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Important If True 54: A 30 Foot High Screaming Billboard

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Important If True 54:

Important If True 54


A 30 Foot High Screaming Billboard
What does the future hold? You wouldn't believe me if I told you. Just imagine... Content creators, the size of skyscrapers, looming over our cities. The greatest actors of the baby boomer generation, locked in undying clone warfare. The world's most precious secrets confined to the pithy slogans of a fortune cookie. Martin Shkreli, still. So, friend, what does the future hold? Let's pretend you never asked.

Discussed: Nick Breckon's Existence, actors archiving facial scans to live forever, scanning your face while Peter Thiel drinks your blood, the far-future silver-gilded George Clooney, living under the tiresome watchful eye of a 200-foot-tall PewDiePie, Jake getting kicked out of the Millennials, dual-piloting the Tom Hanks mecha-robot, Martin Shkreli digitizing his brain at the exact moment of his sentencing, Important If True 19: Pearls Before Slime, the ingredients of Nickelodeon Slime, the ingredients of Nickelodeon Gak, Jake settling deep into his new Gen-X identity, the Ancient Galactic Brain PewDiePies, local fortune cookie production, the paradox of the accurate fortune cookie, fortune cookie driving you into a slow-motion spiral of depression and regret, fading out like a Star Wars ghost, the fortune cookie we need in 2018, the missing Year 0, Jake's future life on the moon

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: Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

Jake's Preliminary Endorsement: The unfindable book "How to Host a Double Dare Party," which apparently had a VHS counterpart

Chris' Endorsement: A delicious breakfast of soft-boiled eggs, nestled into egg cups and uncapped with an egg clacker, served alongside toast soldiers with butter and Marmite

Jake's Endorsement: MIT Technology Review article about a mind-uploading service that is "100% fatal" (cf. Jake's pork chops story)

 

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Oh my goodness - Gak. I had Gak. It was "not quite orange, not quite pink" and lived in a weird splat-shaped container and smelled funny. *wipes away single tear*

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Fantastic episode! 

 

I love the image of 200-foot-tall PewDiePies reacting to wildlife and processes of urban decay while the remains of human civilization live underground and communicate in fortune cookie messages.

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Re: Double Dare

 

Portal 2's "Old Aperture" location encapsulates for me the grody terror of "Double Dare." A kitchen/bathroom tile covered facility with phyiscal challenges, lots of slime, and an antagonizing voice on the PA system, and a live studio audience as the Aperture researchers.

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2 hours ago, Atlantic said:

MEGASHRKELI

Egg Helms

Millennial Cusper

An aloof-douche (which is the guy who comes out at the start of the meal to implicitly insult your tastes)

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4 hours ago, slowbird said:

Alternate title: "Two Millennials, A Gen-Xer, And A Pizza Place"

Wow good. 

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I have managed to avoid ever seeing a pewdiepie video, and this podcast paints a fascinating picture of who he is and what he does. Are all of his videos just him reacting to events in slow motion? Does he watch stupid stuff happen to people on the streets through unsecured security cameras? The possibilities are endless.

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11 minutes ago, Kyir said:

I have managed to avoid ever seeing a pewdiepie video, and this podcast paints a fascinating picture of who he is and what he does. Are all of his videos just him reacting to events in slow motion? Does he watch stupid stuff happen to people on the streets through unsecured security cameras? The possibilities are endless.

I don't even know, I've never watched him either. I just know he's kind of a professional youtube idiot?

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How is it that you guys independently, in conversations almost a year apart, came to the idea of Terminator Clooney robots? I can't tell if I'm dumb for thinking that you didn't realize this, but you guys never mentioned that this episode gets dangerously close to your previous conversation about robots wearing George Clooney's skin, in order to ..uh..do something, I don't really remember. I think this was around the era when you guys were discussing Arnold Schwarzenegger's arm coming back from the future and becoming one of the forty five brains in order to...uhh...

 

Man what is this podcast. 

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I don’t know how we didn’t call that back to be honest. I bet it was on all our minds. 

