Patrick R

...Dragon Age: Inquisition has trans characters? Are trans characters in that kind of fantasy fiction even a thing? I wanted to hear way more about that.

...you guys. It's Deus Ex. Deus Ex is the best game.

I've been playing The Swapper and at first the obvious touchstones were Moon and Super Metroid, but now that I think about it, it actually reminds me a lot of Echo the Dolphin. Especially with the mysterious glyphs you keep encountering.

I remember listening to the audiobook of Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA, and it was just like listening to a 19 hour Aristocrats joke, with war crimes replacing sex acts.

*cough cough* http://inherentvice.wbmoviescreenings.com/ Whoa, what, where did that come from? *whistles, walking away*

Finally beat Sonic the Hedgehog 2, but I had to resort to using save states, so I don't think it counts. Gonna try to beat it for realsies before the new year.

This was a really good episode.

I thought I invented the clap!

Basically the way we do it is I have both parties press record, then I count down to three and have both parties try to clap into the mic at the same time, so there's a visual spike in the recording. The two claps never sync up perfectly, but it gives you a good baseline. Then, in Audacity, you just import both recordings, sync up the claps, and then adjust as needed. It's not like music, where tracks have to be perfectly in sync to sound any good at all, so generally* this editing together of the podcasts only takes about five minutes. Then you just export it as a single track. And this way you can adjust the volume of the individual tracks, in case one is too loud or too quiet, or even edit out pauses without creating noticeable jump cuts in the audio. *I have had issues with one guest where the program they used to record kept omitting tiny bits of data from the audio, which made their track faster than mine, which meant I had to spend 4 hair-pulling hours editing the two tracks to keep them in sync but that was a one time problem. Usually it's really easy.

That's how I do it on my podcast. That's how MBMBAM does it.

Wow. I think I didn't play a single 2014 game this year.

I dunno, I think choosing to opt out of all that is also fine. I only have so much time in my life, I'd rather dedicate it to culture I care about. And if that means I'm out of touch, which I surely am, well that's a choice I've made.

"Meryl's frequency is on the back of the CD case..."

I am constantly on YouTube and Twitter though and the only reason I know about Taylor Swift's new album is because I follow the guy who directed the Blank Spaces video. EDIT: I guess it's different if you are in school? Like, if you are high-school or college age you probably have exponentially more day-to-day interactions with your peers than I do as a 26 year old. I feel like my pop culture awareness sharply plummeted in 2006, as soon as I graduated high school and didn't go to college.

It always amazes me that the concept of a "pop music superstar" still exists in a world where FM radio is so irrelevant.

http://www.businessinsider.com/banker-pros-cheer-wolf-of-wall-street-2013-12

Oh man, if you guys get a chance to see Whiplash DO IT. That movie is so amazing. I saw the 2013 short it's adapted from earlier this year and it was great but I never imagined it could be expanded to feature-length so successfully. Easily the best ending of any movie I've seen this year. Here's a scene from the film that gives a good idea of what the film is like. In a lot of ways it's like Full Metal Jacket meets Juliard.

Playing a lot of Sonic the Hedgehog 2 reminded me there was a time when the accepted physics and rules of momentum in side-scrollers didn't just default to "Super Mario Bros 3". I never was able to get into the Sonic games when I tried to revisit them because I found the controls too floaty and terrible but once you get used to it it's actually a fascinating system of movement. Early zones you can pretty much just hold right and jump but it's not long before you're forced to analyze the flow of the levels and figure out what combination of spin-dashing and bouncing off enemies and jumping you're going to need to get past obstacles. Also the game gets hard as shit as soon as you get to Metropolis Zone. I got there with 10 lives and 4 continues and spent them all beating the first two acts.

So I just watched an incredibly scary short film from 1999 called Outer Space: It's avant garde, but visceral. It's like a Stan Brakhage nightmare. Watch with headphones! EDIT: As Bolegium noted, this has lots of flashing imagery, so epilepsy warning.

Worth noting that interesting sound mix choices can end up being horrible sound mix choices when you're in a shitty theater setting. When Dark Knight Rises came out, Bane's dialogue was a real problem if you saw it in a theater with less than optimal sound. Not all multiplexes are created equal on that front. Christopher Nolan knows these movies are going to play everywhere, so while it's an interesting choice to mix dialogue at lower ranges of audible, it's probably not a prudent one unless the dialogue is genuinely unimportant. My hearing loss means I miss dialogue all the time in theater settings, so I can't really judge either way. I will say I had no idea what the closing lines of the movie were. I honestly thought this was one of the film's strengths. The lack of establishing shots gave it a great momentum. Didn't miss them at all.

Interstellar is a good movie. Bit schizophrenic, but the touches of vestigial Spielberg balance out a lot Nolan's bad character tendencies while Nolan's economy and disdain for traditional world building help minimize the bloated bullshit that tends to overrun Hollywood movies like this. Fun movie, well-paced, great SFX.

1. Leprechaun in a Farm-House 2. Leprechaun in LA 3. Leprechaun in Las Vegas (only one worth seeing) 4. Leprechaun in Space 5. Leprechaun in Compton 6. Leprechaun Back 2 Compton 7. Leprechaun In Ireland (Prequel!)

I mostly associate this word with mid-era Beck songs. Are The Dust Brothers involved in this? EDIT: I should probably not be an asshole and say that I like this title.

If only there was some contigent of Reddit that was concerned with the ethical questions that journalism raises.