Jake

Important If True 4: A Thousand Dormant Machines

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I use a very similar extension to that which Chris has endorsed, but for Firefox! It's called LeechBlock, and even lets me set blocks of time, so for instance I have twitter blocked after 10 minutes every 3 hours. I originally downloaded it in November when I was getting obsessive and hyper anxious and just completely blocked twitter, but now I can give myself enough of a trickle to satisfy while not letting it eat all my time.

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I was very startled in the middle of eating to hear Chris read out my full name. I had a moment of panic in that very childhood "am I in trouble?" way. Thank you so much for answering my letter, very illuminating. And now I know how Nick has time to play games for complete work days!
 

 :wacko: I can't believe I forgot the right Caesar, I was trying to recall an old old memory of reading a Mad magazine in my grandmother's basement and got confused.

 

Hearing Chris' muttered "...Fuck you." so delighted my partner and I that we went to the video to make sure that it was directed at me rather than someone else in the room. Nope, sure enough, there's that moment where he tries to read DaDatman (which was not meant to trip anyone up, sorry!) and then realizes that the's wasting brain power on something powerfully stupid. "Fuck you," he mutters at me through the phone. Owned. "Make a Thumb laugh" is now crossed off my bucket list.

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10 hours ago, Problem Machine said:

I use a very similar extension to that which Chris has endorsed, but for Firefox! It's called LeechBlock, and even lets me set blocks of time, so for instance I have twitter blocked 10 minutes every 3 hours. I originally downloaded it in November when I was getting obsessive and hyper anxious and just completely blocked twitter, but now I can give myself enough of a trickle to satisfy while not letting it eat all my time.

 

Yeah, I've used extensions for both Firefox and Chrome for this, and may need to go back to them.  I ditched them all last year because I thought I had got to a point of self discipline where I didn't need them, and that worked! Until post election, and doubly so post-inauguration and my ability to keep myself from constantly getting distracted by news and social media has been complete garbage since. 

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I used stayfocusd for some time and liked it a lot, though I'm now using Cold Turkey which is multiplatform and also supports scheduling. It's a paid app but I've found it to be worth it. (I'm currently trying to avoid news and social media at least until noon, and in the hours before going to sleep.)

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I like the "shoutouts" and they should stay in the ad-free show, hopefully they are usually fun like this one was and not just "Hi to X from X".

 

You should change the name to something less boring. My idea:

 

[in Chris Remo voice]

"Now it's time for IMPORTANT to YOU. What do you want us to say that's important enough to spend $XX bucks on?"

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If Mount Rushmore were made of butts it would be Mount Tushmore.

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Random thoughts from this episode:

 

The plot of Blank Check is that a young kid's bike gets run over by a thief who gives him a blank check to buy a new one.  The kid fills out the check for $1 million then spends it while pretending to be the assistant to a "Mr. Macintosh".  The adult female he has a crush on is an undercover FBI agent who was posing as a bank teller.  After typical kid movie shenanigans, the bad guys are arrested and the kid gets a kiss ON THE LIPS from the adult lady.  They don't end up together at the end but agree to go on a date in six years.

 

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The eyes of Cars cars are their windshields so a chandelier of headlights wouldn't be the equivalent of human eyes.  To my knowledge, there's only one car that violates this rule.  Its even weirder in this case because she sells headlights, or from her perspective eyes.

 

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I was hoping that Jake was going to try and make some Alexa infinite loop by telling it to skip forward into the podcast to a point where he tells it to skip back to the initial skip.

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In the early 90s there was a San Francisco area band called Captured by Robots. The concept was that alien robots tormented this guy by forcing him to play horrible one man bands lounge music. He used to perform all wrapped up in chains while these junkyard animatronics "tormented" him.

 

Looking at YouTube it seems like he's still doing it, but now the robots are the band and the construction is WAY more elaborate, and it's become a metal band.

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12 minutes ago, feelthedarkness said:

In the early 90s there was a San Francisco area band called Captured by Robots. The concept was that alien robots tormented this guy by forcing him to play horrible one man bands lounge music. He used to perform all wrapped up in chains while these junkyard animatronics "tormented" him.

 

Looking at YouTube it seems like he's still doing it, but now the robots are the band and the construction is WAY more elaborate, and it's become a metal band.

 

Wow I remember hearing about this back then, but was too young and definitely not cool enough to go to one of the shows. 

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On 3/9/2017 at 8:10 PM, Gamebeast23456 said:

...

To the point about bathroom signs, I think you guys are at least slightly underestimating the variability in bathroom designs. I think the detail that actually serves to seperate them is more general than a picture of a human on the sign. Rather, it's the fact that a room is labeled pictographically, as opposed to numerically or linguistically. 

