Luftmensch

Well my third life option (and most desirable, therefor least practical) was to marry a nice French woman from a good family and move to Paris, and then be able to enjoy all the benefits of EU citizenship, but it sounds like even if I ran into the totally improbably prospect of a nice French woman from a good family, it'd take a while to get through that. On-topic, damn, I'm liking those Cleveland CycleWerks bikes. I'd like to know about how they hold up, but if I'm looking to get a bike that seems like the way to go.

In general, having a passport alone will allow you to travel freely around the developed world. As an American, my money won't go very far, but I can visit almost anywhere in Europe, South America, North America and Caribbean islands (Cuba excluded, obviously), and Japan without a visa. You're from the Netherlands, right? You should be okay. Buenos Aires is a big expat city, and it's pretty common to find people from all over the world living there. Working is technically illegal, but easy to get away with.

In practice I think it's really cool, it's just the contrast between my original image, of Che with long black locks flowing in the wind as he revs up his Norton, and this guy (the real deal): Who's a cool guy in his own right, and that's probably more how I'll look in a year when I'm 22, but it's a huge drop from what I envisioned. @chickenontheceiling, I've been sort of planning for a while to possibly take a trip to Argentina to live there for a year (Americans don't need a visa, so I can legally stay indefinitely as long as I leave the country for at least a day once every three months). I've been rethinking the plan in favor of moving to California to get my foot in the door of a decent career. I'm really kind of torn.

When I was a wee lad, I remember having romantic notions of Che Guevara riding his motorcycle through South America. I didn't want to be a violent revolutionary, but I thought it would be rad to take a similar motorcycle trip. Then I saw what his motorcycle looked like: Granted, he did later get a proper Norton, but my image of Che was forever turned into the goofy image of some med student on a silly motorized bicycle.

Christ Steve, now that I know you live in Portland your beard makes perfect sense. I never realized the whole time I lived in Charleston that all the phone numbers started with Vid. Unfortunately, VID-EOG-AMES is a taken landline.

The MDA theory by Robin Hunicke, et al I think does an interesting job of describing what is game without trying to make a narrow definition of what game is. The authors describe eight basic aesthetics they've observed in games (I've heard a few variations on this list but they're all similar) that basically sum up the different things that games seem to ultimately do: 1. Sensation Game as sense-pleasure 2. Fantasy Game as make-believe 3. Narrative Game as drama 4. Challenge Game as obstacle course 5. Fellowship Game as social framework 6. Discovery Game as uncharted territory 7. Expression Game as self-discovery 8. Submission Game as pastime And they give these examples of how these aesthetics fit into a few well-known games: Charades: Fellowship, Expression, Challenge. Quake: Challenge, Sensation, Competition, Fantasy. The Sims: Discovery, Fantasy, Expression, Narrative. Final Fantasy: Fantasy, Narrative, Expression, Discovery, Challenge, Submission. I kind of like their approach especially because it strictly avoids trying to define a game, and just accepts a game as something that we know what it is. Video Games is probably most right in that regard, though I think Chris' proposal to compare brain patterns is a bit silly. I'm no neurologist, but I have a suspicion that the whole scanning brain patterns thing isn't quite the catch-all people hype it up to be.

I haven't taken the time to check the etymology, but the moment Chris began to assert that puzzles are distinct from games, I thought of Games Magazine. The discussion about single player versus multi player games I think leaves out a vast history of people goofing off by themselves and making up rules. The cup-and-ball game dates back to the 1500s, just to take one example. I think a game depends on two things: One, it needs defined arbitrary rules, and two, it needs a person to play by those rule (I'm just exploring too, I already see holes in this definition, which includes every government in existence). An easy example is when you're a kid, you decide the floor, or perhaps light-colored tiles, is made of lava, and you play out the act of crossing the room as if the floor was lava. I think it's fair to call that a game. Where Video games (I use the one-word version because that's language for you) fit into this is that they have to be designed by someone. They are often single-player, but that doesn't mean there's only one person involved. Cup-and-ball and of course solitaire are single-player games, but the rules and set were already crafted by someone else a long time ago. I don't think it's a unique phenomenon at all. Video games have much more complex rules, and they can craft more elaborate real-time scenarios, but I think it's just one particular form of something that's been going on for a long, long time that happens to be well suited for single-player games. I spell Video games as one word, and I consider crossword puzzles to be games. There you go, I'm a real rebel.

Aye, I caught Chris calling them the Wachowski Brothers twice, but in a previous cast he referred to them as the Wachowski Siblings, so I think he is up on the news. It's an easy slip to make after so many years.

