Podcasts about Crowbar

A man was in custody Thursday after a long-running fight between the suspect and another man at homeless shelter escalated to gunfire inside the facility, which is housed inside a Ballard church.George Sloan, 35, was booked into the King County Jail on suspicion of first-degree assault in connection with the incident in the shelter located in the 6500 block of 12th Ave. NW. It was not immediately clear if bond has been set in the case.LIKE & SUBSCRIBE for new videos everyday. https://bit.ly/3KBUDSK

Graham, Tom S and Marsh have somehow found the time to watch, then rewatch and even discuss The Batman, the recent bladder-bursting film directed by Matt Reeves and starring Robert Pattinson. Obviously, we spoil the film. Don’t listen or read below if you have yet to see the film and wish any of its surprises [...]

Kirk Windstein of Crowbar makes his debut on this installment of Into The Necrosphere as we discuss the tremendous response to their latest record, “Zero And Below”. We also talk about how life on the road has changed for him, relationships, self-care and well-being and get the scoop that other little-known band he's involved in, DOWN. Plus - a review of the latest Haunter record and my first impressions of new tracks by Werewolves, Kampfar, Urkraft and more.Support the bands featured on this episode:CROWBARhttps://crowbar.bandcamp.com/ HAUNTERhttps://hauntertx.bandcamp.com/ ACID BATHhttp://www.acid-bath.com/ SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ▶️ https://youtube.com/c/IntoTheNecrosphere LISTEN ON: AMAZON MUSIC: https://amzn.to/3epNJ4KSPOTIFY: https://spoti.fi/3iKqbIPAPPLE PODCASTS: https://apple.co/38wDYhiFOLLOW THE SHOW ON:FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/intothenecrosphere INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/intothenecrosphere TWITTER: https://twitter.com/inecrosphere MERCH:https://into-the-necrosphere.creator-spring.com/

Much to our surprise, the US Space Force wasn't completely invented by the Orange Man a few years ago—in fact, the 80s even made a cartoon about it. It's only logical to continue our aerial hunk research and report back to the people of earth.Today's Episode Sponsor: Three Books™THIS WEEK'S EPISODESStarcom: The U.S. Space Force Episode 1, “Nantucket Sleighride”Robotech Episode 19, “Bursting Point”Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/umq7Rms Support us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/satamtuesdays Our Website: http://www.satamtuesdays.com/The Hosts: Andrew Eric Davison, Austin Bridges, Rory VoieAudio Production: Andrew Eric Davison

This week we conclude our examination of "Vysteria," the fourth 7" single released by Night Demon in 2020. The band discusses the track's lyrical themes, and explains how the lyrics came along as a collaborative process after the music had already been written and recorded. Jarvis takes you line by line through the lyrics to dispel some of the myths and misunderstandings about "Vysteria." Then each member reflects on his parts, and specifically the inspirations behind them and challenges they create in the performance context. They talk about why (as of the taping of this episode in early April 2022) the song had never been played live, but how they expect it to feature prominently in the setlist in the future. You will learn about the different mixes of the song, the cover art, the case of the missing 7" vinyl, the video, and the misguided reactions by certain quarters of the Internet. Become a subscriber today at nightdemon.net/subscriber. This week, subscribers have access to the bonus content below:Full art and packagingUnused music video clipsMusic video treatment sheetKurt Ballou alternate mixes Metallica "Disposable Heroes" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtNrx1c3Xh8Randy Burns - https://www.facebook.com/randyburnsproducer/Kurt Ballou - https://www.facebook.com/KurtBallou/Ross Sewage - https://www.doktorsewage.com/"Vysteria" video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlfe92gdcs0 Listen at nightdemon.net/podcast or anywhere you listen to podcasts! 

Welcome to this weeks' BullShit! This week we have a special guest: Crowbar!! We start this episode by pressuring him into trying Thick Water (6:31) Dayne's Got a Question- Have you ever heard of a face plunger? (18:23)Story Time- turns out Jon's a delirious asshole when he's tired :P  We've got several other stories to go along with this one! (52:56) Morgan's Fact of the Day- Did you know this about the word fizzle?  (55:02) What Would You Do If you were in line and someone just cut in front of you? (1:10:00) As always... Jon's Bad Joke of the Day!!!  Thanks for tuning in- make sure to catch our Facebook Live stream of our weekly Review Time segment. If you missed it, you can check it out on our Facebook or YouTube Page.  We drop new podcast episodes on all of your favorite streaming apps every Wednesday, so don't miss it! We have koozies for sale if you're interested :) With that Barflies, there's one last thing: TELL YOUR FUCKING FRIENDS!!!

In which Jamie Brittain, Tom Francis and Alex Wiltshire convene to discuss the excellent Apple Plus existential workplace comedy drama Severance. All spoilers are off from the start with this one! But it’s great, so you should def watch it! Severance is on Apple Plus Meta employees are called ‘Metamates', ewwww. Escape at Dannemora is [...]

J.R. and Launa got a chance to speak with Kenny Chesney face-to-face. Kenny told them why he loves to kick off his tour in Tampa and how the Buccaneers allowed Kenny to use the pirate ship inside Ray Jay. J.R. went to the Old Dominion pop up show at the Crowbar in Ybor last night and he gave us all the details including Kenny Chesney showing up. On today's Second Date Update Hunter and Candace met online and then went out to dinner and told us that it was the kind of date that you hope for. Hunter hasn't heard from Candace since the date, so we called her to find out why she isn't calling him back.

THE DOOMED & STONED SHOW ~Season 8, Episode 11~ It's time once again for our monthly visit to www.DoomCharts.com, with longtime Doom Charts contributors Billy Goate (Editor, Doomed & Stoned), John Gist (Vegas Rock Revolution), and Bucky Brown (The Ripple Effect). As always, there is a massive haul this week, friends, so dig it and dig in! Patrons of the show get to hear it in HQ audio a day sooner! Check out the perks of patronage at https://patreon.com/doomedandstoned. Get a Doomed & Stoned t-shirt, now shipping worldwide via PacketUp: https://doomedandstoned.bandcamp.com/merch PLAYLIST: INTRO (00:00) 1. Dirty Sound Magnet (no. 15) - "Body in Mind" (00:31) HOST SEGMENT I (06:43) 2. Aye Mammoth (no. 25) - "Eternal" (19:53) 3. Elk Witch (no. 11) - "Llao's Island" (23:59) 4. Crowbar (no. 17) - "Confess to Nothing" (30:58) HOST SEGMENT II (35:18) 5. Cosmic Debris (no. 24) - "Interstellar Solar Race" (41:53) 6. Dual Fighter (no. 12) - "Mean Machines" (46:56) 7. Greyborn (no. 18) - "Bits & Pieces" (53:46) HOST SEGMENT III (58:53) 8. Stone Axe (no. 10) - "Lady Switchblade" (1:15:05) 9. MWWB (no. 9) - "Altamira" (1:19:35) 10. Eric Wagner (no. 8) - "Isolation" (1:27:19) HOST SEGMENT IV (1:31:52) 11. Mount Saturn (no. 7) - "Sword First" (1:44:47) 12. Troll Teeth (no. 6) - "Your Hands Are Red" (1:51:35) 13. Humanotone (no. 5) - "Light Antilogies" (1:58:34) HOST SEGMENT V (2:06:51) 14. JIRM (no. 4) - "Repent in Blood" (2:28:19) 15. ZOM (no. 3) - "Running Man" (2:36:56) 16. Samavayo (no. 2) - "Transcend! Exceed! (2:40:52) 17. Messa (no. 1) - "Rubedo" (2:44:51) OUTRO (2:51:33) 18. Di'Aul (no. 26) [BONUS] - "Abracamacabra" (2:52:39) [Thumbnail credit: Greg Osborne for Dual Fighter]

It was a Kenny Chesney's themed Thursday 3 this morning. J.R picked "Don't Happen Twice". Launa picked "Out Last Night". Kevin picked "Get Along". Find out whose song won. Old Dominion announced they are doing a pop up show tonight at the Crowbar in Ybor City and we gave a away one pair of tickets to it. There will only be about 300 people at the show, so these tickets are rare. On today's Second Date Update Daniela called us up and told us about her first date with Kyle. Kyle took her fishing on the date, but hasn't called her back since that date. We know there could be a lot things that Kyle could be upset about, but we called him to find out what happened.

On this week's episode of #RollingRocksRadio Jerry and Scott push the big red button on the #ChaosBomb and welcome Jordan Hanks, AKA Jo, JoJo, Mrs. Crowbar, to the third and final installment of the #CoffeeWarsChronicles. Jordan is a #BBJ White Belt, Mom, nurse, and leader of the #TinyGirlGang. Jordan is also part of a group of BJJ players who met on Twitter and trade BJJ info, Meme battle, and is the youngest (and spiciest) member of #TeamFluffyCoffee. Jordan's story is remarkable. We often hear anecdotes on how Jiu Jitsu has saved someone's life but Jo's story is proof positive that those tales are not hyperbole. This is the last episode of the #CoffeeWarsChronicles before the final round table battle royal. Jordan can be found on the socials below: Twitter: @JoElizabeth93 If you want to contact us with feedback, suggestions, or just to say "Hi" you can e-mail us at rollingrocksradio@protonmail.com Rolling Rocks Radio is also live on the socials. You can find us on Instagram and Twitter and now FACEBOOK! Don't forget Mike from OffYourBackBJJ is offering all our listeners $10 off a $50 dollar or more order. Be sure to head over to https://offyourbackbjj.com/ to check out the spring series preorder and use the code "RollingRocks" for your listener discount! You can find mike on the socials at: Instagram: OffYourBackBJJ Facebook: OffYourBackBJJ Rolling Rock Radio is proud to be a media sponsor of Principle Mixed Martial Arts in Timberville Va! Check out Principle MMA at: Instagram: Principle_MMA Facebook: PrincipleMMA Support Total Defense Martial Arts team member Andrew Undercoffer (AKA G. Campbell) and check out his book Dames and Demons, a Steampunk/gumshoe/occult thriller. Available on Amazon in paperback and digital Thanks to the team at Total Defense Martial Arts in Staunton Virginia This episode's music is "But I Am Shafts Of Light" by Maeth. Used under the creative commons licence - Sourced from Free Music Archives --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

A Podcast done on the stage of the world famous metal bar in Brooklyn, NY Lucky 13 Saloon. We will have former bass player from Crowbar Jeff Golden. Hosted by: Jeff & Jamal Guest: Jeff Golden Metal News by: Frankie The Voice by: Dee Rotten Music by: Parallels (Party of One)51:45 Lucky 13 Saloon Social Media…………… https://youtube.com/channel/UCXzEDGlnk_EcmzEyso1lbLw https://instagram.com/lucky13saloon?utm_medium=copy_link https://www.facebook.com/Lucky13Saloon/ https://www.lucky13saloon.com/ Lucky 13 Saloon Podcast Social Media……. https://www.instagram.com/lucky13saloonpodcast/ https://soundcloud.app.goo.gl/G1wgfQwgs7j4d9hf7 Parallels Social Media............. https://www.facebook.com/parallels.nj Copyright 2022

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Metalheads!! As soon as this album was announced you knew Ben was going to select it to review. A heaping slathering of American Sludge.

Dr. West welcomes Kirk Windstein to FANTASM! They do a track by track of the new album "Zero and Below." Stay tuned for some NFL Football talk. Follow Crowbar: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crowbarmusic/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/crowbarmusic/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/crowbarrules

This episode features album reviews for Cloven Hoof, Crowbar, Vein, Ghost & Allegaeon. Special guest, Nicole, joins the show. 

W 57 odcinku Ciężkie Majki z nekrologiem Taylora Hawkinsa, perkusisty Foo Fighters, ponadto analizują tracklistę nowego albumu Rammstein, strzelanie do tourbusa KoRna, możliwość puszczenia Toola przez implant w głowie, chujowego MaszinGanKeliego i nowego basowego w Megadeth. Wśród albumów m.in. Asgaard, Crowbar, Immolation, narren, Amorphis i POTĘŻNA MESHUGGAHTematem głównym jest relacja z koncertu w Bielsku-Białej i wywiad z grupą Winds Brought Siberia.

Jamie and Marsh enthuse about Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest film, Licorice Pizza – an energetic and uplifting tale of an eccentric romance set against the backdrop of 70s LA. Watch it, it’s fab. The 94th Academy Awards! Licorice Pizza woz robbed! Maybe? Billy Crystal getting covered in gob Who’s in this film then, eh? Alana [...]

From Jacksonville, FL we have the entire band Fortune Child on the podcast this episode. That's right, Christian, Buddy, Melanie and Jon stop by talk for a bit.  Also joining the podcast this week, Drake Meffesta from the band DiAmorte. Drake is one busy guy and awesome to talk too, as you will hear.Plus, we have music by the following bands:Driving Force, Vanderlust, Celtic Hills, Crowbar, Fortune Child, Lovesick Radio, Confidential feat Jake E, DiAmorte, SheWolf and Jyrki 69 feat Tiffany Join Randy and Troy, for this and every episode of Ouch, You're on my Hair and subscribe to the show on ApplePodcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Amazon Music, Podomatic, Podbean, and more. You can find them on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook as well. 

