MrHoatzin

She was WINKING at the camera coquettishly all through the election. Can you imagine Maggie Thatcher or, say, Angela Merkel, dressed for success, stoic and unfeminine, winking at her audience?

Someone last year observed, rather interestingly, that Sarah Palin is especially interesting as the first example of a strong woman personality on the political scene whose power is inherently feminine. They brought up examples of Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher (and I would insert Ayn Rand and Jeanne d'Arc) as more traditional feminist power figures—all of those traditional feminist archetypes tend to have bigger dicks than all the boys in the room, and Sarah Palin was a noticeable exception to that, they argued. I can't remember where I read this article.

;__;

Teenagers are dumb little fucks. There is no way of knowing if they will mature out of their shitty tastes until you are sure it is too late.

Everyone here is, obviously, completely fucking mad.

YY-MD-DMYY?

With all this said, it is weird to me that this stuff, so far, has almost universally been drawing veneration out of people as the first reaction. Those initial sketches that leaked were kindof meh, but everyone was in soft awe at whatever Disney had in store under that Hot Topic Steampunk Gothic™ aesthetic. I wonder if a) Disney has such a stake in people's nostalgia that people's first reaction at the thought of Disney-anything is a warm positive one before they really had the time to fully assess the images on their own merits, or it is interesting because the characters that we're seeing broken apart and rebuilt weren't just some random blobby cartoon dogs and whales, those were Goofy and Monstro, characters we know, ideas within the common culture that people don't freely get to comment on in that exact fashion, and with the blessing of the IP owner at that, or c) sbecause Warren Spector is a badass and people are curious to see what he will do with sumting that odd.

Aaaahhh... hokay. Now that that's been taken care of, how has Idle Thumbs affected my life? I dunno.... "working" here was all kinds of excruciating. Except for maybe the logo (which is impossible to use in anything unless it is peeking from behind something) and the Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures Preview (which is also all kinds of awkward), I don't know if I have really contributed much of quality, that I could look back on and be proud of. Most if not all of the articles I have written are obnoxious, narcissistic, meandering, long, pointless, unreadable. As far as how listening to the podcast has affected my life, Jake's example has made me accept the fact that I am a gamer who doesn't play games. I used to think I was some sort of unique freak, but I guess I am more of a demographic—or at the very least, there is two of us, so I am no longer alone! :gaming:

AAAAGGHHH! People around me keep using "accidentally" as a VERB, is this a meme I've forgotten or something?!

Steam-cum-eBay? What a horrible thought. A game comes out, and you're all like, I'd give you five bucks for it, and then when the price drops three years and two sequels later, Steam automatically buys it for you?

I wonder what those peaks in, erm, joinage are. Also, I have been using YYYYMMDD as my date stamp on everything for ever. It just makes sense.

It was a weird thing I cobbled together as a logo placeholder for a site I have been working on and off for about a year now. Whenever it is ready for beta testing, I will let y'all know.

Oh, I agree! I love what his movies do if you look at them as tongue-in-cheek propaganda. You have this weird plastic cast of stock characters playing out a weird morality/honor/justice tale, and every now and again he cuts to commercials that kindof round off the fascist world. It is so very dry and awesome. That said, I haven't seen any of his European movies, nor have I seen that Showgirls movie which everyone hates.

This is the most archaic thing I've heard in a long while. ¬¬

I think Paul Verhoeven is a madman who makes impressively potent but flawed propaganda for our fascist overlords (many different flavors thereof). I think Darren Aronofsky is a artsy-fartsy pansy who makes interesting but flawed essays on bourgeois psychoses (many different flavors thereof). I am curious about the latter's treatment of the former's stuff, regardless of how icky remakes and reboots may be.

The first one was awesome, the second one I never could get into, the third one I played a demo for at E3 in 2005, it was a weird demo in as far as you had your dude in some sort of idyllic, but repeating and featureless shrubby/foresty plot of land and you got to run through some grazing wildlife with no clipping, and then stumble upon some dudes duking it out and ignoring you altogether... The allegedly "broken" combat system is actually a feature, not a bug, though one would think they'd figure out how to do the funky controls more compellingly by now. Allegedly, they're supposed to discourage button mashing and allow for a more deliberate control of the sword. Silly Krauts.

You should totally make a bot that welcomes people in your name, and then you won't have to visit the forums at all! ¬_¬

Avid strikes me as powerful but highly unintuitive. I'll look into it, tho.

When he goes to retrieve the monkey head.

Oh, holy fuck, what is going on in this world when the legendary Roots crew are performing as a backup band for mister Jimmy "Some Chimpanzee" Fallon?! I just realized this as I looked at the dude's show's wiki page.

Hahahaha, oh man, it looks like Lil' Tim is sitting in Brother Question's lap. It is probably a trick of the lighting that makes Questlove look like he is in the background... um... right? :shifty:

Another thing I really like is the preponderance of clever new types of puzzles, all TTG as of late have really shined in this department: the pirate face-off, the manatee communication, that with the simplified interface inventory items become verbs (the hook hand, primarily, but also all the inventory items that get to be used more than once, like the little loupe, and the pyrate parrot, the sword, etc.).

That's kindof the bright surreal edgy thing I am talking about! It is a different tone all around. Murray has more of an impotent thing going this time around, rather than resorting to your stock Disney villain's comedic sidekick shtick, ick k k k. It is a different tone, it is a very comprehensive re-imagining of the material by someone who is not in awe of it, but is invigorated by the opportunity.

I dunno, EA is pretty fucking rotten. What makes them look good is just that they recently realized their properties were getting stale, so they let some indentured creatives flex some creative muscles for a spell. I find the very act of comparing virtues of humongous corporations to be weird, more meaningless than enlightening. They all exist for the bottom line. Humane treatment of employees is at worst a means to an end, at best noblesse oblige—more often than not it is a red line item on the balance sheets, an expense, to be reduced so that the net pile of money gets bigger. The fact that Will Langdell has a penchant for frivolous litigation, and EA decided to kick his ass, has nothing to do with how benevolent and just EA is; Langdell was just crimping EA's style, and they decided to fuck him up.

Everything about this episode is spectacular. The tarot at the beginning is rad. The environment layout and design is pretty uniformly awesome. Coronado De Cava is a great foil to Guybrush. Murray seems crazier than ever, in a good kind of way. The whole presentation has a kind of bright, surreal edge that CMI and EMI outright didn't, but that SMI and MI2 merely hinted at at times. It is a great take on the property all around. Kudos. :tup: