plasticflesh

Re: Double Dare Portal 2's "Old Aperture" location encapsulates for me the grody terror of "Double Dare." A kitchen/bathroom tile covered facility with phyiscal challenges, lots of slime, and an antagonizing voice on the PA system, and a live studio audience as the Aperture researchers.

Great episode, Nick's presence is literally terrifying. I hope this marks a turning point in Important If True where the podcast becomes about the cosmic horror that is hosting a podcast

Thank you! I will indeed look it up. I agree that November did lack a narrative wholeness. It was a feverish sequence of vignettes. My only other entrance to Estonian cinema, or to literature or media of any kind, is through the animation of Pritt Parn and many other directors. Chris Robinson, director of the Ottawa International Film Festival, wrote a book "Estonian Animation: Between Genius and Utter Illiteracy" and was organizing many screenings of their stuff in NYC in 2005 or so. I recall a great QA with a pair of directors, I can't recall exactly sure whom though, I want to say Matti Kutt was one of them. I also definitely saw Pritt Parn at a small screening in 2013 or so in Brooklyn. So I viewed November through that lens, of a sort of live action animation. And it did indeed capture the intense absurdity and tenderness that those animations have. I also am drawn to it because I enjoy period piece or fantasy movies with a supernatural or magical realism element.

I saw this really interesting Estonian film "November" yesterday. It mixes Pagan and Christian mythology in a story about unrequited love and making ends meet by any means necessary in medieval Estonia. Weird, macabre, whimsical, absurd, beautifully shot.

I didn't seem to find a thread of this game and I'm compelled to make one. If one exists and I searched wrong, nixing this thread is fine by me. Consulting the idle slack, I have been informed that the game has significant controversy due to its bad history, exclusion of period racial diversity, women characters relegated to be wives and sex workers, and a very embarrassing development staff. I now have a feeling of shame for not researching this more before purchasing it; instead pursuing my compulsive obsession for escapist fantasy. As for the game, it so far is interesting for it is gated progress open world, a Tell-Tale style story telling system in the fashion of forward moving branching choices that return to a bottle neck plot point. It does have a sort of 1980s writing style at best. It's interesting in that the pacing so far seems to be slow and procedural. The environments look nice and I do like the illustrated map and altar style menu design.

I had some good long sessions a month or so ago. Very good game. I like it's focus on environmental balance, and that most systems have some sort of waste product that can feed back into other systems. Very tricky to make a colony that can be well oxygenated and ventilated, well fed, clean, disease free, stable power system, etc. I had to put it down because it was one of those "one more cycle" games for me.

ah yes, that's the spirit anyway I'll report back with my experiences whenever I spend another bit of time with the game. I bumped into a coworker who has been enjoying it because "it's like gaming in the 90s." He seems unaware of the controversy. So I'll see what he has to say eventually.

Ugh those descriptions of mechanical misogyny in this game is not a compelling inspiration to continue my play. I haven't played more since that Sunday session. Maybe I'll log in and do some squats though. May the lord dam my forsaken void of temperance to build a bulwark against future impulsive torrents of un-researched purchased based on unverified anecdotes. An industrious and diligent beaver lord, using his holy flat beaver tail to dam it up with logs of research and knowledge. With a dry little hovel inside for baby lord beavers.

I'll try using my new spade

I played the game for another hour last night, doing a little bit of post credit sequence stuff in the Rattay town. It was boring, for the second time the game had me search around for a spade. I bought one, then got a new mission from the castle lords, and noticed the game autosaved so decided that was a good place to stop. In spite of the game having various mechanics as mentioned above that limit ease of use in favor of 'realism' such as eating, injury systems, limited saving, it does have certain ease of use mechanics that I question. One is fast travel, which I haven't used yet, which I always have issue with but this one might be some kind of mini game with interference. But the most rediculous feature the chest next to save-beds apparently teleports items between all the other chests next to save beds. This is more offensive than all the willful omissions of race, perks that give stinkiness a manly musk to influence women, and other fantasies of a hard right revisionist appocalyptic past. How dare my peasant have a magical chest of teleporting lentil soups. If this game is so dedicated to realism I should have to hire a donkey to transport my pretzels I don't think I've spotted a potato

Since I'm an animation nut, and if you're intersting in drawing cartoon style, it's also interesting to look at animation bibles to see what they prescribe for their shows. King of the Hill Animation Pointers, Story Boarding the Simpsons Way PDF

"The Art Spirit by Robert Henrii" is one of my favorite drawing instruction books, because it's basically all expression and no technique, and therefore it's sort of a useless book, but I find it so amusing for it's pretentious inspiration quality. I was also really inspired by Giorgio Morandi, an abstract painter who ended up drawing the same still life for decades. This article has some good quotes, such as: "One can travel the world and see nothing," he said, "To achieve understanding it is necessary not to see many things, but to look hard at what you do see." In terms of actually helpful books I became a sort of perspective nerd at one point. I can't think of actually helpful books besides the totally cheesy but I think not bad "Drawing on the Right side of the Brain", and the terribly religious, new age, self help trollop "The Artists Way", but it might have some interesting exercises buried in there.

