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Idle Thumbs BONUS: Ruination Online March 2017

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Idle Thumbs BONUS:

Idle Thumbs BONUS


Ruination Online March 2017
Enjoy this bonus episode drawn from our Idle Thumbs Patreon Ruination Online! Each month, we do a livestream where all topics have been posed by high-tier backers of our Patreon campaign: patreon.com/IdleThumbs

Due to popular demand, we're releasing the audio of that stream to the main podcast feed for easier listening.

Discussed: The hype cycle, making movies, death robots, music listening habits, World of Warcraft and missing the boat, The Legend of Zelda series, Jake Rodkin, robot overlords, infinite money, cyberpunk, dumb Star Wars names, Jurassic World, Firewatch, Twin Peaks, board games, video podcasts, the moon, pets

 

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The one game that comes most readily to mind for me that I regret missing the boat on is Earthbound. I saw the oversized box and assumed that it was some weird peripheral game like Mario Paint, the only other game to come in an oversized box, and assumed that I didn't have the peripheral and couldn't play it. I'm pretty sure if I'd gotten to it at the time, though, it would have ended up as one of my all-time favorites.

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42 minutes ago, Problem Machine said:

The one game that comes most readily to mind for me that I regret missing the boat on is Earthbound. I saw the oversized box and assumed that it was some weird peripheral game like Mario Paint, the only other game to come in an oversized box, and assumed that I didn't have the peripheral and couldn't play it. I'm pretty sure if I'd gotten to it at the time, though, it would have ended up as one of my all-time favorites.

 

Earthbound is at the absolute top of a related but different list for me: Games I want to like and think I should, but always always slide off of when I try to get into them. 

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1 hour ago, Jake said:

 

Earthbound is at the absolute top of a related but different list for me: Games I want to like and think I should, but always always slide off of when I try to get into them. 

When I played through the first half or so a year or two back it was very JRPG-ish for me. Chrono Trigger is one of my all-time favorite games, but I have a hard time actually playing it any more just because I no longer have as much patience for the genre conventions as I once did -- which is why I wish I'd played Earthbound when I did have patience for those conventions, because I loved pretty much everything else about it.

 

The one entry on that other list you bring up here that comes to mind is Rogue Legacy, which I thought I would LOVE but ended up... Well, 'despising' is too strong a word, but I thought it was misguided in a few fundamental ways.

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I will forever be bummed that I missed out on the golden age of Battlefield:1942 multiplayer

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I like TF2 a lot, but only came to it when it was full of hats and money laundering. I wish I could've been part of the fresh release TF2 experience.

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14 minutes ago, SuperBiasedMan said:

I like TF2 a lot, but only came to it when it was full of hats and money laundering. I wish I could've been part of the fresh release TF2 experience.

 

Yeah, I feel the same. I didn't pick up the Orange Box until a couple of years later, and all of my time with Team Fortress Classic just made me feel revolted by the "evolved" experience of TF2.

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One weird game community that I'm extremely glad I got to be a part of was TF2 on the 360. There wasn't much support given to it post-launch, and so it just remained vanilla TF2 as the PC version started getting all the character updates. A few months after the Orange Box came out, the servers were populated by a small group of the same people, and after a while we all kinda just knew each other. I fell off after I built myself a gaming PC, and started playing TF2 there instead. A year or so later, I went back to the 360 version to see if anyone was still on, and I was surprised to find active servers! Recently, someone had discovered how to turn on the dev console, which was not restricted in any way, as it usually is in Valve multiplayer games. All the servers were more or less chaos as a result.

 

That specific multiplayer community feels pretty unique...I haven't had quite that experience with any other game. 

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I really got into the 360 TF2 community as well.  At one point I was even part of a "clan" that expanded so much it eventually split into three other groups.  The one I was part of even tried to get some kind of tournament scene going among the community at large but it fell apart once it became apparent the consoles would never receive the PC updates.  I'm still friends with a couple of those people even today and it remains the only place I've made friends online that I have subsequently met in real life.

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I'd say my desert island album would almost certainly be Godspeed You, Black Emperor's Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven. It has a huge range of modes, is super long, and can function as either background or up-front music.

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I spent the entire cast thinking they were saying rumination instead of ruination and getting kind of confused.

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Something that was said and unexamined that I was curious about is Chris's assertion that he'd "feel stupid" buying albums. Why? He clearly likes physical media to some extent (not just holding onto the Sony Walkman, but he's talked about buying blu-rays of Twin Peaks and Batman) and we're in an era now where record collecting is more popular and mainsteam than it's been in decades (I heard there's even an Idle Thumbs vinyl). I wonder what Chris's personal reason for feeling dumb buying albums is.

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4 hours ago, Patrick R said:

Something that was said and unexamined that I was curious about is Chris's assertion that he'd "feel stupid" buying albums. Why? He clearly likes physical media to some extent (not just holding onto the Sony Walkman, but he's talked about buying blu-rays of Twin Peaks and Batman) and we're in an era now where record collecting is more popular and mainsteam than it's been in decades (I heard there's even an Idle Thumbs vinyl). I wonder what Chris's personal reason for feeling dumb buying albums is.

 

I do actually buy vinyl sometimes. But buying CDs feels stupid, because they are just straight up obsolete technology. Vinyl is obsolete in a sense, but it's also big and beautiful and tactile. CDs come in shitty plastic cases with tiny album art. When they were actually the current best way to own music, their downsides were pretty minor, but now they're much more glaring.

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Yah cds feel cheap to me, if your going digital you might as well just use iTunes. Streaming/subscription bums me out actually.  I hate that if I stop paying money I loose my music and yeah I end up just listening to random singles. 

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1 hour ago, infamous space turtle said:

Yah cds feel cheap to me, if your going digital you might as well just use iTunes. Streaming/subscription bums me out actually.  I hate that if I stop paying money I loose my music and yeah I end up just listening to random singles. 

 

I still buy albums from iTunes or Amazon (and then transfer the files to iTunes) when I do listen to a new album... I just don't listen to new music that often.

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I still tend to buy CDs - they sound great and can be ripped to anything. Paying a similar price for the mp3 files never made sense to me. I obviously have no problem owning games digitally, but that's essentially the same experience once you're playing. I can't kick the physical habit when it comes to music and books.

 

Also, some of the very best reissue labels can't make their releases available digitally, and collecting their stuff is important to me. They often have excellent booklets I wouldn't want to miss out on anyway.

 

So there's an assumption that a physical collection can be entirely supplanted by an iTunes collection or a streaming service, but that's not the case. It's similar with film - the fraction of older films available digitally is tiny, before you even consider that a good physical release might come with director's commentary, documentaries, a really good new essay etc. I don't think physical music or film is genuinely obsolete whilst they remain the collectors' choice in these ways.

 

Streaming is useful (I have a Google Play Music subscription) but I treat it like a library rather than my collection. If I really love a book or album, I'll probably eventually buy myself a copy to keep.

 

Vinyl is nice and I collect it from time to time, but the pricing is bonkers now that it's a more fashionable item.

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I still buy physical books because I like reading them and having them, and tend to do most reading at this point while traveling. But most music I listen to in iPhone earbuds anyway, so if it's an MP3 I don't care. 

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I will buy physical copies of CDs I really love but mostly stick to a handful of artists I already like and buy when their new releases come out. Microsoft's music service lets you download a DRM free zip of the mp3s you buy and you download them to as many devices as you want as well as stream. I stick to that because 1. I hate iTunes and 2. Having everything in onedrive makes it easy to organize and access my music anywhere. Plus I have a cd player in my car if I ever want to listen to an album front to back, which I often do.

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My new (old, refurbished) phone's music app doesn't even have the option to play tracks in order on an album which is the most infuriating fucking thing. The way that so many people don't even conceive of the album as a work of music, just a bucket to shove individual music tracks into, just makes me deeply sad and frustrated. No, I don't want to listen to Abbey Road in fucking alphabetical order!

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I get not wanting to collect CDs (100% agreed on cases feeling cheap and junky), but I think they are one of the best ways to discover albums now because the market for vinyl has driven up used record prices while used CDs are cheap and sound as good as they ever have. Also, the only decent speakers I own are connected to my TV, which is connected to a blu-ray player, so that's the only way I can listen to music not through bad laptop speakers or earbuds.

 

*That is to say, albums by professional musicians, as I also just download a lot of whatever's new on the "lo-fi" tag on Bandcamp.

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I still buy CDs... Mostly used for the reason mentioned above. But then I feel like an idiot when I fire up Spotify and listen to something I own on CD there.

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On 3/18/2017 at 11:51 AM, Problem Machine said:

My new (old, refurbished) phone's music app doesn't even have the option to play tracks in order on an album which is the most infuriating fucking thing. The way that so many people don't even conceive of the album as a work of music, just a bucket to shove individual music tracks into, just makes me deeply sad and frustrated. No, I don't want to listen to Abbey Road in fucking alphabetical order!

you want to listen to abbey road how it was meant to be listened to - peaking at octopus's garden.

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I missed out on Earthbound so hard that whenever people talk about it I briefly confuse it with Gunbound, which is a Korean Free to Play Artillery-style game from a decade ago which I KNOW no one is talking about because I'm the only person I know who played it.

 

http://gunbound.softnyx.net/

 

I rarely buy music for a much more banal reason, which is that at some point I started listening to podcasts and that snowballed so hard I regularly subscribe to between 30-40 pods, so that's the thing I listen to at work, in the car, doing housework, etc.

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