Important If True 14: Your Worst Nightmare

[Jake]

Important If True 14:

Your Worst Nightmare
The world is full of minutiae so inconsequential and baffling that sorting through it all isn’t worth your time. Good thing we’re here to sort through it for you! This week: How does a factory farmed chicken cross the road? Do the ‘90s have the emotional capacity to love you back? And who will Luigi doorbell ditch next? These questions and more can be safely checked off your list after listening.

Send us email at questions@importantiftrue.com. If you enjoyed this and would like to subscribe to an ad-free feed, please consider supporting Idle Thumbs by backing our Patreon.

Discussed: Being left alone in someone else’s house, Second Livestock, mobile phone app reviewing warehouse, scientists imaging your dreams, Batman Forever 60FPS HD footage (more), recurring inexplicable horrible imagery, the 1990s

Nick's Endorsement: "When We Held Kings" by Eric Raskin

Chris' Endorsement: Learning about the Jewish concept of the eruv

Jake's Endorsement: 1. "Snatch" movie trailer, 2. "House" opening titles

 

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[BigJKO]

I swear to god I've heard that poop story before. When Chris was telling it, and the ziplock bag detail came up I thought "I've definitely heard this specific mutation of this story. Is it just an urban tale?" And then Nick revealed the origins of the story and my brain made the connection that Nick must've told this story in a previous Thumbs cast some time. Has to be. This was the strangest deja vu..

[Salacious Snake]

That Batman footage is so goofy. It looks like they just smoothed it out with a basic interpolative smoothing dealie in a video editor. This basically inserts new frames that are sort of a smeary blend between the real frames. (It's useful for putting mismatched footage together or doing slow motion in post.) It has the bonus cheapifying effect of making it look like you shot at a high rate, but with too slow a shutter.

 

A lot of TVs have a built-in "motion smoothing" option that drives me mad. I kinda get why it came about, because as TVs get bigger, the judder in a panning 24p shot gets more noticeable, and it does bother some people. But it makes movies look like taped TV shows!

 

At least with the Hobbit, Peter Jackson knew he was targeting a higher framerate, so he knew he had to use heavier prop swords and stuff so it didn't look super wobbly and cheap (and of course he could light the scenes enough to use an appropriate shutter speed). Inflicting that higher framerate on something that was intended for 24p is just hilarious.

 

There are so many problems with Second Livestock that I don't even know where to begin.

[gdf]

51 minutes ago, BigJKO said:

I swear to god I've heard that poop story before. When Chris was telling it, and the ziplock bag detail came up I thought "I've definitely heard this specific mutation of this story. Is it just an urban tale?" And then Nick revealed the origins of the story and my brain made the connection that Nick must've told this story in a previous Thumbs cast some time. Has to be. This was the strangest deja vu..

You definitely have, but because it is indeed a huge urban legend! I've heard it from a few different people and even told it a couple of times before I got suspicious and googled it.

[Turgid]

There's another alternative for the hair stylist story - maybe the actual person involved also goes to that hairstylist!

 

She told the story first, and when Nick came in the hair stylist was biting her tongue, so she didn't burst Nick's bubble.

 

Then Chris reminded her of it through the mention of Nick, but she went back to the original version.

 

Stands to reason that the original person would tell multiple people. Or as people have now revealed the story is an urban legend, the hair stylist has heard it multiple times, and was referring back to the best version she had heard.

[BigJKO]

1 hour ago, gdf said:

You definitely have, but because it is indeed a huge urban legend! I've heard it from a few different people and even told it a couple of times before I got suspicious and googled it.

 

I probably have heard some other version of this story, but my brain reacted pretty strongly to the ziploc bag detail which isn't present on that site's story. Considering Jake's retold his brain autopsy story three different times, it's *possible* that Nick's already told this story and everybody just forgot.

[skeptem]

As soon as Chris said  the door would lock behind her I knew what the story was and I was hoping that Nick was laughing because he knew it was some copypasta/email-chain thing from years and years ago....I was wrong.

 

The weirder thing is that he said he knew the people involved in it? Nick is messing with everyone. 

[Nappi]

1 hour ago, skeptem said:

As soon as Chris said  the door would lock behind her I knew what the story was and I was hoping that Nick was laughing because he knew it was some copypasta/email-chain thing from years and years ago....I was wrong.

 

Haha.. I went through the exact same thought process.

[Johnny Driggs]

I can't believe Chris said the word "foghorn" two times in relation to chickens and never once said "leghorn."