This week on the show, Desmond and Tom cover a double feature of films based on Native American evil spirits that have very little to do with actual Native Americans. We're going to go from best to worst, so first, a look at the weird body horror / cosmic horror freakout The Manitou. Then, a skinwalker is like an evil Navajo witch, right? So why is this dumb movie full of bikers and wolfmen? That's the question they ask in their review of Skinwalkers. Songs included: "The Fear That Binds You" by Crowbar, "Becoming" by Pantera, "Skinwalker" by Navajo Witch, and "Man Bites Dogged" by Napalm Death. Send feedback to: dreadmediapodcast@gmail.com. Follow @DevilDinosaurJr and @dreadmedia on Twitter! Join the Facebook group! Support the show at www.patreon.com/dreadmedia. Visit www.desmondreddick.com, www.stayscary.wordpress.com, www.dreadmedia.bandcamp.com, www.kccinephile.com, and www.dejasdomicileofdread.blogspot.com.

Rocket of TheMetalDen.com returns with a new episode of Rock And Roll Death Brigade podcast, featuring music by GHOST, LINKIN PARK, STEEL PANTHER, BRANNON BARRETT, CROWBAR, SOUNDGARDEN & more, with special guest commentary by The Real Music Observer plus stand-up comedy by Sam Kinison and Rocket. https://twitter.com/randyrocketcody Real Music Observer - "The Crue's Plan B" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v21FhJiUMa4 http://themetalden.com/ --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/rockandrolldeathbrigade/support

Jamie and Marsh compile a list of 50 movies, released across the last 22 years, which are dead good. Are they the deadest good? Decide for yourself! They certainly contain all manner of blood-drinking, cow-kissing, custard-selling, marmalade-making, bestiality, incest and murder. Phantom Thread There Will Be Blood The Piano Teacher The White Ribbon Cache The [...]

For this week's episode, we traveled to Crowbar in Ybor, Tampa to interview Of Good Nature! We talk about how to describe their genre, living life in an egg, and we try space flavored Coke Zero!

Ouiiii ca c'est de l'émission, d'la boooonne ! Une dose confortable de zik, une once de news, vos deux animateurs préférés, de la Red qui chronique a tout va, et une AntreView remplie de bonne humeur et de copains ! Voilàààà la recette de cette semaine ! Ça vous plait ? Nous aussi !!! Donc la playlist ne peut être qu'efficace pour un programme pareil ! On débute avec JINJER, CLAWFINGER, ANATOMY OF I, CROWBAR, CRISIX, WRATH OF THE NEBULA, CYCLES, THE LOSTS, NEAT, CANCER BATS, YAROTZ, MESSA et enfin ALBERCAVE.Du bon, du brut, de l'imparable !La playlist globale est là : https://mega.nz/file/jUxWBSJa#8BWMbVoCZC3HrDglhuSCXTSSErkfTT7ThGritrH_agsL'ami Kermhit de France Metal est avec nous pour cette AntreView, retrouvez là en intégralité sur notre chaine YouTube et abonnez-vous : https://www.youtube.com/c/LAntreLEmissionduMétalNos pu#%@!  de partenaires de fou :@Fatlab Studio@Skull strings@IGNIS PROD@werooooock@FuriosFest@Actu-METAL Toulouse@Radio Transparence@Metal Invasion Radio/Podcast-----------------------------------------Yeahhhh it's the show, the gooooood one ! A comfortable dose of music, an ounce of news, your two favorite hosts, The Red who chronicles right, and an AntreView filled with good humor and friends ! That's this week's recipe ! Do you like it ? So are we !!! So the playlist can only be effective for such a program! We start with JINJER, CLAWFINGER, ANATOMY OF I, CROWBAR, CRISIX, WRATH OF THE NEBULA, CYCLES, THE LOSTS, NEAT, CANCER BATS, YAROTZ, MESSA and finally ALBERCAVE.Good, raw, unstoppable !

THE DOOMED & STONED SHOW ~Season 8, Episode 7~ This week, we bring you more new music from around the heavy underground, including freshly baked tracks from All Them Witches, Stone Axe, Crowbar, Dawnrider, and more! Also, Doomed & Stoned t-shirts are available (three designs to choose from), plus our first ever hoodie! Pre-order yours at https://doomedandstoned.bandcamp.com/merch. PLAYLIST: INTRO (00:00) 1. Stone Axe - "Fell on Deaf Ears" (00:31) HOST SEGMENT I (04:56) 2. Quicksand - "Missile Command" (22:56) 3. ZOM - "Showtime" (26:21) 4. Obsidian Sea - "I Love the Woods" (30:58) HOST SEGMENT II (36:17) 5. Crowbar - "Chemical Godz" (48:28) 6. Dawnrider - "Order of Dawn" (52:58) 7. Dungeon Weed - "Mesmeric Scintillations" (59:51) HOST SEGMENT III (1:05:41) 8. El Perro - "Breaking Free" (1:19:31) 9. Zack Oakley - "Freedom Rock" (1:23:11) 10. All Them Witches - "Blacksnake Blues" (1:28:34) HOST SEGMENT IV (1:39:49) 11. Travo - "Golden Eye" (2:00:26) 12. Red Eye - "Morþor" (2:07:55) 13. Dawn of Solace - "Erase" (2:14:40) OUTRO (2:19:19) 14. Fat Greasy Beast (BONUS) - "Pasu Dharma" (2:20:20) 15. Purification (BONUS) - "The Crowning Mercy" (2:82:03) CREDITS Theme: Dylan Tucker Incidental Music: Hellvetika, Saturn's Husk Thumbnail: Dawn of Solace - 'Flames of Perdition'

