I_smell

Hi I'm gonna be at Gamescom in Germany, somewhere in the Indie Megabooth all next week. Probably wearing all orange, probably on SpeedRunners. Just throwin it out there!

EDIT- Nah, forget it, nope. This is someone else's story, I shouldn't post it.

Never seen that music video, but that's really funny and cool.

Aaaaa I have a guy in my office who's latvian, he's exactly the same. Brings in a bottle of whiskey and is upset that nobody's joining in. Goes out to buy lunch and gets 5 buckets of ice-cream when we do not have a freezer. Constantly pushing references to drugs and sex in the game, gets told off for referring to female employees as booth babes, etc. I'm not gonna tie that to any specific race, I'm actually pretty relieved to hear that these people exist in other countries. Keeps the office fun!

I moved from England to NL and nobody here is overweight. It's unbelievable to go back and remember what a fat person looks like, and how common they are.

Russians call fruit seeds "bones". "Where is apple? Did you remove his bones??"

In my early 20s I'm learning the root meaning and definition of a lot of worn-out cliches they drop on kids, like "Always be yourself!" and "Enjoy the little things!" and "The grass is always greener!" and "Home is where the heart is!". I guess it takes a lifetime to slowly fill out a good sense of why these one-liners persist over generations, and I look forward to collecting more set-ups to these tired old punchlines for the rest of my life.

Yaaayyyyyy! Hooray for you! I just got back from my 2nd solo travel trip. It was in Barcelona, I booked it on Wednesday and flew out on Friday... Yeah I guess I booked a flight out of Schiphol Airport on Wednesday, huh :I It was nice! I didn't make any friends like on my last trip, but my last trip still stands in my heart as proof that I'm a good, approachable, charismatic boy. Lots of fun sight-seeing, stairs-climbing and a bit of existential thinking, it was a packed couple days. One thing I thought about was that I've always been aware that sometimes people who push you to succeed are healthy friends to have, and sometimes they are not! Sometimes a guy is just bullying you, and sometimes they're genuinely encouraging you to reach your goals. One is just negative- like my boss or my older brother or my parents, and the other is really uplifting and empowering- usually a girlfriend. Here's the thing though: I realized the positive kind of pushy can come with a caveat. I was leaning on smiles and good encouragement on my trip, and I realized that a lot of those people actually look down on me. Sometimes people can help you and push you to succeed, and be all smiles and hugs, but they do it from a place of "I want you to be BETTER", not "I want you to be happy". I realized some people are pushing me forward out of frustration and disappointment. Sometimes people want you to take drugs and buy sex and gamble and fight people, travel the world and do big dangerous things because that's what makes THEM feel accomplished- and those feelings are driven by insecurities. It's unhealthy for both of us for me to share someone else's band-aid (metaphorically). Sometimes they just want you to be a cooler boyfriend, or someone who they'll be more happy hanging out with. It's okay to push your favourite movie or some unknown band on a person, but I've been absorbing those kinds of suggestions on who I am and my personality. When push comes to shove: You can't lean on someone who sees you as a let-down from day one. This was a little crisis I had wandering around on my own- but then I remembered a very small handful of people who encourage me to do big things and ALSO look up to me for who I am now. It's nobody who's in-love with me, but just very close friends I've had here and there. Nothing in my cynical mind can nullify the advice of someone who already sees an accomplished and valuable person in me. That's what stops me from hitting rock-bottom, and I forgot about that while I was chasing around girls who want me to learn the guitar and buy all new clothes and go to the gym. Those can be positive things to try, but in the wrong context they really aren't! I usually delete my big posts in the Life thread before I hit Post, but aaaa this one's pretty toothless, so here ya go

Oops sorry, I skimmed over this Dutch e-mail in my inbox! I just saw it now and thought "Oh, aafspraken... what do I have an appointment for?"

WAhahahaha!!! I personally love that this is pissing off a boss at a Starbucks. That's perfect, that makes it. The fact that you adhered to the dress code by shaving it into a mohawk is also perfect. Double thumbs up. (shame about that middle guy)

SHOULD HAVE CALLED IT BIG BIRD!!!

How about we meet in Utrecht? It's in the centre, so that should be fine, right?

I said "I'm gonna put this TV down and then I'm gonna hug you, so get ready for that." and I think you didn't register that as instruction. Hahaha the con was KIND OF dissapointing. I'd never heard of it, and I know s'Hertogenbosch is hardly the capital of the world, so I expected something really small. Personally I was surprised by the crowd, we had a good group of players playing for most of the weekend, I'd give it a thumbs up. There was one hall with a manageably small number of booths, and nothing to eat but hotdogs and candy for 2 days, but the crowd was just busy enough to justify going. Lots of cosplayers. Seeing an Idle Thumbs listener coalesce in our physical plane, outside of the web-realm, made it worth it imo. We exchanged baboos, I'd be a dead certain if anyone wanted to go out for beers in NL. I don't know who else is here. Ooh here's the busiest photo of the tinyBooth I took, by the way:

Life update!!!! I exhibited games at Epicon in NL all weekend, and right on the way out I bumped into Roderick.

