Patrick R

I do the same thing, only I tap my teeth together. And I can only do it when I'm not driving.

As soon as Mingus informed me (Complete Dickhead) his alliances would be with Roll Fizzlebeef, I knew I was boned, so I funded The Famous (the only one not allied with you guys) for the rest of the game. Pretty much all my money went to him, as well as intel as I spied on the movements and ship positions of all the Jake Rodkin/Charles Mingus border planets. My chief goal was just to insure that Roll Fizzlebeef wouldn't win.

Yeah, all I really know about Massive Chalice is what was said on Dota Today and the Kickstarter video, so it wouldn't surprise me if a lot of this gets addressed.

Yeah, it seems like a pretty fantastic idea.

Yeah, Brad Muir's reaction to the question of same-sex marriage in the game is why I'm confident that he's not some weird regressive eugenics freak*. AND answered my question at the beginning of this thread, about what (beyond simply mitigated risk) is gained by Double Fine crowd-sourcing it's games. Pretty sweet. *I'm gonna write a punk rock song called "Eugenics Freak" now.

But then his posts will be in sweet 3D! What could be radder?

Intellectually, I know you are probably right about it more likely being bad luck and poor communication than straight-up deceit, and definitely right about the five years not being a waste. But it's really hard for me to feel any of it, at this point. I'm sure down the road I will and it will make more sense. Or maybe I'm right, and my life is over because I am some unlovable goblin. Tough call at this point. I think big life changes always do this, though, especially with risk involved. Until you're actually there, and you have more literal problems and difficulties to address, the inescapable dread of the unknown will just be there.

If Massive Chalice did a 180 12 hours in, and became about the story of a single hero's resentment of the whole hero-breeding-industrial-complex, eventually going AWOL from the whole thing and raising children in the woods to be simple farmers away from violence (no cattle, too many bad memories, just beets), and then that hero gets tracked down and killed, so that hero's kid vows vengeance against the immortal king character you were playing as for the first 12 hours... ...well, I imagine there'd be a lot of angry Kickstarter backers. But it'd be pretty sweet.

I want to give her the benefit of the doubt, so it's possible that she thought this would be good for me as well because, being in an open relationship, I too have other people I am seeing right now. Maybe she saw it as the best possible way for both of us. But man, in practice it does not work like this. I don't love the other people at all like I loved her, and the level of perceived deceit* involved is maybe the most painful part of it. Like, it throws so much of what I thought was true about our relationship into question. *Maybe I will take your advice and start developing my own strategy game called Perceived Deceit. That's almost a Massive Chalice quality title. It'll be about how to end a relationship with someone you don't love, but they still love you. The twist is that even though there are hundreds of different ways it can end, there are absolutely no win-states. I'll probably license your music generator, and encourage players to upload videos of them and their exes during happier times, to play over the end credits. IGF, here I come! I think with the kind of brain I have, an immersion therapy type situation is my only real option. I am completely unable to stop my mind from going there. I almost broke down at work the other day because fuckin' Funky Town came on the radio, and it has that part where it goes "Gotta move on!" over and over again. The big twist there being that I tweeted about that, only to get a reply from Lipps Inc. themselves, unknowingly mocking me for my pain. What's next, Disco Duck calls me a pussy?

Mostly. And also general gross traditions of class struggle. The idea of defining humans by the achievements, social standing, and genetics of their family is just really repellent to me. I don't think Brad Muir is a secret racist or anything, I think he just thought of a neat gameplay mechanic, based on the idea of a conflict happening over a large time-scale, but the unfortunate real-world implications of that mechanic have always been not so great. It's actually a part of the world of Harry Potter that turned me off as well. At least to my memory: I read the first 5 books years and years ago, so I'm open to the idea that I completely wrong about it. But the idea of the sorting hat, of certain families always going to certain houses, and the idea that the people are largely identified by their house identity is kind of weird to me, especially in such widely-read children's literature. Maybe it got more nuanced than "Gryffindor is virtuous, Slytherin are bastards, who-gives-a-fuck about Hufflepuff, etc." later on, but that sort of always distanced me from it.

I think about my own imminent death and the futility of all human existence at least three times a day. Actually, way more often since my girlfriend broke up with me on Monday. Five years gone! Turns out this whole open relationship thing was an excuse to sort of create a distance between us and line herself up with someone to replace me*. Or something. Either way, she doesn't love me anymore and I still totally love her and man, does this whole thing blow. I could fill a full sub-forum with all the ways life sucks now, but I've already been pretty dedicated to openly mourning and flagellating myself in every other part of social media, so I figure I should probably keep the weeping to a minimum on the place where I mostly want to talk about how sweet Gunpoint is (spoiler: really sweet). I guess what I am looking for is advice on how to deal? This has been my longest and most serious relationship ever. I've had break-ups before, but never ones that sucked this bad, in so many different ways. I can't get over how much reminds me of her. Literally everything about my life in the past five years has been partially based on being with her, and the assumed future that we would continue to be together. Even the fact that my keys are lighter and smaller because I don't have her apartment keys anymore kills me. How do you stop yourself from constantly thinking about it? *In all fairness, she denies this completely, and I may just be super bitter and connecting the dots to form a more insidious picture of her than what actually happened, but I'm still skeptical of the story she gave me. I don't think you end a five year relationship on a whim. She says she suggested the open relationship with no intentions of this sort of thing. But she had to have begun to feel tired and done with our relationship before she ever suggested the open relationship a mere month ago, right? And the fact that she spent less and less time with me and more and more time with this other guy, until she broke up with me and stayed with him...that doesn't make it sound like he had nothing to do with it as she claims, right?