Re: drawing Recently I've been giving identical advice to beginners as what @Problem Machine mentioned above, but I phrase it differently: as expression versus technique. The expression of representing the idea comes first and in my opinion is more important. The technique of perfecting the representation is something that comes with practice and time. I think about it in terms of music, too. Punk rock is always notorious for musicians using very simple techniques, 3 chord songs if even that, but are also celebrated for their enthusiasm and charisma in early works. This is why I don't like to decry stick figures. I think it is a miracle that smiley faces and stick figures exist, and that humans can so easily glob onto their semiotic meaning. XKCD for one is brilliant and conveying the versatility of a stick figure. Anyway I found for me personally that I enjoy art instructors who focus more on expression and idea rather than technique. Of course an art instructor is meant to teach technique, but also to be supportive in celebrating ideas and charisma and enthusiasm. So my suggestion is if a person goes to an art class and is over whelmed or feels bullied out of it, in my opinion that is the fault of the professor. But people are also all different, and some desire the boot camp mean professor approach, so finding a good art class is like finding a therapist, it often is about a relationship between the tutor and tutee.

I'm also compelled to share this Animaniacs bit that faithfully reenacts the entire Frozen Peas bit, just cleaning up a bit of the blue bits. It's pretty verbatim. It's good. I'm not sure why there's a bit of The Critic at the front of this youtube. The Critic also does a lot of Welles jokes so there's that.

I am compelled to assert the most pedantic bird related correction that is a sort of curse laid upon me by hanging out with bird watchers. Technically there is no such thing as a "sea gull," it is just "gull." There are many types of gulls, but there is no distinction between sea gulls and land gulls, as there is no sort of land gull, all gulls are of the sea. 🕊️

Wow that is a really cool analogy that never occurred to me. It is totally on point and I dig it

This is very good

I have looked into the 2025 Important If True episode 388 for January 2025, and found this image of a more advance robot Nick Breckon:

I agree about your Dark Souls thematic despair, and you sum it up very well. Would you think that Getting Over It is attempting a slightly similar but tonally parallel, premise?

I agree. Completing most games was never a consideration for me as a kid due to this hardness. Perhaps some games did have surmountable challenges, but most of the time I used cheat codes in order to just explore the game world. Eventually I discovered the hint book market and eventual via AOL, online walkthroughs. I never played the amiga/c64 era games in ernest. The closest was C64's Mission Impossible or Paradroid at a friends house. My family owned Montezuma's Revenge, but on EGA DOS, which is not the way to play that game... so, extra hard!

Re: Hard From the most cynical point of view: 80s games, if they were arcade games, might have been hard to increase money spent. 90s console games often had hard 2nd or 3rd levels to prevent the game being beaten within the 1 or 2 day rental period. So those scales of hardness are often about obfuscating game play to increase profits. I think the "Dark Souls" hard and to a lesser extent "Kaizo Mario" style "hard" is more about challenge in and of itself. Dark Souls hard is something I love, because it's about embodying the challenge in that world. But it's also about freedom of exploration and player choices. Getting Over It is almost like a rhythm game, in that it is so linear, and thus a very limited amount of solutions or strategies possible. Perhaps a hardcore version of Diamonds should be developed, perhaps titled "Dark Diamonds" or "Diamonds Souls" or "Diamonds with Bennet Foddy" so that it can employ the tag line: "Nothing is harder than Diamonds." The mouse-input puts me right off of Getting Over It, sadly. I just really, really, hate using the mouse to play games. I wonder if it would adapt well to a game pad? What would be really interesting is a bespoke giant force-feed-back mallet input device for Getting Over It. Perhaps for the Arcade Edition. Ofcourse also while sitting inside a jar. Re: Speedrun

I recently completed Ossuary. (steam link) (developer's page) A short dialog based adventure game, it is a esoteric philosophical nightmare based on "Discordian thought" which is a sort of subversive satirical religion. The Ossuary game plays like a more concise version of Yume Nikki mixed with the sword fighting from Monkey Island. You explore a small after life world talking to people, and using a verb inventory of Sins to incite them to action. It is interesting and short, I spent maybe 3 hours on the main game. I also recommend the free Ossuary Demo as it is basically a completely separate and unique episode of the game.

This is an interesting topic because I'm really picky about game ads not portraying gameplay footage. I understand why this is, that you want to sell a dream if the product isn't beautiful by mainstream marketing standards. The above Mario 3 TV spot is my favorite weird ad like that. I like this ad because it's more about what the game is. But like this is obviously the exact point Tom Francis is getting on with with his marketing style, focusing on gameplay instead of lifestyling.

My theory is that Goldeneye 64 made a bold step towards murdering cheat codes in games. By making the cheat-like systems a reward for skillful play of the game. Instead of making the cheat system a sort of tourism-mode way of exploring the game. Were there other games that had Goldeneye 64-like unlockable cheat systems? I also like something fart I forget what i was going to say. Oh right, I also like how speedrunners use programming exploits to find "hidden features," Quake's rocket jump being a famous one for becoming a real feature.

https://status.slack.com/ this thing says it's all on fire at the moment, so there's that