Inglenook's new album is out. If you've heard of them before, it was probably through Boulet, the French cartoonist. Here's Boulet drawing a little picture set to (and inspired by) a track from Inglenook's new EP: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=Xi5llf4odzk

A while ago I wrote a little comic book I called Space Wizard, about a lone human who wanders space in a giant Space RV. All in all, I think it ripped heavily off of Spaceballs, Spaceman Spiff, Titan AE, and Cowboy Bebop; and directly "borrowed" moments from Indiana Jones, The Incredibles, and Pulp Fiction, but after I started listening to Idle Thumbs all I could think was "shit if I show this to people they'll think it's totally a riff on Space Asshole and The Wizard" I'm still proud of having written something called Space Wizard before I even heard IT. I think that'll be my new title.

Cripes, the first couple days after I posted this I didn't have any responses so I expected it to just be buried and never seen again. I appreciate all the input. The short answer is that I'm not in any line of work right now. I recently left (on good terms) a job doing graphics for a local t-shirt place, after I reached a point where I knew I had gone as far as that job could take me (my former boss, a very nice woman and old friend, agreed with me and my plan). My plan since has been to put together a nice portfolio, learn Spanish, and take my money I've got saved up to move to a nice city, get my foot in the door at some nice place where I can prove myself to someone important, and, with any luck maybe do something awesome like you do today. The field specifically isn't important. Every time I've gotten a job I've found a million reasons I could do it forever and not learn everything; this is true of t-shirt printing, welding, carpentry, everything. I've just had the bad luck of getting jobs in a town of 30,000 where the ceiling is kind of low. But video games, children's cartoons, and films all especially appeal to me. I've also tossed around for a long time the possibility of joining the Navy and becoming a Nuke, a job they've been offering me since high school and which they tell me is still absolutely open if I ever want to go for it. I don't feel it, maybe I'm skipping on an amazing opportunity there. Oh, crud, important detail, I don't have a college degree. I started college like everyone else because that's what you do, and it turned out I couldn't afford it so I had to drop out with a pile of debt. It's pretty lame, and will probably hold me back, but I've kind of made peace with the fact that I was pretty stupid and irresponsible and I have to pay for it. dibs, my mother is an Irish citizen, but she claimed her citizenship after I was born and since I turned 21 this year the gate has slammed the fuck shut for me to get an Irish passport by birthright, even by legal loophole. It pisses me off because I would just move to goddamned Europe in a heartbeat if I could. There is no rational reason for it, I just wish I could get on a train and be somewhere where no-one speaks the same language as me. Instead I get on the bus and spend three hours with racists and then I'm in Atlanta and it still sucks. I had figured that much out from the research I did since I posted, but thanks for the specific recommendations. I'm pretty sure Berkeley is where Dr. Hal (aka Harry Robins aka every doctor from Half-Life) lives, so that's a plus. Another question: Like I said, I have literally no support network west of Atlanta, and I've never lived more than a bus ride away from someone who could bail me out of a tough situation. This isn't really a question, or asking for favors, I just want to know if that's a totally terribly bad idea or if I'm on the right track here. South Carolina is pretty soul-sucking place.

I've been reading Cory Doctorow's Pirate Cinema for a few minutes before I go to bed, and it definitely is pretty futurist-ic and kind of heavy-handed in how it deals with its theories (especially up through the first few chapters, where I am so far), but I've kind of digged it so far. Even though it does name existing corporations specifically (EMI and Disney are specifically name-dropped), I think maybe it works because it comes from the perspective of a kind of narrow-minded 16-year-old who doesn't really understand anything about life, so everything is coming at him as a new illuminating revelation. It's not as deep as Cloud Atlas by any stretch but I think it works very well because it focuses your attention right where the kid's mind is like a spotlight, showing you everything he knows in complete detail but leaving the periphery dark. I also recently read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress for the first time recently, which also is an obviously dated-in-its-time attempt at futurism, but in the general narrative the idea that we have a thriving moon colony and yet there's only a few dozen to a few hundred computers in existence seems plausible in very general terms, given how the story was framed. So yeah, I didn't like the Sonmi-451 section's use of brand names as generics either, but I don't think it's specifically because it's using brand names or because it got things wrong, I think it's more holistic and general than that.

When I read a book or watch a movie and a character is forced to hold their breath, I will usually instinctively hold my breath and rush through that section. I have no idea why I do this, but it seems relevant to this discussion. Generally I will try to pace my reading to be appropriate to experiencing the text. When I read Nietzsche, I will often sit back and ponder the impact of what he wrote (and usually come to the conclusion that Nietzsche was a pretentious and immature asshat, so you know), and when I read an action thriller I will read at a quick pace and take the information as it comes, usually not fully absorbing the events until the end. This has its ups and downs, but it's not really a conscious decision either way, it's just a reaction to the text.

