Patrick R

If you'll permit, I'd like to push my gay agenda. If you want to belong to a culture, the LGBT community is an awesome one. We've produced a huge range of art, music, films, literature, poetry, theater, and more. We have a history of riots and clandestine meetings and plague and parades. And best of all, our culture extends to other nations! Go to France and see your people in Le Marais! Or to Japan, in Ni-chōme! Try turning gay! You can't choose your orientation, but you can choose to try to choose. Who knows, you might like it. And then you'll finally belong and also not belong because holy shit so much of the world does not give a fuck about non-straight people.

I think being able to opt into just being assigned a team would be good. Especially when you are an amateur, there is a trepidation to forcing yourself on someone who's more experienced, and you might assume that's everyone.

Why would someone steer a car towards a cliff when they could steer a car towards a vast featureless desert? I imagine it's to seek thrills?

When Mission: Impossible 2 opened with Ethan Hunt free-climbing that mountain, it annoyed me so much. If the point of that scene was to demonstrate that he's a moron, congratulations, mission accomplished.

He's a child in that scene, right?

All this reminds me of "hood Chinese food".

We'll just do it in this thread.

I think the beeping is a game changer. Leaving something beeping is pretty bad.

I discovered last night that my preferred background music for writing is Commodore 64 music. I never grew up with one, but the music falls into a sweet spot of engaging but innocuous that helps me work.

I guess it just feels like an easy thing to forget to me, because I neither care about leaving numbers there nor do I care if anyone leaves numbers there for me. Because the maximum amount it can affect my life is that I have to push one more button on a keypad. So to take it as a sleight or a sign of rudeness is just odd to me. I bet if I were to look at my microwave in my home right now there'd be some leftover time on it. I think most people who do it probably also don't care if they have to be the ones to hit clear. Because it is such an impossibly tiny thing to correct. It's like if someone borrows your stapler and when they put it back on your desk they don't put it at the exact 90 degree angle you had it before. It doesn't mean they don't think you are worth it, it just means they probably didn't even think about it. Especially when you have a limited amount of time for lunch and you are just trying to get your food. It's an easy situation to get distracted in. Now, the dirty microwave thing is way different. Because if you don't wipe that damned hot pocket cheese off the glass the moment it gets there, it will harden and turn black and never leave. That seems worth getting angry over.

Except turning the lights off is a matter of saving electricity. If you're the last one out, no one is around to turn it off and it will stay on for God knows how long. A microwave uses the same amount of electricity either way, and in this context there's a person right behind you who can hit clear in the matter of .5 seconds. Their fingers will already be there anyway. It's not the same amount of energy as replacing a roll of toilet paper or anything, it takes no time and effort to correct. I'm not saying it's not the right thing to do, but to cause such ire is baffling to me, unless just seeing numbers on a microwave you're about to use upsets you in an OCD kind of way.

I was planning on doing a bunch of different electronic variants on several Christmas Carols for people to use in their games, but my own game is taking way longer than it should, so I'll just post what I was able to do: Carol of the Bells - Midi Carol of the Bells - Dx10 Carol of the Bells - Fucked Carol of the Bells - Worst Carol of the Bells - Completely Ruined And then I tried my hand at doing original Christmas-sounding music, and got this: Ice Cube Christmas Ice Cube Christmas (remixed at the end for easier looping)

There are shows that can walk that line. The Larry Sanders Show is as funny as sitcoms get but the characters are all real and you grow to care about them deeply. Parks and Rec got there occasionally, but mostly when I watch comedy I just want to laugh. I don't care if any of these fictional people learn lessons because 98% of sitcom characters have the emotional maturity of 7th graders. They have to in order to keep cranking out jokes. I like shows like 30 Rock and Seinfeld and Arrested Development (well, Arrested Development after the first season) that just lean into that, instead of trying to warm my heart. There is a shitload of media out there depicting realistic characters I can care about, shows that don't have a joke-every-20-seconds mandate. If I want to watch characters grow and stumble and come together and fall apart, I'll watch Six Feet Under or Mad Men. But if I want to laugh for 22 minutes, I will never put on a "heart-warming comedy" like The Office or Parks and Rec. I don't like that middle ground. I like the "dramedy" side of that middle ground even less. I am all about the identity politics of a show like Orange is The New Black, but that straddling between comedy and drama usually just results in a tonal mush that puts me off. Same with a show like Men of a Certain Age or Weeds or Shameless or any of that Showtime shit.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think a lot of Tina Fey's shows rely on nasty caricature, so it's not as if the East Coast characters aren't also portrayed as that. It's just that there's a dozen different East Coast caricatures that are more specific and well-observed, where the Midwest stuff is kind of lazy. My bigger problem is she does the Seinfeld thing where most ethnic minorities are just wacky obstacles with ludicrous accents instead of actual characters. But I still thought that show was funny as hell. Her joke-factory approach to sitcoms really clicks with me. I get tired of shows like Parks and Rec that try to wring pathos out of their cartoon-like characters. By the end of that show it felt like every episode was 60% people hugging and saying supportive things, possibly (in my mind) to pander to their Tumblr fanbase.