 

It's also worth noting that the symbol of the guy probably wasn't intended to simply denote "bathroom" but instead was used (in conjunction with the stick figure with a skirt) to try to denote gender in the most language agnostic way possible.

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Before this episode I'd never heard of pizza robot bands. I've now seen photos of them, which makes the Rock-Afire-Explosion-Fire segment and content SO MUCH MORE horrific.

 

The suggestion of using the Rock-Afire band to record a replacement video of the important if true theme and/or opening segments makes me very happy.

 

Might I also suggest a patreon tier of "get Chris to say things in that weird 'f*cking pizza robooots' voice" (around 31:45). Would probably pay some cold hard cash for custom messages in that voice.

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On 3/14/2017 at 0:54 PM, BeachyKeen said:

 

It's also worth noting that the symbol of the guy probably wasn't intended to simply denote "bathroom" but instead was used (in conjunction with the stick figure with a skirt) to try to denote gender in the most language agnostic way possible.

 

When my daughter was 4-years-old, I had to take her to the bathroom on an airplane.  When we got in there, she protested, "This is the boys' room!" and pointed to a diagram showing a stick-figure person putting trash in the right place.  Because, of course, the symbol for "person" is the same as the symbol for "boy" on the boys' room.

That may have been the day I became a feminist.  Or at least convinced that inclusive language matters.

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On 3/14/2017 at 11:54 AM, BeachyKeen said:

 

It's also worth noting that the symbol of the guy probably wasn't intended to simply denote "bathroom" but instead was used (in conjunction with the stick figure with a skirt) to try to denote gender in the most language agnostic way possible.

 

Sure, at one point the sign said "restroom" and had the picture of "man" or "woman," but increasingly the word restroom or toilet has been stylized away and only the icon remains. That's what Chris was amused by I think - that bathroom signage has evolved to the point that an otherwise unadorned picture of a person on a door unquestionably means "you pee or poop in this room" to millions of people. 

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15 hours ago, Urthman said:

 

When my daughter was 4-years-old, I had to take her to the bathroom on an airplane.  When we got in there, she protested, "This is the boys' room!" and pointed to a diagram showing a stick-figure person putting trash in the right place.  Because, of course, the symbol for "person" is the same as the symbol for "boy" on the boys' room.

That may have been the day I became a feminist.  Or at least convinced that inclusive language matters.

 

Yeah, I definitely thought about that too. That the symbol for "male" and "human" are symbolically synonymous which implicitly differentiates "human" from "female". It's at least a little fucked up.

 

11 hours ago, Jake said:

 

Sure, at one point the sign said "restroom" and had the picture of "man" or "woman," but increasingly the word restroom or toilet has been stylized away and only the icon remains. That's what Chris was amused by I think - that bathroom signage has evolved to the point that an otherwise unadorned picture of a person on a door unquestionably means "you pee or poop in this room" to millions of people. 

 

Right. That's fair. Now we just have to be wary about further mental coupling of the stick figure symbol with restroom functions, lest the "wet floor" signs become a self fulfilling prophecy.

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I have to say I am a fan of the more internationally-flavoured "WC" signage. Sometimes those are gendered with stick figures, but often they are not.

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On 3/10/2017 at 1:46 PM, Vasari said:

I forgot to post this last week, but the funniest part of the Alexa dollhouse incident was when a news station in San Diego reported the story and activated even more Alexas by repeating the phrase.

 

The same thing happened a few years ago when a TV advert for the Xbox One featured a voice command that would turn on any Xbox Ones that heard it. If voice-activated technology is going to be everywhere in the future then there has to be some sort of safeguard that can't be bypassed by someone shouting the magic word.

 

This is like that troll video back when everyone had Kinect hooked up to their XBones and someone made their XBL gamer tag "XboxShutdown" so people would freak out during games of COD

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So, I was listening to this episode on my phone last night, in preparation for Wizard Jam 8.

 

Almost exactly at the 20:00 minute mark when the thumbs started talking about a messed up "Alexa Order" listen based on injecting weird Alexa voice commands, the audio started clipping and skipping around. I was of course a little bothered by this, but it continued. This was a little unsettling to me (as I was lying down in the dark). The audio garbled and skipped to the "man, what are we talking about?". 

 

I immediately assumed this was a classic Thumbs meta-joke that was spliced in since it was so perfectly time, but I didn't remember it. I deleted the file, believing it must not be real, and re-downloaded the episode. To my surprise, the show actually has no such glitch in the audio. My file was just corrupted at the correct moment to great effect.

 

Anyway, this is of no consequence to anyone, but amused/disturbed me greatly so I thought I'd share. -_-

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