Adapted by Julie Hoverson from a story by Phillips Barbee (pseudonym of Robert Sheckley) Published in Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1952   Classic era science fiction about a very odd visitor from outer space.   Cast List Professor Michaels - Grant Baciocco (Radio Adventures of Dr. Floyd) Frank Connors - Bryan Hendrickson Mrs. Jones - Kimberly Poole (Warp'd Space) Sheriff Flynn - Glen Hallstrom General O'Donnell - Chuck Burke Allenson, scientist - Cary Ayers Moriarty, physicist - Eleiece Krawiec Brigadier-General - H. Keith Lyons Driver - Cary Ayers Soldier1 - John Carroll Soldier2 - Lothar Tuppan Pilot - Mark Olson The Leech - Suzanne Dunn, Will Watt, James Sedgwick, Julie Hoverson Many thanks to Project Gutenberg and Librivox for curating these classic stories. [Link to The Leech in short sci fi collection 24 at Librivox] Music by  misterscott99 [Thanx to Steve Guy for suggesting searching YouTube for a Theramin artist!!] Editing and Sound:   Julie Hoverson Cover Design:  Brett Coulstock   "What kind of a place is it? Why it's a cabin in upstate New York, can't you tell?" ************************************************ The Leech By Phillips Barbee (Robert Sheckley), Galaxy Science Fiction December 1952 Cast: [Opening credits - Olivia] The Leech Frank Connors, assistant Professor Michaels, anthropologist Mrs. Jones, housekeeper Sheriff Flynn / Jerry General O'Donnell / driver Allenson, scientist Moriarty, atomic physicist [bring in the leech voice, subtle, under the opening credits] LEECH A LEECH    hungry.  Empty.  hungry.  Empty. hungry.  hungry.  Empty [repeats under] OLIVIA     Did you have any trouble finding it?  What do you mean, what kind of a place is it?  Why, it's a professor's rural retreat, circa 1952, can't you tell?  LEECH    falling falling falling heat impact FOOD!  ...eat. MUSIC STING   1_BIG NEWS AMBIANCE    OUTDOORS, BREEZE, CREAK OF HAMMOCK SOUND    [OFF A BIT]  KNOCK ON DOOR, SCREEN DOOR OPENS MRS. JONES    What? FRANK     Where's the prof?  I have to talk to him! MRS. JONES    You can give me his mail, young man. FRANK    But this is big news! MRS. JONES    If it's school business-- FRANK    It's not! MRS. JONES    It can still wait.  This is Professor Michaels' resting week, and you know it.  SOUND    SCREEN DOOR SLAMS MRS. JONES    [fading out] Bad enough those army convoys have to drive by at all hours of the day and night. FRANK    Wait!  Oh, heck. SOUND    A COUPLE OF STEPS ON WOOD PROF    [sigh] [calling]  Conners?  What the devil are you on about? SOUND    FOOTSTEPS ON GRAVEL FRANK     Oh!  Professor!  Say - I'm awfully sorry to disturb you, but there's something damn funny out in the ditch. PROF    Ditch? SOUND    DOOR OPENS MRS. JONES    Oh, you!  I told him to go, professor! PROF    It's all right, Mrs. Jones.  I'll handle this. MRS. JONES    Dinner in half an hour!  You know how you get when you don't eat. SOUND    DOOR SHUTS FRANK     So, the ditch.  Didja hear me?  There's something weird. PROF    Of course I heard you.  [sigh]  You found a pixie.  Feed him some milk, and go away. FRANK     No sir, I think it's a... a rock. PROF    A rock.  In the road.  How quaint.  FRANK    But sir-- PROF    [annoyed, but languid]  What is your job, Frank? FRANK    Sir? PROF    If you don't know, then perhaps I should hire someone else. FRANK    I'm to keep everyone off you while you relax.  See to the mail, the shopping. PROF    And does any of that involve spotting "rocks"? FRANK    No. PROF    Warning me of rocks? FRANK    No. PROF    Protecting me from rocks? FRANK    No, but-- PROF    So move the rock and get on with your-- FRANK    But sir, I tried!  See? SOUND    SHOVEL MOVEMENT PROF    [sigh] what?  [sharper] What? SOUND    DOOR SLAMS OPEN MRS. JONES    What on god's green earth did you do to my shovel, young man? FRANK    I didn't do anything.  The rock thing did! MUSIC   LEECH B SOUND    [UNDER] FEET ON GRAVEL LEECH    food dull food warm light FOOD cold dark food slow food sloooooow... MUSIC   2_THE LEECH AMBIANCE    OUTDOORS SOUND    WALKING QUICKLY FRANK    [a bit breathless] I really wouldn't have bothered you for just nothing, but look! SOUND    DOINK ON METAL FRANK    Two inches!  It melted two inches right off! SOUND    FEET HALT PROF    [incredulous] That?  FRANK    That!  You can see it better from up close. PROF    Shh!  SOUND    SLOWER FOOTSTEPS PROF    [whispered] Do you hear anything? FRANK    [whispered] No.  I mean, not beyond birds and things. PROF    [grim] Neither do I. FRANK    So? PROF    [brighter]  Well, it's indicative of something, isn't it? SOUND    BRISKER FOOTSTEPS PROF    You have a notebook on you?  FRANK    No. PROF    Anything to write on? FRANK    Uh, no.  Just - just your mail. PROF    Here.  SOUND    SHUFFLE ENVELOPES PROF    No... no... no... Ah.  Here.  They won't notice if I don't respond. SOUND    SLAPS PAPER INTO HAND FRANK    Okay. PROF    We have what appears to be a round item of a stone-like appearance.  Greyish-black and striated. SOUND    JUGGLE SHOVEL, WRITING NOISES FRANK    Gotcha. PROF    [dictating] Sitting in the ditch.  Nearest edge, say, three feet off the road. FRANK    It's a bit farther than that, isn't it? PROF    I wouldn't say so. FRANK    [acquiescing] Okay. PROF    About the size of a truck tire. FRANK    No, really now, I think you have your proportions mixed up... SOUND    WALKS FORWARD FRANK    [dismayed] Oh. PROF    What?  Think I'm getting senile or something? FRANK    No, just... PROF    "Just" is not quantifiable.  Just spit it out. FRANK    It was smaller.  Before. PROF    How much smaller? FRANK    I dunno - an inch maybe.  But definitely smaller. PROF    Find me a stick. FRANK    A... stick? PROF    Here. [give me that] SOUND    TAKES SHOVEL FRANK    Don't touch it! PROF    I'm not planning to.  Not yet. SOUND    A COUPLE OF STEPS, DRAGGING SOUND PROF    As you observe, I am drawing a line approximately three inches beyond the edge of the thing. FRANK    [noting] Three inches.  Got it. PROF    Now, we'll have something to measure by in case it grows again. FRANK    Right. PROF    Now.  Let's see what happens. SOUND    METAL ON STONE - SORT OF SOUND    SIZZLING NOISE PROF    It's not unyielding - the shovel seems to sink in-- FRANK    Oh no it's not! SOUND    SCRAPE PROF    What?  Aha!  You're right.  It's not sinking in, it's being melted away.  Gives the same impression.  Odd how the mind interprets things.... FRANK    I think it just got bigger. PROF    Really? FRANK    I was watching, and I think it swelled a little. PROF    Could be heat waves.  I suspect something like this would reflect like asphalt.  But let's test it.  The shovel's not good for much any more anyway. SOUND    METAL ON STONE GRATE, SIZZLING FRANK    Don't touch it! PROF    My hand is nowhere near touching it.  I merely want to see... FRANK    Look!  It's getting larger!  I can see it! SOUND    WOOD ON STONE PROF    [impressed] Well!  [clinical] But it generates no appreciable heat.  Odd.  I would assume some sort of acidic chemical reaction, which would almost invariably generate heat.  FRANK    And it grew!  Just a fraction of an inch-- PROF    I was paying attention to other things.  [sigh] SOUND    WOOD LANDS ON STONE, SIZZLING FRANK    D'you see it swelling? PROF    I doubt there was enough left of that handle to do much.  What else--? FRANK    Rocks? PROF    Sound thinking. SOUND    PICK UP SOME ROCKS, DROP THEM, SIZZLE FRANK    Isn't that just about the damnedest thing you ever saw, Professor?  What do you think it is? PROF    It's no stone...  I'm going to phone the college and ask a physics man about it.  Or a biologist. I'd like to get rid of that thing before it spoils my lawn. MUSIC   LEECH C LEECH    food sharp food fall food lie food move moist food dry food grow food air grow bigger grow.... wake! MUSIC   3_BACON AMBIANCE    IN PROF'S HOUSE SOUND    DISTANT POUNDING ON DOOR MRS. JONES    What is it?  SOUND    BUSTLING THROUGH HOUSE SOUND    DOOR YANKED OPEN MRS. JONES    You better have a brilliant explanation for this-- FRANK    Absolutely vital.  Professor Michaels knows‑‑ PROF    I'm coming.  It had better be particularly important to drag me away from Mrs. Jones' bacon. MRS. JONES    [amused annoyance] And Mrs. Jones better leave you boys to your business and see to her bacon before it all burns away. SOUND    BUSTLES OFF FRANK    It's nearly eighteen feet across! PROF    The thing? FRANK    Yup!  PROF    I was trying some acids on it yesterday, and nothing seemed to even ruffle it. FRANK    None of them? PROF    Nope.  I'll finagle a bacon sandwich or two and we'll head out presently. MUSIC   LEECH D LEECH    so small.  how is one so small.  one was large.  one was grand.  Miniscule now.  Hungry.  sooooo hungry.  food is slow. Dull.  Eat... MUSIC   4_SHERIFF AMBIANCE    OUTDOORS, AT THE SITE FRANK    See what I mean? PROF    Seems the larger it gets, the faster it grows.  Not surprising, if what I suspect is happening is true. FRANK    What's that?  PROF    Say it absorbs whatever it touches.  The more surface area, the more it can touch, the more it can absorb. FRANK    That's not good.  It's like some kind of... of leech. PROF    I don't know that I would characterize it so narrowly just yet, Frank-- SOUND    CAR DRIVES UP, STOPS FRANK    Morning Sheriff! SHERIFF    Morning.  What the devil is this? PROF    Don't know.  Just showed up. SHERIFF    Ha. Ha.  We gotta get it out of the road!  Something like this, you can't let it block the road.  The Army's gotta use this road. FRANK    We didn't-- PROF    Shh.  [up, dry] Terribly sorry.  Go right ahead and move it, Sheriff. But be careful. It's hot. FRANK    [quiet] Hot? PROF    [quiet] Close enough. SHERIFF    Should just be able to-- SOUND    OPENS TRUNK SHERIFF    Where is the--? FRANK    [quiet] Shouldn't we warn him? PROF    [quiet] We'll stop him if he goes to touch it.  But if he doesn't see for himself, he'll never buy it. FRANK    Oh. MUSIC   LEECH E SOUND    [UNDER] METAL HITTING STONE, GUNSHOTS SHERIFF    [frustrated noise] LEECH    slow food.  fast!  energy impact.  ahhhhhh.  more.   more hit.  more energy.  give! MUSIC   5_MONKEY'S UNCLE AMBIANCE    OUTDOORS, AT THE SITE SHERIFF    Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle. PROF    [quiet] That would make deputy Jerry, there, "cheetah".   FRANK    [snickers] PROF    Ready to listen yet, sheriff? SOUND    ARMY CONVOY APPROACHING SHERIFF    What?  Hey look!  NOW we'll get some action! PROF    [quiet] That's rather what I'm afraid of. MUSIC   LEECH F SOUND     [UNDER]     CONVOY STOPS, IDLES, DOORS OPEN, ETC. LEECH    more energy.  more food.  need.  senses very dim.  Thoughts very dim.  grow.  waken more.  food. MUSIC   6_ARMY AMBIANCE    OUTDOORS, AT THE SITE O'DONNELL    You can't block this road.  Clear that away. PROF    Sorry.  It's not ours.  And we can't seem to do anything with it. O'DONNELL    What in sam hill is it? FRANK    A leech. SHERIFF    A what? PROF    [annoyed but covering] Simply a name to refer to it by - we have no real idea what it is. O'DONNELL    But you've tried moving it? PROF    Every way we could think of. O'DONNELL    Crowbar? FRANK    Didn't help. O'DONNELL    Blowtorch? PROF    More or less.  No effect. O'DONNELL    Gunshot? SHERIFF    Sad to say... O'DONNELL    [calling orders] Driver?  Ride over that thing. FRANK    But sir! PROF    Shh. SOUND    JEEP STARTS INTO GEAR FRANK    [to prof] We have to stop him! PROF    You thought the sheriff was bad, having to see it first?  This is the military. FRANK    Oh. SOUND    JEEP ROLLS FORWARD SLOWLY, TAKES A BUMP, THEN HALTS, SIZZLING SNEAKS IN, UNDER. O'DONNELL    [bellowing] I didn't tell you to stop! DRIVER    I didn't stop it, sir! O'DONNELL    Get moving! DRIVER    It's stalled out sir! PROF    General?  Pardon me, but if you look closely, you'll see that the tires are melting down. SOUND    POP, HISS OF TIRE FRANK    Yikes! O'DONNELL    Criminee!  [orders] Driver!  Jump clear!  Don't touch any of that grey stuff! MUSIC   LEECH G SOUND     [UNDER] DRIVER CLIMBS ONTO HOOD OF CAR AND JUMPS LEECH    large food.  energy.  much movement.  nice.  hungry.  more large?  Need food.  waking waking... more self, more hungry.  need food MUSIC   7_JEEP AMBIANCE    OUTDOORS, AT THE SITE SOUND    CAR SLOWLY SINKING INTO THE THING, MUCH SIZZLING DRIVER    It's up to the chassis already! O'DONNELL    How fast can it eat? PROF    [quiet] you are keeping track aren't you? FRANK    Sure thing, professor!  It's been about three minutes, give or take a few. PROF    Make a note - Frank needs a stopwatch. FRANK    Oh.  Ok.  Right. SOUND    SCRIBBLING O'DONNELL    You called this thing a leech, professor? PROF    As I said, it is nothing but a name to refer to it by. O'DONNELL    But it is leeching, far as I can tell - eating anything that gets near it. PROF    Which bodes rather ill for the underside. O'DONNELL    Whazzat? PROF    You're only thinking about things that get near it on the top - who knows how far below this thing may have eaten away the dirt, or even the bedrock. FRANK    Dirt and stones do seem to digest a bit slower. O'DONNELL    You've been experimenting with it, eh?  Did you by any chance MAKE this thing with one of your experiments, professor? PROF    [sigh]  First, general, I am not that type of scientist.  I am a professor of anthropology.  I do, however, understand scientific method and felt that if we established some parameters up front, such as rate of growth, speed of dissolution, etc., we might be able to more easily convince some of my hard science colleagues to come and have a look. O'DONNELL    [after a pause] So you say. SOUND    MARCHES OFF FRANK    You did that on purpose, didn't you?  PROF    [over innocent] did what? FRANK    Oh, no - don't play innocent!  I've seen you lecture someone til their eyes glazed over, before this! PROF    [chuckle] DRIVER    [background]  There goes the aerial! SOUND    SIZZLING OUT O'DONNELL    [commands, off] You!  DRIVER    Sir!  Yes sir! O'DONNELL    [commands, off] Go back and have some men bring up hand grenades and dynamite! DRIVER    Yes sir! FRANK    That will get it! PROF    I am not so sure. O'DONNELL    [from off, yelling to prof] I don't know what you've got here, but it's not going to stop a U.S. Army convoy! PROF    I pray he's right. MUSIC   LEECH H SOUND UNDER    EXPLOSIONS - HAND GRENADES AND DYNAMITE LEECH    waking more.  thinking more.  sensing more.  hungry. [boom] food!  yes yes food! [boom]  Ahhhhh eat and grow.  [bullets] mass and movement.  energy.  more.  yes.  please!  [huge explosion]  yesssssss! MUSIC   8_EVACUATE AMBIANCE    OUTDOORS, NEAR PROF'S HOUSE SOUND    WOOD CRACKING THROUGHOUT UNDER MRS. JONES    Well, I never. PROF    Did you get everything moved out all right? MRS. JONES    Well, yes, but I've cooked for you in that very house for nearly ten years now.  Where am I supposed to feel at home?  Where are you? [supposed to feel at home] PROF    [muttered] That may not be a problem for long. SOUND    HUGE CRACK, SHATTER OF GLASS MRS. JONES    There goes the front porch!  Who would have thought such a terrible thing could spread so darn far? PROF    The government surely didn't. MRS. JONES    It looks like one of them - what's the word?  Blasted heath.  Yes.  That's exactly what a blasted heath would look like. PROF    [musing] Or a cooled lava flow.  [snapping out] Either way, it's pretty darn blasted. MRS. JONES    Blasted leech. SOUND    FEET ARRIVING PROF    I do wish people would stop calling it that. SOLDIER    Pardon me, sir?  General O'Donnell would like to see you at the command post. PROF    Right.  I already know the end to this little melodrama.  [to soldier] See to it Mrs. Jones gets back to the city, will you? SOLDIER    Sir, I'm supposed to escort you-- PROF    But I know where I'm going.  She does not. SOLDIER    Yes, sir! MUSIC   LEECH I SOUND    CRUSHING HOUSE UNDER LEECH    slow food.  want fast food.  more awake now.  why no more fast come.  good energy.  big food.  hungry.  more food make more pieces.  more pieces make more hungry.  more hungry wants more food.  MUSIC   9_PERIMETER AMBIANCE    OUTDOORS, AT THE EDGE OF THE LARGER SITE SOUND    CROWD NOISE, FADING IN PROF    What's that over there? SOLDIER2    Perimeter.  Barbed wire.  Half mile out. PROF    I doubt the barbed wire is making all that noise. SOLDIER2    Oh, them.  Reporters.  Rubberneckers. FRANK    [calling from off] Professor! PROF    Assistants. SOLDIER2    You need assistance? PROF    Just my assistant.  Let him in would you? SOLDIER2    I don't have any orders-- PROF    Well, he takes all my notes, so I guess I'll have to stay within earshot.  Which ends about here. SOLDIER2    But the general-- PROF    Will it be easier to move the general, or my assistant, do you think? SOLDIER2    Um... MUSIC   10_HQ AMBIANCE    INSIDE HEADQUARTERS TENT SOUND    TENT FLAP SWOOP, PROF AND FRANK ENTER TENT O'DONNELL    I've been put in charge of operation leech.  Ah, professor... and...? PROF    My assistant.  He is also the one who found this thing in the first place.  Absolutely indispensable. FRANK    Hi. O'DONNELL    Is he trustworthy? PROF    Think of him as my right arm. FRANK    The one he writes with. O'DONNELL    You're a professor, right? PROF    Yes. Anthropology. O'DONNELL    Good.  I'd like you to stay around in an advisory capacity.  I'd appreciate your observations on the... enemy. PROF    I think this is more in the line of a physicist or a biochemist. O'DONNELL    I don't want this place cluttered up with scientists.  