the station’s own social media channel. This takes time and I must select the correct place to advertise on, so I don’t spam.
Are we done now! Yes, that’s correct. Now it’s time to shut everything down (not the broadcast server ffs!) and open a brewski.
This is a story about a podcast I and a friend run and the strangest interview I have ever been part of. It turned out to be a great learning experience, but I must start the story in 2013, before the podcast even existed.
I was a new employee in a company, working as a security specialist. My first assignment was a brand-new encryption solution that I was asked to evaluate. My manager wanted me to tell him if this product was worth investigating further or not. I was given a production presentation pamphlet. It was something you don’t hear every day: a Swedish company offering a totally new encryption solution. It was one of those startups that had gotten a healthy injection of cash from a “corporate angel”. In short, they were given money to realize a new solution. It was presented as something brand new and never seen before. It didn’t need any keys, passphrases or other information that could give away the secrecy of the data. Also, it was based on a security protocol that the inventor of the solution had invented herself. And it also boosted that it was patented and the patent registration number was printed in the pamphlet.
It was easy for me to get the patent document from the patent office. It read as the same “marketing fluff” that the pamphlet did with the addition of a generic diagram and some text talking about quantum encryption. Most of the statements raised red flags for me. I will explain shortly why. Then I thought that “maybe there is something to download to test it?”. No download links and no instructions on who to contact at sales to get a trial version. Checking their website and other sources gave me no further information. I started doubting that they had some sort of software solution ready. This was weird. The company was at the time a few years old. “They got to have some sort of beta”, I thought. But nothing came up anywhere. I noted to my manager that I didn’t recommend going any further with this solution. My manager wasn’t a bit surprised. He had read the marketing text and didn’t think it was interesting to pursue further. Fair enough, not all things on the market are worth the effort. There’s nothing strange about that.
A few years later I read a popular Swedish magazine where a reviewer had gone through the solution. The most interesting part of the article was when he commented on the claim about “quantum properties”. The marketing text stated that the solution through quantum properties could detect if someone was eavesdropping the encrypted data. Not hacking or trying to decrypt it. Just watching the packet stream would set off an alert. This was claimed to work on any kind of connection. The reviewer noted that an ethernet connection as opposed to a fiber optic connection doesn’t have quantum properties. The claim was wrong as this feature could not work. It was physically impossible.
Years passed and in 2018 me and a friend decided to start a podcast together. We both worked at the same company at the time and in the IT security industry. So, it was clear we would cover the IT-security field. That’s a story for another day, though. A few months later we were offered a sponsorship by a large security organization in Sweden. This included that they sent interesting IT-security and info security lecturers for us to interview. We started doing regular interviews during the spring and it continued.
In the summer the other host went on vacation, and I decided to take the reins of the podcast myself during his vacation. I ran the show, covering the events in the IT-security field during each week. One of the last podcasts I made before he came back was about the inventor and her company. I was careful not to mention her name or the name of the company. But I talked about the claim that she had invented an encryption protocol herself. This is generally a very bad thing to do. Especially if you don’t make the solution open. Her encryption, if it existed at all, was closed source. Microsoft made this mistake in the 90s when they released Windows 95. It had the passwords of the users stored in passwordlist-files. Those encrypted .pwl-files were built so no one got to know how they worked and that was supposed to be secure. It was not. Not by a long shot. Hackers had a field day with the solution and what little security Windows 95 could offer was lost. The .pwl files were properly hacked and became useless. A new encryption format must go through years of vetting and attacks before getting trusted for implementation in standards. Some encryption standards that were considered secure, have been broken over the years and then stopped being used. This is the harsh reality and the reason why this was a red flag for me. I noted this on the podcast.
This is where it got interesting. What happened next was something I would never have seen coming. Our contact in the organization suggested another guest for our podcast. He said she was a bit controversial but may be interesting. We had to decide ourselves if she fit the podcast. She had invented her own encryption. You guessed it, it was her and it was the very same solution that I had evaluated previously. Who would have thought? What was the likelihood of our paths crossing? Me and the other host agreed to allow her on. It was a bit of risk taking, but a self-made inventor could be interesting to have on. I silently wondered if we knew what we had gotten ourselves into. We had no idea…
It was a nice day in autumn when she arrived at our work office. We led her to a conference room we had been allowed to use. She told us she had just come back from a large company nearby. She had been presenting her product to them, and she seemed to be very hopeful of it leading to some business for her company.
