RubixsQube

i like the bee question because at any given time, it could be your actual situation. The next time any of you opens a box of pizza, you will have no idea whether or not bees are gonna swarm from out of nowhere. I do like the idea of pizza disappearing from the world just because someone wouldn't deal with a few swarms of bees, though, too.

I am way in over my head here. Unity is profoundly powerful god forbid I just start throwing in four hundred million assets all rotating through space

If anything, I'm creating some pretty weird album cover art

I played a little bit of ARMS, and while it was fun, I'm not a huge fan of 1-on-1 multiplayer. Splatoon is a little different because it's team-based, but still, I get too stressed out by constantly losing. I was super, super excited to see that 8bitdo controllers were updated with Switch support, as I own one of their incredible SNES bluetooth pads. It's one of the only third-party controllers that feels like an actual SNES controller, and I've been using it a bunch on my mac. It connects to my Switch just as easily as the pro controller, and has no noticeable input lag. I have gotten back into Shovel Knight as a result! It feels like some sort of magic, and I expect Nintendo to release a Switch update to patch out this functionality, but for the time being, wow.

I was considering Unity, although I primarily use a Mac and I don't know how well Unity development on a Mac is. I also have no idea how steep the learning curve is for someone who's never developed in 3D. My last games were strictly 2D affairs, the most recent in Pico-8, which may be the exact opposite of Unity.

This podcast is great. The joy at Nick's reveal about the story, urban legend or not, was so profoundly good. I have two notes, although perhaps I should just write this in: 1) I have always been really fascinated by eruv after seeing the boundaries around the orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Los Angeles. There's a single house here in Tucson with eruv wire (Chris referred to it as string, but I'm fairly certain it's always wire) around it, I assume so that the family living there can take tools out to do gardening, or play, on the sabbath. The more that I looked into it, the more traditions I discovered that seemed like Orthodox Jewish Bible-workarounds (I do not mean this dismissively, similar to how Chris didn't want to call them "loopholes."). For instance, Tefillin, those black leather boxes worn by observant Jewish men which contain parchments inscribed with the Torah as "a memorial between your eyes" (Exodus 13:9). Or the practice of selling Chametz over Passover, since you are not allowed to own any food with leavening. I have a friend who teaches at a large, very well-to-do orthodox Jewish high school that also owns quite a few restaurants and bakeries around the country, and each year, during Passover, because he is a Gentile, he suddenly finds himself owning millions of dollars worth of food in restaurants for one week. I apologize if I'm being too overly simplistic in describing this, and I would hope someone who is a practicing Jew could help expound on this all. It's super fascinating. 2) Perhaps this is too pedantic, but is there any way that when you discuss science results on the podcast, you discuss the actual scientists who performed the experiments, and their affiliation? Too often, people just say "scientists discovered", lumping all scientists together. This is the final link in a long chain of oversimplification (ironic that I do the same thing in this very same post, above!) that goes: 1) Scientist performs the research, cites statistical significance, perhaps gives a few tentative ramifications of the results 2) School / Hospital / Research Lab publishes press release about study, only discussing importance of ramifications 3) Media reports on press release, trumping up importance of ramifications, which were likely only barely significant 4) People post about media reports and articles about ramifications, ignoring who performed the study, what the study actually was, and the significance repeat repeat repeat This is how we get so many articles about "miracle cancer cures," when in actuality it's like, some medical researchers found that in very highly specific cases they were able to use some really intense combination of factors to provide a slightly statistically significant decrease in cancer cell growth. Now, I know that the podcast is called "Important If True", and you guys are mostly just having a fun time, so I don't expect you to go into detail into significance and statistics and repeatability or whatever, but it'd be great if you at least gave credit to the scientists and their institutions of study. Ugh, pedantry over

I'm in. This will be my fourth game for a Wizard Jam, and I'm really excited. I may even try my hand at learning another entire game creation engine, like an idiot. I really appreciate all of the work you all do (especially @zerofiftyone) in organizing this. It's been really wonderful making silly games.

My scattered thoughts: 1) Hearing Nick's story makes way more sense after getting to know his alter ego, famous Dark Souls streamer Idle Thumbs. While I generally side with a story-teller, knowing Nick's ability to get lost in any environment, I have a feeling that he really went out of his way to hoist himself on that ol' petard. 2) If anyone wants to read the full article discussed on the podcast about the link between name and occupation (and not just see the abstract linked in the description), you can find it here. It's actually 10 separate studies, and I need to take a closer look at it to see if my initial concerns are valid. It seems like this could be some sort of weird p-hacking thing. It seems like they chose dentist and lawyer because those were professions they could easily find names for, but still, going through a bunch of D or L names to find the ones that have the highest statistical significance is a little suspect. It does have great weird tables: 3) While Chris did bring up the idea that the Cars Pope stand-in must have killed the real Pope...did that mean his Pope-mobile consumed and devoured and took on the personality of the original Popemobile? 4) I can't be the only one who heard the opening of canyon.mid and had to go and actually listen to it, right

