Chris

I don't know what that actually means. I mean I know that you combined some words people often mention in the same breath, like "hipster" and "glasses" and "San Francisco," but I can't discern much beyond that. I still think it looks dumb.

I can't even tell what this means!! But I can't bring myself to listen to any of it to find out!!

I believe the game is called Android: Netrunner.

Sorry I need to interject here. Using your cellular telephone to mimic a lighter definitely does not look cool.

Christ almighty, I watched this entire thing. It was the most amazing Spelunky run I've ever seen. Fuck.

lol

How did I never realize this before?! It even has a ring!

That was the whole joke though! I only thought of it as I was bringing it up the first time. I wouldn't have done it out of the blue if I hadn't introduced it as a possibility first.

On this episode: Sean and Chris have mixed feelings about By Blood, a San Francisco-set novel told from a disturbing and compelling voyeuristic perspective, but they ultimately decided it was worth the read. Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed Buy the book on Amazon

Hey new people! Welcome!

Definitely points for creativity. I'm tempted to let that stay for a while.

It's Tuesday. Idle Thumbs 114: A Heavy (Baboon) Heart With the tragic passing of Ryan Davis, we try to find a chuckle within a horrific simulator, just as we hope he would've wanted. Our thoughts and wishes go out to the guys at Giant Bomb and Ryan's friends and family. He was and is truly one of the greats. Things Discussed: Surgeon Simulator 2013, Kinect Party, Back to the First Date (MolyJam), Faux Paws (MolyJam), Moly Dog (MolyJam), The Walking Dead: 400 Days Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

A billion times better. It feels like you're using a device rather than just gliding your finger, I think to a surprisingly large degree thanks to the subtle audio feedback that sounds like a tiny Price is Right wheel spinning or something. It's hard to explain. I suspect you can disable that, either at the dev level or player level, but it grew on me really fast. I don't really like using trackpads in general. But we were playing Broken Age (traditional point and click adventure game) on this thing and it felt great; I don't think we're going to need to do any special control support for it at all, it just worked.

I think the intention is that most traditional face button usage is still under your right thumb, using quadrants of the haptic touchscreen.

It has speakers in it. When I used it, the cursor pad made a little mechanical rolling sound as you used it. It was really subtle and effective.

It wasn't due to Idle Thumbs, they came to Double Fine and some of us used it.

Oh my god amazing.

A run of Spelunky (at least for me) is often only 15 minutes or so, very rarely more than 30, and there's no winning or losing, you just die and try again in a pretty low-pressure way. Dota 2 is cool but it's too intense for me to want to spend that much time on. I also have a strong resistance against games that are best played with arranged groups, not because they're bad but because of all the logistics involved and because I know I have to commit to a certain amount of time during which 9 other people are counting on me to have uninterrupted focus and attention. One of the reasons I have so many hours of Spelunky logged is because I just leave it running all the time. I've only played two games tonight but probably logged something like three hours on Steam, because it was paused for the duration of dinner. I just find it hard to get psyched up about the amount of focus and attention Dota 2 demands right now. I'm sure at some point I'll have a cycle where I'm more interested in playing hardcore multiplayer games.

No: https://twitter.com/vanaman

Uh that was Beethoven not Mozart. PLEASE.

I feel similarly, which I hope I communicated on the podcast, I just generally feel it is more the responsibility of those who host the community more than anyone else's. That's not to say communities shouldn't also be self-policing—that's the ideal scenario—but I think a big part of creating the particular tenor of conversation that becomes self-policed is for the stakeholders themselves to establish it.

I don't even know, just everything.

God this show has become fucking dumb. The end of this episode, just, christ. What a preposterous series of events. Also I can't seem to stop it now, even though I find it totally ludicrous at this point.