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Everything posted by gregbrown
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Idle Thumbs 87: Spray Spin-Grill
gregbrown replied to Jake's topic in Idle Thumbs Episodes & Streams
If y'all are interested in streaming Spaceteam, you can use Reflector to mirror your iOS screens to your PC or Mac, and then stream it as if it were a regular game. It works great in my experience. -
The Idle Book Log: unofficial recommendations for forthcoming Idle Thumbs Book Clubs.
gregbrown replied to makingmatter's topic in Books
Hey, it was still a really good and useful post—unlike that one time I spent 10 minutes calculating US marijuana consumption in mega-Snoops. -
The Idle Book Log: unofficial recommendations for forthcoming Idle Thumbs Book Clubs.
gregbrown replied to makingmatter's topic in Books
It is pretty bad. (I have read this book.) -
I think this'll be the case if only because there are still surprisingly few HFR theaters out there. For example, I'm in Raleigh, NC—a fairly large metropolitan area with around 1.8 mil once you add neighboring cities—and we don't have any. The closest is two hours away!
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Idle Book Club Episode 4: Evidence of Things Unseen
gregbrown replied to Sean's topic in Idle Book Club Episodes
Just finished the book, and the extended Lightfoot-POV coda really made the book for me. Like you guys mentioned in the 'cast, there were quite a few coincidences there near the end, the wildest of which was Tenner's appearance. It's weird how we'll accept some coincidences and discard others; generally, the earlier and more singular a coincidence, the better it'll sell on the page (or on-screen). This is why Slumdog Millionaire is structured as mostly flashbacks, front-loading the coincidence so that it simply becomes the premise. Like y'all mentioned, Wiggins uses the TVA really artfully: not in any partisan way, but instead as a really concentrated microcosm for the effects of modernity. She did undersell the benefits, though, and I scanned in my favorite passage that talks about how dams and rural electrification transformed some areas in the 1930s. It's from the first volume of LBJ's biography, which is laced with these kinds of expansive tangents that paint a picture of how the world was. Pretty rad. Also, you guys should really read Stoner by John Williams! It has a ton of the thoughtful introspection that you all seemed to enjoy in this book and in The Sense of an Ending. -
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Video of the moment
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NeoGAF uncovers some evidence that The Phantom Pain actually an MGS game, as we suspected.
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Haha, yeah, I was shocked when it came up that it wasn't the next Kojima game. The trailer totally had the same enigmatic, overlong style that they usually use for the debuts.
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They had an orchestra play several game soundtracks, including The Walking Dead (mp4).
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Cliffy B also wants to see "someone teabagged" during the VGAs. Pushing gaming forward.
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Clementine's voice just got her award from Son Of Weird Al (or Carrot Top?).
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Groupon in SF hosted a drone hacking competition last weekend, including one team that "taught a drone to behave itself on the end of a leash
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Idle Thumbs 86: Always Support the Danger Layer
gregbrown replied to Jake's topic in Idle Thumbs Episodes & Streams
BBC's World Book Club (podcast) Bookworm with Michael Silverblatt (podcast) Let's Talk About Love: A Journey to the End of Taste by Carl Wilson (book) -
You're right that the two are usually correlated, even though I'm damaged enough that I'll usually notice bad work even when I'm enjoying the heck out of the film. But I do think you have the causality backwards. Is it really the case that craft has no effect on our emotional involvement with a film, on our suspension of disbelief? I'd argue that's absolutely not the case, and that the more poorly-written a story is, the more it's robbed of emotional impact, for example. Likewise, I don't typically evaluate the craft of filmmaking on some abstract scale, but instead on its effectiveness at the work it's trying to do. For example, (Soderbergh's) Solaris and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind have similar aims, but get there by very different means that both work organically as a whole. Do I happen to like the cinematography in Solaris more than Eternal Sunshine's, or vice-versa for the writing? Yes, but they both achieve the jobs they set out to do, and I don't think that grafting the best elements of one to the best elements of the other would have worked. Likewise, we can evaluate elements of Lord of the Rings in the same light: Jackson pushed the DI really far in some cases, and we can evaluate why that happened—to differentiate plot-lines like Soderbergh's Traffic (and more subtly in-camera in Inception), to paper over differences in lighting in (re-)shooting over the course of a year, and simply to push an beautiful & idyllic or stylized view of each environment. I'd argue that it really accomplishes none of those goals, but that's the grounds I'd make my case on, and not some abstract ideal. I don't mean to indicate that this is the only reason why I didn't enjoy LotR, but it tends to be one that most people can agree on, and it's easier to start with concrete details than by debating the writing or other elements. For example, on the directing side I'd argue that the Council of Elrond highlights how generally poor Jackson's staging is—even compared to the modern degraded standard—with most of the shots simply a character standing by themselves and no idea of how they're all facing each other. This is individually all stuff that would slip by otherwise, but as an aggregation of problems with the film, it does have concrete effects and shouldn't simply be hand-waved away as a perceptual happenstance. And while our noticing is affected by our engagement—and by my subsequent decade of experience seeing other films—it's silly to pretend the relationship doesn't flow the other way even more strongly.
