Chris

Important If True 34: This is Celebrity Explainer

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Important If True 34:

Important If True 34


This is Celebrity Explainer
Can cold spaghetti enable your rise as a charismatic cult leader? How do you outrun your own 17-hour-tape-delayed ghost? How do you fight your homeowner's association? The world is confusing. Fortunately, each week, there's one source to which you can turn: WikiHow.

Discussed: Botnik Writer, Celebrity Explainer, eating cold spaghetti, mundane perception-alternate events, becoming a highly captivating charismatic cult leader, Roy Batty in Blade Runner, modern technology enabling you to relive your boring life forever, Mom's Spaghetti, a very well-known meme, encountering your own ghost, avoiding your own ghost, l'esprit de l'escalier, watching your own failures forever, Disney Channel Original Film "Me and My Ghost Pal", your own stupid subjective myopic experience, cutting parsley, generating associative memories, X-Acto knives, freeing yourself from bad associations, excellent WikiHow illustrations: How to Fight Your Homeowner Association, How to Break a Habit, How to Prepare Parsley, How to Escape a 17-and-a-half Hour Time Loop, Crown Records Management: The Power of Memory, The Truman Show but with a weird ghost version of you, The Game but the point is to make you eat McDonald's, Jones Pontiac Oldsmobile & Plymouth of Topeka, How to Avoid Encounters with Ghosts and the Paranormal, dreams

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.

Nick's Endorsement: Exercising with a pull-up bar in your home, and not doing crunches because they hurt your terrible old back

Chris' Endorsement: The underappreciated Martin Scorsese dark comedy The King of Comedy (Amazon, iTunes)

Jake's Endorsement: The dark Garfield art spiral of famed illustrator Olly Moss

Sponsored by: Warby Parker prescription glasses with free home try-on, Quip electric toothbrushes with $10 off your first brush head refill

 

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RE: The 17-and-a-half Hour Time Loop

You can leave yourself handy & discrete reminders for your ideas, appointments, etc. Sometimes you don't always have your phone or any paper on hand. And maybe you don't want to leave said information on your phone or some piece of paper anyway.

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Throughout the first half of this episode, all I could think of was: Have they not seen the movie Primer (2004)? If not, please do so immediately! One of the most mind-bending time travel movies ever made, it deals with the subject of traveling into the recent past and how you might deal with alternate copies of yourself. Also an amazing example of extremely low-budget filmmaking.

 

Also, the childhood spaghetti incident recalls the Sapienza mission of the recent Hitman game, where the mad scientist guy you have to kill is obsessed with recreating his mom's spaghetti recipe.

Spoiler

The secret ingredient turns out to be expired spaghetti sauce, which can be used to hilarious ends.

 

Edited by DrZing
spaghetti

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"Catch a flash of the horror of the mundanity of your own life" is an intense sentence. 10/10 cast.

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17 minutes ago, DrZing said:

Throughout the first half of this episode, all I could think of was: Have they not seen the movie Primer (2004)? If not, please do so immediately! One of the most mind-bending time travel movies ever made, it deals with the subject of traveling into the recent past and how you might deal with alternate copies of yourself. Also an amazing example of extremely low-budget filmmaking.

 

I have, and I remember the general sensation of being overpowered by the labyrinthine complexities of time travel as presented in the film, but I don't remember a lot of detailed specifics.

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9 minutes ago, Chris said:

 

I have, and I remember the general sensation of being overpowered by the labyrinthine complexities of time travel as presented in the film, but I don't remember a lot of detailed specifics.

 

The plot is so insane that at least 17 hours of repeat viewing may be required. A Google image search for "Primer plot chart" might be helpful. Non-spoiler version: https://xkcd.com/657/

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Primer is also very different than a recording of yourself that only you can see. I saw Primer and like it but it didn't apply, to my mind, in this context, which I think is a lot closer to rewatching just your life on tape delay. 

 

People looking for a weird and overwhelming time travel movie should watch Primer though. 

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Huh, so..

 

I got my pull up bar out so I can start using it again this week.

 

I recorded The King of Comedy on tv as i've always heard good things and planned on watching it this week.

 

I have been already enjoying the Garfield tweets.

 

3/3 for me!

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5 hours ago, infamous space turtle said:

Hmm I'd use the third person thing to get better at presenting myself. I could potentially change weird mannerisms i might not know about or things that look bad. 

Ugh, god. It would be mortifying, like hearing your own dumb voice on an answering machine times a thousand.

 

edit: and they just got there

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This episode made my brain hurt a bit more than the typical episode hurts my brain...So basically the premise is that there's another ephemeral me running around doing exactly what I was doing 17 hours ago? Does this other me have any agency or is he fated to do what I've already done?  Basically you'd have a 3-D memory running around as a constant reminder of bad and good. Maybe if I ever wake up from a blackout drunk I could follow my "delayed self" around to see what horribly embarrassing things I did?     

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I think the worst part of the seventeen-hour thing is watching the times when you're just sitting there, doing nothing, and thinking about something. Because seventeen hours later you'll have forgotten what you were thinking about at the time, so you'll just be looking at yourself like "hey do something! come on!" 

 

I say this most every week, but this is my favourite ep yet. Absolutely brilliant. 

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7 hours ago, WickedCestus said:

I think the worst part of the seventeen-hour thing is watching the times when you're just sitting there, doing nothing, and thinking about something. Because seventeen hours later you'll have forgotten what you were thinking about at the time, so you'll just be looking at yourself like "hey do something! come on!" 

 

And then, seventeen hours after that, you can watch yourself watch your previous self: "hey, stop watching that, you know he's not gonna do anything!"

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Hey, so I saw on Twitter that Nick's GF is moving to Vancouver for work. Does this mean we have to dust off the ole "F Nick Breckon"? 

 

Sorry if this is a weird, personal question. I figure if they didn't want people to know they wouldn't have said anything.

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For the exercise inclined, I think this is one of my favorite on the web:

 

http://www.exrx.net/Lists/Directory.html

 

GIFs detailing good form, and hard to understand medical explanation of anything you might want. They have guides to any type of routine you might want.

 

I've only ever really done 3 Day Splits (this version: Chest/Triceps, Back/Biceps, Shoulders/Legs).

 

 

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As far as seeing a bunch of ghosts of yourself playing out their mundane tasks, there's a great short that's not quite so terrifying and has nothing to do with time travel by Satoshi Kon that I highly recommend. I believe it was his last work before his passing. It's called "Ohayo" and you can see it on youtube: 

 

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