Modern Technology Watches – Episode 305 – Flight of the Navigator (1986)

On this episode of Modern Technology Watches Rob shows Gila the 1986 scifi adventure Flight of the Navigator in which a young boy finds himself stranded out of his time and away from the world he knows, with his only hope coming from a mysterious robot spaceship.

Will Gila enjoy the ride? It may not take a brain scan at NASA to find the answer.

Modern Technology Watches – Episode 304 – Bernie (2011)

Modern Technology Watches makes a triumphant return as Gila introduces Rob to Bernie, Richard Linklater’s 2011 black comedy dramatization of the events surrounding a murder in East Texas.

Will Rob tolerate the twisted Texan tale, or will it load him with microaggressions until he snaps?

Modern Technology Watches – Episode 303 – Citizen Ruth (1996)

Prompted by current events, Gila and Rob use the 1996 film Citizen Ruth as a starting point to talk about the current state of bodily autonomy and reproductive rights in the United States.

This is not a standard fun episode of Modern Technology Watches, but it’s the episode we needed to make this particular week. We appreciate your understanding.

Content warnings: US politics, reproductive health and decisions, religious fanaticism and oppression, addiction

Modern Transcripts!

Accessibility of information is something that is very important to us here at the Modern Technology Podcast Network. We realize that although our work is primarily audio-based, there will always be those for whom that is not the most useful data medium.

To best serve everyone we can, we are doing our best to post human-made, human-readable text transcripts of our work. This is a lot of work with hours of audio, so in addition to tackling what we can ourselves we have recently begun engaging the excellent services of a professional transcriber (shoutout to the wonderful Betty Sulwe!) and it’s our goal to eventually present all our work in readable as well as listenable formats.

Transcript links for individual episodes will be added to the relevant episode and podcast pages as they become available. You can also check out our new Transcripts page for a consolidated list of all currently-available transcripts.

Transcripts of future episodes will be given priority as they are released, and we are slowly going to be filling in the gaps in our back catalogue as well. Those of you who are interested can contact us with your feedback. You can also let us know which of our past episodes you’d most like to see transcribed so we can queue things up accordingly.

As with all our original content, our transcripts will always be freely-licensed, copyable, and reusable under Creative Commons.

Share and enjoy!

Modern Technology Watches – Episode 302 – Sneakers (1992)

Rob continues Gila’s Modern Technology Watches hacker-movie education with the 1992 film Sneakers, a techno-classic in which an all-star cast engages in text-mode and heist-mode battles over a magic box of HAX.

Will this be more fun for Gila than her previous forays into cyberpunk standards, or will it prove as incomprehensible as a pile of random Scrabble tiles?

Modern Technology Watches – Episode 301 – Keeping the Faith (2000)

Gila christens the third season of Modern Technology Watches by showing Rob Keeping the Faith, a quirky romantic comedy from 2000 about a rabbi, a priest, and the woman they love.

Will the joined forces of Ben Stiller, Edward Norton, and Jenna Elfman count Rob as a new believer? How well does the experience of watching Abrahamic clergy fight over Dharma hold up for Gila?

Modern Technology Watches – Episode 213 – Hackers (1995)

Hack the planet! For the second-season finale of Modern Technology Watches Rob finally shows Gila 1995’s Hackers, a film with a firmly argued-about place in the history of the real-life hacker community as well as a firewall-protected place in Rob’s hacker head.

Will the movie win Gila’s heart through cyberspace hijinks, or will she send it to the pool on the roof? Listen along as we cap off a fun second season, and look forward to the next!

Modern Technology Watches – Episode 212 – Cheaters (2000)

On this testy edition of Modern Technology Watches high school is a real-life game show as Gila shows Rob 2000’s Cheaters, a made-for-cable dramatization of the 1995 Steinmetz Academic Decathlon cheating scandal.

Will Rob accept the results and award medals accordingly, or will Gila get caught reading the answers to the podcast off her shoe? Listen along as they face moral quandaries, 1990s flashbacks, and TV-movie gloom.

Modern Technology Watches – Episode 211 – Metropolis (1927)

In the mood for a quiet night in, Rob introduces Gila to Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent scifi drama Metropolis for this episode of Modern Technology Watches.

How will Gila take to such a large dose of iconic German expressionism from between the World Wars? How much delicate explaining will Rob have to do? What’s with all that floppy hair? Listen along as we break some new ground of our own.

Modern Technology Watches – Episode 210 – Election (1999)

On this politically-charged episode of Modern Technology Watches Gila takes Rob on a trip down the dark side of high-school fake politics with the 1999 Alexander Payne dark-comedy Election.

Will this movie get Rob’s vote, or will he rebel against it and get expelled from the audience? Listen and tabulate!

Modern Technology Watches – Episode 209 – An Adventure in Space and Time (2013)

Modern Technology Watches is celebrating the anniversary of Doctor Who as longtime-Who-fan Rob shows not-very-fannish Gila An Adventure in Space and Time, the 2013 BBC TV docudrama about that series’ creation.

Will Gila dig the looks at 1960s TV production and creative-human drama to be found among the scifi-flavored fanservice, or will Rob need anti-radiation gloves to protect him from the fallout? Join us in the painstakingly-recreated TARDIS control room as we find out!

Modern.Technology in archival quality!

You may have noticed that we here at the Modern Technology Podcast Network are big fans of Free Content. All our podcasts are freely licensed under Creative Commons terms which not only ensure that our content is available free of charge and will always remain so, it is also allowed to be freely republished, rebroadcast, and – should anyone get a wild hair to do so – remixed into something new.

Bringing our output formats a little more in line with that particular goal, in addition to our normal podcast feeds we are now archiving high-quality FLAC files of each episode to our page on the Internet Archive. For those unfamiliar, FLAC is a digital-audio standard producing files which are compressed in file-size but, unlike the podcast-standard MP3 files which go out in our podcast feeds, they are lossless. These FLACs are the files we initially produce our shows as, from which we make the lossy MP3s that go out into our podcast streams.

We behind the scenes have long been supporters of the Internet Archive and their work, and they are the perfect place for us to archive the small chunk of the Internet Modern.Technology creates. People interested in rebroadcasting, republishing, or remixing our work in line with our Creative Commons licenses can now find it in a format which can be further edited and re-exported without any loss in fidelity.

Listeners not interested in FLAC have nothing to worry about; we’ll keep posting and podcasting our normal MP3s as we always have. You still get the full show in the MP3s, there’s nothing extra added to the FLACs. This is merely an additional sharing venue for our episodes which makes the audio geek segment behind the scenes of this network very happy, and hopefully will do the same for the audio geek segment out there among you.

From now on, you can generally expect our archival FLACs to be posted within a day or so of our podcast MP3s.

Modern Technology Watches – Episode 208 – Bye Bye Birdie (1995)

On this kissable episode of Modern Technology Watches Gila takes Rob to a particularly-strange version of 1958 via the 1995 TV-movie adaptation of hit musical Bye Bye Birdie.

Catchy songs! Intense choreography! Sanitized nostalgia! Tyne Daly! No Paul Lynde! Listen along as we find out how it all comes together.