Hey y'know- I'm actually watching the Ryan video on the front page and it's really fun! It is totally that old GiantBomb magic! All of it, like improvising jokes over time, playing corny free music to montages, doing impressions of games, green-screen project bloopers, all the fun stuff! I cannot stop a smile from watching this! I remember why I was so hooked on GiantBomb!

This is messy and dumb, yeah. What I'm thinking about here is that the Transformers movies are set in a universe where My Little Pony toys exists, but Transformers toys don't. I mean how does that work?? It's stupid that the thing just turns into a blob of cubes... They're supposed to clunk their big giant pipes and plates around, guys, that's the fun. This is just nebulous alchemy! Aaaaaah I guess you get to movie 4, ya gotta mix things up.

Ooh I never mentioned how my solo travel went. I was super excited and happy about it! I went there a little bit for sightseeing, but mainly I went there cos I've always had this phobia of being alone and hanging around by myself. So this was like my big test, I went to travel around and make my own fun by myself. It went so well! A bunch of strangers I've never met wanted to be friends with me, I totally accomplished some fun stuff and went outside of my comfort zone. I was scared that maybe I'd bumble around and just shut myself in a box and feel sorry for myself, but no I was confident and capable and approachable and a nice guy to be around. People like that are totally my heroes, and I was so happy to see myself being that! Friends told me that you'll sit around, and people will just approach and want to be friends with you, but I was adamant that that's a fantasy, and people aren't like that unless you're a pretty young girl sitting by herself at a bar. WELP! If you throw yourself into certain situations; life is like that, and I'm happy to be a part of it.

Wow, time flies! Thumbs up to the GiantBomb guys, but yeah Ryan had a real stamp on all their stuff. There's been a couple times where I felt like he would've liked this or would've had a lot to say about that. I can only speak as a fan of all this personality stuff, but solid gold job! A positive influence, and I hope what he was putting out there caught on! I think so.

Well I never went to anywhere, it's taken a long time to talk myself into it. But yes, if this goes well then I will of course go to France, Italy, Germany, Austria, Poland and so on.

Hey guys I am going to Belgium tomorrow! Here's the thing; I've always had a phobia of being alone. I can't go out by myself too far, and it's just been feeling like this big weakness that I can't face being alone. Especially after meeting so many exciting people over the passed year who go on all these world-travel trips. So after being bullied into seeing Europe by my new friends so much, I finally started working towards facing it. I went to the cinema by myself recently- it was hard and I wanted to go home, but someone actually texted me right before I walked in asking to see the same movie with me, and a group of friends, the next day. It was very encouraging! I ate in a restaurant by myself and felt fine. Last weekend, I went to Budapest with a friend. We couch-surfed for the first time and it was a big lesson in solo travel. So tomorrow I will take a train to Belgium, see some things and try some things, and stay in a hostel over the weekend. I'm very proud of myself so far, and I hope the experience will be freeing. Also yesterday was my birthday, I'm 23 I ate lots and lots of ice-cream and drank a whole liter of chocolate milk!

I love how many examples of game review synopsis Chris had lined up. He's nailed it!

Like here's this slow, quiet, confusing short that's just generally designed to feel kind of uneasy the whole time. You can't show that to friends and family and rely on them to find something interesting in it, and most people on the internet are not even gonna watch to the end. I relegate academically interesting projects to way back on the shelf, cos I'm just scared of spending months on something that I won't get a nice pat on the back for at the end. Other shorts at least have this jovial pace, or a fun protagonist or some exciting mystery to be answered; but this one especially just made me think "Wow, how do you maintain confidence in the project for the length of time it takes to animate this?"

I think it's brave to make something so insanely unappealing.

Yeah I didn't have anything I'd call a hero for a while, because speaking academically, or creatively, I think just admiring and respecting someone feels complimentary enough. I heard one person describe someone who boosted their career, and helped them out a lot in the beginning, saying "He is my sensei", which I found a bit silly, but a nicely endearing way to describe someone.

My hero is a woman who's so undeniably happy to be alive. She falls passionately in-love with everyone and everything, places, music, colours, sunshine. She's never late, she always gives a hundred percent, unstoppably helpful, relentlessly grateful, a thirst for adventure that always wins over a fear of the unknown, she always forgives, and is always a strong example of how to march through tragedy gracefully. She's Disneyland-excited about everything on Earth and every little moment, and wants to radiate that beautiful disease outward to everyone. Coming from sitting in my parent's house working all day, feeling sinkingly miserable that I was just gathering dust in my early 20s, she taught me that the world is giving you all it has if you open up and look for it; that the human condition is psychosomatic, and that happiness is a choice. I think people feel like that when they spend time with children or get a puppy, but it was meeting a capable adult with this attitude that broke my hopeless trajectory, and re-built it as something with the potential to be so much happier, and to have such a more positive effect on the world. This person is imperfect aswel, by the way, I know that. That doesn't make the sentiment any less inspiring. There are animators and designers who I think are cool, but I have too much levity in myself to call them heroes any more. I think it's nice that people do, though, and I support it. Nachimir's was a very nice read