Yeah, Zeus, I wouldn't worry too much. It's pretty easy to avoid being annoyed when all it takes is to just not read one thread. Also, avoiding the noid is important.

To me it sounds like a cross between Plants Vs. Zombies, tower defense, that one mini game in Banjo Kazooie (Could be DK64 or some other N64 platformer?) where you crawled inside someone's nose and had to eat the right colored boogers, Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne, Quidditch and Diablo 2.

Again, I have no idea what is going on in this thread and people feeling attacked. I disagreed with you, explained why, and then concluded by saying that I'm not even expecting you to hold to some arbitrary standard based on how I view the tone of the podcast. I don't think I'm being over-reactionary or angry or even serious? I constantly re-listen to old episodes. When I am done with new episodes of other podcasts I listen to, I always fall back on a regular rotation of old episodes of Idle Thumbs. I still disagree with your characterization, and the idea of equivocating Chris telling a story about trolling someone in Diablo 2 with mud stains that kind of look like poop to you telling stories about your actual poop. Maybe my avatar is too intense. People feel attacked because it looks like I'm about to bite them? EDIT: Actually, I'm making the exact same face in my icon as Zeus' Urkel. That's kind of amazing.

I actually did the thing Sean's wife suggested in Warcraft 2. The AI in Warcraft 2 didn't know how to destroy stone walls, so I would go into the Mapmaker utility, create the largest map possible, with the enemy team baby-walled in a small corner of the map, unable to expand enough to create flying units. I think I had played Sim City 2000 at a friend's house, was jealous, and thought "fuck it, I'll make my own city simulator". I also populated the map with a lot of sheep, so my units would have something to do.

know they comment on making stupid dick and poop jokes, but I don't think they actually make that many. I think making an allusion to shit in the course of a joke is different from a shit joke. Like Chris making a farting noise to mock some dumb games journalism cliche like "The Citizen Kane of Games" doesn't really count as a fart joke to me. Especially compared to, say, every other nerd-centric podcast on the internet, Idle Thumbs is pretty damn high-brow and clean. What you do in this thread is closer to Shawn Elliott's Clapper story. TMI as opposed to silly scatological humor. Not that all threads in a podcast's forums must reflect that podcast's tone. Just that I think characterizing it as a "deluge" doesn't seem quite right, to me.

I've listened to both episodes of this podcast, plus however many hours of you guys talking about Dota on Idle Thumbs, without having ever played or even seen footage of the game (or any LOMA for that matter). Every time I hear it talked about, I think I learn about some other mechanic or rule or nuance of the game that completely changes the wacky image of Dota I have in my head. It often feels , like you are making up terms and names of Lords and abilities on the spot. I wonder how long I can go listening to this podcast without actually experiencing the game. And what it'll be like finally playing the game after, say, 50 episodes of this.

Personally I think the whole theme of breeding heroes is really gross and regressive, but I am not at all this game's target market (not into turn based strategy). I imagine if I was and the gameplay intrigued me enough, I'd be able to look past it, but as a casual observer turning the concept of "good breeding" into a game mechanic isn't just kind of icky, it's antithetical to the kind of fiction I'm interested in. I don't want stories where genetically heroic figures do great deeds based on destiny and fate, I want stories where ordinary people do extraordinary things because it's what they have to. But at any rate, hearing more about the idea of aging heroes again reminded me of Robin & Marian, and made me more interested in it. I wonder if Brad Muir has seen it and, if not, it'd be possible to get him a copy*. It's hard to imagine pulling off that kind of intimate wistfulness in a simulation of this scale, but if the intent is indeed to get the character to really care about the aging heroes and their arc, it's certainly a good example of it. *I'm literally willing to buy a copy and ship it to the Double Fine offices. I can't help it, I'm obsessed with this movie.

Is that really true, though?

I had Where In The USA Is Carmen Sandiego? growing up, and in that game if you get too off track people you question just start giving non-sequiturs as answers. One time I just wanted to see how off track I could get and there was a town that just kept talking about UFO's. It really freaked me out, and right then my dad's pager on his dresser started to vibrate and I ran out of the room screaming. When my parents asked what was wrong, it was really hard to explain.

Been going through a pretty hard time lately, but this has been a very reliable pump-up jam.

I find most things to be ostensible.

Papers Please?

Well, you can always play Amnesia and pretend it's an adaptation of Sinister.