This is the weirdest conversation in the world to me. I don't even think of it as "leftover time" I just think of it as what the microwave shows if you pull something out early. It takes one button to clear it. Sometimes people remember to clear it sometimes people don't. That is one button you have to press. I can see it being slightly annoying, maybe, but such anger? Not cleaning the microwave in shared environments is definitely a way worse problem.

I don't know if we're all planning on rewatching these movies on the same time frame (like, say, one a week) or if we're all just gonna go at our own speed, but between Wizard Jam and prepping for two episodes of my podcast, I won't have time to do any of it until 2016.

Is there a Bo Jackson of video games? Are there e-sports athletes (is that even what you call them?) that compete at high levels in multiple games? I can't figure if that should be more or less common than in physical sports?

I will withhold my opinions on this until I rewatch, but my memory is that it absolutely constantly plays the fat potato people for laughs. It's one of the reasons I haven't gone back to it.

Yeah, I think organizing a live watch across all these time zones would be a nightmare. I don't know if I can make it through Toy Story again. One of those movies I wore out as a kid, every moment is so clearly burned into my brain that watching it feels redundant and weird. I have the same problem with Star Wars.

Me and my friend did a variant called "survival mode" on battle course 2, where you drive around shooting every green shell as soon as you get it, laying every banana as soon as you get it, and shooting every red shell you get into the wall (which we called "bricking") as soon as you get it. BUT if you get a feather you can jump into the safe zones while the other guy has to run the gauntlet, still shooting green shells and laying bananas everywhere. Then if he gets a feather, he gets to jump into the safe zone and you have to leave. Last person standing wins.

I have already worked out the whole story in my head, this thread is mostly to pressure myself to write it down and finish it as a game. It's not going to be as technically audacious as What Happened To Us (which I've very slowly been working on in TyrannoBuilder since the last game jam), no worrying about integrating sound or anything like that. It's a sci-fi story about suicide with the holiday season (I think probably starting around mid-November) as a backdrop. It's based on my own experiences with seasonal affective disorder and suicidal ideation. It'll probably be a huge bummer. It is ok if you don't want to play it.

Wrote about 60 new screens for this. Didn't save. Lost everything. Dumb dumb dumb. Watched Into the Abyss, a Werner Herzog documentary about death row and capital punishment, that ended up being great research, suggesting a lot of great details I hadn't considered. Also watched The Bridge, the documentary about people committing suicide off of the Golden Gate bridge. Wasn't good at all, very shallow and aimless. If you are interested in being a "Beta Tester" for this, send me a message and I'll link you to my rough draft when I'm done. Basically I'll mostly need feedback on pacing, since this NEEDS to be under 45 minutes (preferably under 30) or no one will play it through at all.

NO ONE AGREES ON ANYTHING. I love Ratatouille, hate that speech. It's untrue (critics of every medium have historically been hugely important to shaping them! Only assholes love to write bad reviews!) and feels weirdly like sour grapes from a group of artists who have basically never had to deal with negative criticism to begin with. Also their whole movie IS criticism of Disney, so it's also weirdly hypocritical? "The average piece of junk is more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. Except for before when we were criticizing all those direct to video Little Mermaid and Lion King sequels, that doesn't count." I think Rataouille is the most gorgeous and inventive of Pixar's films (I adore that it is a critical but earnest love-letter to everything Disney could be but had, in recent years, failed to live up to), but I should say that I haven't seen it in nearly ten years. Most of these movies I only saw once or twice when they came out. This whole string of conversations will probably make me rewatch them all next year.The video store I work at has most of them on Blu-Ray.

There are obvious parts of Wall-E that are incredible (SO GORGEOUS), but I always thought the social commentary was so shallow and naive. And I really don't like love at first sight as a device, so a lot of it left me kind of cold.

ELABORATE IS IT BECAUSE THERE'S NO POO-POO PLATTER JOKES IN TOY STORY? EDIT: Ah, ok.