Chris

Welcome, new folks!

It was Sean.

Hopefully I didn't overstate this. I'm just new to DS9. I've seen the original series, a few episodes of The Next Generation, and a couple of the movies.

My point is that it still doesn't. It only makes sense because you understand its specific meaning, just like any other genre description. But in the English language generally, we also often say actors "play a role," and they are not defining a character the way one does in a pen and paper RPG, they are giving voice to a specific character whose personality and actions have been explicitly prescribed in advance.

"Role-playing game" still means absolutely nothing in and of itself. Playing a role is what you do in every game. "Role playing" is supposed to suggest more player freedom in defining that role, except that the term is also used to describe games that are fully linear with fully defined personalities, and the concept of "playing a role" outside of games overwhelmingly commonly refers to acting from a predefined script, not improvising a character.

My favorite part of that running stunt was my private joke that I hadn't even seen the movie I was referring to.

I hadn't seen that Post obituary; thanks for linking it.

The first time I rode Star Tours I was 10 or 11 and I had never seen Star Wars, so I didn't "get" any of it, I just thought it was a cool fun space thing. Also your fears are true, they totally redid it several years ago. It's got a bunch of prequel stuff in it now. It's still cool and fun, just not as cool.

I should have phrased the thing about stinginess better, but yes I was intending to reply to what you're saying. Having worked at Double Fine for two years, after previously being there eight years earlier (with a very high degree of staff retention between those two periods), I do not believe it is true that any significant number of people work at Double Fine as a stepping stone. My point about less competitive salaries was meant to illustrate that people ARE in fact frequently willing to work for less money than they could theoretically make out because of the intangible benefits they get out of the culture of a place, rather than to bulk up a resume or something. DF is the place a lot of people go after the stepping stones, not the other way around.

Anyone have any experiences staying at any of the Disneyland Resort hotels? I'm currently in the early planning process of planning a stay in the Grand California, because ~~fuck it~~, and I'm curious to hear accounts from any of the three hotels.

That is absolutely not how people there see it. DF disproportionately hires senior people who could probably be making more elsewhere, but want to work at Double Fine anyway—this is not because Double Fine is intentionally stingy, but because it is not a AAA studio attached to a large publisher that can afford to pay 60 people above-market-rate salaries. There is not some large collection of mid-sized independent studios that Double Fine is a stepping stone to; you either work at a small indie (or for yourself), or you work at a large AAA studio. There's almost no in-between left. DF is a rare example. It's fairly impressive that DF still exists at all, because despite all of its challenges in recent years, it at least hasn't shut down like most similar companies have. There are Klei and Capy (both of which are smaller than DF) but really not very many other mid-sized independent studios. If you want to work at a place like that, your choices are few.

That reminds me of the old submarine ride at Disneyland (currently not open) where, especially as a kid, it felt like you were going deep under the sea but in reality you aren't going anywhere.

The Haunted Mansion is awesome, one of the great rides. Like Sarah said, when we went it was the holiday themed version, which I had never seen. It was better than I was expecting it to be, really. But it's tough to beat the 60s-detached-creepy-cool vibe of the original (as compared to the somewhat more in-your-face-90s-capital-c-Creepy-with-stripes mode that The Nightmare Before Christmas resides in).

They are absolutely not making that on average. I made less than half of that when I worked there. Pretty much any Double Fine employee could go get a job in their discipline at some way less appealing Bay Area game/tech company and increase their salary by a lot. That is burn rate, it is the TOTAL cost to employ somebody, which includes not only salary, but health insurance and all other benefits, rent, utilities and other office overhead, company events, and so on. "Cost to employ" is not the same thing as "take-home pay." A huge chunk of that total figure is not going to change much depending on where the studio is located.

I always enjoy seeing San Francisco in movies, including American movies, and I'm American. I think that kind of impulse is hard to completely avoid.

I had those parents as well (when I mentioned to my dad we were going to Disneyland this time I think his entire response was "Why?"), and so even when I ended up going to Disneyland as a kid/teen with friends, I was still basically neutral on it. I certainly had fun (it would be hard to have NO fun at Disneyland I think) but my overall impression was really primed to be really skeptical, so my memories of those visits are very scattered. It wasn't until I was an adult that I actually appreciated it the way I now do.

I totally understand people's immediate reactions with respect to talking over people, especially when it has resonance with other parts of Anita's online life. But speaking as an Idle Thumbs host, I have never felt very comfortable with the episodes where we have a guest on and then treat that person Like A Guest, being deferential with speech patterns and so on. It just feels like a different podcast to me, not like ours. We should only have guests on who we like and enjoy as friends, who will understand that we aren't trying to silence them, we're all just letting ourselves get excited, and they have the same right. Obviously if they've never been on Thumbs before this can be an adjustment. In this case I would put forth Danielle. When she was on the podcast, before she was a permanent host, we got these exact same reactions from people who felt uncomfortable about the implications of a woman coming on Idle Thumbs and then getting talked over. But as it turned out, she fit in great--so well in fact that she is now on the show all the time. I'm not saying this to foreshadow Anita becoming a host; she has her own web series already, obviously, and it's way bigger than ours. I'm just saying that, to me, it only makes sense that we treat every guest the same as we treat each other.

Everything about this post is amazing.

Your posts aren't really making it seem any less weird to me, unfortunately.

Oh it has been added to many

The Behemoth?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/arts/music/jeff-goldblums-orchestra-debuts-at-cafe-carlyle.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0

Welcome, new folks!

The tax rate for people in his income bracket in Sweden is extremely high so I imagine he's not going to walk away with $2.5b personally but yeah clearly he and anyone at Mojang with equity or beneficiary of a liquidity agreement is going to be in good shape.

Shift-control-v in Chrome should paste without formatting in any text form on any website.