Jake

Fortunately the classic "highlight to read" technique still works if you are scared. Adding the ability to un-see it once it's been clicked would require actual knowledge of how javascript works (which I don't have), and probably more code than can be reasonably snuck into a BB tag.

I can't find this in widescreen, only in letterbox, and apologies if this was already linked in this thread by me or someone else, but the video for DVNO by the Justice is a vintage motion graphics homage festival: etWi1bOotd0

Bumping this classic thread because of the awesome faux-vintage motion graphics ad for the new "uses real sugar, finally" Pepsi drink. k5mM7EGR1oI (or HD)

"Shadow and Colossus: Back in Action" Like good games on the DS, we are back. With GDC a fond and distant memory, we tackle the surprising stack of good new titles for Nintendo's handheld, learn some new moves from a hobo, see the latest from BioWare and Double Fine, and shed a tear as Wander goes Hollywood. Games Discussed: Rhythm Heaven, Henry Hatsworth in the Puzzling Adventure, Brütal Legend, Dragon Age, Bully, Tap Tap Revenge, Shadow of the Colossus

"The quotes are weirdly personal for no reason at all, if still accurate." - ign.com

Just picked this up (along with hatsworth, and a DSi to finally replace my classic original Tyco Toys slab DS). Can't wait to stop reading books for a week or two and play handheld video games instead.

Oh shit. Also: "As a sidenote, the art on that cover is really ugly." - ign.com

Haha, quality lifewasting going on in here.

I have been dorking out with books even more than usual lately. Here's a lot of text you won't read about some dorky-but-sweet books: Anathem by Neal Stephenson. I love this guy (his most well known book is Snow Crash) and am slowly working through everything he's done. Anathem is highly recommended. Dune. I had never read it and my dad told me I should, so I did. It's good. I'm wary of all the sequels, however. It reminds me of Ender's Game in that regard -- it's a good read, and you can see why it is so well regarded, and how its presence shaped future genre literature, but you can also feel the luck, or the once-in-a-lifetime coming together of hard to repeat great ideas when you read it. Nation by Terry Pratchett. Good! I read it right after Anathem and, though it's far more Young Adult, and obviously infinitely more Pratchett and infinitely less super-dense math-fueled hard sci-fi/parallel world/fantasy than Anathem, it was a great companion read. My brain ended up sort of repeatedly trying to mush the two together as I was reading, and seemed to enjoy the process. The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Woo by Junot Diaz. Recommended by Steve H.S. Gaynor ages ago on Twitter, this book is good. Yep. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Bought this to test out Kindle on the iPhone. I immediately regretted it, not because the book is bad (it's pretty enjoyable if you are the sort of person who finds YA-style Gaiman-style fiction pretty enjoyable), but because I now have this "book" which I "own" and can "read anywhere," but really I have a "license" to "content" which I can "read on a Kindle approved device until I can't anymore, for whatever reason." It immediately made me wish that I instead had a physical book in my hands which I could put on a shelf and retrieve at any time in the future at my leisure, loan to friends, pass on to future family, whatever. Instead I paid like 8 bucks for some text on my iPhone. The instant delivery of a book into my hands was fairly amazing, but not worth the tradeoffs that come with it. I wish Amazon would somehow offer physical/ebook combo packs, where you could buy the physical hardcover or paperback of a book, and then add a Kindle copy onto your order at a discounted rate. I would probably buy a shitload of content if that were the case. The Dark Tower! Someone at work recommended this series, and I am currently in the middle of the third book (of seven). I'm liking them, but like most genre works which start out good and then just continue existing, I am wary that it will start sliding downhill the further in I read. We'll see. Also read: A book all about web form desgn, some suspect John Grisham novel when staying at my parents' house for a couple nights. On order: Stack-o-Chandler. I love Raymond Chandler (though I have only read a few Chandler books, I've enjoyed them all), and cheesy old design, so I ended up paying too much to import this five book set. Of these I've only read The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye, so I'm looking forward to the other three. Things I'd like to read soon: Most books recommended in this thread, most books recommended to me on Twitter the two times I've asked, but haven't yet picked up. Thanks for this thread, its a good idea.

