Problem Machine

Well it's a game of pure chance where you can either gain or lose money or equivalent assets, so that's pretty definitely gambling, but that's not what I was confused about. Most I'm confused about what you meant by "Schrodinger's Gamble," which seems kind of nonsensical... am I missing something?

I... what?

"Why did I follow him? I don't know. Why do things happen as they do in dreams?"

It would probably actually be illegal in several states for them to have it in now. Crazy.

Regarding Matt Uelmen getting an orchestra to work with, as I recall Blizzard also set him up with one to work with for the Diablo 2 expansion (which had an amazing soundtrack) and also I think one of the WoW expansions. I haven't heard the WoW stuff, but from Lord of Destruction and the samples linked earlier in this thread I can't wait to hear the Torchlight 2 soundtrack. I look forward to seeing where they go with the design of the game as well. I thought the first game did a lot right, but in terms of the soundtrack and general structure it owed a lot to Diablo and didn't really do it as well as Diablo did. I'm hoping that Torchlight 2 will be ditching a lot of those elements cribbed from Diablo; being set in a more open world should do well for it, since it doesn't really benefit from the sense of claustrophobia the way Diablo did, and I'm hoping they completely ditch the whole plotline with the giant corrupting demon deep under the earth. The underground fairy cities certainly implied a far more interesting plot than the trite Diablo riff of the forgettable demon beast.

In Spelunky arrow traps just automatically sense anything on a horizontal plane with them out to a certain range, about a screen width or a bit less. I think you might be thinking of another game (perhaps Terraria?)

True, but they mentioned a couple of times not being sure if something was in the original game, and I think in pretty much every instance it was, so I just wanted to clarify that.

I think all of the game dynamics stuff they mentioned was in the PC version, it's just missing the co-op play... which sounds fantastic.

Yay confogl mutation every day!

It may help that, as I just mentioned, I don't really hate newer episodes as much as just find them not very compelling, so there isn't that blind rage getting in the way of my critical faculties- just, maybe, glaucomic disappointment.

For what it's worth, from what I've seen, I don't think think the show is bad, it's just not very good any more. And the rant isn't about ripping into the newer episodes either- in fact, I may have mischaracterized it by calling it a rant. Don't worry about it.

I think part of that is because it was really a show that rewarded you paying attention. Something I've noticed on the rare occasion that I see a more recent Simpsons episode is that they make sure whenever they tell a joke to slow down and make sure that you get it, but in the older episodes there were tons of little background gags and throwaway one-liners which, if you caught them, were sometimes the funniest thing in the episode. I think a lot of it comes down to how confident you are in your ability to make jokes. If you hoarde them and are miserly with them it ends up creating a kind of joke 'schedule', and if there's one thing that kills humor it's predictability. Arrested Development was also notable for how densely packed with easily missable jokes it was. For whatever reason, it didn't work out as well for that show as it did for The Simpsons, but it does share that aspect of being highly quotable and a lot of fans have that kind of encyclopedic knowledge of it. It comes from having a show worth paying close attention to.

Jake's Simpsons rant made me sad. Just makes you think, all of these shows that got cancelled 'before their time'... maybe we dodged a bullet there.

It was as fleshed out as one could expect of a 40-year old memory. Making it more detailed would break the fiction of the world, not to mention bogging the book down with unnecessary fluff. Because it only touches on what he thinks is important, the entire story is cut down to the minimum of what is necessary to convey the emotional weight of the story. The book isn't meant to convey the experiences he had when he was in school, just to convey his memories of those experiences and how those memories change. Stepping outside of those bounds would make it, if nothing else, a very different book. Perhaps you would have liked it better, but the intent would have been different.

By telling, it's showing. The entire thing is locked into Tony's perspective, and more specifically present-time Tony's perspective. How that flavors his stories, and how the new information he gets changes them, is kind of the point.

I may have been a bit careless in my phrasing. Here's what I mean: The part of your story which people interact with emotionally is the characters. Without a character going through the events in a story, it's just a bunch of things that happened. A twist that isn't filtered through a character won't be an emotional experience for the audience- it can be surprising, yes, and it can get them to think, but that's more the functionality of a riddle or something than a story. I don't have anything against riddles, but I don't go to them for emotional involvement. The reason why the ending of The Sixth Sense was a big deal wasn't because we didn't know he was dead, it was because he didn't know he was dead.

Hallo. I heard of Idle Thumbs when I got linked to the kickstarter, thought it sounded interesting, and have spent the last month or two listening through the entirety of the episode archive. Really enjoyed all of the casts, wish I had some money to throw towards it but I am impressively broke right now. Super looking forward to the new cast and the bookblast, The Sense of an Ending blew me away (ign.com).

I skimmed a few of your posts Speedy and I think you might be focusing too much on the 'twist'. The difference between a well done plot twist and an amateurish one, in my opinion, is that the well done plot twist is designed to impact the character and the amateurish one is designed to impact the audience. For us as an audience, perhaps, the twist is hardly a revolution, but imagine what it represented to Tony and how it recontextualizes everything for him. Personally, I found it gut-wrenching. The story wasn't about what it seemed to be about, which was, I think, what the story was about. I don't really want to get into spoiler territory until after the cast. I'll just say, though, that the artistry of the description of the chip blew me away; even though I could clearly recognize the author's intent and hand there, it was just such a perfect way to communicate the impact of the moment.