RubixsQube

Two things: 1) This is a clip from Supper Mario Broth, showing how Luigi's Mansion rendered Luigi's arms without the body, and it reminded me of The Eyes of Luigi. I thought I'd share. 2) Sometimes I will catch myself just saying "cell phone" every once in a while in Luigi's voice. Thank you.

I agree with you, SAM, with regards to the larger audience not working well with some runners. I think also, runners tend to fall into a routine of being dry and sarcastic about what's going on in a run, which for people who aren't intimately familiar with a game can be confusing and off-putting. It happened quite a bit with a few of the Zelda runs, in particular, and was frustrating. I think that the best runs use the opportunity to talk with a wider audience to describe the routes and the glitches and exploits in detail, such that people following along can feel the thrill of how quickly a game is being run as compared to how it would be run casually. Also, and this is a sad fact, a lot of people who do this aren't necessarily funny or entertaining, they're just good at running a game. However, they think they're funny, which is a bad combination. This year there just weren't as many exciting standout moments as in previous years. You highlighted a few of my favorites, SAM, but even in that Pepsiman run, the dude on the couch dressed as the titular character was a bit of an unfunny drag on what otherwise was pretty funny.

Growing up, I had two Ripley's Believe it or Not paperback books: These were just collections of interesting panels from the syndicated comic strip, but I must have read them hundreds of times. I also owned the board game, which was probably only played once with my family before they realized it was Not That Good of a Game. (It did feature a token that people passed around depending on who was set to play called a "Tern Token", ha ha). I was way into the idea of Ripley's Believe It Or Not, and I really think that the green book above helped contribute to my modern skepticism. When you see a book that just showcases a series of coincidences, you start to wonder that maybe collecting coincidences doesn't make them feel magical anymore. When you see everything collected, you realize that there are enough possible events that could happen in a given day that, no duh, coincidences will be everywhere. I remember going to a Ripley's Believe it Or Not Museum, and being fairly disappointed, since it didn't live up to the version that I had created in my mind, based on these books.

I think that while they're certainly exciting, and they do describe things well, their commentary doesn't seem to click with me. They don't have much dynamic range in how they present matches, every moment in a given match seems to be the Most Exciting, or the Most Crucial. They start at 10, and stay there, which tends to wash out the actual amazing moments. I think that perhaps this is just how it is in the e-sports community, since this is what most of the audience wants, they want hype and excitement. I think that a commentator, especially in a finals match, should recognize that more people outside their niche community are tuning in. The Smash community has a series of deep references that are kind of trotted out and not well explained, which is disappointing (every time I hear to a commentator refer to the top players as "Gods" I wince). I am being pretty picky! It was fine, and better explained than Anything in UMVC3.

Chris you need to stream Hitman (2016) so that you can find and assassinate Gary Busey for some reason.

I want to point out that, outside of the awful commentary, the Super Smash Bros. Melee Evo 2016 finals were goddamn amazing: Yes, it's like 40 minutes, and the same criticisms pointed out by Nick and Chris in the episode are valid, but damn if this isn't a profoundly tense series of matches. People complain about how Super Smash Bros. Melee ends up just being the same few characters (which is both true, but it's also true of SFV, as was mentioned in the episode), so it was pretty fun to see Jigglypuff played so well in the finals against someone who, up until that point, played primarily as Peach. Both of those characters are regarded as being very good by the community, but they aren't the typical three you see in Melee: Fox / Falco / Marth (And Super Smash Bros. for the WiiU has even more variety!) Edit: Most of the people on these forums probably have a good working knowledge of Melee, but in case you don't, some background. Hungrybox, the American who played as Jigglypuff, was the winner of the Losers Bracket, where you go if you lose a match at some point on your way through the tournament (as is standard in a Double Elimination Tournament). In the Losers Bracket, if you lose another set (of 3 individual matches), you're out of the tournament. The winner of Winners Bracket has not lost a set throughout the tournament, which is why the person in Losers Bracket has to win two sets against the person who won Winners Bracket to Win the Championship - so that the person in Winners Bracket has their own chance to go down to Losers Bracket, essentially. This process is called "Resetting the Bracket" and it's what Nick described as confusing his mom in the episode. Jigglypuff is a character that Hungrybox has to play with incredible finesse, especially against Fox, who is widely regarded as one of the strongest characters in the game. Jigglypuff is a very light character, which is bad if you are playing Super Smash Bros., as you die when you are thrown from the screen, but she has some advantages that balance things out. First, she has an amazing recovery, allowing her to kind of fly around like Kirby to get back to the stage. Second, and this turns out to be vital in the match above, she has the ability to use a move called Rest, where, if she's touching another character and uses Rest, she will fall asleep and the other character is really smacked around. If they're at even a moderate percentage, they'll be killed. It's worth noting that Jigglypuff will continue to sleep for a while, giving the other player a chance to come in and kill her while she sleeps, so sleep is pretty good in situations where this is the last of the other player's lives (called stocks in the match, represented by little heads on the bottom), or where Jigglypuff is at a very high percentage and she can take a stock from the other player in a situation where she'd likely be dead soon anyway. So, while watching this match, know that Armada, who is playing as Fox a character with a lot of very close combat style, is also always on the lookout for a situation where they're touching Jigglypuff, where Hungrybox could use Rest. Knowing that makes watching this final way, way more fun.