The recording went off to a bad start. It wasn’t her fault. It was mine. She spoke about prime numbers, and I explained what that was. Got the explanation right but also suggested a few numbers that were prime numbers. Among them was 9, which is not a prime number at all. It’s divisible by 3. I got to hear that a number (haha!) of times from listeners and thought there was no end of it. What happened next was worse. She claimed that her cryptography did not use mathematics and pointed to a matrix with binary numbers she drew on the whiteboard. Listeners could not see that, but if they had, they would probably have drawn the conclusion I did: a matrix, a mathematical thing. At least I learned to use them in math class in school way back when. Either way, I have never heard about cryptography not using math. I tried a conversation starter by telling her that her solution reminded me of the Kerberos protocol. That did not sit well with her. I started worrying that she might stand up and walk out on us if we asked the wrong questions. It was probably not what we should have done. She was kind of worked up from my question. We really didn’t know how to challenge her different views on how encryption was to be done. In the end, she told us her point of view without much intervention. We thanked her for her time and then stopped recording.
What she said later totally should have gone into the recording but didn’t. It was interesting and unexpected. The first thing was that she was going to teach herself Microsoft C#, a popular programming language, to be able to build the software solution. I could hardly believe that I heard her right. At this time, her company was 10 years old. It confirmed what I suspected from the beginning: there was no functioning solution. They basically had an unrealized idea that yet had to materialize. This is kind of the most long-standing “vapor ware” I have ever heard of. What could she really sell to an interested customer if she had no solution ready? Then came the next thing she said. She told us of her quantum computer that she had in her cellar. Some background: quantum computing is bleeding edge research technology. Companies like Microsoft, IBM and Google pour loads of money into their projects to create the first quantum computer capable of reaching the goal of being powerful enough to bring massive parallel computing to this world. This technology advances but is many years away from being done. Back when this interview was conducted there were just a handful of quantum computers in the world. Somehow, she had one in her cellar. Such statements are impossible to verify unless you look in her cellar, I guess. This left me wondering exactly why she said something like that.
We went home to our respective homes, and the episode was uploaded and spread though the podcast services on time and to a waiting community. The response came a few days later.
Someone posted a message in a Swedish Facebook group specializing in IT-security. This message was about the interview, and it was surprisingly respectful for an angry take on our podcast. The people posting in the thread called us out and wondered why we had put her on the show. They also wondered if we knew anything about cryptography, given that we didn’t question anything she said. And few days later someone posted a new post without knowing about the first one. There were the same critical questions about the interview. We responded the best we could.
Something good came out of it. A man working with cryptography in a Swedish university offered himself as a guest on our show. We let him on, and it became a good introduction to cryptography and quantum computing. The calmness began to come back to our world. This is the end of the story, right. Nooooo… Not by any stretch of imagination.
Time passed and we continued producing podcast episodes. Months passed, but one day I got an email from a listener. It was addressed to me and asked me if I believed in her solution. At this time, I had to be careful what to respond. I didn’t want to be too negative about it. I noted that all I had to do was to say it like it was. I responded something like “there is no product to test in order to evaluate its capabilities. Until such a solution exists and can be tested, I do not believe it works. If I ever get to test it, it’s unlikely I will believe in it. But let me at least try”. I felt pretty good about that answer.
20 minutes later, I stood outside the building I work in, so I could get some fresh air. Then the phone rang. It was her and she wanted to talk to my manager. It was a moment of “ouch, dammit!”. It wasn’t just my direct manager she wanted to talk to. Not even the CEO of my company. Nope, she wanted to talk to the CEO of the company group. I thought I was going to get into some hot water. But she was nice and polite. I gave her his number. Then I went back to the office and sent him a message. I asked him to be a bit on the skeptical side with her. I got no response from either of them. It later struck me that it was probably just a coincidence she called me at the time she did. She most likely wanted to do a sales pitch. It was not her with a fake name I had mailed back to. A sigh of relief later it was all forgotten.
More time went on. Months later I got a message from her. She wanted to come again as a guest of our show. I didn’t have the heart to tell her no. I asked her to come back to her later. Time passed and I didn’t hear from her at all and forgot about it.
This story has a sad ending. One day I saw a message from her daughter on social media telling us that the inventor, her mother, had passed away recently.
