Luftmensch

Oh goodness how on earth did we all collectively forget Pikmin? That game. Maybe I'm being a little loose with calling it "atmosphere" or "immersion", but that game had such a beautiful world and just playing it and walking around in that scenery made me happier. Ugh. Gorgeous.

A lady friend I used to date texted me to tell me she would be in town for the first time in three years next month. It felt kind of badass to be able to say "Oh cool, while you're in town do you want to go sailing? In my boat? That I built? With my hands?" I won't send her photos until it actually looks like not a complete PoS.

I have three comments. As I do every week, I listened to this episode on my nightly dog walk. I haven't listened to Gabe Newell's talk at LBJ so I wasn't sure what Sean was talking about at first. Something about Greenlight and API and Sean having to take a walk. Jake seemed to share my confusion. Then all at once everything clicked, and Jake and I simultaneously understood the brilliance of Gabe's incredible Greenlight plans. And once that idea sunk in, I had to take a walk. Fortunately I already was and I walked the rest of the way late at night in a quiet neighborhood laughing out loud like a madman at jokes about booty clappers and babywalls. I agree with Sean with the idea that there aren't really fundamentally likable character designs or anything, but I still agree with Chris with his point that, with the cultural zeitgeist we already have in the developed/western/whatever world, if you were to introduce the characters Rayman and Mario to the world at the same time Mario would still just be a more appealing character because that's the sort of thing we like. As a sort of subpoint, it seems to me the theories don't necessarily contradict. It makes sense to me to have common fundamental rules as well as cultural bias. It's hard to argue that as a humans and as an organisms with some form of nervous system, people are inherently inclined to avoid pain, but at the same time, it's impossible to deny that there are still masochists and ascetics who actively seek out pain. Sean is really bad at describing things. But I totally empathize with him for that because I am too, and like Sean, all my friends spend more time making fun of me for being bad at telling the story than they do actually letting me get out my thoughts. Also like Sean, I have terrible friends. Unlike Sean, my friends don't look like Big Bird and sound like Steven Spielberg.

Didn't they have Tim Schafer and Max Schaefer on at different times? Not regular, sure, but they were on. Maybe.

Yeah, there's some good material to work from. This student film is pretty decent:

That would (hopefully) include both Schafers. Actually it'd be cool they did get some more people from the Doublefine and Telltale offices to come in. So many of them come from a similar background anyway. I love the regular format of the podcast, which is mostly about the specific chemistry of the hosts, so I don't necessarily want it to just turn into an interview show or have special guests all the time, but I do still get excited when someone cool comes on occasionally. Also: Maybe a special 100th episode song? I know it's a long shot but those are fun.

Oh well, it might not even have been anime at all, I just have these weird obscure scraps of memory. It was almost definitely a kids cartoon anyway.

I can't find the original article, but I remember reading the fear from an indie dev that the new Xbox will do away with XBLIG, which would be pretty sad. What would interest me is if Valve used the steam box as an opportunity to make their own version of XBLIG. A lot of the barrier to entry already exists, but one crucial thing I think is that any indie game you can sell on Steam you could just sell online. Since the steambox is going to be a closed system (I assume), it would kind of make sense to open up some kind of controlled channel for indie devs to show off their stuff, on the TV, with the great new controller.

Heck yeah, I listen to it whenever I go running. I don't know if it's just a different cultural aesthetic preference (since I don't know much anime or Japanese media overall) but I love that it's extremely retrofuturistic without just being straight-up dieselpunk or decopunk derivative. Maybe the original source material lends itself to that really well, but it's cool that it takes all the scale and pomposity of early 20th century diplomats and still puts them in a crazy futuristic world without just coming across as a kitsch novelty. I think it makes a difference that they didn't insist that everything in the world is steam or diesel powered.

I think my first real exposure to anime was with 2001's Metropolis. My dad had a big newspaper clipping from the New York Times and was really stoked to see it (I don't know if he did since it was a very limited release). When the DVD came out I was absolutely captivated. It wasn't long before he started buying the Miyazaki films and Akira. I have this weird childhood memory that I can't place. It was of a cartoon, I think an anime, that took place either on an island or at least along the coast somewhere, and there was (I think) a young child who met or was friends with some weird dinosaur that looked like a Pokemon or the Loch Ness monster, and I think the ostensible antagonist was a bearded sailor in a tug boat. This ring any bells?

Like I said before, I'm distinguishing between anecdotes and trends. Since you started your statement with "gee, I don't understand what you're saying" and then proved it with three paragraphs of rant, I think all that can be said has.

But talk about a high skill ceiling. I guess at a certain point getting the muscle memory to be able to just do simple reloads and negotiate a flashlight while shooting at the same time kind of has a skill cap just in how fast a person can move or how fast the game accepts inputs, but with how complex these weapons are, I can imagine a pretty serious metagame coming from precise sequences and tactics to optimize for really specific firefight scenarios. Also, just from my own experienced having lived in a household that totally took advantage of the weird post-9/11 defense research spending spree, I can imagine DoD giving some team of five dudes a $300k grant to study this weird game and analyze how the mechanics could apply to real firefight situations.