FRANK    But he isn't-- O'DONNELL    Don't get me wrong. I have the greatest appreciation for science. I am, if I do say so, a scientific soldier. I'm always interested in the latest weapons. You can't fight any kind of a war any more without science. PROF    Of course not. O'DONNELL    But I can't have a team of longhairs poking around this thing for the next month, holding me up. My job is to destroy it, by any means in my power, and at once. I am going to do just that. PROF    I don't think it will be that easy. O'DONNELL    That's what you're here for.  Tell me what the problem is, and I'll figure out how to solve it. FRANK    [muttered] Usually a scientist's job. PROF    Very well.  As far as I can figure out, this thing-- O'DONNELL    The leech. PROF    It isn't really-- O'DONNELL    It's the codename. FRANK    [muttered] I'm the one who called it that in the first place. PROF    The "leech" appears to be an organic mass-energy converter, and a frighteningly efficient one.  I'm guessing here, and keep in mind that this is really not my-- O'DONNELL    Get on with it. PROF    It appears to convert external mass into energy, then back into its own internal mass.  Energy is directly converted into the body mass.  How this takes place, I do not know.  The leech is not protoplasmic.  It may not even be cellular-- O'DONNELL    So we need something big against it.  That's all right, then.  I've got plenty of big stuff here. FRANK    Oh boy! PROF    I don't think you understand me.  Let me rephrase.  [intense] The leech eats energy!  It will consume any energy weapon you use against it. O'DONNELL    [considering]  And what happens if it keeps on eating? PROF    I think it will only be limited by its food source. O'DONNELL    So when it runs out, we'll all be safe? PROF    When it runs out, we'll all be gone. MUSIC   LEECH J LEECH    senses growing.  Feel moving food.  Sitting food.  Food near.  Food far.  Waiting for food to come near.  Hungrrrrry. MUSIC   11_NEED HELP AMBIANCE    INSIDE HEADQUARTERS TENT PROF    I insist you contact some physicists.  Biologists and chemists too.  Give them a chance to figure out how to nullify it.  I can give you some names. O'DONNELL    I don't have time to wait while a passel of scientists wrangle!  I have this axiom - Muster enough force, and anything will give.  Anything. FRANK    [muttered] Military thinking. O'DONNELL    [pleased] Thanks. PROF    [sigh] But I am not that kind of-- O'DONNELL    Don't sell yourself short, Prof!  And don't underestimate the army.  We have, massed under North Hill - right over there - the greatest accumulation of energy and radioactive weapons ever assembled in one spot.  I bet even this leech won't withstand the full force of all that. FRANK    [worried] Professor? PROF    [doubtful] I suppose it could be possible to overload the thing.  O'DONNELL    [smug] I'll go and give some orders.  We're gonna crack that leech in half! SOUND    HE LEAVES FRANK    Did he listen to a single thing you said? PROF    [sigh] He is the military. FRANK    Then why are you - we - even here? PROF    I fear the general wants to be able to say he consulted a scientist.  I'm convenient since I can't possibly have a relevant opinion. MUSIC   LEECH K SOUND    [UNDER] RAY GUNS, EXPLOSIONS, ETC. LEECH    Fooooood!  Rich food!  Needing more!  Ray food, energy food, liquid food!  Needing more!  More food makes more hungry!!!!  Sensing.  Sensing for food.  Ahhhh.  THERE. MUSIC   12_STOCKPILE AMBIANCE    INSIDE HEADQUARTERS TENT O'DONNELL    [incredulous and furious] It did what?  SOUND    NANA OF VOICE ON WALKIE-TALKIE. FRANK    It flew! PROF    It might be better described as a type of hovering. O'DONNELL    Shh!  Over and out. SOUND    WALKIE SQUAWK - OFF PROF    [resigned] Where did it go? O'DONNELL    The damned fools!  Why'd they have to panic?  You'd think they'd never been trained! FRANK    They couldn't exactly expect that! PROF    [urgent] Where? O'DONNELL    North Hill.  [angry sigh]  Our armory. FRANK    But that's a whole mile away! PROF    At least.  O'DONNELL    Sixty-seven men died!  And the leech just - just jumped there! PROF    I still say it hovered.  It definitely moved with some sort of self-propulsion. FRANK    I'll write that down. PROF    The way it looked, it floated across the sky, blacking out the sun, and then, when it reached its goal, it simply dropped. O'DONNELL    [snarling] How can you be so clinical about this? FRANK    I - I- PROF    It's OUR job to take notes for the scientists you will eventually have to call in. MUSIC   LEECH L LEECH    So good!  So nice!  Rich food.  Much energy.  Growwww.  Yessss.  Ahhhh.  More cells.  Now, more hungry. MUSIC   13_EXPERTS AMBIANCE    INSIDE HEADQUARTERS TENT SOUND    PACING O'DONNELL    Haven't those eggheads made up their minds yet? We've had to evacuate six nearby farms. FRANK    It's not like choosing a tie. O'DONNELL    But they're the experts! PROF    No one's an expert on this.  It's never happened before.  The physicists consider it a biological matter, and the biologists seem to think the chemists should have the answer.  We can't even agree on whose problem it is! O'DONNELL    It's the military's problem!  I don't give a hang what the thing is!  I just want to know how to destroy it!  [offhand] They better give me permission to use the bomb. SOUND    STRIDES OFF FRANK    Will that work? PROF    Well, I have a theory. FRANK    Yes? PROF    Which I hope will remain a theory. FRANK    How can I make notes if you don't tell me? PROF    The Bomb might overload it.  MIGHT destroy it.  Or give it what it needs to grow big enough to devour the entire continent.  Sooner.  SOUND    FEET STRIDE BACK O'DONNELL    Still talking!  Gah!  I've been pushing for the Bomb for a week now!  And I'll get it, but not til they run out of doubletalk! FRANK    Could be a while. O'DONNELL    [intense] I am going to destroy that leech.  I am going to SMASH it, if it's the last thing I do!  It's gone beyond national security now.  THIS is personal. SOUND    STRIDES OFF PROF    I knew you shouldn't have named it. FRANK    Why? PROF    Once you name something, you get to thinking you KNOW it.  And no matter how much you think you won't, you start applying traits to it.  Anthropomorphizing it.  Attaching motives and feelings to it. FRANK    Who says it doesn't feel? PROF    It does. O'DONNELL    [from off] Here come the bright boys now! MUSIC   LEECH M LEECH    So big.  Big now.  Big makes hungry.  So much to fill.  So much to feed.  Need more.  More good rich food. MUSIC   14_SCIENTISTS AMBIANCE    INSIDE HEADQUARTERS TENT O'DONNELL    Well, have you figured out what it is yet? ALLENSON    [weary sarcasm] Just a minute - I'll hack off a sample.  Hah. O'DONNELL    [exasperated] Have you figured out some scientific way of killing it? MORIARTY    [dry, offhand] Oh, that wasn't difficult at all.  FRANK    Really? MORIARTY    Wrap it in a perfect vacuum.  That'll do the trick.  Or blow it off the earth with anti-gravity. FRANK    Can they really? PROF    Don't be silly. ALLENSON    Failing that, we suggest you use your atomic bombs and use them fast. O'DONNELL    Yes!  [vainly trying to curb his enthusiasm]  Is that the opinion of the entire think tank? MORIARTY    [sigh]  Yes. SOUND    GENERAL HURRIES OFF ALLENSON    He should have called us in immediately!  There's no time to consider anything but force now. PROF    Have you come to any conclusions about the nature of this thing? MORIARTY    Only general ones.  Very much in line with your notes and conclusions.  ALLENSON    As you mentioned, it's a perfect converter--it can transform mass into energy, and any energy into mass. MORIARTY     Naturally that's impossible and I have figures to prove it.  We're positing that this thing was in some dormant spore-stage until it was pulled in by the earth's gravity. ALLENSON    Incidentally, we should be damned grateful that it didn't land in the ocean.  We'd have been eaten out of house and home-- FRANK    Literally. ALLENSON    --before we even knew what we were looking for. PROF    [musing] I wonder how long it will take him to get permission to use the bomb. MUSIC   LEECH N LEECH    slow grow.  Hungry.  No grow.  Dull food not enough.  Want more.  Want grow.  Want be big again. MUSIC   15_BOMBS AMBIANCE    INSIDE HEADQUARTERS TENT O'DONNELL    Brigadier-General, with all due respect sir, how many MORE scientists can there be?  We've been waiting for-- BRIG-GENERAL    [on phone] Washington had to explore every alternative before detonating an atomic bomb in the middle of New York! O'DONNELL    So now I can use the bomb? BRIG-GENERAL    We need some time to evacuate people in an orderly fashion. O'DONNELL    Sir!  This leech is still growing!  We have to stop it before it gets out of hand! FRANK    Bit late for that. PROF    Shh.  He's doing the best he can. BRIG-GENERAL    We've signed you out five bombs.  Use them well.  But not until the order comes through. MUSIC   LEECH O LEECH    slowing.  Drowsing.  Waiting.  Cells starving.  Too much need food.  Tired... SOUND    EXPLOSION LEECH    YESSSS!  Foooooood!  Much!  Too much!  Holding!  Choking!  No!  straining....  straining!  More cells.  Need more cells!  Building!  Feeeeeeeeding!  Choking?  [beat] No.  SOUND    BOMB LEECH    Enough cells now.  Rich food.  More.  Grow.  Build.  JOY. MUSIC   16_SIXTY MILES AMBIANCE    INSIDE NEW HEADQUARTERS TENT O'DONNELL    Sixty miles across. PROF    There was no way to know. O'DONNELL    This was supposed to KILL it. FRANK    At least there was no fallout. PROF    I'm sure it ate THAT too. O'DONNELL    I have to KILL IT!  Do you hear me!  The blasted thing has spread all the way to the Adirondacks! FRANK    What's next?  More bombs? PROF    I don't think it's advisable.  If we throw enough at it to crack it, we might crack open the earth's crust. O'DONNELL    The leech has to be blown up quick.  What are the bright boys hedging for? PROF    They don't know what will happen.  The concentration of bombs it would require-- O'DONNELL    Perhaps they'd like me to order a bayonet attack. FRANK    They've got to do something. PROF    It's frustrating.  I keep feeling like I should be doing more, but this simply isn't my area of expertise!  That thing thrives on force - and the scientists don't have time to consider any alternatives. FRANK    Fight fire with fire. PROF    But it's not fire.  Fire is fickle.  Fire is Loki.  Fire is a trickster.  This thing is...  is... O'DONNELL    Where the heck are the scientists? SOUND    TENT FLAP ALLENSON    [coming in] We've finished the calculations. O'DONNELL    Good.  I'll call in the strike. MORIARTY    There's a damned good chance of splitting the earth wide open with that much power! O'DONNELL    You have to take chances in war.  FRANK    He doesn't even care! PROF    He cares.  He just doesn't care about that.  Hercules himself couldn't turn the general from his course. ALLENSON    Hear us out! O'DONNELL    Your own calculations show that the leech is now growing at twenty feet per hour.  So how much time is that before it reaches this post? FRANK    He's got a point. PROF    [musing]  Hercules....  Something... ALLENSON    And speeding up.  But this can't be done in haste-- PROF    Aha!  O'DONNELL    What? PROF    I may have a counter-offer. O'DONNELL    Does it involve me blowing up the leech? PROF    It's a very dim chance, but...  [trails off] O'DONNELL    Yes? PROF    have you ever heard of Antaeus? MUSIC   LEECH P LEECH    more large.  more thought.  More memory.  Large rock and dirt and stone food.  Devoured.  Joy.  Huge mass of combustibles - light and heat and energy!  Food.  True joy!  SOUND    MEMORY SOUNDS LEECH    then all devoured.  Dark.  Cold.  Empty.  Cells Shrinking, dying, self-devouring self.  Moving.  Seeking.  Food. MUSIC   17_DRONE SHIP AMB    OUTSIDE SOUND    SMALL PLANE PASSES OVERHEAD FRANK    So that's what a drone looks like. PROF    Pretty much like any other rocket ship.  The pilot just happens to be over there in the tent. O'DONNELL    I hope you're right about this, professor. MORIARTY    The calculations all validate the hypothesis.  If what you said about the creature's motivational capability is accurate-- FRANK    There it goes! O'DONNELL    Straight up!  Son of a biscuit! PROF    It's - it's - enormous! MUSIC   LEECH Q SOUND    FIGHTER PLANE BUZZES PAST LEECH    Food!  Rich food!  Above!  Out of reach!  Why not fall?  Come to me?  Food!  ... seek. SOUND    BUZZ OF FIGHTER PLANE MOVING AWAY LEECH    heat!  Small food.  Cold!  Nothing.  Ah, little flying food, come to - oh.  Oh, yes.  Far.  There.  Huge bright glowing mass of combustibles.  Food. MUSIC   18_ANTAEUS AMBIANCE    OUTDOORS FRANK    Wow.  Now, that's a crater. PROF    You can look at it later.  I keep worrying that I've missed something. FRANK    But the leech is gone, professor!  Right up and out of the atmosphere. PROF    There's no way to be sure it won't come back. FRANK    Everybody's going to be watching for the leech. PROF    Please don't call it that. FRANK    What then?  Antaeus?  Who's that anyway? PROF    Greek Mythology.  Son of Gaea and Poseidon - the earth goddess and sea god.  He was an invincible wrestler, drawing his strength from the earth itself. FRANK    His mom.  Apron strings, even in mythology. PROF    [chuckles]  Well, Hercules had to wrestle him, and every time Hercules threw him to the ground, he rose refreshed.  FRANK    Didn't Hercules know about the earth? PROF    He figured it out.  After that, he just held Antaeus up in the air until he gave up. O'DONNELL    [off slightly] Come on, join me in some champagne.  Even you brainy folks can use a little celebration! MORIARTY    [happily] Maybe just a sip! ALLENSON    I don't mind if I do. FRANK    Be there in a minute!  [to prof] So the fighter rocketship they sent up will just keep leading it around in space til it gets tired and drops dead? O'DONNELL    Better.  It's going to take it right into the sun.  Big or not, the damn thing can't eat THAT. PROF    Lord, I hope not.  O'DONNELL    [to pilot] How's the ship, pilot? PILOT    Just reached the orbit of Mercury, sir. O'DONNELL    Fine!  Fine.  I swore to destroy that thing.  Not the way I wanted to do it - too far out to see it go up with my own eyes - If I had a choice, it would be more personal.  But the important thing is the destruction.  Destruction is at times a sacred mission.  Man, I feel wonderful! MORIARTY    [panicky]  Turn the rocket!!!!  TURN IT! O'DONNELL    What the devil? MORIARTY    Considering rate of growth, energy consumption capacity, and speed versus projected energy retention, figuring in the energy it will receive from the sun as it approaches-- O'DONNELL    Speak English! MORIARTY    [dire warning] It's gonna devour the sun. MUSIC   LEECH R LEECH    closer!  Closer!  More heat!  More light!  All!  Must have all!  Small rich food moving away.  Choice.  Nearby small food?  Far big food?  Hungry NOW.  Close first.  Catch quick, feed enough to move to big food.   Yes! MUSIC   19_TURN AWAY AMBIANCE    INSIDE HEADQUARTERS TENT PILOT    It's turning, sir! ALL    [general sounds of relief] ALLENSON    Take it out at right angles to the plane of the solar system. SOUND    RADAR [start much earlier] FRANK    So the blob is the leech and the dot is the ship? PROF    Yes.  O'DONNELL    What portion of the sky would the leech be in just now? MORIARTY    Somewhere out in that section - just over that tree. O'DONNELL    Fine.  [calling order back over shoulder]  Soldier!  Carry out your orders! ALL    [surprised concern - "what?" "huh"  "what are you up to?" etc.] FRANK    [calling] The dot is slowing down!  The blob is catching up! PROF    What are you up to, general? O'DONNELL    [grim satisfaction] I told you this was a personal matter.  I swore to destroy that leech.  We can never have any security while it is alive.  [chuckles triumphantly] I had that ship especially built. PROF    To do... what... precisely? O'DONNELL    Shall we look at the sky? SOUND    FEET, TENT FLAP, ETC. as they leave. O'DONNELL    Soldier? PILOT    Three seconds, sir! O'DONNELL    Push the button. PILOT    Yes, sir! FRANK     is something supposed to--  Whoah! MORIARTY    Not a good idea to look directly at the explosion! PROF    What... did... you... do? O'DONNELL    [smug]  That rocket was built around a hydrogen bomb.  I set it off at the contact moment. FRANK    How come there's no sound?  Thought there'd be a loud bang or something.  Is it like thunder? ALLENSON    Sound doesn't travel in a vacuum. PROF    [explaining] We're anthropologists.  O'DONNELL    [calling to pilot] Anything on the radar? PILOT    [from within] Nope!  Not a speck, sir. O'DONNELL    Men - and scientists - I have met the enemy and he is MINE.  Let's have some more of that champagne. PROF    I wish I was that sure. MUSIC   LEECH S LEECH    Catching food.  Slowing.  Tiring.  Catch.  Massive surge!  Too much!  Holding!  Holding!  Absorbing!  Building!  No!  No!  overload!  Too much!  Breaking!  Come apart!  Losing thought!  Losing cohesion!  Breaking.  Broken.  Shattered. SOUND    [long moment of silence, then in squeaky little voices:] LEECHETTE1    Hungry LEECHETTE2    Hungry LEECHETTE3    Hungry LEECHETTE4    cold.  hungry LEECHETTE5    Hungry [more and more leechettes until they populate the entire soundscape] LEECH    [MANY VOICES] hungry.  Empty.  hungry.  Empty. hungry.  hungry.  Empty [repeats under] MUSIC END CREDITS