There is an old saying: “Don’t speak ill of the dead”. I really don’t want to do that either. Remember that my first experience with their security product was before I even met her. My whole point is to tell a story about working in the IT industry. We must be hard on security companies, because so much of our society will be entrusted to their protection. It’s nothing personal really.
13th of September will mark the fourth birthday of the The ERICADE Radio Network. If you wonder, two years ago I wanted to change the name to ericade.radio, but replacing all the StationIDs would simply be too expensive. So ericade.radio is now the short name instead. Anyway… I’m proud to call this a radio station, which may weird, when everyone else thinks of streaming music as little more than a playlist generator. This is not wrong, but it is missing why a true radio station is so much more than Spotify’s radio feature or a YouTube-channel promising “Synthwave, chipwave, retrowave … something, something the dark side”. Ahem… IT’S CALLED TRACKED MUSIC!!! Oh, anyway. What makes ericade.radio a radio station, is exactly what makes any radio station just that. Three words: format, idents, clock
Me in front of the microphone.I like big screens, and I cannot lie.
Format
This guy talks the talk, but can he walk the walk?
Simple! Just play the same kind of music. If listeners stop listening because they like the station, but there are so many bad songs on it, you need to tighten the playlist. With tracker music, this means getting an ear for what “sounds right” when sifting through new songs. I have rejected songs I loved, but I felt that they would never fit. So bad does not necessarily mean that it’s horrible to listen to.
My work is to “curate” the music. A decent estimate suggests there are 200,000 Amiga 4-channel tracked songs still available on the Internet. Ericade.radio has little over 2000 songs, but they’re all tested by me and often gets stars from listeners. This way a lot of thought is put into it. And the most popular trackers we play music from are:
Amiga 4-channel module – 43.3%
Fasttracker – 27.4%
Impulsetracker – 13.8%
Modern remix – 5.3%
Screamtracker – 3.8%
Idents
This is almost the dude that you hear between songs the telling you what you’re listening to. Almost, as in just half of his face in the picture. But his voice is fully featured on the station.
All radio stations must identify themselves. This is pretty much a universal law and goes for radio amateurs, beacons, repeaters, and broadcasting stations. In Sweden, amateur stations must “regularly” identify themselves. In the United States, the home of radio, stations are assigned call signs starting with K or W. So, the station must announce its call sign something like “You’re listening to KJCM 106.7” or “This is KRUD 98.5 on your FM dial”.
Idents automate this and have evolved into “Station IDs” that may say things like “This is WTHX – the voice of Podunk, Texas” or “You’re tuned to WWTF – The leader in Black metal-country ballads”.
If you have ladies with pretty voices singing the station call-sign and the slogan, that is a “jingle”.
If the call sign and slogan is stated by a burly man with testosterone poisoning and is heard in the beginning of a song – that is called a “Sweeper”.
Idents must be carefully selected and not be too long, inadvertently funny or just bad. They are the audio logotypes of the station.
We used to have Nicole Carino, now it’s a British DJ that goes by the name of Jono Woodward.
Clock
Imagine a round plate with two … Ah, you know how an analog clock looks. Now, what if I pull of the second- and hour-hands? The clock face would now just show you the minutes. This is the brain behind a true radio station. It resets when the minute hand strikes twelve. Therefore, we talk about “top of the hour”. This automatically starts a new hour and is unimaginatively called a “clock”. You can have different clocks for different parts of the day or weekdays. A clock running on Friday evening would probably have up-tempo music, while Sunday afternoon clocks plays more mellow music.
A clock is thus a list of what to play at a given time during the hour. This means that you can draw a clock face and then put slices for each tune, advert or ident that is supposed to play at that time. This is never exact, but the order is always preserved.
Ericade.radio is an Internet station, so it will not care that much. I’ve decided to assert the local, Swedishness of the station by having four clocks. They each state: “Good morning”, “Good mid day”, “Good afternoon” and “Good evening”. The station voice, Jono Woodward complained about the “Good mid day”-one, as English countries don’t say that. In Sweden we do. Since I paid for the idents, he complied. 😀
All clocks here play the same kind of music, as it would be too much work trying to shape the mix and, on the Internet, it would not matter too much anyway. But professional stations will put a lot of effort into “dayparting” as this is called. They also instruct the software to build tempo transitions by choosing songs that ramp up the tempo and then drop it. I don’t have the time to rate all songs based on speed and texture.
Texture is the complexity of the song. Low textured songs have few instruments, and high textured ones can be more like symphonies.