For anyone that cares (potentially nobody), here is the Covert Agent article that prompted me to write in. I think, regardless of how old and decrepit the discussion of ludology vs. narratology is, the article is pretty interesting, even if you don't care much about Covert Agent. Edit: On looking at a video tweeted by dante that goes into the "debate" between ludology and narratology, I think that I can see why I was so confused about the response made on the podcast. I think that perhaps I am still interested in what some of the people in this thread (and on the cast) were discussing. I think that it has to be really hard to create something like Breath of the Wild, or Dwarf Fortress, or Crusader Kings 2, or Far Cry 2, where a variety of systems have to interplay in such a way as a narrative can develop. Similarly, as SuperBiasedMan points out, some story-heavy games, like Night in the Woods, have interesting unique elements which make an individual play experience feel less authored. So as games mature as a medium, it feels like a difference in game styles (sorry for even raising the idea that there might be this gulf!) is being blurred more and more. I think that perhaps originally, this wasn't an actual debate, sure, but I do believe there's a huge value in discussing it, especially since (as I mentioned in my overly long, dry email) it does seem to be at the core of Idle Thumbs, a show hosted by game developers who work on interesting, well-though-out, narrative-driven games but seem to more often discuss novel play experience and interacting systems.

Yeah, I don't think it's difficulty ramp is as good as it needs to be. Like, the devs did a reddit AMA, and the top rated question was about difficulty. I don't know if I agree with their response: I think that trying to make a game that is "interesting to some degree on your 5th and 5000th" is a noble goal. I just think that because of the fact that you don't directly control the seed, you have this second layer of difficulty beyond just the base game which makes for infuriating play sessions. Depending on the enemies the game throws at you right off the bat, you could have a fairly straightforward path through the first area, or be chased by multiple flying enemies as you maneuver through a maze of holes, and the game is profoundly punishing for small missteps, as noted in the polygon review. I think that there's a larger conversation to be had about modern difficult games as a way of appealing to a maturing audience, but god damn, I don't play video games to get frustrated.

Look at everything in the first Breath of the Wild DLC! - A new Hard Mode where enemies might be in the sky - An object that sets a temporary warp point somewhere on the map - A weird and exciting horde mode - Apparently Nintendo has been tracking Link's GPS location all this time and they'll show you where you've walked on the map (as a way of helping you find areas you haven't visited). Did anybody actually read the Shiekah Slate TOS when they accepted it - New outfits and weapons! Most importantly, look at this!

You can watch it here.

I think that Alien sequel is called LIAEN: OVEN CANT

PREDICTION: This movie won't be very good and this casting decision will feel extra sad

Yeah, it sounds like someone doing a passable Crow impersonation and then a dude talking. I agree with you, but man, I don't think they could have gotten away with changing the robots too much, because nerds hate change to things they like.

I think the problem I've found with this style of joking is that it never lets up, and so it just feels very writerly. There's a huge lack of any comedic timing in the first two episodes that I watched. They just say the line they've written, and then move on to the next line they've written. Scenes don't even develop enough to let the audience kind of see what's going on before there'e a gag. I feel as if this perhaps they cut out a quarter of the jokes, they could let the whole thing breathe a bit, which would make the whole reboot seem more confident. Also, I cannot in any way discern between any of the three characters, I remember the original MST3K having the robots play against the human host, which lead to different style jokes. Oh while I was typing this @Patrick R said a few of the same things.

I posted this on twitter, but this is me in my office, where I work on what will eventually be the way deeper, larger version of that deep field image I keep over my shoulder. Here's a fun game. How many nerdy references can you identify? There are many.