On this episode I'm joined by Trevor Portz to discuss the blistering debut by his new band, Abhoria, as well as a music collection that should have its own postcode. I also deliver the verdict on the latest Crowbar record, react to new tracks by Septicflesh, Abbath, Watain and Troops of Doom and pour through the latest metal news headlines to save you the bother of doing so yourself.Support the bands featured on this episode:ABHORIA:https://abhoria.bandcamp.com/ ASHEN HORDE: https://ashenhorde.bandcamp.com/ CROWBAR:https://crowbar.bandcamp.com/ SIDIOUS:https://clobberrecords.bandcamp.com/ WEREWOLVES:https://werewolvesdeathmetal.bandcamp.com/ SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ▶️ https://youtube.com/c/IntoTheNecrosphere LISTEN ON: AMAZON MUSIC: https://amzn.to/3epNJ4KSPOTIFY: https://spoti.fi/3iKqbIPAPPLE PODCASTS: https://apple.co/38wDYhiFOLLOW THE SHOW ON:FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/intothenecrosphere INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/intothenecrosphere TWITTER: https://twitter.com/inecrosphere MERCH:https://into-the-necrosphere.creator-spring.com/

JPP, Metalhead Mundy and Foggy review Crowbar's latest and play two fun challenges.

Jamie offers Marsh a cinematic serving suggestion: a pairing of Hitchcock’s classic 1940 adaptation of Rebecca with the 1948 version of Brighton Rock starring Richard Attenborough. Discussed: hauntings, Hell and the occult origins of beef tea. You can watch both of these films for free on The Inter-Net! Rebecca is on Youtube and Brighton Rock [...]

Alex sits down with Robb to talk about the crushing new track “On Broken Glass”, starting their own record label and merch stores, the UK rap scene, the time they hung out with Kirk from Crowbar, the amount of dislocated shoulders and broken bones that happened during their latest video shoot, what working as the head of security at hardcore shows teaches you, and the influence of Chimaira on his band.#NFR 121WATCH & SUBSCRIBE on YouTubehttps://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9bKRKhpgFRTudsVfPkFlMg?sub_confirmation=1ALL NEW NFR every WEDNESDAY at 3PM ET ONLY on GaS DigitalOr catch the YouTube Premiere later in the week: THURSDAY NIGHT at MIDNIGHT EThttps://GaSDigitalNetwork.com/LIVESign up to #GasDigitalNetwork with promo code NFR for a 7 Day FREE TRIAL to get access to the HD livestreams, the live chat, and EVERY episode of NFR On Demand in HD.https://GaSDigitalNetwork.com/high-octane-all-accessFOLLOW THE WHOLE SHOW ON SOCIAL MEDIA!ROBB FLYNNInstagram: https://instagram.com/robbflynnTwitter: https://twitter.com/TheGeneralMHALEX TAYLORInstagram: https://instagram.com/alexmlvGAS DIGITALInstagram: https://instagram.com/gasdigitalTwitter: https://twitter.com/gasdigital#RobbFlynn #Podcast #Metal #GaSDigitalNetworkSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Crowbar is a band that has long been in legendary status. They've blazed a path in sludge metal since 1990 and have roots as far back as 1979. They've influenced about as many bands as people they've played in front of throughout the world and through all this, and on album number twelve, they are still as heavy and vital as ever. Zero and Below (MNRK Heavy) is a beast of an album that is as much of the band's legacy as powdered sugar is to beignets or butter to crawfish. But, it's also an album that continues the trajectory of one of the most beloved bands in the history of metal. Sludge would be an entirely different animal if not for Crowbar and their savage riffs coupled with Kirk's gravelly vocals, and Zero and Below is yet another triumph in a long line of them. Buke sat down with Kirk Windstein (aka RIFF LORD) and discussed the new album and how it feels to be on album number twelve, the NOLA music scene and how all its musicians create the most original and unique sounds as well as how it feels like one big family, a bit of Crowbar history and how Kirk got started on the guitar, a lifelong fandom of KISS and his favorite member, Kirk's love of animals, absolutely zero retirement plans in the works, and a whole host of other topics.This is a killer conversation, so grab your beverage of choice and settle in for a wicked edition of the Nine Circles Audio Thing.9C LINKS: Website | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

The mighty Kirk Windstein is back on the show! This week, we discuss Zero and Below, the new album by Kirk's band Crowbar. We also talk about writing the record back in 2019 prior to the pandemic, the rehearsal process and livestream reunion he has planned with southern metal act Down, the 20-year anniversary of the second Down album, the making of the record as a follow-up to NOLA, and his current tour package with Sepultura and Sacred Reich being rescheduled three times. Other topics include how difficult it was for Crowbar to cancel tours during the pandemic, why it's difficult to tour the European festival circuit in the current climate, the importance of defeating one's fears in his life, and if there is a new Down album in the works. Petar, Brandon, and Jozalyn also discuss our feelings on Cannibal Corpse fans chanting “Fuck Chris Barnes” at a recent show, Tool selling an expensive box set of Fear Inoculum, and the tragic passing of grunge and desert rock pioneer Mark Lanegan. Song: Crowbar “Chemical Godz” Song: Crowbar “ Bleeding From Every Hole” Song: Friends of Hell “Friends of Hell” Thank you to our sponsor, Metal Blade Records, for their continued support!

Holmberg's Morning Sickness - Tuesday March 1, 2022

The inimitable Katy Irizarry is back on the podcast this week for an epic virtual throwdown spanning everything from the political to the personal and, of course, the metal. I also review George “Corpsegrinder” Fisher's solo record and react to a truckload of new tunes by the likes of Au Dessus, Drudkh, Crowbar and more.Support the bands featured on this episode:ABBATH:https://abbath.bandcamp.com/ CORPSEGRINDER: https://corpsegrind.bandcamp.com/ DRUDKH:https://drudkh.bandcamp.com/ SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST ▶️ https://youtube.com/c/IntoTheNecrosphere LISTEN ON: AMAZON MUSIC: https://amzn.to/3epNJ4KSPOTIFY: https://spoti.fi/3iKqbIPAPPLE PODCASTS: https://apple.co/38wDYhiFOLLOW THE SHOW ON:FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/intothenecrosphere INSTAGRAM: https://www.instagram.com/intothenecrosphere TWITTER: https://twitter.com/inecrosphere MERCH:https://into-the-necrosphere.creator-spring.com/

The Everblack Podcast sat down with Kirk Windstein from CROWBAR to talk about their new album ‘Zero And Below', the global exposure of Beavis and Butthead, the status of DOWN, touring with Sepultura and more!CROWBAR - ‘Zero and Below' is out March 4 via MNRK HeavyOrder here : https://crowbarzeroandbelow.com***EVERBLACK PODCAST***SUBSCRIBE and STREAM HERE: https://linktr.ee/EverblackPodcastwww.everblack.com.auwww.facebook.com/Everblackmedia Thanks to : Deathwish Hotrods & KustomsRW Promotion Blacklight AD Screenprinting Electric WitchEverblack intro theme by Jaymes Jackson

Dordingull mánudaginn 28.Febrúar 2022 Í þætti dagsins: Nýtt efni frá Crowbar, Stray from the path og Corpsegrinder í viðbót við Pantera, Reykjavík, Hrafnaþing og Jinjer Lagalistinn: Jinjer - Disclosure! Pantera - Rise Reykjavik! - Oberon Stray from the Path - Guillotine The Old Wind - I'm Dead Crowbar - Bleeding from Every Hole Skurk - Feigur Napalm Death - Resentment Always Simmers Skepna - Láttu Ekki Helvítin Ná Þér Zeal & Ardor - I Caught You Hrafnaþing - War Corpsegrinder - Crimson Proof Watain - Leper's Grace Graveater - Exekration Eight Bells - Torpid Dreamer Changer - Three to one Annihilator - Haunted Pantera - Mouth For War Pantera - Walk Pantera - Fucking Hostile

In this episode, we have Ybor City's very own Tom DeGeorge from Crowbar telling us what's going on with Music Venues! We talk about his beginnings in Atlanta, how Crowbar got started, and even things to come for Crowbar that you cannot miss! This is HUGE News! Tune in to hear what is to come […] The post Talking Schmutz: Tom DeGeorge of Crowbar appeared first on Radio Influence.

Jamie and Alex take a trip up the castellated spires and lethal staircases of the Castlevania series. We cover both the bonkers camp of the Symphony Of The Night-likes, and also the lethal twitching of the 8 & 16 bit games on Old Nintendos. Yes in that order, as this is a very personal and [...]

If you've never heard of Nick Panaseiko, that's entirely understandable. He was a backstage guy, making sure that the act onstage is playing to a full house, making sure their records were on the radio and in record stores.He was a promo man. Kelly Jay of Crowbar referred to the Canadian music industry of the era as a matter of ‘six degrees of Nick Panaseiko'. Taking off from a popular Panasonic ad campaign of the day, legendary rocker Ronnie Hawkins dubbed him, “Nick Panaseiko, a man slightly ahead of his time”. And at his induction into the Jack Richardson Hall of Fame, Alice Cooper, Ronnie Hawkins and Peter Criss of KISS all sent video tributes.“Promo Man” places Nick in the zeitgeist of the music industry in the 60s and 70s and his work with the acts who were - and in some cases still are - the aural soundtrack to our lives. How Nick made his way to the epicenter of the Canadian music industry and made his way out alive is the story of “Promo Man”. It takes the reader from the 17-year-old kid who booked The Supremes to a sold-out show through his success breaking KISS in Canada to his time with Quality Records and WEA in the 70s.While Nick's metier was promoting acts, his other duties as assigned including finding Freddie Mercury and Liberace Toronto gay bars, playing board games with young Marlon Richards, finding cocaine for his father, Keith and Ronnie Wood, having to deal with a racist Bill Cosby, being the de-facto minder for Keith Moon at a party and being an extra in a Van Halen video.This book truly lives in his tales of a breakneck lifestyle, working with and promoting acts including Queen, Liberace, The Cars, Van Halen, and finally The Rolling Stones. This is an insider's look at the freewheeling times of the Canadian music industry as it came into being, told by the consummate insider. Key to the book are the many photographs by acclaimed rock and roll photographer John Rowlands of Nick with artists including Debbie Harry, Donna Summer, KISS, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Johnny Cash, Liberace, Keith Moon, and Freddie Mercury. The fast pace of the narrative coupled with the photos brings to life a much-mythologized time in popular music.To tell Nick Panaseiko's story is author Bob Klanac, a Canadian music journalist who has penned hundreds of reviews and interviews. Among them: Levon Helm, John Mayer, Garth Hudson, Bill Wyman, Chris Cornell, Johnny Winters and many, many more. He was a juror for the Polaris Music Prize and is currently a member of the Slaight Family Polaris Heritage Prize Jury and a Juno Awards juror. Purchase a copy of "Promo Man: Backstage Tales From The Vinyl Jungle" through Amazon: Listen to a playlist of the music discussed in this episode: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1CFhHZ3r15UyVXeZY5gyNZ?si=dab337473ae149cbVisit the "Promo Man" Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/promomanbookThe Booked On Rock Website: https://www.bookedonrock.comFollow The Booked On Rock with Eric Senich:FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/bookedonrockpodcastTWITTER: https://twitter.com/bookedonrockSupport Your Local Bookstore! Find your nearest independent bookstore here: https://www.indiebound.org/indie-store-finderContact The Booked On Rock Podcast:thebookedonrockpodcast@gmail.comThe Booked On Rock Theme Song: “Whoosh” by Crowander [ https://freemusicarchive.org/music/crowander]

Interview aired the weekend of 2/11/22

We talk with Kirk Windstein about Crowbar's new album, "Zero and Below", struggling with vices on the road and maintaining his faith through his life.

