Jake

Idle Thumbs 271: Cool Blob Future

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Idle Thumbs 271:

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Cool Blob Future

You pass someone on the street and immediately you know. The light hitting their face, the way they amble forward, aware of the world but maybe simultaneously inside a totally different world too. You pass them and keep to yourself, knowing that you are apart from them, not of them, but you also know, deep down, that you could become one of them at any time.

Discussed: Pokémon GO, Inside, Limbo, Splash Damage, Dark Souls 3, Hitman, Far Cry 2, WarHammer

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Pepsiman is way weirder than Nick described.  The gameplay is basically that of an endless runner (though the game itself isn't endless).  Developed for and released only in Japan, the game has FMV cutscenes and features an American man drinking Pepsi while watching TV.  He says some pretty broken phrases like "Pepsi for TV-Game" and was told by the Japanese director to intentionally act poorly.  Even though it was always meant for Japan, the entire game is in English.  The levels are ridiculous but my favorite one is the post apocalyptic New York that Nick described.  The actual premise of the level is that a building is on fire and there are people trapped on the roof and are too weak to escape.  A firefighter asks Pepsiman to give them something to revive them.  The rest of the level is also on fire because why not.

 

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Man I haven't listened to new Thumbs episodes in *ages*, I've been mostly going through old episodes archive.

I feel like I took a time machine to future from like year 2012. When did the mid-cast ads start?

 

Regarding Pepsi, the weirdest stuff I've ever eaten is Pepsi flavored chips in Japan some three-four years ago. Just gotta love those weird limited edition things that come out of any possible product in Japan. Pepsi co. and their license handling company Suntory in Japan is especially nuts about doing limited weird products with absolutely horrible taste.

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When do they stop spoiling Inside?? D:

 

EDIT-- 46:30 is actually the answer to that question.

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Considering how well Valve does, listing out all the ways they get their community to do work for free was pretty depressing. 

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I feel like I took a time machine to future from like year 2012. When did the mid-cast ads start?

2013. Ever since the Kickstarter, we've paid rent on studio space (and had numerous other software and services expenses) and the Kickstarter money wasn't going to last forever!

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If you guys ever do another Kickstarter or similar I'll gladly pay again 50 dollars. :)

 

By the way, you guys mentioned in the beginning that you've moved into a new place? Did you mean with that Campo Santo or the Thumbs office? I know CS moved to a new location at least since I saw the Twitter posts about that.

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Whoops, so my yesterday quick follow up email didn't make it to the episode :[

Valve did release their public opinion on the gambling websites:

http://store.steampowered.com/news/22883/

tl;dr: they're gonna ban them from the API since they're breaking the user agreements.

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I can't draw so I'm just going to lazyweb some fanart:

 

Insidle Thumbs:

A  blob humonculous that's made up of thumbs and/or Idle Thumbs hosts.

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If you guys ever do another Kickstarter or similar I'll gladly pay again 50 dollars. :)

 

By the way, you guys mentioned in the beginning that you've moved into a new place? Did you mean with that Campo Santo or the Thumbs office? I know CS moved to a new location at least since I saw the Twitter posts about that.

 

They're the same office :)

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Did Nick say in the Nature Box ad that he's no longer working at Telltale? Is this the first announcement of this?

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kept hearing "azure cool blob" as "as your cool blob," which made a very different impression in my mind.

 

Was there a bet for how many times Jake could say "homunculus"? :D

 

i was playing the Sims 3 while listening to this in the background and half-paying attention, so every repeat of "homunculus" had me checking to see if the track wasn't accidentally looping.

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The state of Far Cry 2 speedrunning is pretty dire.

 

The current record is by HL2/GTA speedrunner S. However that run was lost two years ago when twitch deleted all of their archives. All that's left is this pastebin:

 

http://pastebin.com/DWUn3UC3

 

The 3 hour run is rough, but still pretty refined as far as first runs go. I'd like to see you play on 1.0 since more glitches means that you're a better speedrunner.

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I sent this in as an email last week, but after this week's Pokemon Go talk, and last week's CS:GO talk, it's even more appropriate. I was reminded of a neogaf user's story they wrote about their childhood with Pokemon. http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1191332

 

His first two paragraphs are a very good summation at why the recent news about Valve, CS, and lottery lawsuits made me think of his story.

