agorman

Nick Breckon's story about his neighbor's conversation was fabulous. It also revealed to me that my dream podcast from the Idle Thumbs network is just 10-15 minutes of Nick Breckon telling a life story or ranting about something.

This was a crazy fever-dream of an episode. I loved it.

Gotta have the spice

One weird game community that I'm extremely glad I got to be a part of was TF2 on the 360. There wasn't much support given to it post-launch, and so it just remained vanilla TF2 as the PC version started getting all the character updates. A few months after the Orange Box came out, the servers were populated by a small group of the same people, and after a while we all kinda just knew each other. I fell off after I built myself a gaming PC, and started playing TF2 there instead. A year or so later, I went back to the 360 version to see if anyone was still on, and I was surprised to find active servers! Recently, someone had discovered how to turn on the dev console, which was not restricted in any way, as it usually is in Valve multiplayer games. All the servers were more or less chaos as a result. That specific multiplayer community feels pretty unique...I haven't had quite that experience with any other game.

I will forever be bummed that I missed out on the golden age of Battlefield:1942 multiplayer

Other than The Sense of an Ending, the only other book I've ready by Barnes is England, England. These two novels also share a fair amount of thematic content, but England, England explores how we revise our history on a more macro scale than Sense of an Ending does. I'm curious if people who have more read more of Barnes find this thematic through line in most of his work, or if I'm just looking at a small sample size of his work here.

I'll be headed to PAX for Sunday only, but live in the Boston area, and would love to meetup with folks sometime if you all have time.

I'm only about halfway through this thread but this has some extremely good content. My god

I never saw these movies and watched the first three with a group of friends and a couple beers last weekend. I can see why some people are super into this series but I wouldn't be able to watch it if I wasn't with a group of friends. It's more entertaining to watch them and be mind-boggled that it somehow spawned what soon will be eight movies and one of the most financially successful film franchises ever made. The first three are so obviously lower budget B-Movies, it's pretty amazing to watch them knowing what the series is now known for. I'm looking forward to making my way through 4-7 soon...I think I will need friends and beer to get through them again.

The mail from the reader who thought resisting scratching an itch would send you into Mortal Kombat is just the best. Reminded me of the crushing disappointment I faced as a kid when I learned that eating Gushers would not turn your head into a fruit. Kids are the best.

I occasionally do some streaming at twitch.tv/gormanate if anyone is interested in watching me play Dark Souls 2! I'll add and follow you all.

I'm really excited that you're loosening the format. Episodes where you just let the conversation take you wherever it wants are my favorite!

This happens???????

I normally try to wait until Christmas to open these kind of things, but I couldn't restrain myself because I'm a child. I got The Wizard t-shirt, a Shitty Wizard Tetraptych, a signed copy of Moonglow by Michael Chabon, and incredibly delicious home made cookies from @Argobot and @Chris. In the words that Mario says at the end of the level, "Thank you, so nice!"

I've been slowly plodding my way through Dark Souls for over a year now (albeit with large gaps in time I spend playing it), and hearing Nick blow through this thing in weeks makes me feel like a huge baby.

I have started doing this about things I care about on the internet and it has improved my life significantly.

I am extremely excited about this. I also have extremely strong memories around reading the first 3-4 books. I was a bit younger (gosh, it must have been around when I was in 2nd grade), but I can recall my mom coming home from the bookstore with these books she had heard some of her friends talking about. My neighbors would come over and we would all read the books together, often times out in my backyard on a picnic blanket eating cheerios (my mom organized stuff like this with my neighbors all the time.) When the 4th came out we discovered Jim Dale's audiobooks (on tape! I did not have a CD player until way later than the rest of the world), and went back and listened to the first 3 all on audiobook. Jim Dale's voice is permanently embedded in my head as the canonical voices of the characters. Also I remember lots of arguments stemming from how to pronounce Hermonie and Dobby.

I'm just posting to express my adoration for this! It looks so great!

[Edit] - I kept some concepts from my original idea, but drastically changed what the core gameplay loop is. Concept: This game is a top-down 2D management game where you are in charge of several workers that are used to try and keep alive a computer system that is constantly in danger of being shut down. Inspired in large part by battle screens in FTL. Basic Ideas There are several stations workers need to attend to keep the computer system running. Hackers and viruses come in, workers have to fight them. Computer in a gross/not well maintained environment - When the code gates are creamy, the system starts to overheat, and workers move slower from station to station. Considering several more additional systems and threats, but I'm trying to be realistic about the time I'll be able to put into this project and want it to be relatively balanced by the time it's done, so not sure how many more variables I'll get to introduce.

I'm definitely down for drinks/food somewhere! Somewhat relatedly...I've never been to PAX before...does anyone have good recommendations on how to best use my time there?

Yayyyyyyyyyyy you got it! Sorry that took so long! I also got mine about a week ago! (pictures incoming, once I figure out how to upload images here!)

I finally watched Season 1 of Friday Night Lights and man, what a great show. I could nitpick some parts of it, and personally didn't really care about Jason and Lyla's relationship very much, but it's shockingly refreshing to see a show so full of love and compassion for its characters. This show also made me realize how rare it is to see a mature, committed marriage between two people who deeply love one another. I'm really struck by it and I can't wait to keep watching more, (though everyone keeps prepping me for how bad Season 2 is)

Not technically my shit, but a good friend of mine got published in The Atlantic (!) about how he sold spells on eBay for beer money, and it's a pretty good read (I would say this if I wasn't his friend!) http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/12/ebay-fortuneteller/421542/

I saw Spotlight last night and I think it might be my favorite movie I've seen this year. I have sat here for like 10 minutes trying to cohere my thoughts into something worthwhile but have failed. The whole movie is so understated (the aesthetics are perfect) and resists temptation to be showy or flashy compared to the version of this movie I can imagine being portrayed in The Newsroom or something similar

Go back! It's really something else. Some passages hit uncomfortably close to home for me. This one from Pride that particularly devastated me.