I haven't really had time to put together a new show so here's one from 11 years ago. Here's what I played.Sir Lord Baltimore   “Kingdom Come”, Cathedral   “Ride”, Part Chimp   “Dirty Sun”,Cavity   “Song From a Goad”, Ever Circling Wolves   “Alone Into the Silence of Ice”,Entombed   “Wolverine Blues”, Crowbar   “Let Me Mourn”, Eyehategod   “Shoplift”,Down   “On March the Saints”, Corrosion of Conformity   “Shake Like You”, Superjoint Ritual   “The Introvert”, Clutch   “Who Wants to Rock?/Pure Rock Fury”,Sweet Cobra   “Matriarch”, Panthers   “Walk of Shame”, Sloburn   “Son of God”, Nebula   “Reeder's Song”, Lit   “Wrathchild”, Black Thai   “The Ladder”,Devil to Pay   “Thinning the Herd”.

RIP to the greats of 2022... Betty White, Bob Saget, Meat Loaf and Louie AndersonThe Goat retires! TB12 - Tom Brady"Wordle" sells to the NYT for seven figure sumMadonna's AssJake paul vs. Dana White - The fued continues....This week is none other than "The RIFF BEAST" NOLA's, Kirk Windstein!He is a founding member of the sludge metal band Crowbar and a founding member of the heavy metal supergroup DownTheir new album due out march 4th called Zero and Below.Give them a follow:http://www.crowbarnola.com/

Derrick Green of Sepultura joins the Talk Toomey Podcast this week to discuss their upcoming tour with Sacred Reich and Crowbar. Derrick and Joshua also talk about living abroad, tour must haves and Quadra. Derrick also let's us know his favorite moments during the SepulQuarta sessions. The guys go into Derrick's early days in Cleveland and talk Derrick's love of skateboarding. Joshua and Chris start the show talking about their love of Sepultura over the years and Chris believes if you checked out on Sepultura when Max left you are missing out on a ton of great music. They discuss Munky from Korn talking about heavy music not being mainstream at the moment. Killswitch Engage live with both Howard and Jesse is debated. Cliff Burton Day, Toomey Tour stories and more also on this episode. 

Derrick, fighting off a case of the cooties, talks with Mark about the surreal, gross out comedy, THE GREASY STRANGLER.  _______________________________________________________________________ CONTACT AND FOLLOW ASTRO RADIO Z: Contact: astroradiozpodcast@gmail.com Twitter: @AstroRadioZ Twitch: twitch.tv/DerrickDanzig CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCASTS: ALL THE GIMMICKS: https://allthegimmicks.wordpress.com/… FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Allth… and THE PODCAST AT ORGY CASTLE: https://podcastatorgycastle.home.blog/ RESIM: https://resim.bandcamp.com/ Music Used: CROWBAR  - REPULSIVE IN IT'S SPLENDED BEAUTY MIDNIGHT - SZEX WITCHERY --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/astroradioz/message

Jamie, Graham and Chris get lost in the desert of the real for three and half hours. Join them as they discuss the several Matrices, velcro, dads, bad squids, comedy French Dracula bastards, whether Geoff Keighley is real, whether films themselves exist, the “vocabulary of power”, the emotional logistics of sofas, 5D aeroplanes – and [...]

Kirk Windstein of Crowbar explores his long history as a music fan that grew up in the Golden Age of rock and roll. He goes deep on his relationship with Pantera, his bond with Dimebag Darrell and why they were the most significant heavy metal band of the Nineties. He also details his passion for Type O Negative and his first favourite, Elton John. The interview features a detailed exploration of his musical story and Down's origins, his thoughts on the mean streets of New Orleans plus details on forthcoming music: which will include a new Crowbar record, a new solo album and a “reimagined” covers record with Down.