Ericade.radio makes use of clocks as must be done but does not really daypart or mix the tempo.
Trivia: when Beatles released “Hey Jude” in the late 60s, stations did not want to play it, but were forced to due to its immense popularity. The problem was that it’s around eight minutes long. A clock is historically built around a song being 2-4 minutes and that up to 15 songs fit in an hour. Ad breaks and idents may change this.
So that’s what makes a station? Well, it’s more like the “tenements” of the station. I will talk more about the other things in later posts. But I want to briefly point out one more thing that a true radio station must do. And that the playlist channel of the kind you hear on YouTube will not.
Process the audio
Loudness is a touchy subject for any audio guy or gal. But I believe it comes down to:
Consistency (Same darn sound levels all the time!!!)
Proper loudness (It needs the oumph!)
All songs I put on the station will be automatically normalized to -11 dB to a full-scale output (LUFS), which is a fancy way of saying “darn tooting loud”. This means that songs recorded too low will be “lifted up a bit”. The broadcast software (PlayIt Live) will then set it to a reference level of -16 dB LUFS, which is a bit more like “somewhat, but not too loud. My hearing aid is bad”. This means that the idents, my speech, and the songs will have a consistent level. But this is only the beginning. Time to get REALLY LOUD.
Blinkly lights! Weird bars! Moving sliders! This just have to sound awesome. (It does)
The station will at this time play at the same level over time. But the proper loudness is not yet there. There are many broadcast processors out there. I’ve chosen Thimeo Stereo Tool and bought all the licensed modules bar the ones used for AM or FM-processing.
The audio gets in and get levelled right and then repeatedly smashed by three big hammers until marches in an orderly line in perfect columns. Those hammers are called “compressors”. To give you an idea of what this means, while using a huge over exaggeration: it makes a hair pin dropped to the floor and an atom bomb blast next door sound the same level.
That’s a sacrifice as it means quality can suffer. Badly processed stations sound “pumpy” as peaks in energy (think drumbeats!) pushes the whole song down and then it slowly returns. Listen to NRJs stations here in Sweden to hear just how bad this can be.
Try to do this with some cheap ipod-ripoff.
And yes, the segues. Not the weird bikes, those are called “Segways”. A segue is how a track mix over to another. And a true radio station must allow no gaps between them! This sounds unprofessional and really “just a mere playlist”. The CUE-points is what sets the point at which the segue must start. This is done automatically, but I must check them before they go on the air. Pushing new songs into the station is the whole idea behind “Flashback, tracks from the past”. But I will save that story for another day. Four years on the air – a huge thank you to all of you supporting the station. You know who you are. Again, thank you.
Det skulle nog bli rätt svårt att få någon rätsida på grillen, men det var ändå det mindre problemet jämfört med balkongen den hade stått på när den föll. Till råga på allt hade eländet vält medan kolen ännu brann för full låga. Sen hade det gått snabbt. Några textilier, som dumt nog hade stått bredvid grillen, hade fört elden vidare mot räcket, fönsterkarmen och väggen. Brandsläckaren hade räddat situationen men inte utan skador. Brännskadorna fick det att se ut som någon försök måla slumpvisa delar med kamoufleringsfärg. Monteringen hade Evert gjort enligt anvisningarna, men en vital metalldel visade sig ha varit skadad och hade helt enkelt knäckts med han varit iväg efter ölen. Försäkringsbolaget ansåg att skadan täcktes av deras drulleförsäkring, men självrisken skulle bli rätt saftig ändå.
Med liket efter klotgrillen i bakluckan på bilen, åkte så Evert tillbaka till City-Outlet för att lämna tillbaka den eländiga tingesten och få dem att även täcka självrisken. Reklamationsavdelningen visade sig ligga nära baksidan av affärskomplexet, vilket man lätt kunde förstå varför. Evert kunde se hur saker och ting såg ut redan innan han kom nära de öppna portarna under skylten där det stod ”Reklamationer och övrigt”. Köerna ringlade långa och arga människor stod i klungor med sina lådor. Ingen av dessa lådor verkade innehålla en klotgrill, men det fanns ändå en typ av låda som verkade vanligare än de andra. Denna var över 1,5 meter hög och kanske en halvmeter bred och hade i övrigt inga egentliga illustrationer. Evert kunde inte se riktigt vad det stod på dessa lådor, men så hade han inte varken lust eller ork att krångla med glasögonen. Han hade på sig de han behövde för sin bilkörning och det fick räcka.