I'm listening to the very end and I'm glad that you two admitted ahead of time that you sound like douchebags talking about the movie, because you absolutely sound like total douchebags talking about the movie. I'm sure I'm going to sound overly disparaging of your critical faculties here, but from Chris' persistent harping about how Cloud Atlas never should be a movie, I think you're severely underestimating the Wachowskis as filmmakers. Never judge a movie by it's trailer is my rule. Here's a clip from the movie itself, if I understand correctly: http://www.nytimes.c...loud-atlas.html Trailers are always different from the movie. That's why I absolutely love the increasingly common "sneak peeks" websites are posting these days; because they bypass the marketing glitz and glam and show the raw heart of the movie and tell you exactly why they're good. The Wachowskis, in particular, are absolute masters of nonlinear narrative. I'm sure someone will disagree with me on this, but the first 10 minutes of Speed Racer were some of the absolute best 10 minutes of film ever cut, because they brilliantly weaved together multiple stories from multiple time periods into one flowing coherent story that filled in every detail as it needed to be revealed for the perfect emotional impact. Alright I'm going to back off the praise for a minute to admit that the Wachowskis aren't the greatest filmmakers of all time or anything, and they did make the Matrix sequels which were pretty terrible. But what I do think is that if anyone's clever enough to take a story like Cloud Atlas and weave it into something appropriate for film, it would probably be them. The fact that they also threw in a hoverplane is completely trivial. The fact that the trailer--which was the longest goddamned trailer I've ever seen and told me jack shit--showed a magical negro nursing his white master to health, is also probably not reflective of the film. And if it is, you have to own up and accept that the film doesn't have the capacity to tell anything close to the same story as the novel. That'd be like if Peter Jackson tried to keep Tom Bombadil in The Lord of the Rings. It wasn't the film he was making. Allah almighty I hate when people whine about film adaptations. It really is the absolute douchiest thing. But thanks again to owning up to it. I'm going to finish listening to you reading the last paragraph. Good show!

This is all old stuff, but going back to the "Death of the Author" discussion, I'm somewhat intrigued by how broadly this affects art culture. Books, in general, are expected to be quite completely finished when they're released, and shan't be tampered with. By extension, we expect that serial publications are final, and even if the author came up with a clever way to foreshadow later characters and events or tie up plot holes, that can't be done because that would be soiling the already published work (or for that matter, if Dickens ever had wanted to go and make A Tale of Two Cities maybe a little bit concise, I guess that's just too bad). And Allah knows what kind of a fuss people throw when a director tries to go back and revise his work (sorry George, Star Wars is sacred). The only exceptions I can think of to this rule are Portal, which repeatedly added Easter eggs and cinematic revisions in anticipation for the sequel, and The Princess Bride by William Goldman (the novel, mind you, not the film written by the same man), which through its multiple reprints added additional forewords, afterwords, and bonus chapters (this isn't your Leonard Maltin style foreword full of vapid praise either; these are full on extra chapters in the fiction composed by the author himself). Personally, I like the idea that the author can go back and revise or add upon his previous work, but I guess it demands a lot of trust from the readers in the author himself, not just his work.

I've had a damned good time with FTL so far, but I'm also kind of intrigued with the sort of progress all of you have made. Granted, I did watch the IT livestream of FTL, so I had a slight edge compared with just playing the tutorial, but according to my Stats I've only played 18 games and I already beat it. On easy, mind you, I won't lie, but I did it pretty early on with a lucky acquisition of a Hull Bomb and two lasers as well as maxed out shields. I don't recall if I had drones or cloaking or both, I wish the high scores made notes of your final loadout. Now that I've beat the game, I've found that the more interesting challenge is seeing how far I can get with each of the loadouts. The Engi Cruiser Type B is so far the most intriguing I've see, because it has no crew except for one single Engi. I have no idea how to make that work.

I reckon I stand corrected, but it seems peculiar that the pronunciation would be so thoroughly separated from its roots. I figured its pronunciation goes more like kee-HO-tik (IPA: ki:ˈhoʊtik) to match the root, Don Quixote, and I've never heard it said any other way before. Seriously though, how did it get that pronunciation? EDIT: Turns out the short answer is that quixotic was part of the English language so long that it basically predated the notion of correctly pronouncing Spanish words.