Chad talks to Rob Hirschfeld, the Founder and CEO of RackN, which develops software to help automate data centers, which they call Digital Rebar. RackN is focused on helping customers automate infrastructure. They focus on customer autonomy and self-management, and that's why they're a software company, not a services or as-a-service platform company. Digital Rebar is a platform that helps connect all of the different pieces and tools that people use to manage infrastructure into infrastructure pipelines through the seamless multi-component automation across all of the different pieces and parts that have to be run to bring up infrastructure. RackN's Website (https://rackn.com/); Digial Rebar (https://rackn.com/rebar/) Follow Rob on Twitter (https://twitter.com/zehicle) or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/rhirschfeld/). Visit his website at robhirschfeld.com (https://robhirschfeld.com/). Follow RackN on Twitter (https://twitter.com/rackngo), LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/rackn/), or YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCr3bBtP-pMsDQ5c0IDjt_LQ). Follow thoughtbot on Twitter (https://twitter.com/thoughtbot), or LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/150727/). Become a Sponsor (https://thoughtbot.com/sponsorship) of Giant Robots! Transcript: CHAD: This is the Giant Robots Smashing Into Other Giant Robots Podcast where we explore the design, development, and business of great products. I'm your host, Chad Pytel. And with me today is Rob Hirschfeld, Founder, and CEO of RackN, which develops software to help automate data centers, which they call Digital Rebar. Rob, welcome to the show ROB: Chad, it is a pleasure to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. CHAD: Why don't we start with a little bit more information about what RackN and the Digital Rebar platform actually is. ROB: I would be happy to. RackN is focused on helping customers automate infrastructure. And for us, it's really important that the customers are doing the automation. We're very focused on customer autonomy and self-management. It's why we're a software company, not a services or as a service platform company. But fundamentally, what Digital Rebar does is it is the platform that helps connect all of the different pieces and tools that people use to manage infrastructure into infrastructure pipelines through the seamless multi-component automation across all of the different pieces and parts that have to be run to bring up infrastructure. And we were talking data centers do a lot of on-premises all the way from the bare metal up. But multi-cloud, you name it, we're doing infrastructure at that level. CHAD: So, how agnostic to the actual bare metal are you? ROB: We're very agnostic to the bare metal. The way we look at it is data centers are heterogeneous, diverse places. And that the thing that sometimes blocks companies from being innovative is when they decide, oh, we're going to use this one vendor for this one platform. And that keeps them actually from moving forward. So when we look at data centers, the heterogeneity and sometimes the complexity of that environment is a feature. It's not a bug from that perspective. And so it's always been important to us to be multi-vendor, to do things in a vendor-neutral way to accommodate the quirks and the differences between...and it's not just vendors; it's actually user choice. A lot of companies have a multi-vendor problem (I'm air quoting) that is actually a multi-team problem where teams have chosen to make different choices. TerraForm has no conformance standard built into it. [laughs] And so you might have everybody in your company using TerraForm and Ansible happily but all differently. And that's the problem that we walk into when we walk into a data center challenge. And you can't sweep that under the rug. So we embraced it. CHAD: What kind of companies are your primary customers? ROB: We're very wide-ranging, from the top banks use us and deploy us, telcos, service providers, very large scale service providers use us under the covers, media companies. It really runs the gamut because it's fundamentally for us just about infrastructure. And our largest customers are racing to be the first to deploy. And it's multi-site, but 20,000 machines that they're managing under our Digital Rebar management system. CHAD: It's easy, I think, depending on where you sit and your experiences. The cloud providers today can overshadow the idea that there are even people who still have their own data centers or rent a portion of a data center. In today's ecosystem, what are some of the factors that cause someone to do that who isn't an infrastructure provider themselves? ROB: You know the funny thing about these cloud stories (And we're talking just the day after Amazon had a day-long outage.) is that even the cloud providers don't have you give up operation. You're still responsible for the ops. And for our customers, it's not like they can all just use Lambdas and API gateways. At the end of the day, they're actually doing multi-site distributed operations. And they have these estates that are actually it's more about how do I control distributed infrastructure as much as it is about repatriating. Now, we do a lot to help people repatriate. And they do that because they want more control. Cost savings is a significant component with this. You get into the 1000s of machines, and that's a big deal. Even at hundreds of machines, you can save a lot of money compared to what you get in cloud. And I think people get confused with it being an or choice. It really is an and choice. Our best customers are incredibly savvy cloud users. They want that dynamic, resilient very API-driven environment. And they're looking to bring that throughout the organization. And so those are the ones that get excited when they see what we've done because we spend a lot of time doing infrastructure as code and API-driven infrastructure. That's really what they want. CHAD: Cool. So, how long have you been working on RackN? When did you found it? ROB: [laughs] Oh my goodness. So RackN is seven years old. Digital Rebar, we consider it to be at its fourth generation, but those numbers actually count back before that. They go back to 2009. The founding team was actually at Dell together in the OpenStack heyday and even before the OpenStack heyday. And we were trying to ship clouds from the Dell Factory. And what we found was that every customer had this bespoke data center we've already talked about. And we couldn't write automation that would work customer to customer to customer. And it was driving us nuts. We're a software team, not a hardware team inside of Dell. And the idea that if I fixed something in the delivery or in their data center, and couldn't go back to their data center because it was different than what the next customer needed and the next customer needed, we knew that we would never have a community. It's very much about this community and reuse pattern. There's an interesting story that I picked up from SREcon actually where they were talking about the early days of boilers. This is going back a few centuries ago. But when they first started putting boilers into homes and buildings, there was no pattern, there was no standard. And everybody would basically hire a plumber or a heating architect. Heating architect was a thing. But you'd build a boiler and every one was custom, and every one was different. And no surprise, they blew up a lot, and they caused fires. And buildings were incredibly unsafe because they were working on high-pressure systems with no pattern. And it took regulation and laws and standards. And now nobody even thinks about it. You just take standard parts, and you connect them together in standard ways. And that creates actually a much more innovative system. You wouldn't want every house to be wired uniquely either. And so when we look at the state of automation today, we see it as this pre-industrial pre-standardization process and that companies are actually harmed and harming themselves because they don't have standards, and patterns, and practices that they can just roll and know they work. And so that philosophy started way back in 2009 with the first generation which was called Crowbar. Some of your audience might even remember this from the OpenStack days. It was the first OpenStack installer built around Chef. And it had all sorts of challenges in it, but it showed us the way. And then we iterated up to where Digital Rebar is today. Really fully infrastructure as code, building infrastructure pipelines, and a lot of philosophical pieces we've learned along the way. CHAD: So you were at Dell working on this thing. How did you decide to leave Dell and start something new? ROB: Dell helped me with that decision. [laughs] So the challenge of being a software person inside of Dell especially at the time, Crowbar was open-source which did make it easier for us to say, "Hey, we want to part ways but keep the IP." And the funny thing is there's not a scrap of Crowbar in Digital Rebar except one or two naming conventions that we pulled forward and the nod of the name, that Rebar is a nod to Crowbar. But what happened was Dell when it went private, really did actually double down on the hardware and the more enterprise packaged things. They didn't want to invest in DevOps and that conversation that you need to have with your customers on how they operate, the infrastructure you sold them. And that made Dell not a very good place for me and the team. And so we left Dell, looked at the opportunity to take what we'd been building with Crowbar and then make it into a product. That's been a long journey. CHAD: Now, did you bootstrap, or did you take investment? ROB: We took [laughs] a little bit of investment. We raised some seed funding. Certainly not what was in hindsight was going to be sufficient for us to do it. But we thought at the time that we had something that was much more product-ready for customers than it was. CHAD: And what was the challenge that you found? What was the surprise there that it wasn't as ready as you thought? ROB: So what we've learned in our space specifically...and there are some things that I think apply to everybody, and there are some things that you might be able to throw on the floor and ignore. I was a big fan of Minimum Viable Product. And it turned out that the MVP strategy was not at all workable with customers in data centers. Our product is for people running production data centers. And nobody's going to put in software to run a data center that is MVP. It has to be resilient. It has to be robust. It has to be simple enough that they can understand it and solve some core problems, which is still sort of an MVP idea. But it can't be oops. [laughs] You can't have a lot of oops moments when you're dealing with enterprise infrastructure automation software. It has to work. And importantly, and as a design note, this has been a lesson for us. If it does break, it has to break in very transparent, obvious ways. And I can't emphasize that enough. There's so much that when we build it, we come back and like, was it obvious that it broke? Is it obvious that it broke in a way that you can fix? CHAD: And it's part of the culture too to do detailed post mortems with explanations and be as transparent as possible or at least find the root cause so that you can address it. That's part of the culture of the space too, right? ROB: You'd like to hope so. [laughs] CHAD: Okay. [laughs] In my experience, that's the culture of the space. ROB: You're looking more at a developer experience. But even with a developer, you've got to be in a post mortem or something. And it's like everybody's pointing to the person to the left and the right sort of by human nature. You don't walk into that room assuming that it was your fault, and you should, but that's not how it usually is approached. And what we find in the ops space, and I would tell people to work around this pattern if they can, is that if you're the thing doing the automation, you're always the first cause of the problem. So we run into situations where we're doing a configuration, and we find a vendor bug or a glitch or there's something, and we found it. It's our problem whether we were the cause or not. And that's super hard. I think that people on every side of any type of issue need to look through and figure out what the...the blameless post mortem is a really important piece in all this. At the end of the day, it's always a human system that made a mistake or has something like that. But it's not as simple as the thing that told you the bad news that the messenger was at fault. And there's a system design element to that. That's what we're talking about here is that when you're exposing errors or when something's not behaving the way you expect, our philosophy is to stop. And we've had some very contentious arguments with customers who were like, "Just retry until it fixes itself," or vendors who were like, "Yeah, if you retry that thing three times, [laughs] then it'll magically go away." And we're like, that's not good behavior. Fix the problem. It actually took us years to put a retry element into the tasks so that you can say, yeah, this does need three retries. Just go do it. We've resisted for a long time for this reason. CHAD: So you head out into the market. And did you get initial customers, or was there so much resistance to the product that you had that you struggled to get even first customers? ROB: We had first customers. We had a nice body of code. The problem is actually pretty well understood even by our customers. And so it wasn't hard for them to get a trial going. So we actually had a very profitable customer doing...it was in object storage, public object storage space. And they were installing us. They wanted to move us into all their data centers. But for it to work, we ended up having an engineer who basically did consulting and worked with them for the better part of six months and built a whole bunch of stuff, got it working. They could plug in servers, and everything would set itself up. And they could hit a button and reset all the servers, and they would talk to the switches. It was an amazing amount of automation. But, and this happens a lot, the person we'd been working with was an SRE. And when they went to turn it over to the admins in the ops team, they said, [laughs] "We can't operate. There's too much going on, too complex." And we'd actually recognized...and this is a really serious challenge. It's a challenge now that we're almost five years into the generation that came after that experience. And we recognized there was a problem. And that this wasn't going to create that repeatable experience that we were looking for if it took that much. At the same time, we had been building what is now Digital Rebar in this generation that was a single Golang binary. All the services were bundled into the system. So it listened on different ports but provide all the services, very easy to install, really, really simple. We literally stripped everything back to the basics and restarted. And we had this experience where we sat down with a customer who had...I'm going to take a second and tell the story because this is such a compelling story from a product experience. So we took our first product. We were in a bake-off with another bare metal focus provisioning at the time. And they were in a lab, and they set our stuff up. And they turned it on, and they provisioned. And they set up the competitor, and they turned it on and provisioned. And both products worked. Our product took 20 minutes to go through the cycle and the competitor took 3. And the customer came back and said, "I can't use this. I like your product better. It has more controls with all this stuff." But it took 20 minutes instead of 3. We actually logged into the system, looked at it and we were like, "Well, that's because it recognized that your BIOS was out of date, patched your BIOS, updated the system, checked that it was right, and then rebooted the systems and then continued on its way because it recognized your systems were outdated automatically. And he said, "I didn't want it to do that. I needed it to boot as quickly as possible." And literally, [laughs] we were in the middle of a team retreat. So it's like, the CTO is literally excusing himself on the table to talk to the guy to make this stuff, try and make it right. And he's like, "Well, we've got this new thing. Why don't you install this, what's now Digital Rebar, on the system and repeat the experiment?" And he did and Digital Rebar was even faster than the competitor. And it did exactly just install, booted, and was done. And he came back to the table, and it took 15 minutes to have the whole conversation to make everything work. It was that much of a simpler design. And he sat down and told the story. And I was in the middle of it. I'm just like, "We're going to have to pivot and put everything into the new version," which is what we did. And we just ripped out the complexity. And then over the last couple of years now, we've built the complexity back into the system to do all those additional but much more customer-driven from that perspective. CHAD: How did you make sure that as you were changing your focus, putting all of your energy into the new version that you [laughs] didn't introduce too much risk in that process or didn't take too long? ROB: [laughs] We did take too long and introduced too much risk, and we did run out of money. [laughs] All those things happened. This was a very difficult decision. We thought we could get it done much faster. The challenge of the simpler product was that it was too simple to be enough in customers' data centers. And so yeah, we almost went out of business in the middle of all this cycle. We had a time where RackN went back down to just the two founders. And at this point, we'd gotten far enough with the product that we knew it was the right thing. And we'd also embedded a degree...with the way we do the UX, we have this split. The UX runs on a hosted system. It doesn't have to but by default, it does. And then we have the back end. So we were very careful about how we collected metrics because you really need to know who's downloading and using your products. And we had enough data from that to realize that we had some very committed early users and early customers, just huge brand names that were playing around. So we knew that we'd gotten this mix right, that we were solving a problem in a unique way. But it was going to take time because big companies don't make decisions quickly. We have a joke. We call it the reorg half-life problem. So the half-life of a reorg in any of our customers is about nine months. And either you're successful inside of that reorg half-life, or you have to be resilient across this reorg half. And so initially, it was taking more than nine months. We had to be able to get the product in play. And once we did, we had some customers who came in with very big checks and let us come back and basically build back up. And we've been adding some really nice names into our customer roster. Unfortunately, it's all private. I can tell you their industries and their scale, but I can't name them. But that engagement helped drive us towards the feature set and the capabilities and building things up along that process. But it was frustrating. And some of them, especially at the time we were open-source, were very happy to say, "No, we are a super big brand name. We don't pay for software." I'm like, "Most profitable, highest valued companies in the world you don't want to pay for this operational software?" And they're like, "No, we don't have to." And that didn't sit very well with us. Very hard, as a starting startup, it was hard. CHAD: At the time, everything you were doing was open source. ROB: So in the Digital Rebar era, we were trying to do Open Core. Digital Rebar itself was open. And then we were trying to hold back the BIOS patches, integrate enterprise single sign-on. So there was a degree of integration pieces that we held back as RackN and then left the core open. So you could use Digital Rebar and run it, which we had actually had a lot of success with people downloading, installing, and running Digital Rebar, not as much success in getting them to pay us for that privilege. CHAD: So, how did you adjust to that reality? ROB: We inverted the license. After we landed a couple of big banks and we had several others and some hyperscalers too who were like, "This is really good software. We love it. We're embedding it in our service, but we're not going to pay you." And then they would show up with bugs and complaints and issues and all sorts of stuff still. And what happened is we started seeing them replicating the closed pieces. The APIs were open. We actually looked at it and listening to our communities, they wanted to see what was in the closed pieces. That was actually operationally important for them to understand how that stuff worked. They never contributed or asked to see anything in the core. And, there's an important and here, and they needed performance improvements in the core that were radically different. So the original open-source stuff went to maybe 500 machines, and then it started to cap out. And we were like, all right, we're going to have to really rewrite the data store mechanisms that go with this. And the team looked at each other and were like, "We're not going to open source that. That's really complex and challenging IP." And so we said the right model for us is going to be to make the core closed and then allow our community and users to see all the things that they are actually using to interact with their environment. And it ends up being a little bit of a filter. There are people who only use open-source software. But those companies also don't necessarily want to pay. When I was an open-source evangelist, this was always a problem. You're pounding on the table saying, "If you're using open-source software, you need to understand who to pay for that service, that software that you're getting. If you're not paying for it, that software is going to go away." In a lot of cases, we're a walking example of that. And it's funny, more of the codebase is open today than it was then. [chuckles] But the challenge is that it's really an open ecosystem now because none of that software is particularly useful without the core to run it and glue everything together. CHAD: Was that a difficult decision to make? Was it controversial? ROB: Incredibly difficult. It was something I spent a lot of time agonizing about. My CTO is much clear-eyed on this. From his perspective, he and the other engineers are blood, sweat, and tears putting this in. And it was very frustrating for them to see it running people's production data centers who told us, and this is I think the key, who just said to us, "You know, we're not going to pay money for that." And so for them, it was very clear-eyed it's their work, their sweat equity, very gut feeling for that. For me, I watched communities with open-source routes, you know, the Kubernetes community. I was in OpenStack. I was on the board for that. And there is definitely a lift that you get from having free software and not having the strings. And I also like the idea that from a support perspective, if you're using open-source software, you could conceivably not care for the vendor that went away. You could find another life for it. But years have gone by and that's not actually a truism that when you are using open-source software if you're getting it from a vendor, you're not necessarily protected from that vendor making decisions for you. CentOS is a great...the whole we're about to hit the CentOS deadlines, which is the Streams, and you can't get other versions. And we now have three versions of CentOS, at least three versions of CentOS with Rocky, and Alma, and CentOs Streams. Those are very challenging decisions for people running enterprise data centers, not that simple. And nobody in our communities is running charity data centers. There's no goodwill charity. I'm running a data center out of the goodness of my heart. [laughs] They are all production systems, enterprise. They're doing real production work. And that's a commercial engagement. It's not a feel-good thing. CHAD: So what did you do in your decision-making process? What pushed you, or what did you come to terms with in order to make that change? ROB: I had to admit I was wrong. [laughter] I had to think back on statements I'd made and the enthusiasm that I'd had and give up some really hard beliefs. Being a CEO or a founder is the same process. So I wish I could say this was the only time [laughs] I had to question, you know, hard-made assumptions, or some core beliefs in what I thought. I've had to get really good at questioning when am I projecting this is the way I want the world to be therefore it will be? That's a CEO skill set and a founder skill set...and when that projection is having you on thin ice. And so you constantly have to make that balance. And this was one of those ones where I'm like, all right, let's do it. And I still wake up some mornings and look at people who are open source only and see how much press they get or how easy it is for them to get mentions and things like that. And I'm like, ah, God, that'd be great. It feels like it's much harder for us because we're commercial to get the amplification. There are conferences that will amplify open-source TerraForm, great example. It gets tons of amplification for being a single vendor project that's really tightly controlled by HashiCorp. But nobody is afraid to go talk about TerraForm and mention TerraForm and do all this stuff, the amazing use of open source by that company. But they could turn it and twist it, and they could change it. It's not a guarantee by any stretch of the imagination. CHAD: Well, one of the things that I've come to terms with, and maybe this is a very positive way of looking at it, instead of that you were wrong, [laughter] is to realize that well, you weren't necessarily wrong. It got you to where you were at that point. But maybe in order to go to the next level, you need to do something different. And that's how I come to terms with some things where I need to change my thinking. ROB: [laughs] I like that. It's good. Sometimes you can look back and be like, yeah, that wasn't the right thing and just own it. But yeah, it does help you to know the path. Part of the reason why I love talking about it with you like this is it's not just Rob was wrong; we're actually walking the path through that decision. And it's easy to imagine us sitting in...we're in a tiny, little shared office listening to calls where...I'll tell you this as a story to make it incredibly concrete because it's exactly how this happened. We were on a call. Everybody was in the room. And we were talking to a major bank saying, "We love your software." We're like, "Great, we're looking forward to working with you," all this stuff. And they're like, "Yeah, we need you to show us how you built this plugin because we want to write our own version of it." CHAD: [chuckles] ROB: We're like, "If you did that, you wouldn't need to buy our software." And they're like, "That's right. We're not going to buy your software." CHAD: Exactly. [laughs] ROB: And we're like, "Well, we won't show you how to use it. Then we won't show you how to do that." And they're like, "Well, okay. We'll figure it out ourselves." And so I'm the cheerful, sunny, positive, sort of managing the call, and I'm not just yelling at them. My CTO is sitting next to me literally tearing his hair. This was literally a tearing his hair out moment. And we hung up the call, and we went on a walk around the neighborhood. And he was just like, "What more do you need to hear for you to understand?" And so it's moments like that. But instead of being like, no, you're wrong, we got to do it this way, I was ready to say, "Okay, what do you think we can do? How do we think we can do it?" And then he left me with a big pile of PR messaging to explain what we're doing, conversations like this. Two years ago when we made this change, almost three, I felt like I was being handed a really hard challenge. As it turns out, it hasn't been as big a deal. The market has changed about how they perceive open source. And for enterprise customers, they're like, "All right, how do we deal with the licensing for this stuff?" And we're like, "You just buy it from us." And they're like, "That's it?" And I'm like, "Yes." And you guarantee every..." "Yes." They're like, "Oh. Well, that's pretty straightforward. I don't have to worry about..." We could go way down an open-source rabbit hole and the consulting pieces and who owns the IP, and I used to deal with all that stuff. Now it's very straightforward. [laughs] Like, "You want to buy and use the software to run your data center?" "Yes, I do." "Great." CHAD: Well, I think this is generally applicable even beyond your specific product but to products in general. It's like, when you're not talking to people who are good customers or who are even going to be your customers who are going to pay for what you want, you can spend a lot of time and energy trying to please them. But you're not going to be successful because they're not going to be your customers no matter what you do. ROB: And that ends up being a bit of a filter with the open-source pieces is that there are customers who were dyed in the wool open source. And this used to be more true actually as the markets moved a lot. We ended up just not talking to many. But they do, they want a lot. They definitely would ask for features or things and additions and help, things like that. And it's hard to say no. Especially as a startup founder, you want to say yes a lot. We try to not say yes to things that we don't...and this puts us at a disadvantage I feel like from a marketing perspective. If we don't do something, we tend to say we don't do it, or we could do it, but it would take whatever. I wish more people in the tech space were as disciplined about this does work, this doesn't work, this is a feature. This is something we're working on. It's not how tech marketing typically works sadly. That's why we focus on self-trials so people can use the product. Mid-roll Ad I wanted to tell you all about something I've been working on quietly for the past year or so, and that's AgencyU. AgencyU is a membership-based program where I work one-on-one with a small group of agency founders and leaders toward their business goals. We do one-on-one coaching sessions and also monthly group meetings. We start with goal setting, advice, and problem-solving based on my experiences over the last 18 years of running thoughtbot. As we progress as a group, we all get to know each other more. And many of the AgencyU members are now working on client projects together and even referring work to each other. Whether you're struggling to grow an agency, taking it to the next level and having growing pains, or a solo founder who just needs someone to talk to, in my 18 years of leading and growing thoughtbot, I've seen and learned from a lot of different situations, and I'd be happy to work with you. Learn more and sign up today at thoughtbot.com/agencyu. That's A-G-E-N-C-Y, the letter U. CHAD: So you have the core and then you have the ecosystem. And you also mentioned earlier that it is an actual software package that people are buying and installing in their data center. But then you have the UI which is in the cloud and what's in the data center is reporting up to that. ROB: Well, this is where I'm going to get very technical [laughs] so hang on for a second. We actually use a cross-domain approach. So the way this works...and our UX is written in React. And everything's...boy, there's like three or four things I have to say all at once. So forgive me as I circle. Everything we do at Digital Rebar is API-first, really API only, so the Golang service with an API, which is amazing. It's the right way to do software. So for our UX, it is a React application that can talk to that what we call an endpoint, that Digital Rebar endpoint. And so the UX is designed to talk directly to the Digital Rebar endpoint, and all of the information that it gets comes from that Digital Rebar endpoint. We do not have to relay it. Like, you have to be inside that network to get access to that endpoint. And the UX just talks to it. CHAD: Okay. And so the UX is just being served from your centralized servers, but you're just delivering the React for the JavaScript app. And that is talking to the local APIs. ROB: Right. And so we do use that browser as a bridge. And so when you want to download new content packs...so Digital Rebar is a platform. So you have to download content and automation and pieces into it. The browser is actually your bridge to do that. So the browser can connect to our catalog, pull down our catalog, and then send things into that browser. So it's super handy for that. But yeah, it's fundamentally...it's all behind your firewall software except...and this is where people get confused because you're downloading it from rackn.io. That download or the URL on the browser looks like it's a RackN URL even though all the traffic is network local. CHAD: Do your customers tend to stay up to date? Are they updating to the latest version right away all the time? ROB: [laughs] No, of course not. CHAD: I figured that was the answer. ROB: And we maintain patches on old versions and things like that. I wish they were a little faster. I'm not always sad that they're...I'm actually very glad when we do a release like we did yesterday...And in that release, I don't expect any of our production customers to go patch everything. So in a SaaS, you might actually have to deal with the fact that you've got...and we're back to our heterogeneity story. And this is why it's important that we don't do this. If we were to push that, if we didn't handle every situation for every customer exactly right, there would be chaos. And it would all come back to our team. The way we do it means that we don't have to deal with that. Customers are in control of when they upgrade and when they migrate, except in the UX case. CHAD: So how do you manage that if someone goes to the UI and their local thing is an old version? Are you detecting that and doing things differently? ROB: Yes, one of the decisions we made that I'm really happy with is we embedded feature flags into the API. When you log in, it will pull back. We know what the versions are. But versions are really problematic as a way to determine what's in software, not what's not in software. So instead, we get an array back that has feature flags as we add features into the core. And we've been doing this for years. And it's an amazingly productive process. And so what the UX does is as we add new things into the UX, it will look for those feature flags. And if the feature flag isn't there, it will show you a message that says, "This feature is not available for your endpoint," or show you the thing appropriate without that. And so the UX has gone through years of this process. And so there are literally just places where the UX changes behavior based on what you've installed on your system. And remember, our customers it's multi-site. So our customers do have multiple versions of Digital Rebar installed across there. So this behavior is really important also for them to be able to do it. And it goes back to LaunchDarkly. I was talking to Edith back in the early days of LaunchDarkly and feature flags, and I got really excited about that. And that's why we embedded it into the product. Everybody should do it. It's amazing. CHAD: One of the previous episodes a few ago was with actually the thoughtbot CTO, Joe Ferris. And we're on a project together where it's a different way of working but especially when you need it... so much of what I had done previously was versioned APIs. Maybe that works at a certain scale. But you get to a certain scale of software and way of working and wanting to do continuous deployment and continually update features and all that stuff. And it's a really good way of working when instead you are communicating on the level of feature availability. ROB: And from an ops person's perspective, and this was true with OpenStack, they were adding feature flags down at the metadata for the...it was incredible. They went deep into the versioned API hellscape. It's the only way I can describe it [laughs] because we don't do that. But the thing that that does not help you with is a lot of times the changes that you're looking at from an API perspective are behavior changes, not API changes. Our API over years now has been additive. And as long as you're okay with new objects showing up, new fields showing up in an object, you could go back to four-year-old software, talk to our API, and it would still work just fine. So all your integrations are going to be good, but the behavior might change. And that's what people don't...they're like, oh, I can make my API version, and everything's good. But the behavior that you're putting behind the scenes might be different. You need a way to express that even more than the APIs in my opinion. CHAD: I do think you really see that when you...if you're just building a monolithic web app, it's harder to see. But once you separate your UI from your back end...and where I first hit this was with mobile applications. The problem becomes more obvious to you as a developer I think. ROB: Yes. CHAD: Because you have some people out there who are actually running different versions of your UI too. So your back end is the same for everybody but your UI is different. ROB: [laughs] CHAD: And so you need a back end that can respond to different clients. And a better way to do that rather than versioning your API is to have the clients tell you what they're capable of while they're making the requests and to respond differently. It's much more of a flexible way. ROB: We do track what UX. We have customers who don't want to use that. They don't even want us changing the UX...or actually normal enterprise. And so they will run...the nice thing about a React app is you can just run it. The Digital Rebar can host its UX, and that's perfectly reasonable. We have customers who do that. But every core adds more operational complexity. And then if they don't patch the UX, they can fall behind or not get features. So we see that it's...you're describing a real, you know, the more information you're exchanging between the clients and the servers, the better for you to track what's really going on. CHAD: And I think overall once you can get a little...in my experience, especially people who haven't worked that way, joining the team, it can take a little bit for them to get comfortable with that approach and the flexibility you need to be building into your system. But once people are comfortable with it and the team is comfortable, it really starts to hum. In my experience, a lot of what we've advocated for in terms of the way software should be built and deployed and that kind of thing is it actually makes it so that you can leave that even easier. And you can really be agile because you can roll things out in a very agile way. ROB: So are you thinking like an actual rolling deployment where the deployed software has multiple versions coming through? CHAD: Yep. And you can also have different users seeing different things at different times as well. You can say, "We're going to be doing continual deployment and have code continually deployed." But that doesn't mean that it's part of the release yet, that it's available to users to use. ROB: Yeah, that ability to split and feature flag is a huge deal. CHAD: Yeah. What I'm trying to figure out is does this apply to every project even the small like, this just changes the way you should build software? Or is there a time in a product to start introducing that thing? ROB: I am a big fan of doing it first and fast. There are decisions that we made early that have proven out really well. Feature flags is one of them. We started right away knowing that this would be an important thing for us to do. And same thing with tracking dependencies and being able to say, "I need..." actually, it's helpful because you can write automation that says, "I need this feature in the product." This flag and the product it's not just a version thing. That makes the automation a little bit more portable, easier to maintain. The other thing we did that I really like is all of our objects have documentation embedded in them. So as I write a parameter or an ask or really anything in the system, everything has a documentation field. And so I can write the documentation for that component right there. And then we modified our build scripts so that they will pull in all of that documentation and create an aggregated view. And so the ability to do just-in-time documentation is very, very high. And so I'm a huge fan of that. Because then you have the burden of like, oh, I need to go back and write up a whole bunch of documentation really lessened when you can be like, okay, for this parameter, I can explain its behavior, or I can tell you what it does and know that it's going to show up as part of a documentation set that explains it. That's been something I've been a big fan of in what we build. And not everybody [laughs] is as much a fan. And you can see people writing stuff without particularly crisp documentation behind it. But at least we can go back and add that documentation or lessons learned or things like that. And it's been hugely helpful to have a place to do that. From a design perspective, one other thing I would say that we did that...and you can imagine the conversation. I have a UX usability focus. I'm out selling the product. So for me, it's how does it demo? How does it show? What's that first experience like? And so for me having icons and colors in the UX, in the experience is really important. Because there's a lot of semantic meaning that people get just looking down a list of icons and seeing that they are different colors and different shapes. But from the CTO's perspective, that's window dressing. Who cares? It doesn't have functional purpose. And we're both right. There's a lot of times when to me, both people can be right. So we added that as a metafield into all of our objects. And so we have the functional part of the definition of the API. And then we have these metaobjects that you can add in or meta definitions that you can add in behind the scenes to drive icons and colors. But sometimes UX rendering hints and things like that that from an API perspective, you're like, I don't care, not really an API thing. But from a do I show...this is sensitive information. Do I turn it into a password field? Or should this have a clipboard so I can clipboard icon it, or should I render it in this type of viewer or a plain text viewer? And all that stuff we have a place for. CHAD: And so it's actually being delivered by the API that's saying that. ROB: Correct. CHAD: That's cool. ROB: It's been very helpful. You can imagine the type of stuff we have, and it's easy to influence UX behaviors without asking for UI change. CHAD: Now, are these GraphQL APIs? ROB: No. We looked at doing that. That's probably a whole nother...I might get our CTO on the line for that. CHAD: [laughs] It's a whole nother episode for that. ROB: But we could do that. But we made some decisions that it wasn't going to provide a lot of lift for us in navigation at the moment. It's funny, there's stuff that we think is a really cool idea, but we've learned not to jump on them without having really specific customer use cases or validations. CHAD: Well, like you said, you've got to say no. You've got to make decisions about what is important, and what isn't important now, and what you'll get to later, and that requires discipline. ROB: This may be a way to bring it full circle. If you go back to the stories of every customer having a unique data center, there's this heterogeneity and multi-vendor pieces that are really important. The unicycle we have to ride for this is we want our customers to have standard operating processes, standard infrastructure pipelines for this and use those and follow that process. Because we know if they do, then they'll keep improving as we improve the pipelines. And they're all unique. So there has to be a way in those infrastructure pipelines to do extensions that allow somebody to say, "I need to make this call here in the middle of this pipeline." And we have ways to do that address those needs. The challenge becomes providing enough opinionated like, this is how you should do things. And it's okay if you have to extend it or change it a little bit or tweak it without it just becoming an open-ended tool where people show up and they're like, "Oh, yeah, I get how to build something." And we have people do this, but they run out of gas in the long journey. They end up writing bespoke workflows. They write their own pipelines; they do their own integrations. And for them, it's very hard to support them. It's very hard to upgrade them. It's very hard for them to survive the reorg, your nine-month reorg windows. And so yeah, there's a balance between go do whatever you want, which you have to enable and do it our way because these processes are going to let your teams collaborate, let you reuse software. And we've actually over time been erring more and more on the side of you really need to do it the way we want you to do; reinforce the infrastructure as code processes. And this is the key, right? I mean, you're coming from a development mindset. You want your tooling to reinforce good behavior, CICD, infrastructure as code, all these things. You need those to be easier to do [laughs] than writing it yourself. And over time, we've been progressing more and more towards the let's make it easier to do it within the opinionated way that we have and less easy to do it within the Wild West pattern. CHAD: Cool. Well, I think with that, we'll start to wrap up. So if people want to find out more, where are some places that they could do that or get in touch with you? ROB: The simplest thing is of course rackn.com is the website. We encourage people to just, if this is interesting, download and try the software. If they have a cloud account, it's super easy to play with it, all things RackN through that. I am very active on Twitter under the handle @zehicle Z-E-H-I-C-L-E. And I'm happy to have conversations around these topics and data center and operations and even the future of cloud and edge computing. So please look me up. I'm excited to have conversations like that. CHAD: Awesome. And you can subscribe to the show and find notes and transcripts for this episode at giantrobots.fm. If you have questions or comments, email us at hosts@giantrobots.fm. And you can find me on Twitter @cpytel. This podcast is brought to you by thoughtbot and produced and edited by Mandy Moore. Thanks for listening and see you next time. Announcer: This podcast was brought to you by thoughtbot. thoughtbot is your expert design and development partner. Let's make your product and team a success.

