Important If True 5: The Convergence Compulsion

[Jake]

Important If True 5:

The Convergence Compulsion
Some questions are like an itch you can't scratch, or worse, an itch you can scratch as much as you'd like, but the itch doesn't go away. Today we indulge our compulsions and scratch away at the unscrachable, like: When did George Clooney start showing off so much skin? Why does the flu virus really want you to party? And what drew three painters of video game box art to the same back-alley brawl, in the same town, on the same night? We will tread these paths again and again until we discover the truth, or are tricked by our own minds into believing we have. Plus, thanks to a helpful reader, major steps are taken to record for all time the 45 brains that control existence.

If you enjoyed this and would like to subscribe to an ad-free feed, please consider supporting Idle Thumbs by backing our Patreon.

Important Reference Material: self-driving car, self-driving flying car, robots wearing skin, The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger, flu-prompted sociability, Streets of Rage cover art, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Amazon, iTunes), Steven Spielberg's early career, 45brains.online

Nick's Endorsement: Flonase Allergy Relief (Nick promises this is not a paid endorsement)

Chris' Endorsement: Kitchen salt jar (alternatively: a "salt pig." ugh.)

Jake's Endorsement: Berkeley High School morning announcements

 

• Listen on the Episode Page
• Listen on Soundcloud
• Listen in iTunes

[Problem Machine]

I like the part where Idle Thumbs (the streamer with the glasses) calls the salt rat a salt pig

[Salacious Snake]

Nothing in the ad-free feed yet for me. Wouldn't be a big surprise if patreon's private feed thingies aren't as quick to update, but I have no real prior experience with it, so I thought I'd mention it.

[Chris]

13 minutes ago, Salacious Snake said:

Nothing in the ad-free feed yet for me. Wouldn't be a big surprise if patreon's private feed thingies aren't as quick to update, but I have no real prior experience with it, so I thought I'd mention it.

 

Sorry about that, it's up now.

[kata]

The mind-altering parasite segments of the recent casts kept knocking around some old memory, and this weeks episode finally dislodged it. You might be interested in checking out a sci-fi short story called "The Giving Plague" by David Brin.

(Apparently he also wrote the story for one of the Ecco the Dolphin games, and, to quote Wikipedia, "had already written a few stories about intelligent dolphins in his Uplif Universe").

[Sullitude]

45 Brains Update

Submit your own proposals for brains to @45brains on Twitter. 407 podcasts remain.

#17 - The Brain Wearing Arnold's Skin

To ensure the highest resale value, this brain wears Arnold Schwarzenegger's skin so it can be sold as 'pre-worn'.

Status: Confirmed

Message: "The worst thing I can be is the same as everybody else. I hate that."

#7 - Unknown Flamethrower-laden Robot

Brain unknown, but definitely has a flamethrower attached.

Status: Partial Identity

Message: TBD

[Johnny Driggs]

I'm weirdly happy that Chris vocalized the observation I've had that basically anyone can say "Here in [non-Muslim-majority nation], we really like our booze."

[brendonsmall]

I am genuinely giddy to listen about the streets of rage cover art. I read a good chunk of that thread a while back and it was mind boggling.

[Mike Danger]

"I was confronted with the future" is definitely the title of the oral history of Important If True that Rolling Stone runs in 5 years

[jennegatron]

You too can be extremely attractive with Warby Parker glasses.

[zach]

a link that seems pertinent given discussions of robots wearing human celebrity skin.

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/19/fashion/leather-dna-alexander-mcqueen.html?_r=0

 

i want a pet sheep robot that is growing human skin sourced from George Clooney's genetic material that i can sheer (flay?) off and make into Clooney-leather wallets.

[Patrick R]

10 hours ago, jennegatron said:

You too can be extremely attractive with Warby Parker glasses.

I spent 10 minutes trying to remember what the hell this could be referencing before I remembered that there's a feed with ads. Nice glasses!

[jennegatron]

1 hour ago, Patrick R said:

I spent 10 minutes trying to remember what the hell this could be referencing before I remembered that there's a feed with ads. Nice glasses!

 

: ) thank you!

[Vasari]

Have you guys seen this deleted scene from Terminator 3? It's about the origin of the Terminator's appearance and voice.

 

 

[SecretAsianMan]

It's not in the same vein as Streets of Rage et al. but the box art for the SNES game Phalanx has always made me laugh.  It's so completely incongruous with what the game actually is.

 

[Gormongous]

25 minutes ago, SecretAsianMan said:

It's not in the same vein as Streets of Rage et al. but the box art for the SNES game Phalanx has always made me laugh.  It's so completely incongruous with what the game actually is.

 

Apparently, it was intentional. The American licensees knew that it was an unremarkable shmup in a market glutted with them and, since they only had control over the packaging and marketing, decided to make those as unique and ridiculous as possible.

 

My favorite repository of bad NES, Genesis, and SNES box art, usually driven by American licensees not knowing what a game was about or knowing and trying to hide it because it was too Japanese, is an old gallery put together by Todd Ciolek, a former 1-Up and ANN writer. My favorite is, of course, Tagin' Dragon, but there's also a heavily airbrushed "street brawl" cover for a Streets of Rage knockoff called Streetsmart:

 

[feelthedarkness]

David Duchovny getting wild in the street.

 

Also potential brain alert: recently a large credit union here announced a rebranding. San Antonio Credit Union is now (no joke) Credit Human. If that isn't a poor attempt by rogue AI to hide, I don't know what is.

[DocRandal]

Concerning robot skin and bugs:

 

http://news.mit.edu/2017/goldbug-beetle-printable-sensor-laden-skin-robots-0323

 

In an attempt to demonstrate the feasibility of flexible, printable electronics that combine sensors and processing circuitry and can act on their environments, the researchers have designed and built a device that responds to mechanical stresses by changing the color of a spot on its surface.
The device was inspired by the golden tortoise beetle, or “goldbug,” an insect whose exterior usually appears golden but turns reddish orange if the insect is poked or prodded — that is, mechanically stressed.

“In nature, networks of sensors and interconnects are called sensorimotor pathways,” says Subramanian Sundaram, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science (EECS), who led the project. “We were trying to see whether we could replicate sensorimotor pathways inside a 3-D-printed object. So we considered the simplest organism we could find.”

 

[Urthman]

Hey, just finished listening to the ad-free podcast of this episode. It was great, but I was wondering why there were only two endorsements at the end.  Did Nick have to leave early or something?

[Chris]

1 hour ago, Urthman said:

Hey, just finished listening to the ad-free podcast of this episode. It was great, but I was wondering why there were only two endorsements at the end.  Did Nick have to leave early or something?

Wait for real? Nick's endorsement was the first one, about Flonase. Did it get deleted from ad-free??

 

Edit: I just checked, it's in there!

[Jake]

I noticed there were only two endorsements and also it sounds like an advertisement for Flonase snuck in? ...

[jennegatron]

whenever you talked about the flonase emblazoned clothes all I could think of was this series of Totino's vines from Griffin McElroy 

 

 

[chummer]

SALT PIG! DIG INTO THE PIG!

 

 

[twmac]

Soooo weird that people would talk about the Streets of Rage box art.

 

For years I would do all these drawings, mainly based around a sewer dweller (he was a hybrid of Blanka and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). I'd owned Streets of Rage for 4 years when I examined the box and realised that subconsciouly I must have noticed that sewer goblin because my drawings resembled what little you could see of him.

[twmac]

On 20/03/2017 at 10:20 PM, feelthedarkness said:

David Duchovny getting wild in the street.

 

Also potential brain alert: recently a large credit union here announced a rebranding. San Antonio Credit Union is now (no joke) Credit Human. If that isn't a poor attempt by rogue AI to hide, I don't know what is.

 

Kind of reminds me of Mario Lopez too.