sclpls

For people that hadn't heard of 80 Days, I recommend you check out the website pockettactics from time to time. Anything worth playing on a phone or tablet will be covered there. It's the filter the iOS app store desperately needs.

Yeah the big problem right now is there are a lot of people with a lot of bad assumptions getting into arguments with strangers without really thinking through their own assumptions. Like, this whole argument about which group is more inclusive. That's actually not that useful of an argument. It's probably better to ask which approaches to inclusivity work for whom? Like, the idea that your group will hear any argument out doesn't make it more inclusive for certain groups of people. During the Bush administration you had a lot of political leaders discussing the pros and cons of torture in a very calm, sober style. But this capacity to hear out these arguments didn't make the U.S. a more inclusive society if you're of the Muslim faith, and these arguments are implicitly about people that share your faith. And I think this assumption that women are only coming to the gaming table now is harmful to any chance for meaningful dialog. I hope more people read Playing at the World. Like, women have been involved in hobbyist gaming since the early days of D&D, and yet they've been in men's blind spot for the same amount of time due to various circumstances. But because people are so ignorant about the history of gaming they don't even realize how ridiculous their arguments sound.

I'm not sure the castle genre does Dwarf Fortress justice.

I know a couple of people that work at Pixar, and it sounds about as awful a work environment as working at EA or Activision or something.

Amazing: arguments on the gamergate reddit page where people can't decide if that clickhole article is making fun of them or not. Confirmed: average member has poor reading comprehension skills.

OMG that clickhole article might possibly be the most on point thing written yet.

I knew when I saw that Rektreational match where Nick Breckon was trapped by his own team's serpent wards that this would have some larger psychological ramifications, but I never would have guessed how deep it would go. :-)

I think Double Fine learned their lesson from the weirdness of when they released Broken Age Part 1 early to backers and the press, but were not allowing the press to talk about it, and all the confusion that caused. So now they are just keeping things much more open. Anyway, I'm super annoyed that I didn't get my key, and so now I have to deal with Humble Bundle Support, which in my experience is extremely unhelpful, and painfully slow. I love Humble, but their support is terrible.

I disagree with that supposition. Gamergate is the one targeting women and launching campaigns to punish outlets by pressuring advertisers to pull advertising from these sites because they wrote something they disagree with. Banning that sort of activity on message boards and comment sections is hardly illiberal.

Castles 2! I played a bunch of that in jr. high school, but completely forgot about it until I listened to this episode! Of course it is available on GOG... excellent.

Really long, but fascinating look into the history of women participating in war games & RPGs. https://medium.com/@increment/the-first-female-gamers-c784fbe3ff37 The author of the piece also wrote an incredible (and incredibly long) book about the history of war gaming. They interviewed him about his book on an episode of Three Moves Ahead.

There's a lot of important information in the episode, but also like, not very much set in motion in this one compared to other stuff from season 1. I think people finding it underwhelming is fair. There's a lot of James in this episode though, and he is easily my least favorite character on the show (I find him impossibly boring), so that's my bias.

Moebius: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Giraud If you don't feel like looking through the wikipedia article, probably sufficient to know that he was a French artist who had a tremendous visual style that the game has adopted.

Man, I've been backing less kickstarters these days, but if it is still looking close on the last day I think I will need to back this one...

Did it get released, or simply announced?

To be fair, a lot of statements or beliefs that are articulated might be difficult to wrap your head around if this was your first time listening to the podcast. Like he doesn't understand Chris stating that he dislikes supernatural stuff. I feel like I understand why, but that definitely is based on previous conversations that have happened. I don't think that's something you could fully understand just from listening to this episode. So it goes, there are always moments ripe for misunderstanding.

I can see where Chris was coming from, even if I agree it isn't really about modernity. I can distinctly remember the first time I watched Twin Peaks. I had just started college, and I met someone in the dorms that was interested in watching the series, and managed to secure the VHS boxed set from someone else on campus. It was kind of late, so we decided to watch it the next day. That next day happened to be 9/11/2001. Classes were cancelled for the day, and after feeling kind of numb and awful from staring at the news, we elected to spend the rest of the day watching Twin Peaks. At that moment in time it was impossible to ignore the thematic element of a community coping with a (seemingly) unexpected trauma. Instead of modernity, we can think of it as the event that throws the identity of a community into a state of shock.

Fair point

Yeah I think its fair to say it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to prioritize the keeps over other aspects of the game, still feels like a missed opportunity! Probably getting that hybrid class you mentioned is a more important detail.

So my feedback for the podcast is that I think its fine that you guys jumped around. Presumably everyone listening already has watched the episode so like a plot recap or whatever is pretty unnecessary obviously. I'm fine with you guys describing whatever was striking to you, and if it doesn't all fit together that's okay. This will be my fourth time rewatching the series, and one thing that is cool about it is every time I have rewatched it I end up with this different interpretive structure that informs how I view scenes. So the show seems to defy any kind of simple interpretation (it's about THIS, NOT THIS), and instead just encompasses so much (it's about this AND this AND this AND this, etc.) I have to admit, I got a little frustrated when you decided to hold off during the spoiler section discussing the image of the traffic light because you decided that conversation was non-spoilery. From my perspective people new to the show will get to that stuff if they go back to the podcast, and meanwhile you've made the conversation a little more stilted, and you might not even get around to talking about that image anyway since there is always a ton of stuff to talk about on the show anyway. I think if during the spoiler section you discuss non-spoilery stuff that is okay. tl;dr version Mostly, I just want the conversation to be free-flowing like it is on Idle Thumbs. As for the Pilot episode, I was also impressed with how carefully the shots were framed to reveal how communication takes place. The way people learn about Laura Palmer's death, every time someone asks someone to shut the door (to constrict a conversation), anytime someone overhears another conversation (kind of a soapy technique there), or more comically the way Lucy explicitly states phone transfers. I think all of the attention placed on understanding the flow of communication does a terrific job of helping inform the viewer about the identity of the community, specifically a small town community in the pre-internet era. It's the sort of thing we can take for granted now where if something happens the assumption (perhaps dubious) is we're just going to find out about it, and quickly. Here we see all the work that is done. I think the value in that presentation is it really shows how horrific things like sexual violence and abuse against women can simultaneously be both hidden from view and in plain sight because of how these communication channels create different networks of knowledge, and form individual identities based upon a person's location within that network. Lynch is also kind of playing with the audience of the show existing in a different communication network, and how much an audience knows about the show affects our understanding about the motivations of different characters. The clue to the audience that Lynch is playing with them is found in the video Cooper shows to different people, and gauging their reaction. the video is both something of a mystery (who is shooting the video?) and also supposed to be a source of truth.

I thought this Eurogamer call-to-action for more civility was excellent: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-10-17-we-cannot-let-this-become-gaming-culture

Deadly Shadows of Thief

The World That Never Was: A True Story of Dreamers, Schemers, Anarchists, and Secret Agents by Alex Butterworth Covers the turbulent politics of left-wing radicalism in late 19th century Europe, and is written in a very approachable style that is well suited for someone that has principally read fiction. Lots of great details and anecdotes covered.

Man, this game is killing me. I have been absolutely loving the non-gameplay trailers for this game, I totally am a sucker for the tone they are putting forth, and find myself getting stupidly emotional about this stuff. But all the gameplay stuff I've seen just looks so undercooked. So I get really excited about the concept of the game, but not at all excited by the actual presentation. Ugh...

I was amused by all the times Sean said "oh no" in this episode.