Jake

Idle Thumbs 224: Ms. Petman

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Idle Thumbs 224:

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Ms. Petman

You are a mess, humanity. Your criminal investigators are a joke at best, and your justice system is terrifying and weird at worst. Your cyber security is easily bypassed, with commands that seem almost fictional. You cannot even assemble your own furniture. It's probably best we just take it from here.

Games Discussed: Home Improvisation, Fingered, HackNet, Contradiction, Halo 2

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What does it say about me that I was absolutely enthralled with hearing about the BSOD still existing and that in Windows 8 it has the sad face emote?

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With the ed mcmillian thing, it feels like you’re tiptoeing around why it feels different, more excuseable, when an individual creator does something problematic than when a big studio does. When a big studio does, it seems to be for craven reasons like that the producers/publishers/marketers want to target a toxic audience, but when a small creator makes something straight out of their consciousness it seems different. Maybe because they’re expressing their selves, not degrading the world just for money. Maybe it’s because we (rightfully) feel that big studios and big games have a larger cultural impact and therefore a larger responsibility to cultivate a pro-social games culture.

I struggle with it – I think there needs to be room for people’s dark sides but also we have a responsibility to the bigger culture. I don’t really like r crumb, I think his excuses are a little bit thin to base a whole career on. Sure, it’s stuff straight out of his brain, unfiltered, not deliberately twisted. But that’s exactly how the status quo is perpetuated – people let problematic stuff into their brains then regurgitate it unquestioningly and I find it vapid.

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With the ed mcmillian thing, it feels like you’re tiptoeing around why it feels different, more excuseable, when an individual creator does something problematic than when a big studio does. When a big studio does, it seems to be for craven reasons like that the producers/publishers/marketers want to target a toxic audience, but when a small creator makes something straight out of their consciousness it seems different. Maybe because they’re expressing their selves, not degrading the world just for money. Maybe it’s because we (rightfully) feel that big studios and big games have a larger cultural impact and therefore a larger responsibility to cultivate a pro-social games culture.

I struggle with it – I think there needs to be room for people’s dark sides but also we have a responsibility to the bigger culture. I don’t really like r crumb, I think his excuses are a little bit thin to base a whole career on. Sure, it’s stuff straight out of his brain, unfiltered, not deliberately twisted. But that’s exactly how the status quo is perpetuated – people let problematic stuff into their brains then regurgitate it unquestioningly and I find it vapid.

This is a good point, although I don't think I was tiptoeing around it so much as just didn't happen upon it at the time.

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Sean's description of people gathering under the drone felt so evocative to me of some ancient ritual or something.

 

"We shall gather under Drone and thank it for its refreshing breeze."

 

"Turn your hymnals to page xx for 'In The Shadow of Drone'"

 

A set of Eastern Orthodox style rules for portraying Drone in iconography, always with a gun and always above humans.

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Sean's dad's reaction to the drone with a gun sounds a lot like what I'm sure my midwestern gun toting dad would think. Oh dads. you're my favorite.

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I have the same pre-fab furniture woes. I bought a cheap bookcase off Amazon, only to figure out midway through the assembly that the backing piece, that's crucial to keeping the frame together was literally cardboard with a wood grain printed onto it to give the illusion of wood. The holes were all drilled badly in the wrong spots. My boyfriend came in to find me just sitting, abjectly looking at this piece of shit bookcase. He said, "This is not going to do anything. It's never going to work."

 

I threw it out, halfway built. I paid $20 to go out to the garbage can.

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Contradiction is a lot of fun. I hope it sells well, because there's no way the £4000 kickstarter covered their production costs and I'd love to see what they can do with a decent-sized budget. Leigh Alexander perfectly expressed what I liked about the acting:

 

The [detective] actor is wildly expressive and wonderfully anti-charismatic. It’s as if the game knows that any leading man would gain an inherent absurdity, being directed by the player to plod around knocking on doors and windows multiple times per hour, presenting dozens of objects and facts to tolerant strangers. Therefore why not eschew the chiseled detective in favor of casting an incredibly absurd person; his performance is inescapably glib, funny and gleeful—"what would you say… if I showed you this," he will deadpan sincerely, brandishing a flyer or a packet of herbs or, no word of a lie, a set of devil horns, with admirable flourish.

 

All the other actors carry their weight admirably: They are just ridiculous enough, just suspicious enough, giving facial performances that are alternately vaunted and sincere, believable but also easy to laugh about. Contradiction is just perfect at what it wants to be: A retro tribute with some modern conveniences, all the best and weirdest parts of an ambitious bygone age with none of the impracticalities.

 

 

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I highly recommend that anybody on the fence about Contradiction go look at the videos Giant Bomb East did on the game. It's hard to convey exactly how wonderfully hammy the acting is without seeing it for yourself.

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Re: Growing up playing DOS games.

