newgameplus

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Posts posted by newgameplus

  5. Posted

    So I don't mean to "um, actually..." this episode, but since I live just outside of Gilroy and this whole story is bonkers, I'm going to embellish it a little. The real story is the Roach-Belcher feud. Lewis Belcher, not mentioned in the episode, was initially a friend of Roach's and helped him become guardian of the estate. Belcher acted as Roach's bondsman, but after a few months accused Roach of stealing and resigned. Henry Sanford, Maria's third husband, was actually a close friend Belcher's. Much of the legal maneuvering was orchestrated by Belcher, including the hiring of Terry as Sanford's lawyer. In their suit in Stockton, the Sanfords accused Roach of stealing $84,654 worth of gold dust which Sánchez had dug up during the gold rush.

     

    Belcher never stopped pursuing this money. He and his posse turned to going after the bondsmen that succeeded him, getting in several gunfights along the way. He managed to get $9,000, but he was eventually assassinated at the very same bar where Sanford and Roach's brother-in-law killed each other. It didn't stop there. New parties kept getting involved and all in all 13 people were murdered within about 4 years of Sánchez' passing, including a state Senator!

     

    I highly recommend reading this article from the California Historical Society Quarterly that was written by someone who combed through all the legal records relevant to the story, as well as drawing on the work of two historians that interviewed survivors from the events. I started looking around for more info because I'm inherently skeptical of any buried treasure claims. But I think that article may hold the key to understanding where the idea of $72,000 came from. Apparently, $13,555 was found in the walls of the Sánchez home in 1853. Play the game of historical telephone enough and ~85,000 minus ~13,000 becomes an Old West legend about a missing $72,000. This is just speculation on my part however. I'd love to know what source Duncan used for writing this episode. Thanks for teaching me something about the area! I didn't grow up here, so I have no idea if it's like a common story that there's gold buried somewhere. It kind of makes me want to ask around though.

     

     

     

     


    Also, the Garlic Festival has broken 100,000 attendees these last few years ^___^ (though to me that weekend is the: "stay at home cause it will be a pain to drive anywhere" festival)

  6. Posted

    9 hours ago, pabosher said:

    I'm very very confused by this series. I love it: the writing, reading, and general production is brilliant, but I don't know how much of it is ever true. Finding out Laddie Boy actually existed was a surprise!

     

    It's cheeky but they are true stories:

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought_hoax:

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    The Dreadnought hoax was a practical joke pulled by Horace de Vere Cole in 1910. Cole tricked the Royal Navy into showing their flagship, the battleship HMS Dreadnought, to a fake delegation of Abyssinian royals. The hoax drew attention in Britain to the emergence of the Bloomsbury Group, among whom some of Cole's collaborators numbered. The hoax was a repeat of a similar impersonation which Cole and Adrian Stephen had organised while they were students at Cambridge in 1905.

     

    http://harvardmagazine.com/2004/03/the-rhodes-roster.html:

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    Another Lampoon president, John Updike, found himself challenged by both the law and Soviet diplomats after a prank. The crime: kidnapping. On April 26, 1953, in the midst of a long-running stand-off between the Lampoon and the Harvard Crimson, Updike and his fellow Lampoon editors were dismayed to find Threskiornis aethiopica, the Lampoon's copper ibis, missing from its perch atop the Lampoon castle. The usual suspects, of course, were Crimsoneditors.

     

    The 'Poonsters wasted no time striking back. Later the same day, the Crimson reported the disappearance of its president and managing editor, Michael Maccoby '54 and George S. Abrams '54. Maccoby and Abrams would be returned only in exchange for the ibis, an anonymous caller told the Crimson. Updike then made the threat public: "[N]o Crimson editor can rest safe in his bed," he informed the paper. "We promise, within a week, to depopulate Cambridge totally of this unfortunate element."

     

     

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galápagos_Islands#History:

    Quote

    In October 1820, the whaleship Essex, out of Nantucket, stopped at the Galápagos for these purposes on its way to the Offshore Grounds. On what was then known as Charles Island, while most of the crew were hunting tortoises one crewmember, English boatsteerer Thomas Chappel, for reasons still unclear, lit a fire which quickly burned out of control. Some of the tortoise hunters had a narrow escape and had to run a gauntlet of fire to get back to the ship. Soon almost the entire island was in flames. Crewmembers reported that after a day of sailing away they could still see the flames against the horizon. One crewmember who returned to the Galápagos several years afterward described the entire island as still a blackened wasteland.

     

  7. Posted

    Omg, I'm listening to the preroll supercut, and I just remembered this one time that I was falling asleep listening to old episodes. I thought that my podcast app was set to stop once the episode ended, but it wasn't and it just took a minute or so to load the next episode. Just as I was nodding off suddenly Jake loudly declares, "Get ready for a surprise!" and I bolted back up and fucking lost it. I didn't fall asleep for like another hour. :lol:

  10. Posted

    You have to get past the first section in order to understand Stephen's Sausage Roll. After that it's starts dropping its mind-blowing moments.

    When you clear the first section, the blue box dissolves to reveal that there's a sausage on the overworld. You then start using sausages as bridges in the overworld turning navigating to the next puzzle a puzzle in itself. The second section introduces a new mechanic that completely changes the types of puzzles that are possible. It just keeps going from there, and it does actually scaffold you pretty well into the new challenges.

    That's what people are really excited about.

  12. Posted

    Hi,

     

    I've never posted before, but I just wanted to say I'm going to miss having Danielle on the cast a whole lot. However, I'm super happy that Idle Thumbs has finally managed to survive an east coast departure, and we even get another podcast out of it. So, sort-of-not-really farewell Danielle and good luck with the move!

     

    Also, is it cool if I lovingly refer to this New York-based weekend cast as wIDLEbeast for awhile? Because, well, I'm going to.