Urthman

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Urthman


  1. On 7/27/2012 at 12:32 AM, Nappi said:

    I really enjoyed Driver: San Francisco in all its silliness. The story was completely ridiculous of course and I couldn't help but laugh at how shitty undercover cop I was, as I hurled innocent civilians at my opponents just to win some street race that had nothing to do with my actual goal. If I remember correctly Tanner realized it was all just a dream at the very end, so until then, for what its worth, he was basically the most sadistic mass murderer in the planet.


    I just got around to playing Driver:SF and had a good time with it and so when I felt like grabbing an old Idle Thumbs episode to listen to, I picked this one to remember what they said about the game.

    This is big spoilers for Driver: SF if anyone cares.

     

    So like Chris and Nappi and other people said this entire game you've got tons of missions where you jump into an innocent person's car for the express purpose of steering it into opposing traffic to ram head on some car you are chasing or racing against.  Even if everyone miraculously survives, at a minimum you've destroyed hundreds of people's cars.  (And yeah, of course it's just a dream, but at this point in the story Tanner is completely unaware of that.)

    So then comes the big plot point where the villain Jericho also gets the power to possess any car and uses it to crash civilian cars into you. But the best, most hilarious part of it is that Tanner has the amazing gall to say to his partner:

    "Oh no! Now Jericho can jump into any car like I can. But unlike me, Jericho has no concern for the safety of innocent civilians!"

    And that's supposed to be a big ominous dramatic beat instead of the amazing WHAT? that it is.  It's very much like the part Chris made fun of in Max Payne 3 where Max has the completely self-unaware moment shaking his head at the stupid media for paying attention to a guy running amok and killing hundreds of people.


  2. On Fri Oct 05 2018 at 9:47 AM, Henke said:

    They've really been putting the "Idle" in Idle Thumbs recently!

     

    "Idle Thumbs" is what they do when their thimbs are idle. Their thumbs haven't been idle for several months. 


  3. Yeah, you guys should dial back on the goofy fictional stuff like Amazon Alexa, statue-loving birds, New Zealand AI scams, Gak ingredients, Martin Shkreli, and "Marmite" and get back to talking about real stuff like segregated Fallout vaults, the biography of ex-Chancellor Mayor Ragnar, Cheatin' Hitman, and Luigi lore.

     

    After all, "Important if True" is logically equivalent to "Not Important if False."


  4. The part that made me laugh out loud in the grocery store late at night and causing people to stare at me was when Jake realized that an exponentially doubling Buzzfeed article would, of course, generate an exponentially growing number of Takes. "The Internet will demand Takes!"

     

    So thanks for that Jake. I sometimes wonder if I have a reputation at that store as the weird guy who laughs to himself.


  5. 6 hours ago, unimural said:

     However, with descriptive two word combinations like valuable shaggy and invite circle we can describe the wine for 40 years. Reciting all possible 8 word combinations will take us to the very least to the point where all the protons in the wine and the sommelier have decayed.

     

    My argument was that a valid wine "note" needs to be a comparison between the flavor component in question and a thing or concept that somehow resembles the flavor in the mind of the sommelier.  "A hint of a summer breeze" or "the flavor of falling in love" would be valid notes, but nonsense like "a note of invite circle" would not.  Therefore the sommelier would run out of unique ways to describe each note much, much sooner than you estimate.  Your "valuable shaggy" and "invite circle" are examples of flavors I suggested would have to be listed as "another incomparable, indescribable note."

     

    6 hours ago, unimural said:

    Also, how does the sommelier the know what the wine tastes like?

     

    I think, by definition, the sommelier for this wine is someone who is able to describe what it tastes like.  If we mention such a person (or series of persons) we have to be assuming magical knowledge from the genie or a series of identical bottles of wine which the sommelier tastes before offering the description.


  6. In honor of Stephen Hawking, I'd like to listen again to Chris's story about how he read A Brief History of Time, thought he'd understood it, and thoughtlessly persisted for an embarrassing amount of time in the belief that A Brief History of Time was a book he'd already read and understood. Anyone know where to find it?  I loved that story.


  7. If wine "notes" are comparisons to flavors, odors, or even concepts used to describe aspects of a wine's flavor, and they were doubling every year, then our endless generations of sommeliers would all too soon run out of things in the universe to compare to the flavor of our exponentially improving wine. Eventually, they would simply be saying "another incomparable, indescribable note; another incomparable, indescribable note; another incomparable, indescribable note..." over and over, and their mouths would become specialized for saying that one phrase as quickly as humanly possible.

     

    Possibly a particularly cheeky sommelier descendant would take it upon himself to start simply saying "another note; another note; another note..." but even this enormous reduction in the total number of syllables would be completely surpassed by the doubling in 2 or at most 3 years later.


