tberton

"Jake present at podcast recording." Sweet! All my favourite episodes are the ones where Jake is present at podcast recording!

Weird, I haven't noticed these traffic light shots that you guys have been mentioning at all.

Sweet, that sounds really exciting! I'm pumped for the game!

Thanks for the responses Jon! By "CK2-style events" I meant events where it's like "Clan Jones wants this thing, Clan Smith wants that thing. What do you do?" And get rewards or punishments based on those decisions. So not necessarily stuff tied to the map, but stuff that fleshes out the internal politics of your society.

The biggest thing that old Thumbs had going for it over new Thumbs was more Gaynor. Of course, there's lots of great stuff about the cast now that it didn't used to have (Danielle, for instance), but I miss those Hot Scoops.

Also, while they are quite different, Paper Mario (N64) and Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (Gamecube) are both fantastic.

Lieutenant Cahtah Blake!

I wanted so badly for somebody to make this joke during the cast. They even had Danielly use her Rhode Island accent and nobody made the connection.

I didn't actually back this game, but I've been following it very closely and I'm pretty excited about it. sclpls, I think comparing the keeps to the strategic layer of XCOM is mistaken: the map is the equivalent, with each keep being more like one of the rooms in your XCOM base. I agree that it would be nice to see some more activity in the keeps themselves, but since they're working on a limited budget I'd prefer that time and money be spent elsewhere. Right now, the only thing I'm worried about is the hybrid classes. This feature seems pretty important to creating depth on both layers and it has yet to be implemented or shown in a very concrete form. I'm sure they'll get it in there, but I'd still like to see how they're doing it specifically.

S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. Come to think of it, the Nemesis system would work brilliantly in STALKER. Also, if you renamed Castlevania: Lords of Shadow to Castlevania: Shadow of Lords, you would have something pretty great.

For anybody not actively following the development of this game, Jon just posted a (one year in game time). It looks really good! Here are some thoughts (and questions for you Jon, if you happen to read this). Art: The game looks beautiful. I love the "watercolour painting" style for the map, especially the sketch paper look for the fog of war. The characters look pretty good too. Are those portraits mostly final, or are they stand-ins? I just ask because they all seem to be a bit different stylistically. Also, will there be a variety of character sprites, or will the be fairly generic for each unit? Clans: I love the idea of the clan system. It feels like taking the abstract "population" of Civ and making it more concrete and interesting. You mentioned stories and events: will there be CKII style events with the clans? Will Fame be the only way to recruit clans? I'm fine with acquiring clans passively, but I think it would be cool to be able to recruit more actively, such as acquiring clans from the neutral camps or bandits that you run across, or perhaps even convincing clans that belong to a rival group to join your side. That seems like it would be a really interesting way to be aggressive without being militaristic. Seasons: I've loved the focus on seasons and supply right from the start. The gameplay variation is one thing, but even having some visual change to the map adds a lot of character to the game. Will seasons affect tiles in a consistent or variant way? Will certain tiles always get snowy during winter, or will there be a possibly of particular bad winters or prosperous summers? Can't wait to see more on the game!

It's a wonderful book. And yeah, I hadn't thought about it, but it would work really well animated.

Not an ampersand, but there's also The Master and Margarita.

After the success of BSG and the resurgence of TV dramas, you'd think that Star Trek would be ripe ground for a new series.

This is a brilliant typo.

Great first episode guys! I'm a series newcomer, so I'm excited to be following along. I think you're both dead on about Sarah Palmer being superbly performed. The whole sequence of Leland finding out, the phone call, identifying the body and then the cops at the house was really well done. In fact, it was a bit too good - I attended my uncle's funeral three days before watching this and that was also a shocking (although not mysterious) death, so watching what I had just seen in real life play out in front of me was kind of tough. In retrospect, I probably should have waited to watch it. But that just speaks to how good the performances and directing are. Sure, it's a bit melodramatic, but that's what grief is. And the continual shots of the staircase, as though Laura's just waiting up there, sleeping in because she doesn't want to go to school, were brilliant.

Recommending non-fiction is way tougher than recommending fiction, because it's so much more topic-specific. That said, I think the most valuable thing a piece of non-fiction can do is to introduce you to a topic you never knew about, or force you to re-evaluate something that you thought you knew. Here are some non-fiction books that have had a big effect on me. (Unfortunately, I don't know if any of these are available on Kindle). Goedel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter - a weird, meandering trip through music, art, math, philosophy, molecular biology, computer science and information theory, looking at different sorts of self-referential systems and their relationship to consciousness. It's not a easy read, but it sure does get you thinking. Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman - a critique of the television age. It's a bit dated, but a lot of Postman's analysis, while somewhat flawed, is still quite valuable. Fun Home by Alison Bechdel - a memoir in the form of a graphic novel, so it might be a nice bridge between fiction and non-fiction for you. Bechdel, a renowned comic artist, recounts the story of growing up in the shadow of her father and the funeral home he ran, her journey to discovering her sexuality and dealing with her father's death mere weeks after she came out to her parents as a lesbian and discovered that her father was gay. Travels with Charlie in Search of America by John Steinbeck - Steinbeck's a novelist, so this is another easy read if you're not used to non-fiction. In 1960, he packed his dog and a bunch of supplies into an RV and drove around the US, trying to chart the changing character of the country. It's a lovely read.

Yeah, I've definitely heard the "Minnesota o" before. Most people I know say "saw-ree". As for "aboot", the more typical pronunciation is actually "a-boat" and is an example of Canadian raising, which is really fascinating if you care to read that article and know anything about phonetics.

Forgot to mention: Ontario license plates have 7 characters, so I don't know what that guy saw.

FYI, if by "massively successful movies" you meant the original LOTR trilogy and not the Hobbit movies, the final one came out in 2003 and therefore not in the last decade. Now let's all take a moment to feel old. EDIT: You should all feel ashamed at the number of Kangaroo Jack jokes left on the table. First of all, while you mentioned that he stole the money, you never said that he's not giving it back. People new to the podcast are now going to be so confused about the plot of that film! What's he going to do with the money? I have no idea! Then, seconds afterward, Chris brought up Contract J.A.C.K. and nobody made a Kangaroo Contract J.A.C.K. joke! For shame!

I have no intentions of playing this game, but I had to ask: why is called Unity? The French Revolution is a period marked by discord, not unity. "Unité" wasn't even in the motto of the Revolution. Coupled with the fact that there's an engine called Unity, it just seems like a silly choice of names. "Liberty" seems more appropriate. "Terror" even.

I get the same feeling any time I hear a "Canadian" accent, as though there is such a thing.

I could not disagree more about Korra. The second season was weak, definitely (although it had some great highs), but Book 3 was incredible - overall, I think it was the best season of Avatar there's been, over both series. There were interesting villains, the plot moved quickly, none of the characters acted like idiots and the fight sees were plentiful and consistently incredible. And I really enjoyed the first episode of Book 4: For a show that's still ostensibly aimed at kids, it's pretty dang impressive. Also, Twig, the relationship stuff has mostly been excised from the show.

Yeah, it's hard for me to imagine having sex without both people being like "hey, let's have sex" in some explicit, if not necessarily verbal, way. I mean, in any context that wasn't obviously rape.

You, sir or madam, lack imagination.