Seriously, what's up with Chris pronouncing Quixotic as "kwicks-otic"? I remember back when he just made fun of people for mispronouncing segue and Moog. Is that pronunciation a meme that I missed?

A couple of you mentioned that you prefer being able to resell your book, but none of you actually mentioned buying used. I've found that in general I can buy a used copy of just about any book for a pretty reasonable price, even accounting in shipping. Except for very rare books or first editions, I haven't had to spend more than $10-$20 on a book, including shipping. My family library has several thousand books we've collected over a few generations, mostly used, that we regularly buy and sell on Amazon.com, Alibris.com, and ThriftBooks.com.

So for whatever reason I have really goddamned vivid dreams, where I can remember most everything that happened in excruciating detail. I've started trying to write these down, which is really hard, because I'm not a writer and because I can't remember the exact order that everything happened. This is about the third or forth I've actually bothered write, so I thought some of you might be interested. Sorry I'm a shit writer. ---------------------------------------- I pulled up to the house and Joel looked upon it solemnly. We pulled through the round driveway; I thought I saw a young girl in the corner of my eye but when I turned to look she wasn't there. I turned to Joel to ask if he saw anything but he was fixated on the house, so I dropped the thought. We stopped at the door and got out. The door was carved from dark, almost black wood, and was primarily adorned with a large silver knocker. Joel gave it two very deliberate knocks and stood back, puffing up to confront the master inside. Sounds of rustling and cursing came from inside the house, and momentarily a small, pale man with black messy hair and a selleck mustache an a short, protruding forehead came to the door, dressed in a black bathrobe. "What the hell are you doing here?" "What happened to Christina?" Joel asked, taking a step towards the door. The pale man looked frustrated "I don't know any Christinas, I don't know you, and I don't like people coming to my door like it's the goddamned lost and found booth. Good day!" He slammed the door. Undiscouraged, Joel knocked on the door again. "I told you to get off my porch! What's your problem?" "We know that Christina got mixed up in some devil-worshiping cult with vampires and demons, and the last place we know she came is here! We want to know what happened to her and where we can find her!" The short man glared into Joel's eyes and took a deep breath. "Alright, I'll admit it, I'm a vampire, and I let those Satanist kids use my shed for their demonic rituals or whatever. I saw some girl come here. You want to know what happened to her? She's dead! Burned alive, sent straight to Hell. Now get out of here before this old vampire gives you some hellfire!" The vampire tried to slam the door, but Joel stopped it with his foot. "Wait! Wait." Joel composed himself, and looked back at the vampire. "If she. . . If Christina was really sent to hell. . . Is there anything I can do. . . Anything I can trade to bring her back? To life?" "What are you thinking numbnuts? She's dead! She was burned in a fire! She's two tin cans of ashes in Hell, what good would it do to bring her back? That'd be worse than death right there, having to live like that, with a clueless goddamned boyfriend who thought it'd be romantic to make you live the rest of your life as a charred corpse! Get out of my face!" The vampire made some inane gesture and glared at Joel, who backed off with a look of horror and disgust. For some purpose I don't recall, we got in the Jeep and drove back off. The sky was a strange shade of pink, too early in the evening for a sunset. I was focusing on driving Joel back home, but I was distracted by a fully rigged schooner boat. It was apparently sailing down the road coming from my left, and as I approached and it came into full view I could see it was indeed a fully crewed sailboat on wheels being blown down the road. And he wasn't slowing down. Without stopping for me (although come to think of it how could they stop a boat?), the schooner peeled right around into my lane, and I had to swerve off the road to get around him. Holy shit! The crew, a well-to-do looking family, gave me dirty looks and I sped up to get away from the crazy boat people. Now this road I was in a nice suburb (besides the cult and all that), with lots of pine trees and winding roads, so I figured it wouldn't be hard to evade a wind-powered boat in what was practically a forest, but it seems the world itself was going through some weird transformations. As I was headed up the road, it suddenly started tilting up in front of me, and next thing I know I was headed towards a cliff! I stopped and kept my foot hard on the brake. Looking around, I could see I wasn't experiencing some geological disaster; I was on a giant drawbridge, and a cruise ship was coming up a river where the neighborhood ahead of me should have been. But I was still on the wrong part of a drawbridge, so I decided to ease myself down before the Jeep flipped outright, so I rolled back down, and just as I got off the bridge, I was still rolling back when that goddamned schooner pulled up behind me and I rolled right back into it! I had slowed down enough that neither of us took any damage, but since the bridge was up I got out to ask what the hell was going on. The skipper of the schooner, apparently oblivious to how fucking bizarre it is that he was sailing a boat through the suburbs, and unbothered that my Jeep just backed into his wooden boat, just boasted about how he built it himself, and that his boat runs 17 knots (which isn't exactly the most impressive feat but is alright). While he was talking, the sky suddenly turned a dark shade of magenta, and the entire world to my left suddenly was shattered with a thunderous sound and replaced with some surrealistic Seussian world, with stage lighting and meaningless structures bent at impressive angles. The spaces were broad and strangely void, except for the occasional out-of-place piece of junk. Besides the oblivious skipper, everyone was on guard and freaked out. We were all more freaked out when out of every distant corner we heard alien animal calls, like mutant hyenas or something. We all saw unhuman shadows running out from the distance. Joel shouted "RUN!" And we split out towards the only direction we couldn't see the creatures. In the middle of one wide-open space was a small yellow car; I led Joel to the car to try and get in, and by good luck the doors were unlocked, so we jumped in and locked the doors we could reach. We were okay in the car for a moment, but a crowd of women, all blonde with the exact same face, ran to the back and peered in. When we glanced up and they saw us, their eyes turned red and they grinned wide: They all at once started clawing at the car, shaking it and wailing like monsters, until one of them opened the cargo hatch and the all poured in. Joel and I didn't have weapons, so we could only punch them from our awkward position twisted around the chairs. As we punched them, their teeth turned to fangs turned to razor-like shards, and their faces deformed so their eyes were no longer eyes, but inflated bleeding sores. It wasn't just our punching; they were transforming back into some hideous primordial form: Even as I punched the demon in front of me, the others behind her transformed back. They were weak and their attacks were futile, but their teeth were sharp as bejezzus and cut the shit out of my hands. Other mortals had been running past and the demons gave chase, so when the crowd had thinned enough to give us a chance, we bolted out of the car and ran. I lost sight of Joel, so I just ran with all I had left. I ran through what seemed to be a bar run by furry pigs. I ran past a spider with big eyes like a cartoon character. I almost ran into a giant egg like Humpty Dumpty, and was going to run away when I realized he was just as terrified as me. I wasn't the only one moved out of my world; we were all being chased by demons and none of us had a clue what to do. A thunderous, grinding sound shook the ground itself, and even the demons and harpies scurried away into the cracks. Even when the sound stopped they wouldn't come back out. The hideous grind came back, shook us for moment and stopped again. The next time the sound came back, the survivors used the cacophony to hide their steps, and we creeped closer to the sound. As I rounded a corner towards the source of the sounds, the grinding climaxed with the most horrible viscous sound, like meat grinding and dying men vomiting blood, in a tone so deep and heavy it shook us all in our throats and wrenched our stomachs. When I rounded the corner, I saw the face of Satan himself: Standing 30 meters tall, lanky and nude, legs spread and grasping his dog-like penis in one hand, the splitting image of Frank Zappa twitched in orgasm as massive volumes of spunk oozed from his three meter dick. It was so thick it never fell off the tip, just a lumpy mass of semen hanging, rancid and apparently mixed with greasy blood. Between his legs there was an effigy of Mary the Mother of God constructed of terrible rusted nails, and his sperm dripped down between the nails. He turned down towards us all an cracked the horniest, scariest grin I've ever seen in my life.