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There's a roleplaying podcast called Friends at the Table hosted by Austin Walker that's currently doing a sci fi season where it's "anything goes" sci fi bullshit. Austin has outright said before that he borrows ideas from discussions on this show, and I cannot wait for numerous sky scraper sized celebrities to appear on the show.

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20 hours ago, SuperBiasedMan said:

There's a roleplaying podcast called Friends at the Table hosted by Austin Walker that's currently doing a sci fi season where it's "anything goes" sci fi bullshit. Austin has outright said before that he borrows ideas from discussions on this show, and I cannot wait for numerous sky scraper sized celebrities to appear on the show.

Is this the current regular one, or the paid one?

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As a Gen X member, I'm ashamed to say that Jake totally vocalized what I was thinking about You Can't Do That on Television and slime.

 

On the slime topic, I avoided all of those products except when I got "The Glooper" on clearance at Kay-Bee Toys. A gun that shoots little snot balls! One more reason I can never criticize any toys of future generations.

 

 

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1 hour ago, SL128 said:

Is this the current regular one, or the paid one?

It's Twilight Mirage, the current regular free campaign. Though in the paid one set in modern day real world they have also borrowed stuff on occasion.

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On 3/24/2018 at 2:46 PM, CaptainFish said:

An aloof-douche (which is the guy who comes out at the start of the meal to implicitly insult your tastes)

This is an incredible joke

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Chris repeatedly calling Jake a "millennial cusper" was interpreted by my brain as "millennial CRISPR".  I now envision that millennial DNA has been given to Jake for the purpose of creating a hybrid Gen-Xer/millennial.  Millennial-X, or Gen-M maybe.

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I tried that soft-boiled egg recipe today and it turned out great, really nice consistency.

 

On 3/27/2018 at 8:03 PM, Problem Machine said:

This is an incredible joke

Thank you!

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Marmite is one of those condiments which is relatively limited in what you can do with it, but I'd never want to be without it. As well as toast, it is also quite good with butter and spaghetti. You can also add a teaspoon of it to add that salty-sweet umami richness to other dishes, a bit like Worcester sauce -- some people like it with bolognese or chilli or onion gravy. You would never want to eat it straight out the jar. That way lies madness.

 

But the endorsement of soft boiled eggs with Marmite soldiers was nice to hear. It is a favourite breakfast of mine. I used to have this extremely good Mario egg cup when I was a kid and I really wish I still had it.

 

I was slightly confounded by the mention of the strange device for removing their tops. I've never heard of an egg clacker. It sounds rather indecent. For me there's a tactile pleasure in denting the top of the egg with the back of a teaspoon, followed by tapping a collar around its neckline with the tip; and then you wedge the spoon in the crack and lever the whole thing off, decapitating the poor creature. It's a delightful sensory experience.

 

A soft-boiled egg accessory I would endorse is the egg cosy. It's a little hat for your egg! 

 

Boiled eggs have a rich and storied history. I think often about the moment in Of Human Bondage where the narrator's uncle, a vicar, allows him to eat the top of his egg if he's been a good boy -- it's a perfect little Dickensian image for stinginess masquerading as generosity. There's a great bit in Gulliver's Travels about a dispute between the 'little-endians' and the 'big-endians': two nations at perpetual war over whether boiled eggs should be cracked at the 'little' or 'big' end. (Interestingly these terms have since been adopted in computer science to describe something to do with the way bytes are arranged that I don't really understand.) The writer M. R. James was said to be able to time the cooking of his soft-boiled egg by the time it took him to finish the crossword in the Times; though how hot he had the water I suppose we will never know. 

 

Sorry for the digression. I could probably write a book about soft boiled eggs. I think it would make me very happy.

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On 4/4/2018 at 3:26 PM, marginalgloss said:

Sorry for the digression. I could probably write a book about soft boiled eggs. I think it would make me very happy.

 

Well, I enjoyed the digression! That Mario egg cup is good.

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On 4/4/2018 at 9:26 PM, marginalgloss said:

I could probably write a book about soft boiled eggs. I think it would make me very happy.

 

Do it!

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