Urthman

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by Urthman

  1. I can't tell anymore when Idle Thumbs is predicting/re-inventing dumb pop culture and when they are just gaslighting us about A Bug's Life, but I was leaning towards the latter when Jake and Nick were talking about the Santa team-up movie being a DreamWorks-type thing. https://youtu.be/aPLiBxhoug0 (in which Santa, Jack Frost, and the Easter Bunny team up to save Hoistmas or something)
  2. People keep saying things about Laura being no angel, but what exactly did she do that was so bad? Drugs? Having sex? Lying to her parents about what she'd been up to, I guess? Did she ever do anything that hurt someone besides herself?
  3. OMG my head explodes every time the Thumbs crew tries to talk about biology or chemistry or some other science that isn't computers. It's like listening to my dad explain what he thinks is going on inside his computer when it has a problem. Nick definitely did not have chicken pox on a few spots of his body that were supposedly the spots he touched the infected slime. Chicken pox gets in your body through your nose or mouth when an infected person sneezes near you or when you touch their bodily fluids and then touch your nose or mouth. So yes, he could have got it from some snotty slime, but it wouldn't give him a localized rash like poison ivy.
  4. For me, the most aweful and dreadful part was the long, slow shot of the a-bomb explosion. At first it's like, "Oh the bomb. I've seen that before." But then David Lynch says, "Look closer." "Closer." "Closer."
  5. E3 2017

    Nintendo: "We should pay more attention to the rest of the gaming industry. What do gamers love these days?" Team Zelda: "Dark Souls! Far Cry! Assassin's Creed! Crafting! No hand-holding!" Team Mario: "Hats!"
  6. I went into the scene of Dougie at work thinking I was going to get really annoyed and exasperated at how implausible it was that people would ignore his non-responsiveness. But I thought the scene in the meeting was really well done. The boss clearly thinks Dougie's behavior is bizarre and unacceptable, but he doesn't want to stop and deal with it, he just wants to get on with the meeting. And then in his office, he's all, "I don't know what your problem is and I don't care. Pick up the slack or you're out." So it wasn't that they improbably didn't notice, it's that they all-too-plausibly didn't care and didn't want to deal with it.
  7. I can't tell from this screen grab, but watching the episode, I was certain that the picture of young Coop she was looking at had the red curtains from the Black Lodge in the background behind his head. Did the filmmakers just use an old Twin Peaks publicity still of Kyle MacLachlan?
  8. My guess is that this is just a production mistake, that it's supposed to be the case that BadCoop's fingerprints are mirror images of Coop's and the person who put the images together for her screen accidentally mirrored the whole picture instead of just the print.
  9. I think maybe Jake and Chris and some of you other people are just a little too young to understand how deeply weird it is that telephones don't have cords attached to them. Or how weird it is to be talking on the phone and have the person you're talking to walk up to you. As someone who is almost 50 and had finished graduate school before owning a cordless phone, I wouldn't say Lucy's reaction to cell phones is plausible, but I definitely feel like I get the joke. (I remember a long time ago someone explaining, "cyberspace is the place you are in when you talk to someone on the telephone" and that made total sense to me, as does the phenomenon that talking on the phone while trying to drive is way more dangerous than talking to your passenger. I suspect that my mental model of what's going on when I talk on the phone is shaped differently than someone who grew up with cordless phones or cell phones.) That said, I totally agree with Jake and Christ that Lucy's role so far has been one-note and disappointing, with the slight exception of her moment fawning over Wally.
  10. Well, given that one side of the match-up consists mostly of long, drawn-out, time-shifting shots of Cooper falling or looking at weird stuff, it seems like it wouldn't require much precision to get everything to match. A few extra seconds of Cooper in space, a few extra bits cut out (or sped-up, or rewound) of the glitchy scene with the eyeless woman, and it all lines up. All Lynch would have to say is, "This bit with Cooper in the box happens when the guy was out of the room, and that bit with the woman making slashing noises coincides with those two getting killed" and the editor could pretty easily make it happen. It wouldn't really need to have been planned out at all before they did the filming. And I can definitely imagine Lynch enjoying the serendipity of making the bit where Cooper is dangling in space go on even more uncomfortably-too-long than he originally intended just so the timing lines up right. For me, the most surprising and freaky bit was how the terrifying knocking/banging starts exactly when they start having sex. Cliché perhaps, or maybe even an eye-rolling pun, but that part was really creepy the first time I watched this mash-up.
  11. Wow, my reaction to that scene was the total opposite. It seemed like Lynch was teasing us with the prospect that one sip of blessed coffee would finally bring back the Cooper we've all been waiting for. Instead he spits it out as if his system can't even tolerate swallowing the stuff anymore and utters a brainless "Hiiiiii!" that seemed to confirm the taste of coffee hadn't helped him a bit. Like one of those horrible beats in a movie where the hero reaches for the thing we think will save her and it's gone or she drops it or it breaks in her hand. But I hope you're right. Everything Kyle MacLachlan has been doing so far has been incredible and I really can't wait to see what he does with Special Agent Dale Cooper.
  12. I wanted to post this too. Everybody watch this; the way it all lines up is kind of amazing.
  13. It seemed to me that "bad ass beat" was some kind of normal rock song slowed way down until it seemed like something out of the red room?
  14. Sheriff is usually an elected position. In a larger town, you might have new deputies and staff turning over whenever there's a new sheriff elected, but it seems right that a small town like Twin Peaks might elect a new sheriff to replace the old one but all the deputies and staff would remain the same. Also completely unsurprising that the town would elect a younger new guy (especially the old sheriff's son -- although I'm kinda hoping it turns out to be his daughter) rather than one of the older deputies, and that's not even taking the quite plausible racism into account. So Hawk and Andy remaining deputies seemed completely and ordinarily plausible to me.
  15. The darkest timeline would be that Cooper seems to be his old self just like Leland often seemed to just be Leland, but actually he's spent the last 25 years murdering girls who look like Laura Palmer. But now that I think about it, the FBI agent who has spent 25 years hunting a serial killer without knowing that...dun dun dun...he himself was the killer all along sounds like a really hackneyed video game plot. Which maybe makes it perfect for Twin Peaks??
  16. Is this the most beautifully poignant sentence to ever appear on an Idle Thumbs podcast? I think it might be: "What if...What if...I was congratulated, and Chris was fucked?"
  17. I am irrationally irritated to discover that Chris's "packing cubes" are not actually cubes.
  18. The Witness by Jonathan Blow

