Chris

Whoops! I've actually seen Videodrome but not eXistenZ.

This podcast was actually our second take. We tried on Tuesday and totally failed to produce anything amusing or interesting. Hopefully this attempt is better. "Idle Thumbs U.S. returns from vacation fists a'swingin, battering you senseless with tales of lives reconsidered (and rewound), friends (lists) lost, and having to sit and watch someone else really suck (at your favorite game)." Games discussed: Brothers in Arms (iPhone), Fieldrunners, Tony Hawk 10, Mortal Kombat vs. D.C. Universe, Braid, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, Grand Theft Auto IV PC... Fallout 3 iTunes RSS http://www.idlethumbs.net/

Idle Thumbs BONUS: Ruination Online July 2017 Enjoy this bonus episode drawn from our Idle Thumbs Patreon Ruination Online! Each month, we do a livestream where all topics have been posed by high-tier backers of our Patreon campaign: patreon.com/IdleThumbs. This month it's a lightning round: two minutes an answer for maximum efficiency. Due to popular demand, we're releasing the audio of that stream to the main podcast feed for easier listening. We'll be back with a regular episode of Idle Thumbs next week! Discussed: The future of VR headset adoption, indie comic books and adapting comics to other mediums, the origin of the "baboo" sound, making an RPG character sheet for yourself, Legion, vowels, visiting and living through an event from history, the moon, Lord Nelson's final words, what makes for a good ruination question? A note: One answer on this podcast makes reference to Important If True Episode 24, a podcast which has not yet been released. Whoops! We forgot how our schedule works. Look for that episode on Thursday, July 27 for the answer to Reggie Clark's intriguing question, "If you were really a robot would you want to know?" Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes

Okay I have no idea where my head is. Thanks!

I might be mixing up even more things in my head than I remember!

Not that it really matters much but unless my memory is totally crapping out, I think the wacky slot machine conga line music was the Nutcracker, not Swan Lake?

Whoa!

(And the episode is up!)

Because I was taking notes for the upcoming book club episode I think I noticed it more quickly than I otherwise would have, because of the presence of consistent characters, locations, and nicknames (like the narrator as "Fuckhead"). By about a third of the way through I figured there was some kind of continuity but it took me a little longer before I was fairly confident it was in fact the same narrator throughout.

Rewatch episode is live! Sorry for the delay, it was logistically complicated this week as Jake is on vacation.

Whoa!

This is probably how everyone should picture anything we say anyway

Interesting! My impression of non-rhotic English is that it is itself a fairly modern affectation—a cursory Wikipedia search seems to basically confirm this: "No English authorities describe loss of /r/ in the standard language prior to the mid-18th century, and many do not fully accept it until the 1790s." "Americans returning to England after the end of the American Revolutionary War in 1783 reported surprise at the significant changes in fashionable pronunciation. By the early 19th century, the southern British standard was fully transformed into a non-rhotic variety, though it continued to be variable as late as the 1870s." Your point about Southern American dialects makes sense and is well taken, particularly in the context of a sense of prestige, presumably in line with many other traditions of British aristocracy favored by the South and parts of the Northeast. It seems like Mark Twain would have been born into that evolution: "The adoption of postvocalic /r/-less pronunciation as the British prestige standard in the late 18th and early 19th centuries influenced American port cities with close connections to Britain, causing upper-class pronunciation in many eastern and southern port cities such as New York City, Boston, Alexandria, Charleston, and Savannah to become non-rhotic." It was weirdly forgetful of me to forget that property of Southern American speech, but also my general hazy memory that non-rhotic speech is a phenomenon that largely took hold after the establishment of the American colonies (rather than American colonists/citizens themselves actually originating a shift to non-rhotic American-sounding speech) is basically true to history.

It's funny that anyone would ascribe that to Mark Twain, because by rendering "letters" as "letez," it betrays its British or Australian origin by dropping the "r" in pronunciation.

The Idle Book Club 13: Never Let Me Go Something sinister and tragic is at play in an English countryside boarding school, and we're going to spoil it all. Join Chris and Sarah for their discussion of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. This one had a great forum thread too, so be sure to stop by! Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes

Great piece, thanks for linking!

Idle Weekend June 2, 2017: Pushing Our Buttons This weekend, we decided to talk about hard-stops in games. The things that make us look a game in the face, in disbelief or exasperation, and break up with them on the spot. We also dig in on music we love in games, sexism in sports and action movies, and two films we are feeling hot and cold on, often at the same time! Discussed: Endless Space 2, The Witness, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, Demon's Souls, Dark Souls 3, The Longest Journey, Yooka-Laylee, Prey, Wolfenstein: The New Order, Max Payne, Mission: Impossible 2, Godzilla (2014), Alien: Covenant, Prometheus Listen on the Episode Page Listen on Soundcloud Listen in iTunes

You're still supposed to move it. It sort of vibrates at a high frequency but you still move it back and forth across your teeth.

Whoa, thanks for making that! Rad.

Weird! I haven't seen any other reports of this. That is disconcerting though.

This is I think how I feel about Legion as well, which makes me think it's largely the sensibility of Noah Hawley. Sometimes it definitely goes too far, but when it hits, it's really fresh and fun. I am very much looking forward to more work from Hawley.

People have definitely gotten different stories. And yep it seems like you're caught up so far. There's been some discussion in the #postcardconspiracy channel of the Idle Thumbs Reader Slack:

I still think season 2 dragged a bunch, especially with all that "new guy" stuff. I think they could have done the second season's arc a lot more efficiently. Maybe not half the number of episodes, but definitely fewer.

The show actually does move forward, which is actually kind of shocking. By the end of Season 2 it has moved forward extremely dramatically. I agree that was really starting to feel like a risk, but they handle it I think very well. The main problem, and I agree with you here as well, is that there are simply too many episodes. It can't possibly sustain quality across big musical numbers when there have to be so many of them, and when the basic plot conceit relies on tension between specific characters. When it gets dragged out too much, it really weakens. Season 2 goes through a kind of a dry spell for this reason, but they get back into a groove.

It killed us every single time. Amazing.