What an exciting device! What a nice game lineup! THAT BEING SAID I really wonder how the emulation is going to be on those things. I have a hacked/homebrew Wii with component out to my TV (only delivering 480p) to play NES games on my HDTV and it works pretty well for NES/SNES emulation. Perhaps (and this I say only because of the plug shape on the front of the system) they're taking the guts of a Wii and repurposing it for emulation, which, if they do it right should be good. The WiiU emulation has noticeable issues with colors and brightness, and these were not seen on the Wii emulation. I also wonder whether or not it will have noticeable input lag. I bought a raspberry pi 2 and put retropie on there, and the lag was so frustrating. It wasn't my TV, it was the device just not doing a great job upscaling things so as to make the game run in a snappy way.

The internet is a place where people who you have never met and will never meet get really personally annoyed by how you say certain words, abbreviations, and acronyms

Between Nashville and New Mexico? Yeah, it's called Texas, and it sucks butts. New Mexico is such a welcome sight after the nothingness of west Texas.

1) Mike, outside of the New Mexico car breakdown, how was the drive? 2) Mangela, hey, that's awesome, it's always good when people fight for vital social change. It's slow, and the world is stubborn, but dammit, it's important. So, good work. I am about to go to (Garching) Germany for a conference next week. I am not the biggest fan of academic conferences, as it seems like a lot of people use them as a way of showing off. There's just a lot of swagger that makes me feel pretty dumb. I'm also a little worried that as a vegetarian I might have a rough time of it. It will get me out of the 110+ degree heat of southern Arizona.

EVERYONE Nintendo just released Rhythm Heaven: Megamix TODAY, SECRETLY If you've never played a Rhythm Heaven game, do yourself a favor and pick this up. This is probably my favorite weird video game series, ever, and this is a Greatest Hits Collection, with some new content. Also, it's portable. The games are a bit tough, but everything is so fun that you just try and try again. I am so excited. EDIT:

HECK YES BOX BOX BOY. Man, Box Boy is so wonderful.

So, there's , and it looks like they've borrowed from the FarCry 2 playbook.

This game is a fantastic recreation of a classic game. It just needs more weird World Almanac copy protection. Watching Jake, Chris, and Nick play this on the stream with only a very, very limited memory of Carmen Sandiego made me tear my hair out, though, and I'm glad to see you've made some changes for people who aren't as familiar with the game.

Question. This, up in the sky, looks like Cygnus. Does your skybox feature actual constellations? If so, you have my heart, forever.

Actually, I'm going to post two times in a row just to insert this video into the Idle Thumbs hivemind as soon as I can: Can we have a mini Wizard Jam, or Fiction Jam, or whatever, that's just designed around explaining what the fuck is going on in this video

Quantic Dream, never grow up, you hear me, never grow up.

* * * * * * * * * U P D A T E Last week was a lot more work than I thought it would be, but I'm done with a version of this silly game. It's playable, and very silly, and not at all up to the quality of the rest of the games in this game jam, but it's DONE and it MADE ME LAUGH and I got to use a lot of GOOGLE TRANSLATE: https://rubixsqube.itch.io/suddenly-the-king-of-france I can't figure out how to make it play in a browser, or even how to make a windows or mac executable, so for now, it's a .love file, which requires you to go and download/install love2d. It's free, though? Before they try to play it live, I think that I'll have to go and make sure that I can output it to a .exe, at least. * * * * * * * * * SO. I made a game for last year's Wizard Jam. It was my first video game ever! I had a lot of fun, even if it was a silly amount of work for something so rudimentary. (I still kind of think it's pretty darn funny) I want to make another game, even though the next two weeks also feature a trip up to Canada for an all-hands JWST science meeting, and I have like, four or five Big Deal Responsibilities for the meeting! BUT I REALLY WANT TO PARTICIPATE. And so I'm going to make a game: Suddenly the King of France, inspired by this name of , and specifically a . Last time I used Stencyl, which was kind of a buggy platform for game development. I have enough experience with coding (well, not really game coding, but more like, the type of programming an astronomer has to do) to want to use something that isn't kind of hidden largely behind a UI, and for this game, I'm going to be using Lua / LÖVE under the assumption that I should be able to package up the game for itch.io ( ). This evening I've gone through a tutorial to know what I'm getting into, and I was successful enough with writing that little top-down shooter to build up the confidence to go forward with this project. SO WHAT CAN WE EXPECT? Well, Suddenly the King of France is going to also be a top-down game, possibly set in a castle of some sort. I'm thinking of making some sort of regal Pac-Man style game, but I kind of really want the twist to be that every once in a while a French monarch from the past appears and must be dodged. I need to spend some time tomorrow coming up with a more solid game design concepts (right now it's mostly me giggling as I do some of the sound effects in my head, for people who played Shoot that Pizza, you'll know how much I love the sound of my own voice). Maybe I'll just make a terrible Kanye Zone ripoff. I won't be as active in this game dev thread due to my other responsibilities, but I want to kind of give myself the push to work on this, for real, even if it zerofiftyone makes an even more amazing looking and playing game with the same name, again.

