Idle Thumbs 310: They Came Through the Floor

[Chris]

Idle Thumbs 310:

They Came Through the Floor
They're out there. They're at the gates. You can hear their indistinct scrabbling and inhuman gobbering. scrabbling and It's a strange and hostile world—dinosaurs, self-replicating weird car homunculi, The Thing—but that's why you built your house out of stone, after all. There's nothing to worry about…is there? One of the voices pierces the night and, pressing your ear against the thick walls, you strain to hear.

"Come out, you piece of shit!"

Discussed: West of Loathing, ideal game rating system, Production Line, self-driving car robot capitalist nightmare, The Isle, Rust, fair betting on competitive spectator games, hypothetical The Thing online multiplayer game, Grand Moff Tarkin

Sponsored by: Squarespace, with the offer code "THUMBS" for 10% off

 

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[richardco]

"That is disgraceful!"

 

Also:

 

Childs is the Thing at the end. McReady's breath is clearly visible in the arctic night, Childs sounds like he's breathing, but there's no visible breath.

 

 

[blonski]

Not sure if this has been mentioned on Idle Thumbs elsewhere, but Mondo recently made a The Thing board game: https://mondotees.com/blogs/news/the-thing-infection-at-outpost-31-board-game.

 

[Gormongous]

8 hours ago, richardco said:

Childs is the Thing at the end. McReady's breath is clearly visible in the arctic night, Childs sounds like he's breathing, but there's no visible breath.

 

All interpretations are valid if supported by the work itself, of course, but it's worth noting that Kurt Russell has said several times on the record that the ending is supposed to be completely ambiguous, an object lesson that all of human ingenuity cannot prevent disaster from returning things to a clean slate, and that the "clues" about who is the Thing (the breath, the drink, the musical swell) are relics of a hurried shooting schedule, much like the dummy's slight movement at the end of 1978 movie Magic.

[Badfinger]

Oh gosh, now I'm even more excited about West of Loathing!

 

RE: Battlegrounds betting talk, the hurdle you didn't talk about much is the one that's easiest to solve. It'll be testable that you can properly monitor 100 people in the same space playing battlegrounds because they're doing that at Gamescom later this month!

 

https://dotesports.com/pubg/pubg-lan-commentators-reveal-news-16351

[TychoCelchuuu]

The way Chris expressed his extreme interest in blobs is one of my favorite moments from any Idle Thumbs Network podcast ever.

[Johnny Driggs]

Episode 311 is coming up, better get ready to release that secret file:

 

 

I'll be sending a reminder email to make sure it happens.

[your name here]

"The Aisle" is clearly the franchise reboot of the Sam Barlow game "Aisle"

[iax]

Obviously the proper way of ensuring PUBG betting fairness is to paradrop the players onto an isolated island with a LAN setup.

[Kyir]

This episode appears to confirm that teens are bane of Nick's existence. He can't escape them. He can't hide from them.

[mondryle]

17 hours ago, Johnny Driggs said:

Episode 311 is coming up, better get ready to release that secret file:

 

 

I'll be sending a reminder email to make sure it happens.

 

Might have been a reference to the Fallout 4 bit that was released in 299.5? 

 

 

[feelthedarkness]

i feel really judgmental about people who do the stalking murdering thing in those survival games. it says bad things about perpetrator.

 

no similar thoughts for PUBG though, since it's a fixed round. that's a super clever twist on that psychopathy. 

[unimural]

9 hours ago, feelthedarkness said:

i feel really judgmental about people who do the stalking murdering thing in those survival games. it says bad things about perpetrator.

 

I share the sentiment :-) On some episode Sean talked about playing DayZ. IIRC he was in a group, and they had taken a player hostage, asking questions by gunpoint. They forced him to drink bleach for failing to answer something about US states, or something equally horrific. A couple of weeks later I had a dream that I still remember.

 

I was walking through a park towards the sea. It's a real park in Helsinki, and it's next to a cemetery, the sea and there's a beautiful old building that was Finland's oldest mental hospital near as well. As I was walking I started seeing ghostly images, lost souls re-experiencing their moments of death. I saw a recreation of the bleach-scene: someone, with a gun to their head and a Johnson bleach bottle in hand being asked "What is the capital of Atlanta?", or something to that effect. I thought how unfair it was being asked such a US-centric trick question. As I walked further towards the mental hospital, I realised, as one does in dreams, that all these apparitions were people killed DayZ. DayZ was commissioned by Lucifer, to find the most sadistic person. Lucifer wanted to retire, and needed someone to take over ruling hell and torturing people. As I neared the hospital, I had to wade through the endless crowds of forlorn souls.The hospital doors opened to reveal a pitch black, endless room with a huge lonely throne in the middle of the infinite void. On the throne was Sean, the new boss of Hell.

