RubixsQube

Ok, I just managed to get #5 solo, with a pair of kills. The first was right near the beginning, when some fool tried to run me over with a buggy, crashed it instead into a wall, and then got a shotgun to the face. The last was one of the final few, who was trying to be sneaky and ended up getting a 4x scope sassy carl to the noggin. I died racing into the tiny shrinking play area, like a dope. Jeez, this game amps up the adrenaline, oof.

I played a bit more last night, and I have yet to actually fire on someone. I am not saying I have not gotten a kill, I am saying I have not actually seen someone for long enough to shoot at them. It's fun to play with my friends, but man, the end game is just profoundly unsatisfying when you find yourself just surprised and murdered.

Man I am Not Great at this game, but I suppose that'll change as I play more. I would be interested, this week, in playing with some of the Thumbs, I suppose I'll head to the slack to find some people who want to fumble around with a complete idiot (myself).

I just built a computer, because I was tired of listening to friends, and podcasts, and hearing about PC GAMING, so I went made a computer. And I played my first four matches of battlegrounds, and it's real fun, even if it's pretty wonky. I think that this game has a lot of those moments where you just straight-up die out of nowhere, which is lame, but, it's exciting enough leading up to that moment that it balances out pretty well. I should go and see if there's some sort of Thumbs steam group for playing with other people.

https://tinyurl.com/giveawizzytoahorsebag

This episode featured Chris giving a hearty "Fuck You" and "Fuck off" to BOTH Nick and Jake. The rare double fucker! Edit:

I'm a member of the science team for the primary instrument on the telescope. And when it came to flooding/leaking, the mirror and instruments are all packaged up inside the space environment chamber, and they're incredibly safe. Johnson Space Center, while it got real wet, never flooded: Clear Lake stayed just barely below the banks. The people running the tests were very conscientious of our safety, switching us from 8 to 12 hour shifts where we were shuttled in twice a day. I was on the overnight shifts and oof, it was rough, especially as the rain kept coming. I would get back to my hotel, fall asleep, wake up, and get ready to come back in. And the testing continued. I was relieved yesterday evening as a couple of my colleagues drove in from out of state to take over, and I'm sitting in the Dallas airport on my way home. I am very lucky to have been in a place that was relatively safe during this insane storm. I only hope that necessary services: gas, food, groceries, medical supplies, are quickly brought into the city. On my drive north I saw hundreds of trucks moving south to Houston with boats and supplies. It was heartening.

So. On Wednesday morning, I flew out to Houston, Texas, for another set of shifts for testing the telescope I'm working on. I don't know if you've read, but a Hurricane hit the coast just south of Houston, late Friday night, and while the hurricane settled to become a tropical storm pretty quickly, it started to dump a lot of water on the city here. A lot. Here are the rain totals for the last 24-hours: I'm down somewhere in that cluster of red. Essentially, a foot and a half of water came down over the course of a day. And there's more to come. I'm ok, I'm in a relatively safe place, being shuttled back and forth to NASA for my shifts (the testing has to continue despite the disaster), but the city is not. I think that this is going to be one of those events that people talk about for many, many years to come, perhaps one of the worst flooding crises in American history. I just really want you to pay attention to this, and help out wherever you can, if you can. I've been super fortunate, both here, and throughout my life, when it came to natural disasters like this. It's actually really terrifying to be suddenly thrust into a situation where you've lost control and you kind of just have to Wait It Out and Hope Everything Goes Ok. I think that there needs to be a real focus on infrastructure spending and disaster preparedness in this country, because this possibility was known, and written about, well in advance.

People made fun of those Switch commercials, but they actually showed a few situations that I've used the Switch in. I have brought it to a few parties and played the (reviled but actually fun) 1-2-Switch and Snipperclips, and I've also found myself playing Mario Kart with people randomly in travel situations. It's awesome.

Chris, is there a date you can provide for when you were in London seeing Big Moon.

Also, big moon does kind of happen during lunar perigee, when it's 12% larger

Yeah, the explanation that both the original question asker and Chris gave where they saw the moon (on the horizon, generally that's the only time someone notices the moon at all, especially when they're driving or in a city) as huge and then later it appeared normal can be explained by this. Later they came outside and it was higher in the sky, where they had nothing around to compare its size in the sky. Thus it appears "normal" again. It was 100% not atmospheric distortion.

I had to go and find the actual source for that set of images, linked here. Bonus gifs:

Hey, everyone that puts your phone in rice when it gets wet: why are you doing that, who told you to do that, why did you think that was a thing that would actually work A few months ago my gf dropped her iPhone 6 partially in some water, and we just went and opened the phone up and and carefully dried the insides. I cannot believe that rice would like, pull the moisture out from some components buried deep in a phone. Also, the issue with water getting into the phone is that if you don't actually dry it off from the internal components they will slowly corrode them, and rice ain't doing anything to help there.

Also, for everyone who liked Jon Bois' 17776, beyond Breaking Madden, my favorite thing he has done is his series Pretty Good, where he also wields Google Earth to tell weird stories. My two favorite episodes: This episode where he talks about a REAL football game with a final score of 222 to 0. This amazing story about the weird awful 1904 olympic marathon. You don't need to give half a crap about sports to enjoy the weirdness of this. He's a good storyteller.

oof, this is a very good post also, yeah, medians are all the rage. Jake mentioned that the use of the average was really popularized by astronomers, but we often just go with median because of weird outliers. And if anyone hasn't seen how easy it is to create data sets with a given average, they should take a look at the datasaurus dozen: ...a set of datasets that have the same x and y averages, mean, standard deviations, and Pearson's correlations to two decimal places but are totally wacky compared to each other.

