Chris

Idle Thumbs 244: Heroes vs Villains

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EDIT: Right, SgtWhistlebotom is of course correct, that must be what Chris was referring to. Doh.

 

 

Something like this actually happened with Nick at some point I think??

 

The F. Nick Breckoncast was part of the Kickstarter progresscast series. I remember the opening, where Nick tries to introduce himself and is drowned in clips of other Thumbs saying "And I'm Nick Breckon!" And then there's talk of DOTA, I think, and Nick is kind of ambivalent, but then Nick is really enthusiastic.

 

I would most certainly listen to Steve's Hot Scoopcast.

Edited by unimural

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Bridge is an epic game. I used to play it in secondary school, as my school had an international level player and we formed a club around him (he played with a player from another school for competitions). Don't ever think it is a game for timid old people, it is a game for old people who have cast off all inhibitions and will stab you with their mind powers in order to win a trick. I can't wait to hear how ye got on! I was always pretty terrible at it tbh, but it was a lot of fun.

If you guys like it you should try 45 as well, which i have always loved.

 

#PhoneyClubWeakNT (That was the bidding system we used, we had to declare it before each game as it was not the bidding system used by any of the schools we played against).(it probably didn't have a hashtag 20 years ago). (obvs it means that if we opened with clubs it meant we were strong in the major suits, and we bid on NT with hands a lot weaker than most bidding systems, obvs).  

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Oh man, shilling for sponsors. I will talk a lot about Zombies Run because it is well worth knowing about.

 

So there are a lot of apps that purport to motivate you by including zombies but Zombies Run by Six to Start is the nice one. The missions are all unique and fully voiced, written by an actual writer so they very quickly evolve from 'oh no there are zombies' to 'how exactly do we continue grinding on' and a little bit of 'how did this happen in the first place'. There's one mission early on in Season One where things go badly towards the end, and the next mission is just the radio operator holding a vigil, hoping that you can hear him. There's another mission deep in Season One that I won't spoil, but it is genuinely devastating.

 

It has elegant gamification to it, as well - the thing that pulls you through is the fact that it's a radio drama instead of expecting you to get excited about the possibility of zombies. As you run, you gather supplies that you can use in a simple base-building thing. It's not trying to shower you with badges and dangling carrots or anything gross like that, which means your intrinsic motivation stays more or less intact.

 

They have a 'train to 10k' mode, and a separate app that does a couch-to-5k program that includes stretches and sections that are flexible run/walk sections, rather than the stricter run 3 minutes/walk 5 minutes/ run 3 minutes stuff most popular C25K apps have.

 

I first heard about them because most of the people involved are ARG people from way back - they all worked at Mindcandy, back when it ran the ARG Perplex City (before it pivoted and made all the money with Moshi Monsters).

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I first heard about them because most of the people involved are ARG people from way back - they all worked at Mindcandy, back when it ran the ARG Perplex City (before it pivoted and made all the money with Moshi Monsters).

 

I remember Dan being a maintainer for the trail for the AI movie ARG waaaay back in the day. Oh weird Cabel (i.e. Campo Santo backer Panic Cabel) started the thing!

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Thank you, Idle Thumbs, for doing your part to inform the public about Bigger Luke, and the menace he poses to decent society.

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Basically the entire Bigger Luke wiki reads way better if you assume that every time it says something about "supporters" of some theory it's actually just referring to one guy in a very small group of superfans. Clearly the one who supports the classic "bigger luke" theory is the one editing the wiki.

 

medium.jpg

Smaller Luke Theorists would have you believe this proves the existence of Smaller Luke, but as one can determine through close examination, Luke is closer to the camera in this image, giving the illusion he is Bigger Luke when he is, in fact, Luke Prime.

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Oh man, shilling for sponsors. I will talk a lot about Zombies Run because it is well worth knowing about.

 

So there are a lot of apps that purport to motivate you by including zombies but Zombies Run by Six to Start is the nice one. The missions are all unique and fully voiced, written by an actual writer so they very quickly evolve from 'oh no there are zombies' to 'how exactly do we continue grinding on' and a little bit of 'how did this happen in the first place'. There's one mission early on in Season One where things go badly towards the end, and the next mission is just the radio operator holding a vigil, hoping that you can hear him. There's another mission deep in Season One that I won't spoil, but it is genuinely devastating.

 

It has elegant gamification to it, as well - the thing that pulls you through is the fact that it's a radio drama instead of expecting you to get excited about the possibility of zombies. As you run, you gather supplies that you can use in a simple base-building thing. It's not trying to shower you with badges and dangling carrots or anything gross like that, which means your intrinsic motivation stays more or less intact.