 

Part of the reason I have the job I have today is my childhood playing Jill of the Jungle and One Must Fall. I was temping for a company doing data entry and they let me essentially try out for a full time job at the company. Most of the computing for the job is done in unix which I had familiarity with thanks to DOS. I don't think I would have been able to catch on as quickly without that. Thanks video games!

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Incidentally, Hackers just came out on Blu-Ray. I plan on going into some sort of nineties cyberpunk freakout over the weekend.

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Also, regarding Contradiction:

 

The Giant Bomb East folks did a Quick Look a few weeks back, and it hit a weird sweet spot with pretty much everyone involved. The community response was big enough that the game's creator and a couple of the actors started posting in the GB forums, answering questions and such. From what they say, they know it's goofy and weird, but it was just them having some fun and making a strange thing. The awkward interface comes from the fact that Tim Follin had no real programming experience and was learning how to use Node Webkit to make it.

 

And there's this:

 

post-8476-0-65047500-1440085846_thumb.jpg

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The awkward interface comes from the fact that Tim Follin had no real programming experience and was learning how to use Node Webkit to make it.

 

It was also initially released on iPad, so I'd imagine part of the control jankiness arises from translating touch controls to mouse and keyboard.

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Chris's description of HackNet reminds me a lot of the Introversion game Uplink except with console commands instead of Hollywood style screens.

 

 

What does it say about me that I was absolutely enthralled with hearing about the BSOD still existing and that in Windows 8 it has the sad face emote?

 

Windows 8 BSOD

 

BSoD_in_Windows_8.png

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I do not agree with Jake(?) that Fez has the best crash/reboot thingy.

Arkham Asylum is clearly the best.

The XBox version (check the last screen's content):

 

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That initial freeze was especially harrowing on the X360 because of the whole RROD thing being relatively fresh in my mind.

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That initial freeze was especially harrowing on the X360 because of the whole RROD thing being relatively fresh in my mind.

 

I had an actual Xbox 360 RROD freeze occur during Fez's fake intro freeze mentioned on the 'cast.

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Found it funny that everyone was so confident that Hacknet was PC only. There's a very similar iOS game called Hack Net. It's quite decent actually (for being on iOS at least).

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Hey Sean, why are you upset with Taylor Swift?

 

*DEEP BREATH*

 

Here's the thing with ol' Taylor Swift. Sometime over the past six months being ultra-famous in the pop world also started to mean you were friends with Taylor Swift. It means you popped up on her instagram or she invited you on stage for a song. Whatever, that's fine -- the thing that pisses me off is that all of that feels like a cliquey tool to define what's in and what's out, mostly because it began in earnest with the filming of her Bad Blood music video -- a video about a song that is directed at Katy Perry, a public enemy of Taylor Swift. Swift got all of her friends together -- literally a dozen ultra-famous names (Ellie Goulding, Lena Dunham, Cindy Crawford (!!!)) and made a video about a a bunch of badass ladies gearing up with guns to go some unseen war. The video is basically saying "we have bad blood but I have everyone on my side so fuck you." That is pretty much the worst message to send to your fans, most of whom are schoolchildren and have to deal with that shit every day.

 

Miley Cyrus actually summed it up pretty well: 

 

“I don’t get the violence revenge thing,” Miley said of Taylor’s “Bad Blood” music video. “That’s supposed to be a good example? And I’m a bad role model because I’m running around with my titties out? I’m not sure how titties are worse than guns.”

 

I think that's a fair point -- not to clear Miley Cyrus of selling a regressive image of femininity, but I think it's pretty lame for the most famous pop musician on earth to adopt themes of violent revenge with a huge posse because she doesn't like someone. 

 

Anyway, 31 yo male here reporting in on pop music feuds which are totally meaningless at best and a poison to society at worst. <3 

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I could totally relate to the segment about Target furniture being a garbage piñata. I once bought a Target shelf for my DVDs that was 5-6 feet tall, but instead of having two side pieces 5-6 feet tall there were four piece that were each half the height of the shelf.

 

The only way these side pieces held together were the useless wood pegs between the pieces (nothing to tighten them shut, they were just loose) and the shitty cardboard backing that was nailed onto the back of the shelf. Never again Target.

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If we can pause for a moment from all this video game chat to further dissect the Bad Blood video:

 

I can't figure out if that video is meant to be taken seriously re: believing that all the women in it are legitimate badasses. Everyone is so thin and fragile looking - not to knock body types, but there is legitimate criticism to be made about the really unrealistic image of female beauty that Swift and her crew propagate - that it's comical when they wield these big weapons or attempt cool fighting moves. The scene that sticks out the most for me is the boxing ring, where two incredibly small, virtually muscle-free women are delivering punches that resemble stereotypical cat fight motions. I cannot figure out if that's intentional or not, but the result is that in a music video that is meant to have this badass, revenge theme (which as Sean pointed out has its own problems) no one looks particularly badass! 

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