Patrick R

I haven't seen many of his films (Breathless, A Woman is A Woman, Vivre Sa Vie, Sympathy For The Devil) but that's because I haven't liked any of them. I always hate the characters, I find his editing style irritating, and his stories unengaging. But I've seen them all too far apart from each other and too long ago to really go into it much more than that. I'm sure he's a great filmmaker, but he's not for me. Something about him I find aggressively off-putting.

Gonna start this today. Where can I find a copy of the unofficial patch that fixes all the crap? Google is leading me to a bunch of dead links. EDIT: Nevermind, this Steam thread has some good links. Though one of the patches is on an "Adult Games" site, so hopefully it doesn't* restore sexy gothsex mini-games in addition to basic functionality. *Does.

Oh shit they got Kyle Gass toooooooooooooooooo.

I personally think GI Jane is Ridley Scott's most fascinating movie, because it's themes are so muddled that the result is a weird mess that doesn't know what it believes. Sneakily, Thelma and Louise is possibly his best film that isn't called Alien.

As for Max, I either suggest Truffaut if you want something in the same wheelhouse, or Joseph Losey if you want something completely different. But watching all of Godard's filmography implies you are a fan of Godard, which would mean you and I have very different taste in these sorts of things.

As someone who's hosted a podcast based on this very premise for a couple years, I have to disagree. Once you watch 5 or 6 movies of anyone's work, you will recognize patterns. Ridley Scott may not be making the same movies over and over again, but that tends to make the similarities they have stick out more, not less. When his dumb 80's action cop movie Black Rain and morose sci-fi noir Blade Runner and pop horror movie Hannibal all have the same obsessive attention to location and world-building, it's very revealing as to where his interests as an artist lie. In all the directors we've covered, I can't think of a single one whose work wasn't illuminated by watching all (or most) of their filmography. I always thought Wes Craven was a 2nd rate journeyman who got lucky who got lucky a couple times, but a LOT of his films repeat the same structures, themes, ideas, and even endings (stupid booby traps being Craven's preferred way to end any given movie). Also, Takashi Miike seems an odd example in the former list because his career seems to be defined by his lack of focus. I couldn't tell you what a "Takashi Miike styled" film would be, because that includes Audition and Ishi the Killer and DOA 2 and 13 Assassins and The Box, which span a pretty wildly different styles and subjects and tones.

I tried talking during my recorded run for the first time in several days and promptly walked right into spikes on 1-2. I BEAT OLMEC. I SHOULD BE BEYOND THIS. Ahem.

I'm working with people who don't like me and my book got stolen from the breakroom. So, Happy Halloween.

In terms of what I want out of genre fiction, I think a lot about TOS's "The Naked Time". Sulu secretly wanting to be a swashbuckling buccaneer is the best. That's the strength of TOS over the (admittedly, limited) episodes I've seen of later series: it's mostly character driven, not idea driven.

Mine was with jetpack and shotgun, but the exact same story.

The Best Show on WFMU ending feels like the end of an era. Such a bummer.

I beat Olmec! And got 300K+. I can't lie, it was a very charmed run. I went through most of it with the jetpack, a shotgun, and the Kapala. I pretty much mined every level for every last drop of blood, which ended up netting me something about 13 extra health, total. Which is how I survived getting caught in between two tiki traps and getting stabbed twice. It was so exciting, so naturally I did not record it.

So I spent some time today trying to unlock the shortcut to the Temple and I finally did it! I was so excited. And then,,,

I just had a 250K run but my internet crapped out and it didn't save it on the leaderboards. GAH.

In which I let Christopher Lee read Edgar Allan Poe's The Telltale Heart as I play. The narrator's decision to kill the old man came right when I saw a shopkeeper, so it was clear what I would have to do.

They instakill cavemen and scorpions and yetis and whatnot, it's the only way to kill giant frogs, and other giant stuff takes half as much jump damage. Plus ice level traction. Pretty sweet.

I did so well until I got nervous about a zombie in the black market.

Really dreadful run.

Really? I couldn't find a way to do it.

Tomorrow I'm taking my partner to my old neighborhood for some spooky Halloween-themed drivin' around. I'm gonna show them the orphan graveyard behind my old high school. Which sounds like it belongs in the euphemism thread but is in fact an actual true thing that exists.

Well the idea of a Candy box sequel is kind of fundamentally flawed, right? Since the whole point of the first one was surprise and discovery. This one would have to pull off some serious insanity to get that same level of surprise out of people.

That was my plan as well but then I became impatient. Also, the way the controls were bound on a 360 controller were kind of weird. Whip and jump were reversed.

I guess the sort of thing I'm more thinking of is the physicality. The thing about working in a kitchen is that you have to juggle cooking multiple things and they all exist in different places. So you have to flip the burger than run to the fryer than run to get so and so out of the oven. Most Flash type games I've played, they all exist on the same screen and it feels more like Warioware task juggling than decision making or keeping things straight in your head. The way I've heard Quadrilateral Cowboy explained, where you run around with a laptop and you can sort of snap into "laptop mode" where your screen is taken up by the laptop's screen, if you could run to different areas of the kitchen and snap from "burger flipping" mode to "egg cracking mode" to "deep fryer" mode, that'd be closer to what I mean. And you could have an economy with what ingredients you have available, and make sure not to overuse them. When you cook, some days you come into work and you just clearly don't have enough mushrooms or whatever, so you either have to be more stingy with individual dishes that have them or you have to tell the server "We're out of _____" when they give you an order. And then sometimes the server gets the order wrong, or you do, and you get stuff sent back. So yeah, is there a game that is based on this extremely specific design document in my head? Probably not. Maybe I'll try some of those games you recommended. I recall a Flash bartender game that was all about balancing drink ingredients and had limited 2D physics as far as bottle pouring goes, that was pretty interesting.

They seem pretty self-conscious about Far-Cry 2 as well. And I get it. Mario 3D Land sounds like an amazing game, but it's 1) not the kind of thought-provoking game that spurs your classic long Idle Thumbs conversations about broader topics and 2) a game that only Jake has played, so the discussion that can happen is limited. Also, by definition, everyone who hosts Idle Thumbs is going to have the least objective view of their own podcast. So while surely a huge part of what makes us fans are their hilarious and weird tangents about G-Man introducing the Steambox controller (or whatnot), it's not hard to see how, at the time of recording, it just feels like a bunch of silly nonsense.

How have I not learned my lesson about third party controllers?