Ilskan i luften var högst rörbar, i alla fall metaforiskt uttryckt. Den dallrade liksom på något sätt och detta satte sin prägel på hela lokalen. Personalen såg stressad ut medan de försökte hantera anstormningen. Det var en stor mängd av barnfamiljer, pensionärer och en del ungdomar och de hade en mängd av olika varor av uppenbart sekunda kvalité att lämna tillbaka. Särskilt de där stora lådorna som på något sätt stack ut. Evert undrade vad som rimligen kunde dölja sig för misstag i var och en av dessa. Definitivt inte en klotgrill, så mycket var klart.
Tiden gick och kaoset lugnade sig något. Så var det Everts tur. Han förklarade snabbt vad som hänt och visade den olycksaliga tvärslån som gått sönder vid ett av skruvhålen och fått grillen att kantra som ett skepp i full storm. Expediten accepterade förklaringen och skrev ut ett kvitto, men när Evert så kom till frågan om ersättning för skadan, då blev det tvärstopp. Det gick inte utan ett skriftligt utlåtande från försäkringsbolaget som dessutom måste ställas direkt till City-Outlet och inkludera en skriftlig förklaring. Dessutom skulle denna vara inne inom tre dagar efter olyckan. Evert förklarade att olyckan hänt förra helgen och att det tagit tid att få hjälp från försäkringsbolaget. Ja, då gick det nog ändå inte att göra något åt saken tyvärr. Evert förklarade att det är totalt otänkbart att han skulle behöva stå för kalaset som troligen även skulle påverka försäkringspremien. Det är svårt att säga om det var situationen i sig eller om stressen och ilskan i luften i lokalen inverkade, men expediten tappade rätt snabbt tålamodet.
”Om du ska hålla på och krångla, kan du gå härifrån! Vi åtar oss faktiskt att återbetala vad du betalat för grillen. Så gör vi normalt inte. Vi ger dig normalt ett presentkort. Så du får vara nöjd med vad vi erbjuder. Jag har inte tid att bråka med dig. Om du vill fortsätta driva detta, får du ta och stämma oss, men jag säger dig: du slösar både din och vår tid. Så hur ska det vara nu?”
Evert höll upp händerna i en i en gest för att lugna den upprörda mannen och bad så hemskt mycket om ursäkt men undrade om inte det fanns någon form av kompensation som kunde tänkas utgå. Mannen bakom disken var nu högröd i ansikten och tittade på Evert med en vild blick. Han såg sig om i lokalen och rusade fram till en av de där många stora lådorna som stod i lokalen. Han tog en och höll fram den mot en förvirrade Evert.
”Här. Du hittar säkert någon i familjen som vill ha den. Nästa kund!” Den första känslan när Evert stod utanför porten med pengarna för grillen och den märkliga lådan var en ilska som nu inte längre riktigt gick att hålla tillbaka.
”Förbannade idiot. Det behövs inte något geni för att förstå att man betalar för den skada man åstadkommer. Men det är klart, där har du vad som händer när man sätter en slyngel, som inte klarar gymnasiets matematik, men ändå tror att han kan göra karriär inom försäljningsbranschen på en position som kräver att man kan resonera med en annan människa. Undrar om han förstår varför han kommer vara kvar hela sitt arbetsliv i detta ställes svar på klagomuren, istället för att göra sig en karriär bland säljarna? Hade han varit bara lite mer kompetent hade han kanske kunna säga ”vill du ha extra pommes frites med denna order?”. Men det är ju i alla fall ett steg upp från att jobba på zoo som attraktion på apberget.”
Allt detta muttrade han för sig själv medan knöt näven så att knogarna vitnade. Han kände sig som om han valt den ”hemliga lådan” i en TV-tävling, istället för några väl behövliga tusenlappar.
“Det gör bäst i att vara diamanter eller en äkta Rembrandt i den jävla lådan. Antingen det eller en riktigt god whiskey. Jag behöver en nu!” Pulsen gick ner medan Evert kånkade på den stora lådan mot bilen. Ilskan övergick skamkänslor och en känsla av uppgivenhet. Kanske borde han inte ha varit så elak mot mannen bakom disken. Han hade förvisso inte sagt någonting av det han tänkte eller sedan på behörigt avstånd muttrade så att mannen hade hört det. Men var det rättvist? Mannen hade nog att göra och en till jobbig typ i övre medelåldern var nog inte roligt att tas med. Ilskan kom tillbaka, denna gång riktad mot honom själv. Han borde stått på sig. Han var inte gjord av pengar och självrisken var inte att leka med på hans lön.