Am I the only one thinking that the plot of the buddy-cop movie Shadow and Colossus will feature the third colossus as an anonymous insider informant?

Even your piano can turn against you now:

I figured I'd let this thread cool down and come back before I responded, which it has, so I'll explain the point: The point I was getting at here is that that particular example is an example of sexism (I said that already, but I'll clarify since you quoted my straw man), but unlike the glass ceiling, or rape, it's not completely caused by even though it is expressed as an objectification/degradation of her sex. Which may or may not be that important to the discussion, but, even it it just sounds argumentative and petty, I think it's an important distinction to be able to make, especially if you believe the severity of a crime is a function of its intent (or to be more general, that intent is an argument in the function that defines severity. That's kind of muddy to say). Addressing my hypothetical straw man, you suggest: Which of course I'm not saying, but I do say there's enough meaningful similarities between these two experiences that it's a disservice to say they're completely separate (in programming terms, I would call them instances of the same class). I also don't buy the idea that just by experiencing something, you inherently understand the cause and intent of your experience, any more than someone with a bellyache is inherently certain if they just ate something that disagrees with them or if they're in the early stages of stomach cancer. Sharing anecdotes is valuable for telling an emotionally convincing story, not for diagnosing and solving a statistical problem. So maybe in retrospect I wouldn't make the same argument since it might not be worth making, but I hold my original opinion. I think the positions have all be stated and all hold, so I guess that's all there is to say. Es todo.

I dunno, I think it's unfair to call people nowadays games-illiterate. If you go back to the early days of video games, you had these really challenging games, and of course you still had pretty simple stuff like Pong and Tetris, but a much, much greater proportion of people fell below even the ability or desire to play a game at all, regardless of the challenge. I think game literacy, as it were, is at an all-time high, but the highly literate class of players is proportionately much smaller than the overall player base, and the poorly-literate population is just really big now. Maybe we're just thinking of different ideas of illiterate. I'm thinking, it's not fair to call someone game illiterate if they have experience and understanding of how to play a video game. There's a difference between picking up the sports page and reading Mason & Dixon, sure, but it's still literacy.

It would probably make sense, in that case, to make some kind of primary input that reinforces that looking at details is going to be important. Like on the cast, you mentioned Miasmata's primary input pulls up a compass and watch, and, I think similarly, in Portal 2 the scroll wheel zooms in, which really clearly says you're going to need to examine things either in close detail or at a great distance. I think you already do that in TFoL with the whole press E to look thing, so I dunno, if people are still missing that maybe their expectations are just already skewed. I probably sound like a jerk for saying this, but I think it's fascinating and delightful that Brendon (or should I say you? I don't know if this is going to be a second-person type conversation) posted process images of what amounts to a pretty simple doodle, the kind of thing that I feel like most people would just do in one final pass to pass the time. I dunno, I actually appreciate that sort of stuff a lot. Your (his? Argh if he didn't appear in the thread pronoun choice would be so easy) drawings and assets aren't technically impressive masterpieces in the classic sense of the word, but do actually have a process and weren't just magically concocted into existence in one deft stroke of the artist's brush. I'm certain it will never amount to anything as interesting and meaningful, but that's kind of what I have in mind with keeping a so-called development diary of my own game engine tinkering. Because I guess most tutorialized stuff you see is by people who have really honed their craft almost to a formula and basically know it inside-and-out, and probably don't remember what it feels like not to have been good or know what they're doing. It's probably totally inappropriate for me to compare me keeping a diary of falling repeatedly on my face trying to make a trivial Source SDK compile run a stock map to you (Brendon) drawing a nice little picture of Anita relaxing, but whatever, that's my thoughts.

So this sort of shit makes me feel like an incredible asshole. I've always been aware of that stereotype of the rabid coffee drinker who is the grumpiest piece of shit until he's had his coffee fix, but somehow my idea had always been "Christ, that guy's an asshole, people like that are just shitty and need to have some self-control." I mean, if you know that not having coffee will make you grumpy, you should probably take some mental steps to prepare yourself for unfavorable human interactions, right? Just take the modicum of time to breath deeply, and keep your head low until you've got that caffeine in your system. Well it turns out I'm a huge asshole and a shitty person because I've been doing that for like a week now. Every day for quite a while now I've had some serious cravings to make myself cups of tea. I even have this huge John Wayne mug that has the collective residue of hundreds of cups of tea over the years caked on the inside, which I'm kind of proud of. But yeah, I've been drinking nonstop. I ran out of coffee a little while ago. I also kept catching myself blowing up on people and just feeling like an utter piece of shit. Anyway I figured enough is enough, I need the big guns. Literally the only coffee in the house is a jar of instant, which tastes like shit, so I mixed a french press full with two scoops of instant coffee and one scoop of Ovaltine to compensate (I mean that's still gross but it's kind of less gross), and within a few minutes I felt pretty awesome again. So apparently caffeine was the problem. But I'd been drinking tea the whole time? How do twelve cups of tea not add up to two cups of coffee? Coffee only has like three times the caffeine density. I felt like unwinding so I made a cup of tea, and I looked at the box and in little letters I find out that shit's decaffeinated. Look, family, I feel really bad about acting like a total piece of shit on you and blowing up all week. But you brought it upon yourselves pulling that fucking switcharoo on me. Also I still think that people who are jerks when they don't have their coffee are still assholes, but I think my eyes have been opened to the plight of coffee assholes, and I'm sorry for hating you. But get your act together you fucks.