 

I suppose that's what my subconscious feels about people who stalk in the DayZ-likes. Also my subconscious isn't terribly original :-)

[Johnny Driggs]

On 8/5/2017 at 4:51 PM, mondryle said:

Might have been a reference to the Fallout 4 bit that was released in 299.5? 

 

Oh yeah, that's probably it.

[mikemariano]

19 hours ago, unimural said:

On the throne was Sean, the new boss of Hell.

 

[twmac]

On 8/4/2017 at 8:51 AM, richardco said:

"That is disgraceful!"

 

Also:

 

Childs is the Thing at the end. McReady's breath is clearly visible in the arctic night, Childs sounds like he's breathing, but there's no visible breath.

 

 

Except there are multiple points you can see Childs's breath in that scene.

[TychoCelchuuu]

1 hour ago, twmac said:

Except there are multiple points you can see Childs's breath in that scene.

hey hey hey let's not get carried away watching the movie and letting that mess up our interpretations. I mean sure maybe you can see his breath, but what if you couldn't? Wouldn't that be a gas?

 

I love all these little urban legends about films that people believe just because they get repeated a lot, even though they're clearly wrong if you bother watching the movie with your eyes open. Another one is how everyone thinks Will Smith says "welcome to Earf" when he punches the alien in Independence Day. Nope! He says "Earth" very clearly.

[Problem Machine]

Well that one's just kinda racist though, isn't it?

[TychoCelchuuu]

Yeah for sure.

[richardco]

Welp, supposed I've been hoisted.

 

That's what I get for repeating things I've heard and not re-watching the scene all the way through.

[TychoCelchuuu]

20 hours ago, Problem Machine said:

Well that one's just kinda racist though, isn't it?

Also I have always wondered if the urban legend about The Thing would've spread if the roles were reversed. If the legend had been "Kurt Russell is the alien because you can't see his breath but you can see Keith David's breath" would people have just taken it for granted or would they have reacted the way nerds often react when you get something wrong? Are people willing to believe any old bullshit about Keith David because he's a relatively expendable black guy, whereas Kurt Russell is the beloved star of movies like Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China? In other words, is The Thing one sort of racist too? Not as much as the ID4 one, of course, but still, to some degree, a small reflection on how nerd culture is happy to be pedantic about the tiniest details in some cases, but totally willing to say "yeah the black guy's dead and now he's an alien" even thought that's straightforwardly false if you watch the movie with your eyes open?

[Problem Machine]

Ahh, interesting point. The parallel hadn't occurred to me. Probably because I've never seen The Thing. I guess I should sometime.

[twmac]

23 hours ago, TychoCelchuuu said:

hey hey hey let's not get carried away watching the movie and letting that mess up our interpretations. I mean sure maybe you can see his breath, but what if you couldn't? Wouldn't that be a gas?

 

 

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Hhahah, I actually laughed quite a bit when I read this. But also replying to your thoughts on the possible racist connotations and beloved nature of some characters. I love Keith David so much that when that post was supposed to be proof that Childs is an alien, my first reaction was 'Noooo, not Keith David'.Like, for a second my reaction was the horror that real-life Keith David might actually now be a shapeshifting alien.

[Problem Machine]

53 minutes ago, twmac said:

Like, for a second my reaction was the horror that real-life Keith David might actually now be a shapeshifting alien.

aren't all actors?

[Badfinger]

On 8/10/2017 at 10:09 AM, TychoCelchuuu said:

Also I have always wondered if the urban legend about The Thing would've spread if the roles were reversed. If the legend had been "Kurt Russell is the alien because you can't see his breath but you can see Keith David's breath" would people have just taken it for granted or would they have reacted the way nerds often react when you get something wrong? Are people willing to believe any old bullshit about Keith David because he's a relatively expendable black guy, whereas Kurt Russell is the beloved star of movies like Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China? In other words, is The Thing one sort of racist too? Not as much as the ID4 one, of course, but still, to some degree, a small reflection on how nerd culture is happy to be pedantic about the tiniest details in some cases, but totally willing to say "yeah the black guy's dead and now he's an alien" even thought that's straightforwardly false if you watch the movie with your eyes open?

 

My perception is people younger than me are more familiar with Keith David than Kurt Russell, so I think it depends on which nerds are reacting. Escape From New York is almost too old for it to be a formative experience to people 10 years older than me, but Keith David is like Goliath and the Arbiter and Admiral Anderson and Vice President Keith David.