Sean

Idle Thumbs 146: Osama's Dog Good morning students, this is Principal Newell: Christopher Remo is absent today and we are joined by Danielle Riendeau from Polygon and Greg Games Kasavin from Supergiant. Mr. Rodkin would like to remind you that this is your last week to order your 2013 Luigi Year Book. Today's hot lunch is chicken a'la king. Games Discussed: The Sun at Night, Bravely Default, Flappy MMO, Donkey Kong Country Tropical Freeze, BioShock Infinite Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

The Titan Falls 2014. R. 1hr 30min The Titan Falls - When Lt. Todd Titan returns home from the nine-hundred-years wars to bury his terminally ill uncle, he is forced into one last battle with his true life-long enemy: himself. Based upon the award winning two-act play by Cormac McCarthy. Things Discussed: Titanfall, Thief, Calculords, Super Mario Bros 3, Maths Blaster Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

Idle Thumbs 90: Passive But Deadly Triangulated coordinates. An esoteric puzzle. An impossible cipher. The door opens to reveal your captor -- a man; a beard; mirrored shades; the infallible dictator of a banana republic. But upon second glance you realize it's not a fearsome generalissmo -- it's just Nick Breckon. Games Discussed: Miasmata, Escape From The Mysterious Room, The Ship, Tropico 4 Listen on the Episode Page Listen in iTunes Subscribe to the RSS Feed

I've taken a lot of flack for delegating and having groups of my own goons. Olly had made it clear that he was going to have lots of friends giving him help and I had pre-organized zilch so felt like I had to take that aspect of the strategy seriously. I fully expected shit to go full Reservoir Dogs at any moment and think I just got lukcy (and also chose to send a lot of people away from me on another team because I was worried they'd all turn and kill each other).

Your ping threshold is probably set to 100 and if you're in England, I bet your ping is higher than that.

It's not; this is just the extended theme. Building up to 150!

Yeah, we know -- we just totally forgot to handle the txt only version of hte email. We'll fix it.

When Duncan delivered these stories I lost my mind -- we said "do some stuff you think is cool," pitched a format, and he delivered pure gold. We didn't have any plans to do a literary journal when we started like three months ago, but man, I'm so stoked we are.

Olly would know. Also, if you're reading this and you're the guy who just axed me in the face when I was trying to talk to you, go fuck yourself.

He didn't need to apologize once, and I almost didn't post that because I didn't want it to be a smackdown - he didn't say anything patently offensive but at the same time if one is going to plant the seed of a dialog with a statement like "one double order of culture, hold the politics," then I'm going to have to respond.

Sorry; I have to comment on this. The narrative that we can somehow extricate politics from anything, especially culture, is ridiculous and often times recounted by folks who are either stoked about that status quo or simply don't see anything wrong with "the way things are." You may not like "politics" commingling with your video games but, unfortunately, that's a lot like saying "I don't like evolution commingling with my science." They are inextricable, for one, and it's kinda shitty to come at someone like Danielle (in any forum) for advocating that the thing she has spent her vocational career promoting be a little bit smarter about not just the things it makes but also the politics of the things themselves. Politikos, literally "of, for, or relating to citizens," is going to be a hard thing to carve out from any community -- especially one that self identifies by posting thoughts, criticisms and dick jokes to forums on the internet. "I just like games separated from politics," is a statement that somehow suggests that these things aren't made by people who are making choices. That these choices aren't informed by the lives they lead and the world they exist in. And those lives and that world aren't OUR society -- that we don't live in a society of human beings, organized together for our general well-being, with culture being one of its many many byproducts. In a society things can, quite effortlessly, become True or False, Right or Wrong, Said and Unsaid -- that IS politics; the descriptor we use to describe the mechanisms at play when we operate as an organized society. Danielle was making a sarcastic comment towards her relatively unending political position; she is harangued, quite publicly, for criticizing the limited human scope of this culture's "serious" efforts so pointing out "typical gender tropes" in something like DK is, what we call in the biz "a joke." You might groan but that groan seems, and correct me if I'm wrong, directed towards your general dissatisfaction with this dialog inside of the culture of which you are citizen. We don't get to extricate politics from things; it's not the way it works. You might not agree with that fact but I'm gonna tell you that if you go through life, as a citizen in a society of humans, wishing that politics would just get the hell out of [insert thing you like] you're going to end up resentful and feeling falsely marginalized in ADDITION to being just plain wrong. Now I can never come back to the internet. Goodbye forever. PS: For further reading, and an example of this in a very different realm of society, may I recommend The Politics of Life Itself by Nikolas Rose. I don't get to say I'm wise and read the whole thing but I live with a PhD so I get to reach for books while on the toilet and feel smart by association.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarcasm Also, please don't come in here and be an asshole.

Someone's cell was causing some problems and I was on Chris's mic accidentally and clipping like mad. Not stoked about it.

Hi! Welcome!

Tweeted it but I think Olly and I are going to stream some DAYZ tomorrow morning! Probably like 10am PST?

Posts like this make me really happy that the Idle Thumbs community is what it is -- thank you.

Should already be up.

What an incredible thing you've all done.

That's good -- I thought last night was a particularly boring play-through. We'll do some more if people actually like them -- and I'll get my audio fixed. For some reason my computer just stopped recognizing my headset mid-game. No idea what's going on.

Nick has a *SICK* Razer keyboard and has it bound to a keyboard macro. Also if anyone knows anyone at Razer, they should sponsor our podcast because we un-ironically love them.

This is a dumb thing for me to comment about but holy shit I wish they would. They never do! It would be a great chance for Jake or I to say WHY we're stoked to work with Chris, talk about the immense value he adds to everything, etc. Instead it's just a mix of bio and and old story. Bah.

Started setting up OBS last night. Will try it out.

hahahaha

Podcast cancelled