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Important If True 47: The Shitty Wizard

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Important If True 47:

Important If True 47


The Shitty Wizard
This week's episode is about Trust: when to extend it, when to withhold it, and when to cling to it because nothing else makes sense. When the same person you don't know sends you a Christmas card every year, do you trust your mom that it's "just some friend's parents you've forgotten," or do you follow your heart and grift them before they can grift you first? Do we let ourselves believe a robot can write poetry, or is there just some hippie hiding in there? If a voice on the other end of a phone asks "can you hear me?" why not tell them "yes?" Plus, we manage to uncover the truth behind the mysterious "Cut Your Hair" phone calls, and receive a transmission from a universe long ago banished and thought to be lost.

Discussed: Receiving Christmas cards from people you don't know, misguided counter-espionage, de-scrambling anagrams, chatbot poetry, Racter, Eliza, deconstructing Racter, bots as reflections of their creators, the problems with using machine learning to create an artificial Frasier, embracing the flaws of an artificial Frasier as an aesthetic, the standalone tonal language of Kelsey Grammer, poop-related topics leaking in from a banned dimension, Utah-based flat vocal affect call centers, robocalls recording your voice to turn identity into an Arnold Schwarzenegger soundboard, the bizarre grift outlined in Reply All: The Phantom Caller, the truth about the Cut Your Hair phone call, Sneakers

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: Sneakers (1992) (Amazon, iTunes, )

Accidental Endorsement: Sneak King (Xbox, Xbox 360), a free game from Burger King

Nick's Endorsement: Strider video game speed run and live tutorial on speedrunning, a part of Awesome Games Done Quick speedrunning marathon for charity

Chris' Endorsement: Darkman (1990) (Amazon, iTunes.)

Chris' Real Endorsement: watching clips from Would I Lie To You on YouTube

 

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I'm gonna second that Sneakers endorsement. That movie is legitimately good despite what everyone apparently assumes.

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Hi, I'm the Mark that wrote in about Racter - I'm sorry to say the the 'me' in the first poem was a typo on my part, but I'm glad you enjoyed my dumb mistake.

 

Also, I was excited to hear about the Racter/Eliza conversation, I had no idea anyone had ever made them talk to each other. It's led me to this page which contains it, and a variety of other good dialogues, including the famous Eliza/Parry conversation: https://web.stanford.edu/group/SHR/4-2/text/dialogues.html

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I second the Would I Lie to You endorsement. I'm a sucker for British panel/game shows with heavy concentration of comedians or otherwise funny people. Other shows worth checking out: QI, Never Mind the BuzzcocksInsert Name Here, Big Fat Quiz of..., 8 Out of 10 Cats (Does Countdown)...

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Everyone deserves a pink elephant in their life: 

 

 

 

(I was once driving down a highway in the middle of nowhere and saw some place with a giant pink elephant sign that looked similar to the plush from "Darkman" and wanted to stop and take a photo but unfortunately couldn't easily maneuver my car to the entrance to the place to stop and do so. Also I saw "Drag Me To Hell" and "Up" on the same day when they came out which was a tonally bizarre experience.)

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I'm tempted to take a crack at Jake's generated Frasier idea, well the text-only part -- so the simplest part.   The idea of feeding the original script back into the generator with Frasier's lines removed and asking it to guess them might make for a nice middle ground between silly nonsense output and the actual script.

 

But my beefy GPU is busy mining Reddit's new Garlic based cryptocurrency...

 

What a world we live in.

 

 

 

 

 

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So on September 9th, 2015, I was sitting in the DMV to get my license renewed and abruptly a loud explosion came from outside. Found out after leaving the DMV that there was a bomb squad literally in the parking lot next door. Didnt find out till i got home and looked it up that there was Suitcase Bomb found in the parking lot. The strange part was that I never heard about it on cable news, and nobody I knew had heard of this. This makes me wonder if there are just random bombs going off all the time??????????? Should we be worried who knows?

 

http://skookpa.com/category/bomb/

 

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Disappointed that Jake let Chris get away with describing the Shitty Wizard's hypothetical religious-wacko garb as "eschatological" without any objection. 

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I always like it when some British thing that I like and basically take for granted now makes it way over to the US with Would I Lie to You being a superb thing to pick up on. If you want suggestions then look for any clip of Bob Mortimer as his stories just have to be heard. This clip should show why.

 

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The moment Chris said 'British TV show' I knew it would be Would I Lie to You. It's pretty well known in Australia too.

 

I'm going to endorse this BBC podcast about plastics. The idea of exporting plastic to China to be recycled is fascinating

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David Mitchell rants are some of the most enjoyable things I've ever witnessed.

 

I'm still looking forward to that Landis story with the Israeli general, by the way..

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Following up on Nick's endorsement of AGDQ, there's a forum curated playlist of runs that anyone can view or add to.  I've watched almost every run by now and while I don't think there are as many standouts as in past years, there are some that are definitely worth a watch.  My personal favorite is the Mike Tyson's Punch-Out/Super Punch-Out run where the runner played both games simultaneously using one controller.

 

AGDQ 2018 Thumbs Curated Playlist

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An interesting note about the Strider speedrun tutorial: someone who tried the game for the first time after watching the tutorial actually ended up finding a new skip less than four hours after the tutorial happened. In the same day, the world record holder beat his time in the practice room at the event.

 

 

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