Patrick R

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Posts posted by Patrick R

  1. Posted

    Whenever I'm in a car I do this weird thing where I press my toes down against the bottom of my shoe as things pass by the side of the car. I will often do it with curbs along the side of the road where I try to time the pressing down of my toes to the instant the start of the curb would pass my foot and then I lift my toes the instant the end of the curb passes my foot. I've done this since I was a little kid and I have no idea why.

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

  3. Posted

    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.

  4. Posted

    For what it's worth, none of the mechanics are set in stone in terms of how raising children work. One of the possibilities Brad mentioned was that different households represent different types of character classes (warriors, archers, mages, etc.), and you assign your heroes to become lords of various households, and then the children born into that household are raised to become that sort of character class. So if the game went down that route it would fall more on the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate, and wouldn't really have much to do with eugenics or trying to create genetic advantages and would be more like a sort of worker placement type Euro game mechanic.

     

    It is interesting how strategy games sometimes have these unintentional messages in their game mechanics. If you sit down to deeply analyze the mechanics of a lot of city builders and 4x space games you'll often find these unexpected endorsement of conservative politics (3MA had a good episode about this, wish I could remember the episode number...). Rob Zacny did a piece talking to one of the Paradox developers who made a good point about how historical WW2 games are sort of morally problematic because people are going to like playing the Germans since they have the smaller scale, but more powerful military units so they have this underdog appeal.

     

    http://www.pcgamesn.com/not-here-make-friends-part-3-dark-side-historical-strategy/page/0/1

     

    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.

  6. Posted

    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.

     

    If somebody did think about it during that whole thing, they would've probably just killed it because it is such a controversial issue. They'd probably not want to have it associated with the game at all. And then they'd give me a PR company line that I'd have to tell in every interview, and it'd be super, super shitty. And then any gay gamers who are coming to the game and playing it and wanting to see themselves represented would just be really disappointed.

     

    Pretty sweet.

     

    *I'm gonna write a punk rock song called "Eugenics Freak" now.

  8. Posted

    Honestly, I've seen it happen a fair amount in transitioning relationships. One person suggests a break or an open relationship in good faith, but discovers that the space/freedom/attention they get from it is actually more important to them than the relationship, so their intentions shift. What I'm saying is, it could be bad luck and poor communication more than deceit, not that that makes you feel any better. Don't think of the five years as a waste though. Unless the relationship was toxic anyway, you grew as a person during it, which is what counts. Judging a relationship by its permanency is a fool's game, since they all end sometime.

     

    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 spent some time worrying about my situation, and after a couple weeks I had gone over everything enough times that I eventually felt prepared for it.

    Since then, I was still feeling THE EFFECTS of depression and anxiety for a couple weeks more, even though I'm not actively thinking about or worrying about leaving all my friends behind... like I said in that post a couple hours ago.

     

    So this week I've bin taking tablets and doing everything to occupy myself, and I feel some percentage better.

    On the one hand I feel guilty that this could be interpreted as avoiding analysing the problem and how I feel- but on the other much bigger hand, I feel justified in that I recognized that I'd ALREADY DONE THAT for a couple weeks, and the only thing I'm actually quelling is randomly terrifying myself awake at night.

     

    Which is fine, because that was never gonna stimulate any kind of introspective revelation at all.

     

    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. 

  9. Posted

    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.

  10. Posted

    That does sound like she found a way to make the break up as easy as possible for herself with no regard to how it affects you. It's possible she didn't do it consciously as she says, but we have some responsibility to be conscious of our actions and how they affect people, don't we?

     

    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!

     

    Patrick, this may be horrible advice but if it was me I would purposefully spend as much time thinking about it as I could. I have found that if I confront these types of things head on and run them through my head over and over my brain eventually sorts it out and becomes okay with it.

     

    It is a very painful thing to do and can cause a lot of grief in the short term but in the long run I feel like I am better because of it. It becomes something that I can look back on and reflect on every aspect instead of something to avoid entirely.

     

    Some therapists actually encourage this method of coming to terms with things when dealing with people who suffer from PTSD. But again, this could be absolutely horrible advice that only works for some people.

     

    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?

  11. Posted

    This is so interesting to me. Is this rooted in a repulsion to eugenics?

     

    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.

  12. Posted

    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?

  14. Posted

    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.

  15. Posted

    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.

  16. Posted

    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.

  17. Posted

     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.

  18. Posted

    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.

  19. Posted

    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.

  21. Posted

    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.