Patrick R

To go all the way back, I've probably spent more co-op hours playing Zombies Ate My Neighbors than any other game.

I am excited about seeing Mikal Cronin play live tomorrow.

My partner has a pretty big fear of bed bugs, so we don't buy any cloth furniture second hand.

Just listened to the second episode. I am definitely enjoying listening to a podcast about something I don't know anything about, because I can't get mad and disagree with you. Also Trigun and Dragonball Z are two of the few animes I've seen, so it was nice to be able to follow the conversation. I will say, in response to the idea that westerns took influence from Kurosawa but it doesn't go the other way, that's not really true. At the very least most of Kurosawa's samurai films were responses to John Ford westerns of the 30's and 40's. So Kurosawa's influence on westerns was actually just that influence folding back in on itself. Also, isn't your music from Trigun? I've thought it was this whole time but you never mentioned it on this episode so now I don't know.

Weird. I just selected some PL maps on different servers and they all had people playing as robots and tank races and stuff. Maybe I just happened to pick several servers in a row that were running their own weird thing.

I just played TF2 for the first time in a year. What the hell is going on? All the PL maps are robots and tanks and all these other insane mode changes I don't understand at all.

They are definitely the Travis and Justin McElroy of Idle Thumbs in that way. And maybe other ways.

There were also two Power Rangers rip-offs that both took place in virtual reality: The absolute best moment from the VR Troopers opening:

How essential to Pay Day 2 is the DLC? Been eyeing that game for a while and not sure whether I should grab the GOTY version or not.

I definitely intend to try Legendary at some point, but since Brutal already had me constantly dying and doing the same sections over and over (the first vignette's major battle took me 3 hours to beat) I'll probably hold off until I get more acclimated to the specifics of Halo enemies. Example: In the first vignette's major battle sequence, two Hunters spawn in at some point. I unloaded about 6 grenades and two fully loaded weapons into each before they died. I imagine there was a specific place I was supposed to shoot them but since the game didn't tell me I didn't know, and spent forever patiently strafing and unloading clip after clip after clip into them with seemingly no effect. I would like to play the main title games to get a feel for how the combat...evolved but I am worried that the story bits will annoy me too much. Also my 360 can't play regular XBox games, so 1 & 2 are out anyhow. So between 3 and Reach I will probably go with whatever I can find cheaper used at Gamestop.

Just finished Halo 3: ODST. First Halo game I've ever played, outside of about 10 minutes of the first game at a friend's house. I get the hype! Super fun, especially since playing on Brutal meant I kept repeatedly getting my ass handed to me. It was interesting to play ODST without playing any of the others because there's no attempts in ODST to teach you how Halo games work. I sorta had to figure out what weapons did what and how to beat different enemies through dying a lot, the way I had to learn Spelunky. And there's no explanation for who the aliens are and what war you're in or why or any of that. I don't even know if the characters in it are in other Halo games. Not that I could follow the story anyway, since there's weirdly no subtitles option. I want to play more Halo but I have no idea where to start. What's the next 360 Halo game I should play?

I got drunk and saw a film print of Terminator 2 last night and then came here and wrote an angry diatribe about Fury Road and the death of analog thrills (ugh) and then immediately thought "hey don't do that" and deleted it. I don't think James Cameron ever shot action scenes better than Terminator 2's. The Terminator is hampered a bit by it's budget and Aliens is hampered by the fact that no one can really move around right in those alien suits. I totally understand preferring those other two films. I think they both have better scripts. But in terms of what I actually watch these movies for, Terminator 2 is the tops.

EDIT: I like Terminator 2 a lot.

Short Circuit 2 on the other hand...

I must be some bizarre case study because I adored the VATS. In 60+ hours of gameplay seeing Raider's heads explode in slow-motion never got old. The only thing I don't like about the combat is how it was often you line up a shot in VATS only to have all your bullets go directly into a nearby wall that you didn't think was in your way.

I remember that Xbox tech demo! Or at least, I remember thinking the screenshots in EGM were rad.

Just what the world needs, another 80 minute documentary on a subject that could be better covered with a 5 page magazine article.

One day, at some sort of family function, someone fifteen years younger than me is going to say something hurtful about the 1989 Batman and I'm going to get angry and make a fool of myself.

I don't know who you were on the podcast, but no one's voice sounded bad to me. Then again, it's a podcast about nerd stuff so the bar for radio-friendly voices is very low.

Tom Hardy is such a good actor he knows when he is not the protagonist. One of my favorite things about Fury Road is how unrelatable and inscrutable Max is. It allows Furiosa's story to shine. But seriously, watch Bronson and then Inception and then Locke and then Mad Max to get an idea of how good an actor he is. He's basically in a "Gary Oldman in the 90's" mode right now where he veers between wildly different characters, nailing them every time.

Added, but if any of you start asking me for my TF2 items I'm gonna be so mad.

I enjoyed this! Admittedly I know nothing about anime, so it was mostly just me nodding my head and trying to keep up (it's very hard to Google anime terms if you don't know how to spell them) but I think I got the gist of it all. There is the typical "I don't know who's voice belongs to who" situation that you get the first time listening to any podcast, but I think more thorough introductions are in order. Even if it's just your names and where you live, it might help me distinguish you from one another (since you're using your real names and not forum names). Also what the hell is the idol industry? I feel like an explanation started and then stopped suddenly.

Yep! And employees had to pay (something like 90 bucks) for these screenings too! You can opt out of it (I always did, because gross) but the months leading up to them was like the holiday season of shitty health nut behavior.

My partner is a social worker who specializes in HIV-positive populations, and they pointed me to this article that they said explains it pretty well. They think a lot of this is about hospitals covering their asses and not wanting to be legally responsible on the slim chance that someone gets a blood transfusion with HIV positive blood. Gay men can still donate organs, because organ donation recipients sign waivers before receiving the transplant (and are informed if the person donating was a high risk for HIV). Blood donation, on the other hand, often happens rapidly because of sudden accidents. If someone is in a car wreck the doctors can't wait for their consent to give them blood. My partner actually worked for a study that was trying to educate people on organ donation waiting lists about how slim the chances are to contract HIV just because the donor was a gay man, and how even in the event of contracting HIV it's very manageable compared to kidney or liver failure.

I was a picky eater for a long time (broke out of it a couple years ago once I started working as a cook) but I would never have done that. But even when going to places other people would want to go to I would get made fun of and judged for only ordering chicken fried rice or burgers or whatever sushi has fried shrimp in it. I always thought that was incredibly shitty and unnecessary. I think there is a weird very blurry line where people go from being enthusiastic about health and nutrition to being too aggressive with it, and there is a weird culture of "if you live a healthy life you are a better person than those sheeple who still eat processed foods" that goes with it and it grosses me out. It partly goes into my beliefs about body positivity, and ties into the trope of the "good fatty" who eats healthy and works out and still can't control their size, and that they are "better" than those who eat crap and don't exercise. A lot of people I have dealt with who are health nuts (read: get mad at people who don't meet their standards for healthy living) are people who were fat growing up and worked really hard to achieve and maintain their ideal size. Which is really great for them, except when they then turn that fear outward and shit-talk every fat person they see. I used to work at Whole Foods and this kind of behavior was an epidemic, and the corporate culture totally supported it (even giving greater employee discounts to those who get health screenings which measured irrelevant shit like BMI) so it's no surprise. To be clear, not accusing anyone here of any of this. Just explaining where I'm coming from and why it feels so weird to me.