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Important If True 30: The Octopus Affair

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Important If True 30:

Important If True 30


The Octopus Affair
While we grapple with the mysteries of the world around us, while we do our best to solve your conundrums, provide you with advice, and tease out your bizarre hypothetical situations, we are being watched. Watched, judged, and pitied, by beings beyond our perception, hovering outside our senses on the edges of our reality. These beings fear for us, not for the damage we might do to them, but for the damage we might do to ourselves. And for our part, we barely know when they're there. In that way only, are they more afraid of us than we are of them. If you haven't guessed, this episode is about centipedes.

Discussed: September 21 2017, dads, Important If True Dadcast, annoyed bird cursed to live in a cage of its own creation, centipedes: masters of space and time, classic middle-grade novel My Dad the Centipede, classic kid's book The Big Centipede, Yoda, Yoda Centipede, Yoda Da Man, human evolution, relative scale of human beings, giraffes, the ocean, a big fucking whale, octopus cities, the Gloomy Octopus, octopus evictions, miserable octopus society, Mcity (driverless car testing town), Yodaville (military bombing testing town), Safety Town (children's driving education town), Bartertown (Mad Max dystopian barter town), Gravesend (crime and riot simulation town), Pizzaland (fake pizzeria), "America the Beautiful" musical road, Mellotron keyboard instrument (example of Mellotron string loops), Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Amazon, iTunes), Arrival (Amazon, iTunes), Wolverine Street, self-hoisting AI, human beings

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

Jake's Endorsement: 80s.nyc (photographic Google Street View recreation of 1980s New York City)

Nick's Endorsement: The West Wing Weekly ("The West Wing" discussion podcast)

Chris' Endorsement: The Thin Man (1934 film about tipsy mystery-solving) (Amazon, iTunes)

Sponsored by: Quip electric toothbrushes with $10 off your first brush head refill, Warby Parker prescription glasses home try-on, Peter's happy birthday!

 

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I know this isn't the video games podcast but all I could think about during the centipede Dad discussion was a sequel to Octodad - Centidad - and how awesome that would be.

 

Then I thought about a version of QWOP but with centipedes titled QWERTYUIOP[]\ASDFGHJKL;'ZXCVBNM,./

 

Then I thought about a question@IdleThumbs (Patreoners feel free to steal this if you're stuck for this month's question): How hard is it to avoid video game references when recording IIT or other non-video game podcasts, given how ubiquitous video games have been in your professional and personal lives, and the basis of your friendships?

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5 hours ago, Paul Smith said:

How hard is it to avoid video game references when recording IIT or other non-video game podcasts, given how ubiquitous video games have been in your professional and personal lives, and the basis of your friendships?

I can answer right now: It's not hard because I'm not trying to avoid gaming references. Occasionally one of us makes one on IIT and that's not shied away from. Doing Important If True has been a constant reminder how much Idle Thumbs required me (passively, actively, or somewhere in between) to filter the world on-mic through a lens of gaming, game jokes, game references, etc. Without that pressure there on Important If True, I just don't trend towards it unless it's very clearly time for a game reference or joke. (As opposed to on Idle Thumbs, in which my background thought process was often rapid-fire mental techniques to jump start my brain like "if this was a game, then --" or "this is like [game x] where you --" or other boxed-in fill in the blanks I could run through in my head as quickly as possible to try and bridge the conversation to some other observation or stupid or interesting game-related thing I had to say.) I don't know if that's how it feels for the other guys, but it is for me!

 

Also "Centidad"... :tup:

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2 hours ago, Jake said:

I don't know if that's how it feels for the other guys, but it is for me!

 

Same. Over the years, Thumbs has gotten more challenging in that regard for me as, despite being s video game developer, I’m definitely less generally immersed in and aware of everything going on in games, so I have to try a lot harder to maintain those connections. 

 

That said, IIT is easily the most difficult podcast I’ve ever done. (Which I know is ridiculous because it’s so stupid.) Although Thumbs being so hyper focused one one topic presents its own challenges, those limits do simplify things. With IIT, on the other hand, every topic can theoretically be connected to any other topic, which can be paralyzing. I actually have to prep a bit for IIT, which I never have for Thumbs (aside from making sure I’ve played something). The show always turns out better when we each have some ideas in mind, even though we don’t share them with each other ahead of time.

 

Not bringing up video games isn’t a challenge because I just don’t think about it either way—if it comes up, great; if not, great. The challenge is thinking of unexpected shit across all axes as much as possible.

 

2 hours ago, Jake said:

Also "Centidad"... :tup:

 

Also same.

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Safety Town must just be a Michigan institution? I went through something called that too, which also included some fire safety drills (including a simulated house fire.)

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I read Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man some years ago. It was quite fun, although I generally prefer Raymond Chandler's writing over Hammett. Both writers have ridiculous depictions of alcohol consumption (Marlowe wakes up after being knocked out, his head hurts, he finds a full bottle of whiskey and drinks half of it, his head hurts more somehow), but I remember Nick and Nora's drinking being particularly hilarious. I also remember thinking that I might enjoy the story more in a film form. For some reason I never got around to watching it, though. I'll have to fix that.

 

By the way, if we could go back to the hairdresser and a bag of poop saga for just a sec: Did Nick also tell the poop story to the hairdresser or did he remember wrong? Does the hairdresser remember that Nick also told the story?

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Wouldn't it make more sense for the city that's based around a sunken ship to be called "Octlantis"? I feel like they truly goofed these names. 

 

 

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there was an entire section of an episode of the MBMBaM tv show filmed in a safety town and my future husband went to one in Oklahoma as a child

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5 hours ago, plasticflesh said:

I love the ending with the alternate universe robot podcast. Really excellent. 

 

It was made by imfamous space turtle from these very forums!

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"Oliver 200 Whiskey Tortoise" sounds like a code phrase that activates a sleeper agent.

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On 9/24/2017 at 9:45 AM, WickedCestus said:

Wouldn't it make more sense for the city that's based around a sunken ship to be called "Octlantis"? I feel like they truly goofed these names. 

 

 

I think for the metaphor to hold it would have to be an octopus city that started underwater and then rose up to the surface

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