Episode 159 - John Bruening - Midnight Guardian

Overview John Bruening is from Cleveland and writes a series of pulp fiction for his Flinch press publisher. These are modern books that have that pulp flair. This episode is also a cross-over episode with my Relentless Geekery podcast. The 3rd voice you hear is Alan Baltis, co-host on that podcast. Book YouTube Transcript Hey John. Hey, John. Okay, you got your Stephen: mic off? Let’s see. Alan: How’s that? There we go. John: There we go. Okay. How’s the look, how’s. Looks fine. I got that sort of shiny thing going on here. That’s Alan: true. You got the, a little bit of glare from the window, but it casts your face in John: a heroic, it’s a noir kinda thing there. Exactly. Yeah, I had a second. Stephen: All the radiation from his monitor and that’s what makes him, John: yeah it’s gonna turn me into some kind of a superhero or something. That’s what we would hope. Try these, this boy. Okay, there we go. Exactly. These are for like, far away. And this screen is it’s like my eyes have reached a point where there’s no sweet spot. You just have to like, Stephen: to nerd it up there, my glasses so I had Lasix a couple years ago when I had cataract surgery, and so I can see far away. I can see things just fine, but up close I. Can’t see. So I asked them specifically my glasses to tune them for how far away I normally sit to the computer. So these glasses, I can’t really read with them, but at the computer it makes everything look perfect. So there’s nerding it up. I think John: I followed that. Yes. I just had an high appointment in December. I had a, I had an appointment in December and I’m in the earl They told me early stage cataracts, which really sucks. I’ll be 60 at the end of this year and I’m just I’m gonna need eight months. I’m gonna need the eight months between now and December to just get my head around that concept. But yes, yeah, we’ve Alan: actually talked about that before. I don’t have any diagnosis of cataracts yet, but I’m really not looking forward to it because I’m really flinchy Ah-huh. We’re gonna bring that in about things going near my eyes. I hate putting in eyedrops. I hate, like, when I get puffed at, when they’re doing the they don’t do that anymore. Test and stuff like that. It’s just Stephen: they’re modern now, Alan, they don’t do the puff. They have a device. They actually stick on your eye and make everything go watery. Wavy Alan: I do have the new one, but even like that the little thing moving into my field of vision and getting uncomfortably close, I’m, there’s. I know we always jump around in our discussions. There was a great book, great Books by Gene Wolf, the Shadow of the torturer books. Remember those? And one of the things they talked about how one of the most base human instincts is to prot