 

For most people here, Pokémon is innocence embodied. It takes them back to a really comfortable place. Lots of college kids get back into Pokémon for this reason - the nostalgia provides them simple joys in otherwise complicated times in their lives. If you were the right age, I'm sure it's hard to imagine some of your formative years without a Pokémon presence. This series means a lot to a lot of people, including me!

But my Pokémon years were some the harshest of my youth. We lied, we stole, we alienated our parents, we caused problems at school, and we were incredibly cruel to one another over this brand. We were the reason parents were scared. We were the reason lawsuits were brought against the company for being an alleged lottery. We were the reason it was banned from schools and from homes. We were why it was discouraged on reactionary local news stations. We were sick with Pokémon Fever.

 

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Did Nick say in the Nature Box ad that he's no longer working at Telltale? Is this the first announcement of this?

I thought this happened a while ago, but I'm not able to find any information.

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Was there a bet for how many times Jake could say "homunculus"? :D

I think Chris spliced in the same voice clip a bunch of times.

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Was there a bet for how many times Jake could say "homunculus"? :D

 

I think he said it once for each time that Chris used the wrong word to refer to a homunculus.

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Whoops, so my yesterday quick follow up email didn't make it to the episode :[

Valve did release their public opinion on the gambling websites:

http://store.steampowered.com/news/22883/

tl;dr: they're gonna ban them from the API since they're breaking the user agreements.

 

This feels like a really insincere way of dealing with the situation. They're basically saying "Oh, we looked at the rulebook, and the specific implementation of our API that they're using is actually against the terms of service!" They're not actually admitting that they didn't consider the ethical ramifications of this system or that they ignored all the shitty things going on with it, they've just found an obscure rule about "Using the OpenID API and making the same web calls as Steam users". Now that Valve has transformed from Video game developer to Libertarian nightmare factory, they apparently have given up on taking responsibility for any of their services.

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Since they're being sued for facilitating teenage gambling they probably received strict lawyerly instructions to not admit that when they fix it.

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My favorite thing about Pokemon GO is that it has intensified the moral panic that's existed around smartphones to the point where it perfectly resembles the moral panic around silent reading, first in late antiquity with the popularization of spacing and punctuation, then in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the invention of the printing press and the emergence of popular fiction. People moving around silently, lost in thought as they carry their own little worlds with them, not reacting to people or things that they encounter, regardless of the danger... People gathering in groups, sharing the empty and useless knowledge that they've obtained from these little devices, encouraging each other to dive deeper into perversion and ruining both public and private spaces for people who'd use them for their proper purposes...

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My favorite thing about Pokemon GO is that it has intensified the moral panic that's existed around smartphones to the point where it perfectly resembles the moral panic around silent reading, first in late antiquity with the popularization of spacing and punctuation, then in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the invention of the printing press and the emergence of popular fiction. People moving around silently, lost in thought as they carry their own little worlds with them, not reacting to people or things that they encounter, regardless of the danger... People gathering in groups, sharing the empty and useless knowledge that they've obtained from these little devices, encouraging each other to dive deeper into perversion and ruining both public and private spaces for people who'd use them for their proper purposes...

 

I really love it every time you take some modern pop culture thing and draw the connecting lines to often centuries old historical reactions to similar developments. 

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I really love it every time you take some modern pop culture thing and draw the connecting lines to often centuries old historical reactions to similar developments. 

 

What can I say, it's my passion. I think that the transition between spoken and silent reading is fascinating because the latter is such a given to us, to the point that we don't even consider that spoken word was how the overwhelming majority of people read in public and in private until the early medieval period, and yet it was a matter of unbearable, nigh-apocalyptic scandal even to a great mind like St. Augustine. Julius Caesar was considered exceptional for being able to read silently without even muttering or moving his lips, and one time, when he read a letter in the Senate without making a sound, he cause the room to erupt in consternation, so perverse it was thought to be.

 

The first time I thought about it was in the context of a conference presentation that had an amazing quotation, with the time and place removed, about the author's horror at finding someone sitting alone in the corner of a room, fiddling with a small object, deaf and blind to everything around him, and laughing or crying at nothing. He found it indistinguishable from madness, but the audience was invited to consider what disruptive new form of communication it was: radio, TV, video games, smart phones, etc. Of course, the quote was from the late sixteenth or seventeenth century, I can't recall which one, and it was the author's first encounter with someone reading one of those newfangled novels silently. A century later, the birth of the romantic novel would cause an even greater stir. I really wish that I had taken down the citation for it, but this link describes some good reactions: http://web.stanford.edu/class/history34q/readings/Manguel/Silent_Readers.html

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