In this final episode, Sawyer spies on dreams, Bailey talks to Bev, Grant stays with Jared, Devin shares some poetry, the group discovers the source of terror in Rock Creek, the wages for life are paid in full, and Crowbar comforts his mourning friends. All this and more on this episode of... Between the Rows. Episode 6, FINALE * The characters and events in Between the Rows are in no way related to the characters and events in our main campaign. Watch the show live on Twitch! The main campaign streams every Monday at 7PM CST. https://www.twitch.tv/thepaperdungeon/ Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/M32j2ZsB7p Visit our website! https://www.thepaperdungeon.com Support the show on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/thepaperdungeon Link Tree - all the TPD links you need! https://linktr.ee/thepaperdungeon Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepaperdungeon Twitter: https://twitter.com/thepaperdungeon Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thepaperdungeon Good luck, and godspeed. See you next time, Dungeoneers...

In this episode, we have something special for you. This is the first of a six-episode series called Between the Rows. Aaron is the DM, and he finds creative ways to push the cast to their limits. Sit back, try to relax, and join our characters Bev, Sawyer, Jared, Grant, Bailey, and Crowbar, as they discover the truths that lie behind the town of Rock Creek. All this and more on this episode of… Between the Rows. Episode 1, Pilot * The characters and events in Between the Rows are in no way related to the characters and events in our main campaign. Watch the show live on Twitch! The main campaign streams every Monday at 7PM CST. https://www.twitch.tv/thepaperdungeon/ Join our Discord! https://discord.gg/M32j2ZsB7p Visit our website! https://www.thepaperdungeon.com Support the show on Patreon! https://www.patreon.com/thepaperdungeon Link Tree - all the TPD links you need! https://linktr.ee/thepaperdungeon Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thepaperdungeon Twitter: https://twitter.com/thepaperdungeon Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/thepaperdungeon Good luck, and godspeed. See you next time, Dungeoneers...