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I'm in the "LotR films weren't that good" camp, and that's after enjoying the heck out of them when they came out. (The opening to The Two Towers was the Favorite Thing Ever for years, for example.) The cinematography and digital grading has not aged well at all, for example, and Jackson's directorial skills leave a lot to be desired. For example, don't drink every time he shoves the camera too far into an actor's face. You will die. I'm sure part of it is just being burnt out on all the tropes that have been strip-mined from the book for almost 60 years now, but the films seem almost a parody these days—and I don't think The Hobbit films will improve on that mark.
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As noted by Chris and Steve, Goldblum & Markie is back on YouTube.
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Idle Thumbs 85: "An Indulgent Dateline" or "An Indulgent Episode Title"
gregbrown replied to Jake's topic in Idle Thumbs Episodes & Streams
Totally agree with Chris and Jake about being frustrated with overwrought stories in games, especially as part of the larger trend of trying to turn everything into a franchise and stapling the hero's journey over everything. Sometimes it comes from an outright patronizing view of the audience, but sometimes it's also just a lack of confidence in focusing on what they're good at. And on a side-note, canon/lore is the worst thing to happen to popular entertainment in the last half-century—and I say this as someone who owned the Star Trek Encyclopedia as a teenager. It's become completely disgusting and is even starting to turn me off back-stories in general in media. Like, I reflexively flinch. p.s. game boat is real and the real product listing is amazing. -
Idle Thumbs 84: Nineties Cockpit Freakout
gregbrown replied to Jake's topic in Idle Thumbs Episodes & Streams
The Diablo III music falls into that overdoing-it trap hard, throwing as many instruments as they can at . (Though, granted, it's of a piece with the rest of their storytelling strategy.)Diablo II was much better by comparison, and the expansion had some Wagner-wannabe stuff that I was pretty fond of. But the new one? Ugh. -
JP Sweater also has a game available as part of the contest: !
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Idle Book Club Episode 5: The Great Gatsby
gregbrown replied to Sean's topic in Idle Book Club Episodes
If you need a running start, begin the podcast like most other Great Gatsby commentary I've seen: "The Great Gatsby was a book written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1925. It is 218 pages. It takes place during the 1920s. Nick Carraway is the main character and fought in World War I. He meets Tom and Daisy, a couple with a baby. He also meets Jay Gatsby, who throws parties..." -
I didn't get that they were being dismissive of the book, but instead that all the characters would have all read it despite the book being a pretty esoteric reference. (And to be quite frank, for all I enjoyed it A Canticle of Leibowitz IS a really esoteric book. Famous as a sci-fi book only in some circles, and tied heavily to Catholicism and faith. It would be like if they happened to be all conversant with what happened in the later Dune books.)
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A Serious Man absolutely nails the frustration and helplessness of it, and is my favorite Coen film for it.
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Your partner in crime retweeted Blendo Games' announcement!