[Chris]

33 minutes ago, Johnny Driggs said:

I can't believe Chris said the word "foghorn" two times in relation to chickens and never once said "leghorn."

Damnit

[Dr Mario Kart]

For about half an hour i thought someone was prank ringing my doorbell.  Boy do i feel hoisted.

[pyide]

Props to Nick for letting Chris finish the story, that was hilarious. 

[Problem Machine]

I'm one minute into the cast and I'm already mad that you failed to say "subscribe to our chicken feed"

[NuclearMonster]

On the subject of the eruv, there are some other awesome workarounds for the sabbath. I was at some big box store a few weeks back and saw that some appliances had Sabbath-modes. Instead of playing metal music, these were ovens that would just stay on at a lower temp (like 325) for the next 24 hours. Wikipedia has a good article about these devices. It's so fascinating that some of them have randomly-delayed switching so that you're one step removed from activating the device.

[twmac]

If anyone wants to know what 90s-as-fuck is, I present Heartbreak High, an Australian TV-Show in the 90s:

 

 

It encapsulates everything, cheesy colours, 'tude, hair cuts, the lot.

[aeonofdiscord]

Is CANYON.MID a thing every week now? Is this Jake's counter to 'stay spicy'?

[Chris]

4 minutes ago, aeonofdiscord said:

Is CANYON.MID a thing every week now? Is this Jake's counter to 'stay spicy'?

It's supposed to just be in the video version to accompany the final slide. Last week we messed it up and it was in the audio version as well. If we did that again this week: whoops!

[Jake]

5 hours ago, Chris said:

It's supposed to just be in the video version to accompany the final slide. Last week we messed it up and it was in the audio version as well. If we did that again this week: whoops!

Pretty sure it's only in the video version.

[Kyir]

Can I formally request a patreon tier for getting access to a spicy-free podcast feed?

[Problem Machine]

I'm officially registering myself as pro-spicy. Fuck all y'all anti-spices.

[Gormongous]

"Spicy" can stay as long as Jake continues to express comical disgust at its existence. They're two sides of the same coin.

[MadJackalope]

Man the nightmare discussion was creepy similar to experiences I had growing up. I had them actually quite often though one of the worst I remember was shortly after coming home from a 3 week road trip. 

I had one this one night that was just a riderless Super Mario World yoshi jumping through the end level goals over and over and over again. Baaaaawhoop BaaaaawhoopBaaaaawhoopBaaaaawhoop Over and overagain, and in the back of my head I felt like Peach was telling me I had to save mario or something, and I was the yoshi? Or something like that. They were very weird, and horrible because I was already technically awake and couldn't get out of them. I'm not neuraltypical but it was kind of a shock to me as an adult when I casually mentioned these dreams and all my friends were like "uhhh... I've never had that happen to me". 

[Problem Machine]

I think the addition of an entire cast of nightmare versions of Mario characters is exactly what the Idle Thumbs Mario universe theory needs to become truly complete

[feelthedarkness]

i don't so much vote to as remain determined to stay spicy. 

 

also, for the intrepid explorer who didn't experience it in real time, one half of Jake's 90s poles (the dark pole) is best summed up by Raygun Magazine, which basically set the standard for the busted fonts, insane kerning & leading, and pantone banana yellow text on metallic silver paper.

 

http://www.coverjunkie.com/magazines/115

[MadJackalope]

The repetitive nature that was discussed was very similar too. I did acid a fair bit back in the day and there's a similar kind of effect in the psychedelic experience it creates. I'm curious what structure or pattern of the brain causes that effect.  The kind of looping in on itself, self-referential, fractal kind of thing. Both in thought and visuals. I also tend to like very meta humor, or storytelling and I've wondered if there's some kind of similarity. Also I play around with neural networks as an artistic medium, and have noticed that there  is similar kind of effects in how neural networks generate imagery often, so I, with no real qualifications or knowledge on this, wonderif there is some kind of deeper connection there, as in the creation of imagery with the neural network is making visual a particular pattern of behavior in the training model and that this pattern is also present in our brains, at a much more complex level because our brains have been trained for visual recognition etc through evolution in a similar way. Just a thought. 

More discussion about dreams in the podcasts!

People always say that the most boring story to everyone else, except for the person telling the story, is the story of an acid trip or a dream experience. I personally disagree very strongly with that. I love people telling me their dream stories. I sadly don't remember my dreams much these days.