Here's some stuff about my boat. I originally posted it here. As I embark on the (probably ill-fated) task of stumbling around making some kind of action 2D platformer, I'm closing in on another project that's been looming up my queue for well over a year and a half now: My boat. fig. a: Yeah, it's a boat, take my word on that. It doesn't look like much right now, but even if I take my sweet time on this, I'm within one or two weeks of just being done forever. The number of pieces I need to complete before I can put this thing on the water and go sailing can be counted on one hand: Make the flotation presentable (fig. b ) Route a slot in the bottom for the daggerboard to stick out (the long rectangular hole in the middle is where it goes in) Paint the inside and outside Reinstall all the hardware/seats (everything from seats to oarlocks has been installed before, but was removed to facilitate painting) Tie the sailing rig in place (fig. c) fig. b: The only thing keeping this tub afloat is pink foam insulation Me and my dad picked the kit for this boat from Chesapeake Light Craft. They sell all the necessary components (as well as a lot of the tools) you need to put together a seaworthy boat, including the wood (precut mahogany plywood, which sounds lame but is really high-quality stuff) and all the hardware. In this case, we're building the Northeaster Dory, which weighs about 100lbs. and can carry about 800lbs, so two people can easily carry this into the water if there isn't trailer access, and then four people can all load in and go sailing. fig. c: From left to right: The tiller extension (lets you manipulate the rudder from the middle of the boat), the mast (with a stainless steel rail for the sail as well as a gooseneck that the boom attaches to), and the boom. Our dory doesn't have a name as-of-yet, and still needs to be registered and all that good boat stuff, but that's all clerical work. The actual nitty-gritty hard work of making the damned thing is palpably close to conclusion. We even already have a trailer to tote it around. I'm getting pretty stoked. If you have any suggestions for names, shoot. Max and Dory are the two popular albeit unoriginal contenders right now.

I'm kind of delighted, now that I've played a bit of Dota 2, listening back to old episodes of Idle Thumbs where Sean talks about his play experience and being able to identify, "Oh, he's totally talking about Sand King right now, that's awesome". Even though I've only got 45 hours total logged (including all the minutes sitting in the goddamned queue) and I'm probably in the lowest shittiest tier for the lowest shittiest shits, being able to identify that kind of stuff is pretty fulfilling in itself.

These photos of a fictional Zambian space program from the 60's are a thing of wonder (sorry they're not my photos)

It's a wooden dory, built from a kit sold by Chesapeake Light Craft. You can see photos and details here. Unlike the boat in the photo, mine isn't going to be varnished but painted instead, off-white with navy blue hightlights. The overall length is 17' and only weighs 100lbs, so two people can easily carry it into the water (although we do have a trailer so that isn't really necessary). It's made of mahogany plywood glued together with epoxy. It doesn't sound romantic but it's strong and it looks great. Since its maximum payload is 800lbs it can easily hold four passengers at once (up to three could potentially row at once). Unlike in this photo, where the sail is tied directly to the mast, my mast has a stainless steel track with slides so I can just raise or lower the sail one-handed. I'll start posting pictures of my actual boat later.

Edit: Apparently you can't put urls in the quote tag? Article link. I wasn't sure how to narrow it down; I'm sure there are some public access or local TV stations that just throw out shows without pilots. Syndicated isn't right.

I saw Steven Spielberg's Tintin movie last night. All I had heard about it before was grumblings from animators about how it's an abomination of the medium and an insult to the Tintin series. I don't know about how Tintin fans would feel about it, since I've only barely read the books, but the movie, even with its holes, was enormously fun. Beautiful rendering (I never once felt like the motion capture was weird or inappropriate), brilliant physical humor, incredible setpieces, and goddamned brilliant physical humor (I can't emphasize enough how brilliant it was). The story had its holes, sure, but it did the job and none of the inconsistencies were so bad you couldn't look past them. It's on Netflix now.

Sure, catch me on Steam and I'll send you an invite. My username and avatar are the same as on the forums. While you're at it, join The Idle Thumbs Lords Management Consortium group on Steam.