Vilket i sig var en sak: borde han inte ha sagt till chefen att han minsann förtjänade en högre lön? Han hade arbetat på samma ställe i nästan 30 år, och många av de andra som bara varit där 10 år låg före honom i löneligan. Allt hade dessutom blivit så dyrt nu när frugan lämnat honom. Men så fort han nämnde frågan hade chefen verkat så irriterad, så han gick inte längre än att hinta om att det i alla fall vore bra att tänka på.
”Visst, visst. Vi ska titta på det till nästa år. Situationen är ju, som du vet, lite komplicerad. Marknaden är tuff just nu.” Evert hade sedan tänkt på vilken idiot han hade till chef:
”Det är lätt för dig att säga som fått ditt jobb av din farsa. En annan hade börjat från botten och jobbat sig upp. Torka bort det där lismande leendet, din orm. Du skulle sälja mina njurar, båda två, om du kunde komma undan med det.”
Givetvis hade han inte sagt något till chefen. Herre gud, hur skulle det se ut? Sådant säger man inte. Efter lite eftertanke skämdes han och slog fast att så kanske man inte skulle tänka så heller. Chefen hade faktiskt en familj att försörja och en av sönerna hade cancer till råga på allt. När Evert kom hem var det fortfarande gassande solsken ute och ingen av grannarna hade ännu kommit hem. Han hade åkt hem tidigare för att uträtta några ärenden varav att lämna tillbaka grillen var ett av dem. Så nu stod bilen utanför hans kära gamla villa och han tog sig in i porten, bara för att känna lukten som påminde honom om balkongens sorgliga tillstånd.
Ilskan kom och gick. Den böljade och sköljde över honom när han tittade runt i lägenheten. Allting påminde honom om branden, skilsmässan och framförallt den stora ensamheten. En hel värld som vänt honom ryggen och gått vidare. En ensam man och hans ensamma lägenhet, medan resten av världen pågick någon annanstans.
Så sken han upp: lådan. Lite spännande var det. En ny lampa kanske? Den skulle sitta perfekt i vardagsrummet. Eller någon prydnadssak? Det var tomt efter Eva. Han skakade försiktig på den och lyssnade. Tyg! Det lät så i alla fall. Ny bordsduk? Kanske ett sängöverkast. Ingenting som skulle slå att faktiskt ha fått pengarna till reparationen, men ändå någonting.Så öppnade han lådan och tittade ner. Hon tittade tillbaka upp. Hoppet sjönk när han insåg vad han hade fått. En ful, larvig docka. Han satte sig ner och luften gick ur honom. Av alla saker den där lådan kunde innehålla, så var det en docka. Lådan hade lika gärna kunnat var tom. Vad skulle en 56-årig kamrer, med en demolerad balkong med en docka till? Hans enda son var vuxen och hans exfru skulle inte ta i denna enfaldiga leksak med en tång.
Det var inte särskilt svårt att förstå hur detta misslyckade missfoster till leksak kommit till. Någon överbetald produktutvecklare med en ”ljus idé” hade kommit på ett sätt att skapa en billigare produkt. Han måste ha tyckt att Barbiedockor, plyschdjur och fullstora dockor var något som sålde bra så varför då inte slå ihop dem till en enda produktlinje? Billigt och bra. Men en 150 centimeter hög röd plyschräv med blond pagefrisyr iklädd en ljusblå klänning måste ha varit resultatet av en sällsynt dålig insikt i frågan hur den tilltänkta målgruppen, vilken den nu var, fungerade. De långa ögonfransarna och tiaran fick vara pricken över i på denna överdådiga blandning av vad vetenskapen kan åstadkomma med giftiga mängder flamskyddsmedel, billigt tyg och en stoppning som man nog gjorde bäst i att inte fundera på vad den egentligen var gjord av.
Själv visste han inte ens vad han skulle med den till om han inte kunde sälja den för de tretusen kronor reparationen av balkongen skulle kosta honom. Han ställde dockan på en stol och tittade på den med en blandning av ilska och total uppgivenhet. Vad? Varför? Sen gick det upp för honom:
expediten ville bli av med honom så fort som möjligt. Kanske för att han krävt mer än bara pengarna tillbaka för klotgrillen. Så han hade tagit någon de många reklamerade produkterna och slängt fram den för att lösa problemet. Hade han vetat var den innehöll? Troligen, men det var trettio personer framför honom som alla verkade irriterade och mannen med den trasiga grillen vill han bara bli av med så fort som möjligt.