It seems to me that they start the game with Jason surprising the teens because it gets to the point where there is defined gameplay: for the teens, survive, and for Jason, hunt. From the podcast, it sounded like Chris/Nick are sad that each round starts with the teens already in flee/survive mode, when they would rather the early game experience hew more towards the films, where there is a calm before the storm. Chris brought up the fact that this is perhaps an impossible thing, because the players know, going in, what the game entails, so there's no real surprise. Jake's suggestion just shifts the random roll for choosing Jason to a slightly later moment in the round, but I don't know what the players would be doing while waiting for Jason to appear. Would they all be scrambling around looking for survival/escape items? This doesn't seem to be much different from what the game is already. Edit: This was discussed further on in the episode. To replace this comment, I have a question about New Donk City - do you suppose that this is the same city from the arcade Donkey Kong game, where Mario bounded up a construction scene to rescue Pauline? Also, I'm confused as to why Chris thinks that the citizens of New Donk City are "normal humans" whereas Mario is a "capering homunculus." Everyone in NDC is suspiciously similar, and I don't know if I would call them "normal." Is it because they're wearing business suits? I would argue that the style of the Mario games up until now makes the NDC citizens profoundly abnormal. The only other time (that I can remember) Mario has hung out with a group of people much taller than him is in Mario's Time Machine. It should be noted, as well, that only one person in NDC can be controlled via Cappy, the RC Car dude who is not wearing a hat. Cappy can only allow Mario to "cap-ture" (Nintendo's term) characters that aren't already wearing a hat.

I agree, but also I sided with Jake that burning the food for energy would probably annoy the genie and the energy would just (makes the noise Jake made at 43:10 in the episode, "booo"). The version where the food is placed in a flat surface that then falls to power flywheels or whatever, that could just be one step in a food delivery system, keeping with the spirit of the whole enterprise.

Yeah, and then the thread plummets, and it's even more embarrassing.

Hello. For my fourth (!) Wizard Jam entry, I am going to making a game based on Idle Thumbs Episode 32 (and Maltese Falcon reference) The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of. My first game was made using this Mac engine Stencyl, my second was made using Lua/Love, my third was made with Pico-8, and I've finally decided to just take a jump and learn Unity, because I am a "glutton for punishment." I really like the idea of making a 3D space, perhaps one where you can fly around to various objects that float there, maybe exploring them closer if you'd like to. Perhaps there will be nice music that plays. I want this to be a 3D Floating Simulator, maybe. But before I can do that, I have to learn how to use this entire game engine. So, that's exciting. For the time being, I found a fun skybox, and it's not hard to populate it with various simple assets. It was pretty hard to figure out how to have the mouse allow for the camera to swing around, although for now I can only make this work horizontally. And the controls are tank controls. Welp, as it is with these things, I have a long way between here and whatever the final game becomes. EDIT: THE GAME IS OUT, in both Mac and PC versions. https://rubixsqube.itch.io/the-stuff-dreams-are-made-of It's a comedy game? Where you wander around an island and listen to me yammer on? And I hope it's funny? It's got some things that I think are funny, which is mostly the point. Maybe try to wait until one of the audio triggers is done before wandering off to find another one, or in some cases the audio might play over itself. (I haven't tested the PC version, but the Mac version runs.)

https://kotaku.com/a-twin-stick-game-with-no-bullets-1796369065 OH SHIT YOUR GAME IS BLOWING UP also wizard jam advertising

Thank you! It was super fun to work with Unity, and I was helped a lot by people here in this forum and on the slack chat. That was super great! Also, unlike some of the other engines I used, Unity has an incredibly extensive set of tutorials, and there are a ton more on youtube and in various forums. I wasn't making something super complicated, and once I figured out how to write scripts and pass around variables, it became pretty straightforward to run in a similar way to the other engines I've used. I really liked working with Unity, and it's amazing how many completely-different-looking games in this very jam were also made with the same raw tools.

If Jake is worried about power generated from genie food, you don't need to burn the food to generate the energy. If you have a series of people generating their allotment of food at some point where that food has potential energy, then it can be used to power turbines and still disappear entirely. Hell, it can even be dropped down the power chute and then collected at the bottom and eaten, thus providing unlimited free energy and still working within the spirit of the wish.

They expand on the update a little more here. It looks as if they've got some content that isn't random that better introduces the powers. I was someone who played the game, saw the various powers, realized that they were expensive and seemingly not worth it, and just moved on. It seems like the powers are vital to progress apparently. I think about this game a lot like Spelunky, and I viewed the powers like the teleporter, where yeah, I'm sure someone who was really good with the game could use it, but for me, it didn't make any sense how it could help considering you so often used it to kill yourself.

So, the Tumbleseed developers just released this INCREDIBLY FASCINATING writeup about their game's difficulty, along with an update that addresses this. It reveals a whole bunch about their internal thought process when it comes to how this difficulty directly impacted sales and the way people interacted with the game. I really wonder what everyone's thoughts are!