Chris

I can't remember what from the cast this is referencing, but certainly there's been no Danielle-related hate mail sent to Idle Thumbs.

Well, we stopped a fair number of times and weren't going particularly fast or anything. When I say "at once" I don't mean like a marathon. Most of us (including me) were pretty exhausted after the vertical parts.

Basically an entire day of the trip was spent on what amounted to a 12-mile hike that involved more vertical footage than I have ever covered with my own feet in one continuous streak. The only thing the video covers is the part when we were just goofing around eating and unwinding at the end of the nature-filled days, because those were the only bits where we had a video camera out and in frequent usage.

I agree with Sean. We're finding our footing with this kind of thing, and feedback is really useful. I'm also not crazy about doing a generalized Patreon; I don't really like the idea of soliciting the general readership for money if it's not for a specific purpose we can enumerate (beyond just "pay our monthly bills"). I'm sure there are readers who would be totally open to that (as several of them have told us so) but for some reason it just doesn't feel right to me in this particular case.

Welcome, new folks!

Do you actually have any evidence from any of these other places that either of these things are true? By which I mean, how do you know other gaming podcasts don't have similar demographics? Giant Bomb's audience is massively larger than ours, so it has a lot more women in it, but do you know how that falls on a proportional basis? (I'm not defending our numbers, just wondering where those assumptions come from.)

The guy who did that talk isn't there anymore. Obviously he's not the only factor (although he did basically do ALL of that tuning on the first several Halo games) but my suspicion is that, as with every studio that gets big enough, a combination of growth and decades of turnover will eventually dilute really specific things about your design philosophy/culture/etc.

For one thing, there is no season. If there were, all this stuff would be less relevant.

Yeah, I always take stuff out if there's any risk of legal or interpersonal damage. But in general one of the things I (we?) like about Idle Thumbs is how unvarnished it is, so I definitely err on the side of leaving stuff in. There have been lots of times I've had to resist the temptation of editing out failed jokes or dumb/erroneous shit from me, because I don't want to start getting in that habit.

I mean this is actually the exact same situation I'm in. Having a bunch of theoretical people who would be willing to play the game doesn't really change the amount of time I have or the ways that I am drawn to spending that time. It's a bummer.

Dota Today 3: A Rising Tide Lifts All Lords What happens to a lord unmanaged? Telltale's Pierre Shorette joins us to discuss the purgatory that is the leavers' queue. Game Discussed: Dota 2 Listen on the Episode Page Subscribe and rate us on iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

It is not

I don't think This American Life sees it as their purview to cast overriding moral judgments on the stories they report on. That is an entirely different show. TAS is, especially at its best, a show about human experience presented straightforwardly, with enough context for the listener to draw conclusions or musings. They will sometimes have qualitative asides but even those are generally set up to lead into an opinion or experience shared by a subject of the story. It wasn't really "the episode" that was going on about the line between classy and slutty, it was the expressed opinion of one of the only former cheerleaders they could find who wanted to talk about it, and so that became a major part of the story itself. The content that was read from the rulebook, the expressed opinions and experiences of the interview subjects, and the implicit self-censorship of the many cheerleaders who declined to be interviewed should be sufficient to allow the listener to come to his or her own opinions. I don't think the story would have been improved by the reporter editorializing on that front. I could easily imagine a This American Life episode in which institutional and socially enforced sexism were front and center, with a variety of different stories speaking on those forces. I don't know if "slamming" things would have been a useful addition.

I'm on PS4 as Remo

I'm all set actually! Thanks anyway!

Anyone want to toss me a beta code via DM? The one I had isn't taking.

Idle Thumbs 164: The Seed of a Sneeze Lungs howling, eyes watering, mouth agape, you stare into the light. With your throttle down and thrusters on, your search for that satisfying release intensifies, but each passing moment serves to only charge your panic—will you find it? Is it there? Is it you? Then, finally...Gesundheit! Video games. Things Discussed: Star Citizen, Munin, Capsule, Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

It's clearly a useful way to describe a very real and frustrating phenomenon (that I'm sure I've been guilty of myself) but like a lot of jargon it seems like it's often overused to the point where in many cases it's simply being used as stand-in for its root word, "explain."

Obviously because they don't find them boring.

The vote is currently really close. Each design has been in first for a while.

I think Jake was just saying we don't have room for another Jake-sized print, not another any-sized print.

At this point I don't think anyone really knows what the model is actually going to be when the game launches. I've heard some people say they aren't going to keep sell real-money items post-launch. I just have no idea. It's hard to have as firm an opinion about it as about a game that already exists in an essentially final state.

I feel like the majority of our discussion of the game has been about this component of it! I don't think anyone could listen to the last few episodes or Thumbs and not come to the conclusion that we find the Star Citizen economy incredibly strange.

According to its author, it probably doesn't, though. That doesn't mean you have to agree with his view, but I think it's enough to at least ackowledge it's not an open and shut case.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilton_Books