I wonder how many milestones DNF has completed. I'd guess very many.

www.moddb.com is definitely the mod equivalent of TIGSource, and (as pointed out by one of the guys in the Thumbs thread on neogaf) it is a very active community that is churning out a lot of content, but I don't know if anyone is actually looking at it outside that community (unless your mod is Black Mesa Source).

I have to admit I got nervous when the podcast got linked from the Telltale forums. "Click here to listen to the TTG staff member guy who posts in the forum and blog all the time and works here, swearing like a maniac and cracking way too many suspicious off color jokes." No complaints so far, but yeah, I jumped a little when that thread appeared. Anyway, welcome!

Thanks again for making both of the thumbs illustrations. They made a newspaper look really good. I know you think I sullied the center spread with that chunky HPLHS font, and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me some day.

I hope that focusing more strongly on the Stupid Fun Club means that we'll get to see some of Will Wright's "side-interests" actually given some attention/funding. Or, whatever, I also wouldn't complain if he was just doing this to get a smaller team again. He has done it in the past, leaving the Maxis HQ after the Sims went big, forming a smaller external satellite team to work on Spore. This seems like it could just be a more formalized version of that. But I also wouldn't mind seeing some crazy robots or a rebirth of the Soviet space program or whatever else he's working on.

Yes

podcast.idlethumbs.net is Amazon S3/CloudFront so if its down, its probably their fault. Also, it's not down anymore!

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A million Thumbs guys on this episode! Crazy town. GDC! Idle Thumbs Conf Grenade 3: "Morality, the Medical Surprise" Steve Gaynor and Duncan Fyfe join us for the penultimate Conf Grenade, blasting through GDC's midsection at a rate so fast, you might not survive the trip. Put on your game developer hat and buckle up. Things Discussed: Zeno Clash, Far Cry 2, Punch Out!!, The Maw, the Game Design Challenge, Peter Molyneux, Dr. Robotnik, Steve Meretzky, Margaret Robertson, Clint Hocking, Talking, Stalking

Microphone failure? GDC! Idle Thumbs Conf Grenade 4: "[Transmission Lost]" The final Conf Grenade pops and fizzles its way into your ear, offering our closing thoughts on the Game Developers Conference. Join us for some last words before the GDC book slams closed for another 51 weeks. Things Discussed: OnLive, Games for Windows Live, Alex Hutchinson, Army of Two: The 40th Day, Left 4 Dead, World of Warcraft, Jeff Kaplan, xc9(**##c_3

fuck you fixed, you

We ... almost always do that. We haven't been during the GDC stuff because we've been doing them even more seat-of-the-pants than the usual casts.

Way to spin out a hypothetical situation to a conclusion that isn't real. I think that Kojima's award acceptance got a lackluster response because his talk consisted of him saying that he wasn't retiring, that he wanted to make screenplays, and that he wanted games to be respected [implying that they will be somehow better when they are respected like film]. Not necessarily bad sentiments or whatever, but not the most rousing thing to tell a room full of game developers when you're accepting an award.

Why waste the effort of playing it backwards on your own when, here at Idle Thumbs, we do it for you, in the last 30 seconds of the episode. Life couldn't be simpler!

no new cast yet but I updated www.idlethumbs.net to be more GDC themed.

The ad agency responsible for the Pepsi rebrand (Arnell) also did the simultaneous re-brand of a few other Pepsi products including Mountain Dew and Tropicana orange juice, which rolled out at the same time as the ridiculous Pepsi logo which started this thread. For Tropicana they didn't do golden ratio nonsense or whatever else. They just took the logo the brand has had for ages -- a straw sticking out of an orange -- and replaced it with... nothing. Not saying I was particularly fond of the old Tropicana packaging, but people definitely had an affinity for the straw in the orange which they'd been seeing for decades, and they were not pleased. Amazingly, people were so annoyed that Pepsi went and reverted to the old Tropicana packaging. The best part though: Here's a video of Peter Arnell explaining the mountains of amazing crap behind their surely multi-million dollar redesign which resulted in taking an A-brand well recognized fruit juice and re-wrapping it in what looks like packaging the grocery store chains might use to package their generic brand. (Or, what they would use to package liquid laundry detergent.) It might not quite defeat the agency's insane Pepsi document, but it is definitely cut from the same, amazingly horrible cloth. Watch as any hopes you had that there was maybe some irony in that Pepsi branding document get blown off the map 80 times: WJ4yF4F74vc