 

They have a 'train to 10k' mode, and a separate app that does a couch-to-5k program that includes stretches and sections that are flexible run/walk sections, rather than the stricter run 3 minutes/walk 5 minutes/ run 3 minutes stuff most popular C25K apps have.

 

I first heard about them because most of the people involved are ARG people from way back - they all worked at Mindcandy, back when it ran the ARG Perplex City (before it pivoted and made all the money with Moshi Monsters).

Do you mind if we refer to your post if we end up doing a spot for this again?

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FWIW, a current gen iPhone will -still- run you $600 at list, as far as I know. Same goes for comparable Android smartphones. It's just that the major carriers usually subsidize most of that while simultaneously locking you into a multi-year contract. You get to see the real prices if you either opt for a no-contract plan (only some of the major carriers even offer one), or go with a third party carrier like Ting (which I did) which doesn't do subsidies, period. It's definitely a sticker shock moment, but the flip side is you can find phones from a generation or two back for much less, and even if you paid full price, well...with my usage Ting is about $60/mo less than I was being charged by Sprint for literally the same service (Ting uses Sprint's network). Doesn't take long to make up for the lost subsidy at rates like that!

 

And the $400 Kindle was the very first generation e-ink Kindle, long before the Fire tablet variant even existed. I thought it was really funny that they thought anyone would pay that much for something that limited when PDAs worked fine and could be had for much less. ...now I'm on like my fourth or fifth model of Kindle, and have passed my castoffs to much of my family. I can only hope that Oculus can stick it out.

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Do you mind if we refer to your post if we end up doing a spot for this again?

 

Not at all. Part of my motivation was that it really sounded like you didn't know what to make of this thing.

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I figured the restrictions on how you talk in Bridge must be some rule about not passing signals to your partner.  But it seems like an odd rule to me.  Surely if you were determined to pass illegal signals to your partner, there would be a dozen non-verbal ways to do it.  So why put a restriction on how people talk?

 

It seems like you'd have to either trust your opponents to play fair or all go to separate rooms and play with a computer setup that allows no communication except for the bid and the cards played.

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I think it's mostly a "not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" situation. You can't account for every way a player might cheat, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to account for any of them. Also, it's really easy to accidentally give out information in slight phrasing, so it's a good idea to get everybody on the same page.

 

My Mom has started playing Bridge over the past couple years and it's been really interesting to watch her and learn a bit about the game myself. I think I might write into the pod about it.

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I think it's mostly a "not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" situation. You can't account for every way a player might cheat, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't try to account for any of them. Also, it's really easy to accidentally give out information in slight phrasing, so it's a good idea to get everybody on the same page.

My Mom has started playing Bridge over the past couple years and it's been really interesting to watch her and learn a bit about the game myself. I think I might write into the pod about it.

Please do!

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I'm glad AGDQ was brought up.  I'm a huge fan of both marathons and constantly rewatch runs.  I've started 

in some way if anyone is interested.

 

One that I would suggest to the Thumbs (Chris in particular) is the Spelunky run.  The category was all shortcuts, which means taking a new file and unlocking the shortcuts for each area then beating Olmec.  There was also an incentive met for a Hell run.  Additionally, Derek Yu and Andy Hull (designer and programmer) were watching the run and providing comments.

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All I want now is more Bushido Blade. So many hours spent dueling friends in that game.

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When Steve talked about listening to the cast being his way to keep up with the other thumbs, I imagined him recording his responses to the cast to send back to the thumbs. But since they don't leave space for him to talk really it would just be an hour of incidental reactions like "Oh sweet", "Haha" and "Holy shit!". So if this exists please start releasing it as the new podcast Idle Thumb.

 

Also I came looking for the link to that let's play, and since I didn't see it anywhere I found it myself.

for the curious but lazy.

 

Excellent, I was looking for this myself since my wife would like to learn to translate games.

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Oh man Bushido Blade, my brother and I played the shit out of that game. I remember we ended up coming up with special names for some of the most useful attacks -- in particular it was I think the naginata's mid-stance high attack that was christened the 'can/bottle opener', which involved stepping forward, jamming the blade into your opponent's face, and lifting up. It tended to end fights very reliably.

I played SO MUCH Bushido Blade at my friend's house. The only right stage to play on is the bamboo forest.

It was a cool stage but I didn't like that it made the sledgehammer and naginata useless

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Edit: i'm still baffled at how to embed videos  :getmecoat

Edit 2: shout out to Johnny Driggs for this clip b/c it was his meticulous time-stamping and notation on the Youtube channel that helped me find it quick.

 

You just paste in the youtube.com (NOT youtu.be) url:

 

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