Hey! You told me you wouldn't get your Idle Thumbs in my Three Moves Ahead! ...But I'll let this one slide. Brendon Chung is the best, I look forward to listening to this one at work today.

Fair enough. But like I said, it's hard to figure where to start discussion on Illuminatus!, and it's almost as hard just to describe what it's about. I would tell you the basic plot premise but as far as I can tell it doesn't have one. It definitely has at least a few dozen. I'd tell you it's philosophical bend but I think it's even more batshit than any ideology. So the best I can tell you is that it has a general overarching presence of conspiracy and madness of all kinds. Illuminati. Atlantis. Satanists. Homosexual Christian Communists. It's all there. And it's all so wound up and self-contradictory it's hard to say (at least so far as I've gotten) if anyone really has control over anything or if they're all just bullshitting their way through massive global catastrophes and claiming they pulled it off in the end. Wikipedia says "The trilogy is a satirical, postmodern, science fiction-influenced adventure story; a drug-, sex-, and magic-laden trek through a number of conspiracy theories, both historical and imaginary, related to the authors' version of the Illuminati," and that's as good a description as any. It's also an influential book in many joke religions/religions of jokery such as Discordianism and The Church of the SubGenius (and it heavily references the former). Subbes my dear sir, the fnords are not actually spelled fnord. In fact I inserted a few dozen true fnords in my post to prove the point.