Nappi

I strongly disagree with Idle Thumbs people coming across as ironic in the podcast. In fact, their unironic enjoyment of video games is one of the main reasons I love the podcast. I wonder if the reader was being ironic with the hipster email.

The videos are simply delightful! The game is worth checking out for the cutscenes alone. Oh, and the gameplay if awesome as well.

right...

How many neurons do you have to replace before you stop being yourself?

If you want to read non-fiction but still want a good story you might be interested in Laurent Binet's HHhH. The book covers Operation Anthropoid, an assassination attempt of SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich by a Czech and a Slovak. The narration can be a bit annoying at times (that is, when Binet dwells on how hard it is to right non-fiction when you don't have all the information), but the story is really captivating and Heydrich is so vile* that you can't help rooting for the assassins. I should warn you that there are a few detailed descriptions of Nazi atrocities of the fuck-the-whole-humankind variety. Other non-fiction I have enjoyed: Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace, Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl, Venetian Navigators by Andrea Di Robilant, Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry... I'm forgetting many. *The name of the book should give the idea what kind of man we are talking about here. Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich"

I don't have a chance to read during breaks, but I do read during my commute to and from work (about 20+20 min). I read basically whatever, since I find it relatively easy to catch up with the plot even in such short bursts. Looking at my bookshelf, I don't have many short story collections or similar. Sherlock Holmes collections might work, though some of them are definitely longer than 45 minutes. I recently read Randall (xkcd) Munroe's What if? which I mostly enjoyed and which fits the requirements. There is also the Penguin Mini Modern Classics Box Set which, I'd imagine, is quite hard to find at this point. The individual books should be relatively hard to find, though. If the problem is you losing track of time, well, maybe you can just set an alarm on your phone or something.

Turn'd http://www.twitch.tv/patriciaxhx/b/572530767 http://www.twitch.tv/patriciaxhx/b/572538608

One of the cases is called "A Half Moon Walk". There. I hope you feel better now.

Yeah, they used this game as a segue for discussing the board game, I think? I bought it because I have been waiting for a good Sherlock Holmes game for quite some time now.

I bought the game a couple of days ago, and have solved two cases so far. As you said, some aspects of the game (even basic things like walking) are pretty rough, but I'm nevertheless enjoying it so far. For the most parts, it feels like you are actually playing one of the Sherlock Holmes short stories which is pretty impressive. The fact that you have to connect the dots at the end by interpreting the clues you have discovered, makes you feel like you are actually doing a tiny bit of detective work instead of just interacting with everything and watching the protagonist make all the important connections. Only one creepy Watson moment so far, but it was pretty bizarre. I was gathering clues at a train station, and when I turned around to check what was on the other side of the platform, Watson was standing in the middle of the train track buried knee-deep in the ground staring back at me.

What? The character design is pure genius.

Weapons do not have light. The defense upgrades of pieces of armor increase their light generation.[citation needed]

I'm about 18 minutes in so far. Based on Sean's enthusiasm about CS, I predict that in about five weeks he will be start a new podcast called "Counter Terrorism Today" which will immediately be picked up by flocks of chronically terrified people who will subsequently be disappointed to find out that it is about a video game.

Neuromancer was fascinating, but I did not enjoy Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive nearly as much. Pattern Recognition and Spook Country were both good, in my opinion. They highlight quite nicely how weird, futuristic and science fiction-y our present actually is if you choose to view it that way.

I wish I had a better system for searching for interesting authors. Most of my book purchases are based on friend and forum recommendations, occasional book reviews, related product sections in Amazon et al., and me wandering aimlessly through Wikipedia. I have had limited success with the recommendation engine of Goodreads, but the "Readers Also Enjoyed" and "Lists with this Book" sections can be quite helpful at times. It is also a good place to lurk what others are reading.

Ooh, that Inherent Vice looks fantastic! Inherent Vice is my favorite Pynchon novel (of the measly 3 I have read so far), and I have been yearning to read it again for some time now. I don't actually remember much of the plot anymore, just this constant sense of doom lurking behind all that smog and pot smoke. I agree that if someone is to make this movie right, it would probably be P. T. Anderson. Also, holy Wolverine those sideburns!

Decided to read Randall (xkcd) Munroe's What if: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions instead. I'm only 30 pages in but I'm loving it already. I don't know which percentage of these questions have already been answered on xkcd what if (which I only discovered just now) but I can still heartily recommend buying a physical copy of the book to anyone who is interested in this sort of stuff (xkcd, science, absurd thought experiments, etc.), if only because the book is beautifully laid out.

What?

I have The Bone Clocks sitting on my bookshelf but I don't know if I want to pick it up right after Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. I agree that David Mitchell can be quite frustrating author at times. Parts of his novels are among the best writing I have ever come across – like the Frobisher story in Cloud Atlas or the more mundane parts of The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – but those are always balanced by elements that I find off-putting – like the innermost stories in Cloud Atlas or the cult in The Thousand Autumns or the comet shaped birthmark in fucking everything.

I only watched Back to the Future as (sort of) an adult, and I found the fact that Marty doesn't mind at all that his fucking up the past has changed his family almost beyond recognition somehow extremely sad. "I love my new successful and self-confident stranger family much better than the pathetic losers I had spent and the entirety of my life with."

I wish I had more controllers and more space and more friends. But mostly more controllers.

Holy shit that game looks amazing!

Hahaha... nooooooooooo! I noticed that the game got updated and decided to check whether the loot cave was patched or not. The respawn rates did seem much slower. Then the madness with wizards and knights began. It was fun. Rest in peace loot cave. But yeah, the loot cave thing is pretty dumb. It's a shame that late game leveling is such a pain without it.

To be fair, most of that can be explained by them really disliking the anthropologist and trying to get rid of him by being extremely terse and/or facetious. "No, we don't have words for different quantities. No, I have no idea what that picture depicts, nor, in fact, what words like "picture" and "depict" mean. Yeah no, please, have some more - we don't even believe in hunger. No, we have no written or oral history that you could take a look into. When did you say they are going to pick you up again? On that spin-ny thing? No, these necklaces symbolize nothing or serve any aesthetic purpose - they are purely practical. Take it, please." In all seriousness, though, Pirahã culture is pretty fascinating.