”Det är inte rätt. Det är fan inte rätt. Såhär får det fan i mig inte gå till”. Ilskan och känslan av totalt nederlagt fyllde upp honom och han slog de knutna nävarna i stolskarmen medan han försökte att inte helt tappa koncepterna. Det är svårt att veta när man går från en verklighet till en annan. Sker det som en brytare som slås till och skickar en in i vansinnet, eller är det gradvis process där man utan att se tar ännu ett steg mot ett oundvikligt sönderfall?
-”Är det inte rätt? På vilket sätt är det inte rätt? Jag tycker att du fått precis vad du förtjänar”
Evert tittade sig omkring. Var det grannkvinnan som hade sagt det där? Hon brukade aldrig någonsin säga någonting elakt om någon som faktiskt var i rummet. Dessutom brukade hon inte gå in i någons vardagsrum utan att knacka. Och rösten lät yngre. Han vände sig om utan att se någon i rummet. Dörren och fönstren var stängda och ingen stod utanför.
-”Ah, den där fårskalliga minen passar dig precis. Den kompletterar och accentuerar på ett naturligt sätt din intellektuella kapacitet. Om du bara öppnar munnen lite till kan man tro att du idisslar gräs på en äng, fast det vore tarvligt mot korna att säga”.
Dockor kan normalt bara tala om de har någon maskin i sig som får dem att säga saker, det var Evert på det klara med. Men ingen verkar ha sagt det till den uppstudsiga räven som satt framför honom och nu log elakt. Hon blåste bort en lock ur ansiktet och fortsatte utan att pausa nämnvärt.
-”Har du inte mål i munnen, gubbe? Jag vill höra vad du har att säga. Så?” Evert tittade trumpet på henne och mumlade tillbaka.
-”Alltså, du behöver inte vara sådär osympatisk med mig, eller hur?”
-”Jo, det är precis vad jag behöver”, svarade hon direkt och fortsatte:
-”Kalla det brist på sympati om du vill, men det visar bara att du inte hittat det.”
-”Hittat vad?”
-”Om jag behöver säga det, kommer du inte förstå det. Du måste hitta det. Vid detta lag undrade Evert om det inte handlade mer om att hon var besviken på honom än om ilska. Vad var det som inte han inte fattade? På vilket sätt kände hon sig tvungen att provocera honom.
-”Jag är trött på detta ständiga hunsande. Om du vill förolämpa mig mer, får du fan ta en kölapp. Du är en i en lång rad av folk som inte har bättre saker för sig än att köra med mig. Alla är emot mig.”
Hon tittade mot taket och suckade.
-”Och du ser inte den gemensamma nämnaren i allt du berättar. Det är den som är problemet”.
-”Alla andra! Det är alla andra som är problemet!” svarade Evert som vid detta lag var högröd i ansiktet.
-”Du hade två möjligheter. Två! Likväl lyckades du ta fel alternativ. Jag får en känsla av att du skulle välja fel förklaring även om du bara hade ett alternativ som dessutom var korrekt. Om du inte var så tjurskallig, skulle du kanske se problemet. Men jag tänker inte sätta några pengar på det.”
-”Så vadå, är det mitt fel? Är det vad du försöker säga?”
-”Varje gång du råkar ut finns det en gemensam faktor. En enda. Alla andra är variabler…”
-”Jag är konstanten… Det gemensamma problemet är jag. Är det vad du försöker säga” sade Evert och blängde ilsket på dockan.
-”Varför inte. Det låter som en bra förklaring i mina ögon. Jag var rädd att du sniffat en massa lim, men nu inser jag att du inte är korkad, utan bara en osedvanligt tjurskallig typ. Allt är alla andras fel. Och det värsta är att du ha rätt. Det är alla andra som gör dig orätt, men det är du som gör fel”.
-”Och du är någon form av självutnämnd filosof då?”
-”Försök inte byta ämne.”
-”Hmmm… Det ligger något i vad du säger. Jag kanske borde säga ifrån”.
-”Varför inte. Vad har du förlorat på det hittills? Förutom förståndet då. Jag menar, du talar med döda ting och låter dem förolämpa dig å det grövsta.”