    ULTIMATE SPOILERS HERE - If you read this without playing the game, you cannot have the experience Jonathan Blow has said was the whole point of The Witness. What Blow says in interviews is that the driving idea behind The Witness was simply the desire for the player to have the experience of "Aha! Wow! Wait...how many of these have I missed?!" caused by unexpectedly seeing something that seemed confined to a 2D frame out in the 3D world. His original concept was an RPG where the player is learning runes from scrolls to cast spells and then, looking back down after climbing a mountain, sees a learnable spell rune in the shape of the path up the mountain. It seems to me that the rather modest and inoffensive point the game is making by adding all the readings and videos is simply, "Hey, I wonder if that feeling of surprise and seeing the world in a different way is related to any of the deeper thoughts various philosophers and theologians have had about enlightenment, mindfulness, and seeing the world?" And I'd say the game makes no real claims one way or another, so it's bizarre to me that people can actually get upset about it.
  19. The Witness by Jonathan Blow

    It's fascinating to me that pretty much every single critical take on The Witness (other than "some of the puzzles are too hard/tedious/unfair") is some form of, "I thought X meant Y, but it didn't, and that disappointed me." And frequently stated something like this: "Jonathan Blow tricked me into thinking X meant Y, but it didn't, and that makes him a pretentious jerk who was making fun of me the whole time." The Witness is "just" a very beautiful, exquisitely-designed puzzle box with no real story or narrative. The way the whole thing is constructed, from the wordless sequences of the puzzles to the nifty stuff hidden in the environment is all so clever that the cleverness itself seems beautiful to me. But for a lot of people a beautiful first-person environment can't just be something pleasing to look at. It has to be telling a specific, explicit story. This is not just an expectation, but an active perception. People don't just expect a story, they see that there clearly is one--until Jonathan Blow cheats them by "revealing" that there actually isn't any story. But why is this? We don't demand that every statue and painting in a museum tell an explicit story. We don't feel cheated that DaVinci never reveals (and probably didn't know) what the Mona Lisa is thinking or smiling about. Why is this beautiful puzzle box disappointing because it doesn't have a story inside it? Why is it impossible for some people to even see the puzzle box without assuming the existence of a story? On the one hand, it has audiologs, which many games have used for story-telling. On the other hand, the audiologs are clearly just a bunch of readings from philosophers about the nature of perception and it seems pretty obvious after a while that they aren't adding up to any sort of narrative and are probably just a bunch of readings Jonathan Blow and his team thought were interesting. But is it really just a case of "This game looks similar to other games which did have stories in them"?
  20. You're definitely not the only one amused, although it was even funnier when you used it to "tune out" of the bit where you got off into old-manning about being annoyed by the BotW download.
  21. What I don't get about the X Box controllers is that you've got these real nice-feeling analog triggers but then they put shoulder buttons above the triggers so you have to choose between either awkwardly shifting your index fingers up and down between the triggers and shoulder buttons or leaving your index fingers on the shoulder buttons and pulling the triggers with your middle fingers. What kind of monsters shoot guns with their middle fingers?
  22. Nah, just play with mouse and keyboard and then you can always be looking around easily no matter how you're moving. You have so much greater situational awareness it feels like cheating. M+K Dark Souls = it's basically easy mode.
  23. Hey, just finished listening to the ad-free podcast of this episode. It was great, but I was wondering why there were only two endorsements at the end. Did Nick have to leave early or something?
  24. When my daughter was 4-years-old, I had to take her to the bathroom on an airplane. When we got in there, she protested, "This is the boys' room!" and pointed to a diagram showing a stick-figure person putting trash in the right place. Because, of course, the symbol for "person" is the same as the symbol for "boy" on the boys' room. That may have been the day I became a feminist. Or at least convinced that inclusive language matters.
  25. It will come as a surprise to nobody that the crazy Choose Your Own Adventure book that Jake imagined exists exactly as he described it. This beautiful and incredible website featuring animated visualizations of the structure of classic CYOA books describes the book Inside UFO 54-40 which is about the search for the mythical paradise planet called Ultima. The ending where you find Ultima is disconnected from the rest of the book; no pages lead to it. Quoting the website: