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Idle Thumbs 306: Nick Breckons: 1, Mackle: More

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Idle Thumbs 306:

Idle Thumbs 306


Nick Breckons: 1, Mackle: More
"Now boarding all rows, all groups." Lemore was running late. Stepping up to the gate, he presented a creased boarding pass. The crisp sound of denial emanated from the machine. "I'm sorry, Mr. Macklemore, but this is telling me you've already boarded." Fist clenched, Lemore stared down the tunnel in disbelief. "It's Lemore," he said under his breath in a defeated tone. "Professor Mack Lemore." But it was no use. Once again, he'd been had.

Discussed: Horizon: Zero Dawn, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Dark Souls, Sonic/Mario ROM hack, Trespasser: The Lost World - Jurassic Park, identity fraud

 

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I used to have the email address [email protected]

I got so many emails from medical students trying to set up shadowing at hospitals (they would be trying to email something like [email protected]). Also got random emails about a Mini Cooper I didn't own and the occasionally account verification email. I finally got rid of the address because it got super annoying.

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my current email is theoneguy

 

and i get so many people signing up for shit with a "throwaway" address and i really really really need to change it

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Dark Souls lore is like the songs and poems from Tolkien's novels. You can skip the songs entirely and still fully understand the story and enjoy it. Those who read the poems and songs might learn a little more about the world and the creatures in it, but the actual story doesn't change.

Tolkien poem readers will be baffled as to how you enjoyed the book without knowing the entire history of elves. The Dark Souls Lore analyzers will be baffled as to how you enjoyed the game without knowing Gwyn's backstory.

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4 hours ago, emptybob said:

Dark Souls lore is like the songs and poems from Tolkien's novels. You can skip the songs entirely and still fully understand the story and enjoy it. Those who read the poems and songs might learn a little more about the world and the creatures in it, but the actual story doesn't change.

Tolkien poem readers will be baffled as to how you enjoyed the book without knowing the entire history of elves. The Dark Souls Lore analyzers will be baffled as to how you enjoyed the game without knowing Gwyn's backstory.

 

This 100% tracks.

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9 hours ago, emptybob said:

Dark Souls lore is like the songs and poems from Tolkien's novels. You can skip the songs entirely and still fully understand the story and enjoy it. Those who read the poems and songs might learn a little more about the world and the creatures in it, but the actual story doesn't change.

Tolkien poem readers will be baffled as to how you enjoyed the book without knowing the entire history of elves. The Dark Souls Lore analyzers will be baffled as to how you enjoyed the game without knowing Gwyn's backstory.

I think a small difference is that the story of Dark Souls is often described as incomprehensible by the people who didn't dig into any lore. I read Lord of the Rings and knew what happened. But I didn't follow the events I had done in Dark Souls without hearing about some of the undercurrent.

 

Also I've been using this same username everywhere for a decade-ish now and it feels increasingly questionable in the given climate. Especially when I'm a randomer on someone's twitch channel, posting in chat.

 

And I'm not finished the episode, so maybe this gets mentioned. But didn't this exact thing happen to Nick before, where he was mistaken for someone else and emailed an itinerary for a trip, leading to the Thumbs positing how he could still go.

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I have two, I guess, "full name" gmail addresses with both Steve and Steven, I always just get random emails telling me what my local congressman is about (I don't live in America.) At one point I was getting a weekly report emailed to me about a toddler in pre-school, thankfully that eventually stopped. 

 

Also it was kind of nostalgic listening to you guys talking about Lets Plays. I started first watching them/reading screenshot LP's on somethingawful around 08/09. At that time there was a lot of animosity towards "Youtube Let's Plays" because usually the Youtube stuff was such low quality in how it was recorded compared with what was being put out on SomethingAwful at the time. Also one of the core ideas was always "We all do this as a hobby, you're not going to become internet famous because of this so don't come here hoping for internet super-stardom." I think that emphasis on quality and doing it purely to show off a game you love was what really got me into that part of the SA forums back then.

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Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't spaff also British slang for semen?

 

Somehow, the name Manic Mark has always been stuck to me in my friend circle. There's an absurd abundance of Marks there, so each has their own adjective; Metal Mark (the metal fan), Funky Mark (the bass player), Money Mark (the owner of our favourite bar), etc. Somehow, because I was into Manic Street Preachers way back when (and wore their t-shirts), I ended up being Manic. Using that in an email address might've cost me a few callbacks on job interviews, though....

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Just now, MarkHoog said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't spaff also British slang for semen?

 

As a British man, I've never heard that in my entire life. Do you mean Spunk?

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2 minutes ago, pabosher said:

 

As a British man, I've never heard that in my entire life. Do you mean Spunk?

 

Nope, I know spunk all too well.

Okay, that came out wrong.

 

Anyway, it could just be an extremely local/subcultural thing. A Brit friend (from around Basingstoke) pointed it out when I mentioned Spaff in a conversation about IT.

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1 hour ago, MarkHoog said:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't spaff also British slang for semen?

 

In this beginning of the stream for this episode, someone mentioned shock at the first result for Spaff being a lewd Urban Dictionary link; I went to check it out, and this was the first entry:

Quote
To wake up in the morning with a huge amount of Facebook notifications and finding out that one person has 'liked' every comment you made the previous day.
I have just been Spaffed 
I am getting a Spaffing as we speak

I didn't see anything wrong with this, but then I read the rest of the entries below, and you seem to be correct.

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I think the lore discussion is interesting! Jake, Chris and Sean had a convo about this a couple years ago that'll link to here (should be time-stamped to start at the topic):

 

I like thinking about this topic because here's a thing I've done: read through parts of the Game of Thrones Wiki without having any idea what the story is about. I was late to watching the show and had no interest in reading those tomes, but when the 'Red Wedding' became a thing on Twitter, I took the time to look it up and just ended up just going through a hole of links and connections. Now, I can't recall much of what I read that day, but I can tell you that I found the process of piecing together the world and narrative in my brain really enjoyable. Sean makes a distinction between 'lore' and stories told by 'what happens to characters and how they react to that,' but because I think the latter can be told in lore (having read that GoT wiki, I can tell you why the characters did what they did at the Red Wedding), I wonder if Sean meant zooming in on one particular point in this world and focusing on that story. This is all very unconsidered for me right now and I don't want to put words in his mouth; just parsing these ideas as I write.

 

All that said, I've also been playing through Dark Souls 1 and have no interest in looking up that lore I've heard about while I'm playing. I think the process of learning that stuff seems burdensome, my impression of it being that you have to stop the flow of the game to read item descriptions and talk to characters multiple times to get that stuff. To paraphrase Nick, 'It's not what I'm here for.'

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Also regarding naming schemes in school, we had three kids named James in my elementary school. James Delaney, James Gasparino, and James Perry. We all just called them by their last names to differentiate, except for Perry, who refused to be referred to as such, and demanded to be called James.

 

I mean, we ignored him and just called him Perry anyway, because he didn't get the rights to the name just because the other two weren't using it. Also he was a really big jerk and bully, so even though we were all shitty kids he deserved it.

 

I think the first time I met someone who I referred to by a nickname that wasn't just a shortened version of their regular name was a college roommate who was from New Zealand, so he just went by Kiwi because he said people got his name wrong a lot. His real name wasn't hard to pronounce, and it was easily shortened to a nickname that would have been easy to say, but I didn't push it. Also I think he went to school with a lot of wealthy bullies who purposely made fun of his name, so I can see why he might take refuge in a nickname he chose.

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I was in marching band in high school and our drumline had a Brett and a Brent on it and our midwestern accents didn't differentiate the two names enough to be understood so Brent went by 'Squatch' because he has a lot of body hair and is hairy like a Sasquatch. Everyone would call Brett 'Señor' because Spanish was his favorite class in school.

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I feel like both Nick and Chris were agonizing over trying to say "I don't like the genre of high fantasy" without actually saying it and I found it a little strange. Did you guys mean something else by "If I saw a book with a cover that looked like Dark Souls I wouldn't read it"? And if you did just mean "I don't like fantasy", why not just say that? I left not quite understanding what they meant by "I don't like stories like that."

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1 hour ago, SgtWhistlebotom said:

All that said, I've also been playing through Dark Souls 1 and have no interest in looking up that lore I've heard about while I'm playing. I think the process of learning that stuff seems burdensome, my impression of it being that you have to stop the flow of the game to read item descriptions and talk to characters multiple times to get that stuff. To paraphrase Nick, 'It's not what I'm here for.'

My experience of DS lore is mostly that you just play through the games doing what's expected of you at the moment and the lore kind of settles in on you through incidental dialogue and environmental storytelling. Actually stopping to read item descriptions is really not something I started doing until very recently. Don't sweat the lore stuff: It's interesting, but primarily it contextualizes the game. I think partially what's happened with Nick is just an artifact of streaming, where most of the people in chat have had the experience of going through the game a few times and have had a long while to understand the significance of each part and how it fits together; however, the vast majority of first plays are just people going from area to area, not putting in a whole lot of thought exactly why until later on. DS2 explicitly acknowledged that you'd have no idea why you were doing what you were doing until much later.

DS's story style is interesting precisely because it DOESN'T demand anything of the player. The story elements are just there, and how much you engage with them or don't is entirely up to you. That stuff is important though. Even if it's not what you're there for, I think it still actually is what you're there for to some extent. That is to say, you may not be interested in the specifics of the crumbling age of fire at the moment, but the way that backstory forms a specific and meaningful context for the challenges you overcome is still important. Remove too much of that stuff and action games start just becoming guitar hero without the music.

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18 hours ago, Problem Machine said:

How could someone mention a Nick Breckon convention and not call it Breck-con!?!?

 

This. I was yelling it at my car stereo while listening to the podcast on my drive to work. For shame.

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Having heard the full episode now, Nick's distaste for the lore makes more sense to me. It does have game hints and explanation peppered into the lore and narrative. There's places where you either need to pay attention to know how to do things, or have the Internet tell you.

 

When Nick says the game isn't telling him how to navigate these points, it's because the lore isn't part of the game to him, so he's expecting the parts he's engaging with to have the hints.

 

(I hope I'm not putting words in your mouth here Nick) 

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When I was in college my class had more Davids in it than females, myself included.  We eventually started referring to each other by some sort of epithet (I was "Asian Dave").  In hindsight it was a shitty practice but I wasn't cognizant of it at the time.

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I really liked hearing Spaff on the episode! As much as I like the Chris/Jake/Nick triumvirate, I also appreciated the freewheeling nature of potential hosts of the older episodes and this was a nice reminder of that.

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I'm gonna miss this podcast. Having Spaff on was a breath of fresh air, which ironically is what the Thumbs feel killed the show originally (having too many guest hosts)

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