TychoCelchuuu

This might be my boundless cynicism showing but I feel like our society is such that a woman in a sci-fi film or TV show isn't going to ask a lot of questions when it comes time to film the scene where she's in her underwear for some reason. Star Trek: Enterprise had that Vulcan first officer lady strip down at least a couple times in the decontamination chamber, plus they made her rub massage oil all over herself or whatever. Some films actually say something with their "look at our hot lady" scene (I'm thinking of Ripley in her underwear in Alien or the co-ed nudity in Starship Troopers) or they avoid it altogether (Terminator 2) but generally if there's not unnecessary titillation then we're dealing with an exception, not a rule.

Au contraire, mon frere.

...no.

Yeah it was pretty stupid. The movie couldn't go 10 minutes without a brutal fistfight or some other kind of fight, it came up with the flimsiest possible excuse to give its token not Uhura female character a reason to strip down to her underwear, Uhura herself spent most of the movie whining until she turned into a strong female character right at the end, and:

Nobody spies on you playing games. Would it be ethical for them to spy on you playing without your knowledge? Only as ethical as it would be for a neighbor to watch you playing through the window without your knowledge. How ethical is that? I don't know, but it's not a game-specific issue. It's exactly as ethical as your neighbor watching you watch a movie or cook dinner or clean your windows without your knowledge.

This game owns. They added a tutorial in the latest patch and it made me kill myself:

So, I mean, I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but Gabe Newell didn't hack your computer. Everyone has done that in Half-Life 2. I did that in Half-Life 2.

That's not what coercion is.

That's not what coercion is.

JESUS FUCK CHRIST LOOK AT THIS THING

Great episode. I'm not sure if there's a way to communicate what I mean, and maybe I'm not even sure what I mean, but I think the Papo & Yo discussion is one of my favorite game-centric conversations I've ever heard. The information itself was interesting, but like, the context in which it was presented and received... there's an understanding there and an implicit and self-assured framing of the conversation that I found really great. It's a mixture of a lot of things. First is the way Jake (Jake, right? Or maybe Sean) cycled through the various things that impressed him, and the reasons they impressed him, and the way Chris elicited/assented to those comments with those little appreciative noises humans make that can be pretty subtle in their implications. The underlying implication there is that games can be sources of interesting things to think about and talk about, not ways to waste your life, but more importantly they're sources of interesting ways of interacting, something other mediums don't often (or ever?) give us. In what other context would you talk about the crafted experience of picking up a frog with tangible weight but no impact on the critical path? More importantly, talk with genuine appreciation? Second is how the Thumbs think about things because of their knowledge of game development, but in an interesting way (this is where more of the genuine appreciation comes from) - the talk about what time was spent on, and what edges are rough and when and why, but not in an antiseptic shop-talk sort of way, where the game is picked apart into its component pieces and examined as a bare piece of work rather than a work of art, but rather in terms of what it means, emotionally (or in some other sense that I can't nail down) for things to have been made they way they were by the team that made the game (like the work that went into the frog). Third is that all of this is so unique. I mean, it isn't, there are people who can do and do do what the Thumbs do, and I'm sure these conversations happen all the time between like-minded people (I don't have any gamer friends, or at least none I talk with often), but in the context of the discussion and culture around games, the Thumbs and things like them stand out. By way of illustration, I Googled "Papa y Yo" to try to figure out if I was spelling it right (nope) and IGN gave it a 4.0 out of 10, with the best/worst fucking IGN quote since the blow you away thing - they say "A moving experience you shouldn't have." Like holy shit. Imagine seeing games like that, or anything in the world like that. A moving experience to avoid. (I read the review - the issues are largely that the graphics are bad, the game is buggy, and the reviewer found the puzzles too easy and therefore tedious.) More generally, you don't exactly get Idle Thumbs quality discussion at, say, NeoGAF. So, thanks for having these conversations and putting them on the Internet for people to download and grow angry at because they never got their sweet Saitek mouse. I appreciate it.

Anyone who wants Crusader Kings II can now get it cheap in the Humble Weekly Sale.

That Idle Thumbs is, in 2013, talking about TIE Fighter is the reason why there never has been and never will be a podcast that can even hope to approach it in quality.

I think it's just that nerds really like plot holes because they want everything to make logical sense and talking about things in terms of emotion and feeling is a foreign concept to them. It's the sort of thing that makes people think that a story with a twist is better than one without a twist, and that it's more important for a story beat to make logical sense than emotional sense, and that a story where nothing happens is worse than one where lots of things happen.

toblix might've meant that VR often makes people queasy if they aren't the one in control of character movement, especially for sudden movement like that characteristic of first person shooters.

This is all explained by the player being a ghost.

Ah, yes. I recognize some of those words.

um so i wanted to talk about this episode The reader mail intrigued me - as someone who watches a ton of strategy games and who also casts strategy games, including one (Natural Selection 2) that is also a first person shooter, the question of what makes something compelling to watch was really interesting to me. I think the thing Sean brought up (I think it was Sean - actually now that I write this maybe it was Nick) about there always being more to learn because of the depth of Dota 2 is really key. It's true that players controlling an individual avatar, having the goals on either end of the thing, having heroes that players are known for playing, and the stuff the reader mail mentioned are all helpful, but I think the fact that someone watching Dota 2 is always going to be seeing more than they can understand at any given time, but is also always being bombarded with new opportunities to learn stuff and whittle away at the vast number of facts that they don't know, makes watching Dota 2 more enticing that watching almost anything else. Learning something about the mechanics of a game is something that keeps viewers coming back, I think, and Dota 2 just has SO MANY FUCKING MECHANICS that fly at you fast and furious every second of a match (plus casters who aren't afraid to call out every single mechanic as it happens) that you can't help but learn.

I played the first Analogue and Digital (but have yet to play Don't Take it Personally or the newest Analogue) and I enjoyed both more or less equally. Digital is shorter and has BBS nostalgia and the narrative conceit of only reading one side of the conversation is pretty interesting, but Analogue has more to do and has a fun investigative aspect rather than the more linear experience of Digital.

This conversation and others will be cheap as dirt in the next Humble Idle Bundle.

Re: your book comment -

https://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=nfgte5sW9mU http://pastebin.com/DLmeM929