The idea of Nick trying to write Hey Ya from memory in his second-chance-life is really confusing to me. Patrick's scenario indicates you get a do-over but you retain your current memories. So, hypothetically, you are a baby but you have a huge amount of knowledge already, so initially he's going to have to wait to catch up to his physical development, and then is he going to...immediately write down what he remembers from Hey Ya? How many of you could transcribe Hey Ya, or any hugely popular song, entirely from memory? Let's imagine that he can, in fact, write down some version of the song: the lyrics, the beat, perhaps some idea of the various instrument parts...is he then going to record this himself? Is he going to like, make a .mov file and upload it to his personal geocities account? Maybe he gets a band and sings it at his high school dance. No offense to Nick Breckon, but I have a feeling that the Nick Breckon version of Hey Ya might not have the same appeal as the version in our timeline. Also, remember, he has to do all of this before 2002-2003 or else he's actually beaten by Andre 3000. Maybe he thinks he'll try to sell the song to Andre himself. Will he travel to Atlanta in the early 1990s and hope to meet up with him (pretty funny considering Nick is like, less than ten years old, here), saying "here is this song I wrote, you should purchase this song from me." I think Nick's only option is to hope that he can win a court case with Andre 3000, saying it was suspiciously exactly the same as something he and a band recorded in high school, but at that point he's setting himself up to be The Jerk Who Sued Andre 3000 Because of Hey Ya. I think that really, when it comes to your life, you've already forgotten so many of the little things that have happened to you that you're not going to be able to relive things exactly, and you'll introduce enough chaos early on to make it impossible to make sure everything happens the way that you remember it. I think that making an attempt to stop large world-changing events, like 9/11, might be worthwhile, but that's going to be pretty difficult to do, also (see 11/22/63). How the hell could you, as one person, stop Donald Trump from being elected? I think that the true sadness is the fact that you are going to live out your life just knowing that these things will happen, and no matter how many people you grab by the collar and tell on the street, it's not going to do much. Maybe at least just buy a bunch of Apple stock early, and maybe some bitcoin when it was cheap, and see if you can't try to save individual people when you can, if you can remember it. And Patrick, you'll live a life where you'll meet your partner, have had a lot of the same experiences that made you you, and also you'll just happen to be secretly very, very wealthy. Ugh, I have thought so much about time travel, and the ability for one person to go back and change the past, and I always settle on this idea that perhaps we are living in a version of the world where someone has gone back and prevented even worse events from transpiring, and this is the version of the world where we should feel grateful that some time traveling hero like, instilled hope for humanity in Stanislav Petrov one autumn morning in 1983.

I don't know if I understand this, can you describe this feeling a little bit more? Like, not as a way of me trying to prove a point, but mostly because I want to understand the origin of this reaction, as a lot of people feel similarly.

I really liked hearing the discussion on the episode about film adaptations, especially since we are in a kind of weird moment where almost all very popular films are adapted from some other source. It's weird to me how many people just want a page-for-page, slavish adaptation of something that they've read just put onto the screen. The real joy of literature is that a good book (to me) is something that uses the written language to convey an experience that couldn't be done in the same way as film (I think that films can do the same thing, and show something that would be very difficult to write). I personally don't find the Harry Potter book series to be very good (which is not a super popular opinion, and I recognize that), and so when it came to the films, the ones that I felt were most successful (see: Prisoner of Azkaban) where the ones where they were able to play a little looser, and adapt the these overly complicated, fussy books into a more emotional and magical filmic world. And I guess I don't understand the argument on the other side? Do people just wanted to be rewarded for reading something carefully, and so they can recognize characters and lines? Like, what is SeventeenAndAHalfYearOld really afraid of when it comes to an adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time? I think that people must just consider books to be like very ornate, wordy film scripts.

Holy cow, congratulations! You both look so happy, and the wedding looks amazing.

Yeah, it was really funny to hear his skepticism over this exact product one day before this news. Also, this podcast could just be a satellite Idle Thumbs episodes. They talk about: the robot apocalypse, Jeff Goldblum, the weird laughter sound effect from Independence Day that the virus makes on the alien spacecraft, The Xbox naming convention, Chris uses the phrase "it's a disaster," and Jake uses the word garbage (both in his classic way of referring to himself, and ALSO as a bonus referring to actual garbage). I think it's also really interesting to hear Jake and Chris talk about Firewatch, since they made a point of not bringing it up on their own podcasts for fear of being perceived as self serving (I guess?). I suppose I could just replay the game with the commentary if I wanted more of that, though.

It's really great, actually. There's more Breath of the Wild discussion, and a little bit of talk about Flinthook and Nier: Automata, but then Jake and Chris take the floor and talk about Full Throttle for a while. I know that this has probably been said before, but I would absolutely love to hear a game by game retrospective from the Thumbs crew on the classic Lucasarts games. They were a fixture of my (and many others!) childhoods, and every time Jake or Chris let themselves talk about those games on a podcast, it's fascinating stuff. I'm sure there are other podcasts that cover this, but it'd be near to hear about the various Lucasarts games from people who have developed modern story-driven adventure experiences.

There were four times he got hit, as far as I remember, and once where he dodged it: 1. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/134579162?t=58m33s 2. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/134579162?t=01h00m41s 3. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/134579162?t=01h04m15s 4. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/134579162?t=01h06m09s (near miss!) 5. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/134579162?t=01h08m13s

The Wetzel's Pretzel's story has two weird twists (ugh): 1) According to the LA Times: (emphasis mine) Lending evidence for the hypothesis that Rick Wetzel was teased as a child, scaring him into silence during this naming session. 2) If you go to the Wetzel's Pretzel's website, and look at their team, you get to see a bunch of fun flipping panels, including one of Rick Wetzel: In case you hadn't noticed, everybody. Strategic initiatives! Sinful Cinnamon!