-”Jag ska säga vad jag tycker!”
-”Alla kommentarer har en kostnad. En del är helt klart värda det andra inte. Välj dina strider.”
-”Men jag gör bäst i att inte fälla sura kommentarer för mig själv efter att jag accepterat att bli behandlad illa. Jag tror jag har fattat.”
-”På något märkligt sätt har det sjunkit in. Ja, du har förstått. Det förvånar mig, men det finns tydligen hopp för dig.”
Evert slöt ögonen och kände ett lugn komma över sig. Han öppnade ögonen och svarade:
-”Vet du, jag är glad att vi…”
Om det var tillfällig förvirring som skapat situationen, så var den i alla fall över nu. Dockan tittade med sina orörliga plastögon tomt framför sig utan att se och Evert kände sig lite märklig till mods. Han visste att han hade två saker att göra: ringa butiken och sedan montera dockan som en fågelskrämma i trädgården utanför. Han såg fram emot båda uppgifterna och gnolade medan han letade efter telefonnumret i katalogen.
Credit: Image by Ludovic Charlet from Pixabay
Några tankar om novellen från undertecknad
2015-07-27 Jag gillar den gamla TV-serien ”The Twilight zone” skarpt. Varje avsnitt är en egen historia som blandar drama med Science-fiction. När jag kom på ”Räven och vansinnet” låg jag sjuk hemma.
Medan jag halvdåsade, kom jag på en historia som jag först såg som en komedi men nu funderar på om jag ska göra till en blandning av komedi/drama. Jag gillar inte magi i historier särskilt mycket utan vill hellre se ”övernaturliga” fenomen som svagheter och egenheter med psyket.
Historien handlar om en gammal man som blir allt mer förbittrad på att han aldrig får det han har rätt till. När historien börjar har en grill han köpt skapat brännskador på balkongen. Han går tillbaka till affären som ger honom pengarna tillbaka men vägrar ge honom pengar för att täcka självrisken och mannen klarar inte av att konfrontera expediten för att faktiskt få pengar för skadorna, något han anser sig ha rätt till. I ett försök att bli av med mannen samt bli av med en av många varor som arga kunder lämnat tillbaka erbjuder han mannen en annan vara utan att säga vad det är för något.
Han blir hotfull och otrevlig och mannen vågar inte bråka utan tar paketet och går hem. När han kommer hem, inser han att han blivit grundlurad. I paketet ligger en docka som verkar vara en misslyckad produkt som lämnats tillbaka av många andra missnöjda kunder. Mannen ilska får honom att totalt tappa koncepterna.
Här går mannen in i någon form av psykosliknande tillstånd och dockan ”får liv”. Det hintas, men beskrivs inte att det är en psykos, men mannen pratar egentligen med sig själv hela tiden. Dockan är otrevlig och fäller nedlåtande kommentarer. Dockan säger att mannen saknar någonting och säger ibland att ”nu har du hittat det”. Efter ett tag förstår man att dockan försöker få mannen att hitta sin självkänsla och sluta acceptera all skit han får ta. När mannen förstår detta, släpper psykosen och mannen går tillbaka till affären och övertalar expediten att han faktiskt ska få pengar för att betala självrisken. Genom sin nyvunna självkänsla, kan han nu utrycka sig så att folk slutar köra över honom. Dockan slutar som en märklig, men effektiv fågelskrämma.
Design. Dockor i filmer är ofta skrämmande, och det är en ”trope” som jag inte vill följa. Dockan i storyn är ett totalt stolpskott som inget barn vill ha. En ”smart” utvecklingskonsult anser att de populäraste dockorna är ”Barbie”, plyschdjur och dockor stora som vuxna människor. I ett misslyckat försök att skära ner tre produktlinjer till en skapar han en otroligt fånig plyschräv i fullstorlek med en balklänning, ögonfransar och blont pagehår. En totalt värdelös produkt som naturligtvis totalt floppar och nu fyller upp golvet på returavdelningen i drivor av färglösa pappkartonger Därför vet inte mannen vad han fått bara för att expediten vill bli av med honom. Designen kom jag på för att jag är förbannat trött på att dockor i scifi/skräck alltid ska se läskiga ut och ge en känsla av obehag.
Jag är hygglig bra på synopsis, men kommer aldrig igång med historierna. Får se om det blir någon ändring.