  8. On 3/5/2018 at 7:38 AM, Deadpan said:

    My favorite part of Nick's re-do are the little "ha ha ha"s he redubbed: they somehow manage to feel both flat and overacted at the same time, it's an incredible effect.

     

    Yes. To me, it sounded like Nick had somehow decided that all the jokes Chris and Jake were making this episode were somehow at his expense and he was laughing sarcastically at them in a "haha very funny you got me very clever haha" sense.  So good.


  9. On 2/21/2018 at 3:13 PM, Jake said:

    YES I was worried I was being Sly Bootsed. 

     

    I read this as "Sly Boosted" and I endorse it as the correct term of art for Chris's shenanigans.

     

    (Linguistically, Sly Bootsed will almost certainly get corrupted to Sly Boosted within a few hundred years anyway, so you might as well get on board with it now.)


  10. On Thursday, January 18, 2018 at 12:55 AM, dartmonkey said:

    Excitebike Switch announced!... sort of. Not really.

     

    Some crazy shit going on at Nintendo but it looks kinda fun. And recyclable. Time to have a kid.

    D8F5ECC3-3856-4C21-816C-26EDDB36A278-302-00000025FC4D2BDC.jpeg

    Oh, that's what that is. In the commercials it looked to me like the Half-Life gluon beam weapon, which was very confusing. 


  11. Human: Fall Flat has been out for over a year but is suddenly at the top of the Steam charts. It's been sitting there for a month now and nobody knows why.

     

    https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/01/29/steam-charts-end-of-january-2018/

     

    I have been playing it split-screen coop with my (adult) daughter who is not great with a controller.  And the sight of this character dressed as a knight in armor running in drunken-approximations of a straight line with her hands raised above her head (needed to pull yourself up onto ledges) lunging at a chest-high wall...and missing -- is the funniest damn thing I have ever seen in a video game.  (She also thinks it's hilarious rather than frustrating.)

     

    One of my favorite parts was playing a level with a bunch of industrial-type stuff (pipes, switches, wrecking balls) and I'm dressed as a handyman with a ball cap and a toolbelt and I'm a lot less clumsy than she is, so you have this scene of a blue collar dude pulling levers and hauling blocks and getting shit done while this bozo cosplayer Sir Leaps-Alot is bouncing around, pulling rubble down onto her head, and falling off of things.  (When you fall off the level, you fall for a bit and then land (splat!) right about where you fell off.)  My character has no face, but I can totally see his eyes rolling. 

     

    I know why this game *deserves* to be at the top of the Steam charts.


  12. On 1/14/2018 at 1:35 PM, Nappi said:

    I'm impressed by how effective the reader's plot to erase an alternative title, they did not like, was. 

     

    Isn't it against the Wikipedia guidelines to erase a documented, cited fact, one you can verify from IMDB and other places, based on nothing but an email read out loud on a podcast?  That's hardly a valid primary source.


  13. I love that last week the Thumbs were joking about how Chris would get hoisted when Nick would come in and talk about the hairdresser telling him the getting-vomitted-on-at-the-Nutcracker story as if it had happened to her.

     

    But then this week you get an email saying that getting-vomitted-on-at-the-Nutcracker happens to everyone.  So yet another urban legend ("urban legends" can be true) that Chris mistook for a unique event he was giving us the inside scoop on.  Although if there's any hoisting, it's more in the general sense of experiencing what you think was some rare unlucky freakish horror and then finding out, no, that just happens to people all the time.  Aaaaaah!


  14. On 1/9/2018 at 6:13 AM, aoanla said:

    Whilst, sure, sometimes this is due to what Bennett wants to call "bitterness" - frustration with lost progress - I think Bennett also underestimates precisely how much "failure" someone poor at games experiences, and how, at this low skill level, boredom becomes more of a factor than "bitterness" over time.

     

    I 100% agree with this.  I'm "bad" at games compared to an average Gamer, but I can't ever remember quitting a game out of frustration that it was too hard.  But I've quit plenty of games out of the boredom you describe. 

    I was shocked to enjoy Dark Souls because it sounded like it was full of the the kinds of things that bored me in other games, but I loved it because repeating the same sections of the game over and over until I was good enough (and/or leveled-up enough) to progress further never got boring.


  15. On 12/11/2017 at 1:23 AM, Nappi said:

    I have only listened to the beginning of the episode, and I think you nailed the remote setup! :tup: If you hadn't talked about it, I would probably not have realized that Nick wasn't in the room. I hope the setup feels comfortable enough for you too to keep going.

     

    Yeah, I was gonna say the same thing.  I'd never have guessed Nick wasn't in the room with you guys from the sound quality.  Great job getting him piped in from Canada!


  16. I hope they can make creating tiny low-fi black & white videos compelling.  That little black & white clip at the end seems like a disappointing version of that glorious wide-screen, full-color sunrise.

     

    Maybe if they lean into getting the player to learn the difference between what looks good in color and what makes a good-looking black & white film, that could be very cool.