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Idle Thumbs BONUS: Ruination Online December 2017

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Idle Thumbs BONUS:

Idle Thumbs BONUS


Ruination Online December 2017
Enjoy this bonus episode drawn from the Idle Thumbs Patreon Ruination Online! Each month, we do a livestream where all topics have been posed by high-tier backers of our Patreon campaign: patreon.com/IdleThumbs.

Due to popular demand, we're releasing the audio of that stream to the main podcast feed for easier listening.

We'll be back with a regular episode of Idle Thumbs next week!

Discussed: Making a comfortable office, borrowing animal features and giving them to robots, podcasting remotely, web-based applets, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Marvel Heroes, working on licensed games, intellectual properties, the books of David Mitchell, books we like, applying the rules of basic arithmetic to the Twelve Days of Christmas, international cuisine, lab-grown food, the future of food preparation, The Nutcracker, gift giving, learning a new skill, getting distracted and not learning anything, wanting to get into something that seems cool but being unable to

 

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"...American baseball."

"'As opposed to which baseball, Nick?!"

 

Nick was obviously thinking of Finnish baseball, pesäpallo.

 

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I almost started talking about that after realizing what I’d said, but didn’t want to sidetrack and then missed the window. 

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The whole conversation about "wanting to get into sports (particularly football) but being unable to" really resonated with me.

 

A little sports knowledge can open so many doors. Where I work, talking about football's a social lubricant, it's ingrained in the culture here. It's also a safe topic for small talk. However, I just don't get it, and that means I'm the one sitting there with nothing to add to the conversation. It feels like there's a whole world of opportunites closed off to me. So it's good to hear I'm not alone!

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Oh man same. I just moved to Seattle and I'm discovering that having at least an Awareness of what is going on with the seahawks is about as important as knowing what the weather is going to be like.

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Just wanted to say thank you for taking the time and effort (and probably $$$?) to keep the podcast rolling with Nick on board via telepresence. The end result is genuinely impressive and I really don't think I would have noticed any difference in audio quality if you hadn't mentioned that it was a thing.

 

I really quite liked The Bone Clocks, though it's probably not for everyone. What differentiates it is not so much David Mitchell's tendency towards a single fictional universe in his work - that stuff is easy to overlook or ignore. It's more that The Bone Clocks very much feels to me like a work of high concept political/fantasy genre fiction, rather than literary fiction in which mysterious/magical things happen. In that regard it has something in common with writers like Ursula LeGuin, China Mieville, or even Philip Pullman. I really like this tendency, even though it does demand more in the way of internal coherence and, like, lore; some readers understandably find this insufferable. That said, if Mitchell announced that all his future books would be also set in the same world (he's already written one!) I'd be a little disappointed.

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1 hour ago, marginalgloss said:

Just wanted to say thank you for taking the time and effort (and probably $$$?) to keep the podcast rolling with Nick on board via telepresence. The end result is genuinely impressive and I really don't think I would have noticed any difference in audio quality if you hadn't mentioned that it was a thing.

Thanks! The two things we did right, I think, we’re giving Nick one of the existing studio microphones so the sound matches, and (even though it started as a little bit of a joke) putting his face on a monitor at human size/eye level in the studio so he doesn’t disappear from our perception when he’s not talking. It’s surprisjngly helpful to be able to see the subtle nonverbal cues that someone you’re in a room with is about to start talking, and having a Big Face On A Screen gets ya st least part way back there. 

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