I was walking in to the office and when Chris started talking about a video series regarding shuffling probabilities, I thought "I wonder if he's talking about Persi Diaconis," and HE WAS. Everyone, do yourself a favor and look up as much as you can about this man. FACTS - Persi Diaconis' parents were musicians, and up until he was fourteen, he studied classical violin at Julliard. - Persi Diaconis was inspired by meeting (one of my heroes) Martin Gardner to think about both mathematics, and more importantly, magic, when he was thirteen. - Persi Diaconis left both school and home to be a professional magician when he was 14, traveling extensively for a few years with MOTHERFUCKING DAI VERNON OF ALL PEOPLE. - Persi Diaconis can perfectly riffle shuffle a deck 8 times in succession, a task that involves first cutting a deck exactly in half, and then interleaving each card with the other card. He can do this, live, only to show that this act returns a deck BACK TO IT'S ORIGINAL STATE. I have seen him do it during a math talk. - Persi Diaconis, after years of being a card shark across the country, decided that he wanted to understand probability theory so badly that he enrolled in New York City College, and eventually got a PhD in Mathematical Statistics at Harvard. To get into Harvard, his friend Martin Gardner helped a little: - Persi Diaconis then proceeded to do a shit ton of amazing math, including proving that it takes seven shuffles to sufficiently randomize a deck, as described in the video above. - Persi Diaconis won a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1982, because of course he did. PERSI DIACONIS DEMANDS YOU READ ABOUT HIS INTERESTING LIFE AND WORK

you are doing god's work.

Y O U G O T A S U P E R K I N G oh man there is a very, very small chance of getting the real big king, and that's what caught you. Thanks for playing, watching you both react made my afternoon!

I wish I lived in an alternate universe where this and a bunch of the other wizard jam games came out on Mac. The Idle Thumbs motto should read "Constantly Trying to Convince Kevin That He Should Buy a Damn PC"

Mike, in August of last year, I got in a car and drive, by myself from NH to AZ, where I moved for my new job. I've read that Mark Twain once said that America is not a place, it's a road. Perhaps this is made up, but I do believe it. Here are my recommendations. First, find people along the way who you can stay with, who can go out to dinner or drinks with you, who can hand you some snacks for the road in the morning (If you decide to drive through southern Arizona, let me know). Avoid Texas if at all possible, but also try to make your way through New Mexico, since it's one of the great places in the country. Podcasts are fun, but really you should spend time to build a soundtrack. I found it was really fun to figure out the albums I wanted to play based on where I was driving. Take whatever time you need to drive to some weird Atlas Obscura site. Maybe take some time and read a book featuring a famous road trip; it'll help you get in the road trip mood, and also you can follow along in places. Don't eat junk food, it will make you feel like a monster. Don't think you can drive 12 - 14 hours each day, I set it at 8-9 hours, and I was fine. Find larger cities and go to a baseball game, even if you go alone, it's the summer, and baseball is a really wonderful thing. (Actually, go to a minor league game, they have weirder giveaways and theme nights) It's not hard to find websites for little towns you might find yourself in, in the evenings. Look up whether or not there are any weird events, like a concert in the park, or some local production of Twelfth Night. Go! Maybe you're not driving in the summer. In that case, a lot of the same ideas still hold. Be careful what you have displayed in your back seat of your car, it's not uncommon for people to break into a car to grab an easily observed laptop. I purposely kept all the valuables in the trunk and made sure that the back seat had some beat-up boxes, with things covered up where I could. I had a plastic tub I kept in the passenger seat that had snacks and napkins and other important items, which I could easily hide away in a glove box. Mostly though, I remembered how different everything ended up being. It was green and lush in New England, and it gave way to pouring rain in Ohio, and then a day later I was in warm, beautiful Nashville. There were moments when I was driving through Missouri where I had nothing to do but smile. I swam in a hotel pool in Oklahoma City right before sunset, just me in this big stupid pool. In Albequerque I marveled at the beautiful freeway overpasses, red and light blue. I saw Meteor Crater in northern Arizona, and drove through the forests of Flagstaff before descending to the hot desert of Phoenix. Enjoy the opportunity.

It's a plush Tingle with a bean butt