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Jake

Idle Thumbs 20: Idle Thumbs 2000

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I'm also a fan of the long podcasts. I have about a 45 minute trip to school both ways every day, plus a half hour to walk my dog. I really appreciate filling the majority of that time with Thumb goodness.

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Speaking as someone who is always desperately searching for things to help pass the time at work, longer is better. But I can see how you could run out of steam doing a longer show, so throw us the occasional supplemental Podblast and I'm happy.

Also, there is a certain amount of irony in Chris lamenting the blue arrow that always points the way in Far Cry Instincts, while in the same episode complaining about the total lack of navigational signage in hotel he just stayed in.

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Today a co-worker asked me if I was okay. He thought I was choking, but actually I was stifling a laugh while listening to Idle Thumbs. I told him I was laughing and he gave me a strange look because I work with spreadsheets. I wish I had a better story to tell.

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Great show guys! Glad to hear that EA's Dante's Inferno is still being discussed, I could spend 90 mins or so on it . . .

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Dawn of War II is definitely awesome. I played for 2-3 hours tonight, and it was the most fun I've ever had just playing the single-player campaign in an RTS.

I bought Noby Noby Boy, but I don't know why.

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First post here - Really been enjoying the podblast - I think I found you guys from mittense or fullbright off twitter. Anyways, keep the good shit coming!

Oh, yeah I'll be at GDC so hopefully get to stay what up to you guys.

- sk

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Also: GIF's!? Get with the program idlethumbs! uUse PNG's, please.

PNGs make IE6 cry, are still not wholly trusted by me in IE7, and sadly, in a bid to be helpful to designers but actually ends up being harmful and horrible, are dynamically color-adjusted to compensate for their creator's color profile by Safari. Paradoxically, this only happens to PNGs which are saved from Photoshop via "Save For Web" -- PNGs saved out through the standard save window display perfectly correctly in Safari -- but if you are using some sort of hardware color correction solution for print design, and Photoshop is calibrated for that, you're going to end up fucking up PNGs for Safari users. It's retarded.

That is all a smokescreen, though, for the fact that I'm actually just sort of lazy and wasn't thinking when I threw the site together a while ago. I don't actually give a shit about IE 6 or IE7. (See the IE rendering bugs on goty.cx for proof of this fact.) Whenever a real Idle Thumbs site is made (that needs to happen, jeeez, its been 20 episodes! I'm horrible) I will probably use a million PNGs and then somehow break the site for a bunch of people.

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jeeez, its been 20 episodes! I'm horrible

You are an awesome and horrible person at the same time... Speaking of paradox

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This would be an easier connection:

Awful and Awesome so he's aw.

Jake, bad news, you're aw.

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Stuff about not saving his files in 8 bit PNG's ;)

If you're not in the mood for writing the HTML, let me know, I seriously would like to help with making a better more standards compliant idlethumbs.

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Here, here - them tables is the devil's work. Would also gladly muck in, as I've mentioned in the past. JavaScript, HTML, CSS, whatever.

Just sayin'.

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Completely unrelated but for the third time, I got on this page and my eyes got stuck on gdf's

"free periods at school."

Am I the only one picturing a bloody sangria distribution in the gym ? Ok rhetorical question here, I guess I'm the only one with such a horrible mind...

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If you're not in the mood for writing the HTML, let me know, I seriously would like to help with making a better more standards compliant idlethumbs.

Why use an 8 bit png? I can understand why using CSS can be worthwhile, but holy fucking shit people need to get off of their high horse about PNGs/CSS/etc. It's an image file. When someone tells me to arbitrarily use 8-bit PNGs over GIFs, I immediately picture them wearing one of those shoulderbags with a car seat buckle for a snap, and some t-shirt from Hot Topic. Sorry!

CSS can theoretically be great for instantly repurposing or re-flowing content simply by changing the stylesheet, but I have almost never, ever, seen this actually carried out in practice. More often, all of the data that is re-flowed in those situations is already stored in a database system, so when the new design is made, both the CSS and displaying HTML are rewritten or heavily modified, and only the tokens which call back to the database fields are entered in.

Also most CSS driven designs that I see are still filled with crazy hacks and workarounds to get "only in CSS!" type tricks to work. I see guys at work spend hours poking at something to get a piece of content to move 5 pixels to the left and its something that I could do in about 20 seconds in my grizzled hobo-style hybrid code which dates to use a table for something other than tabular data.

I'd eventually like to get my markup prowess up to a point where I could do a page in pure compliant CSS-driven markup, mostly to get my familiarity with layers and overlapping elements a lot stronger, because that aspect of CSS driven design has actual tangible benefits as a visual and functionality designer, but (and I imagine this is sadly the appeal for a lot of people) less because it makes the code looks pretty.*

Anyway, CSS has a lot of amazing positives, but I am tired of people treating it like a religion, and denying any advantages of the things that it replaced. I am admittedly probably an old grandpa stuck in the past, but it kills me to see people kill themselves to accomplish stupidly simple things, and then admonish me for achieving them. I know you weren't doing that to any notable degree, ys, but you apparently touched a nerve!

As for the Idle Thumbs' front page itself... It is... the worst thing ever... under the hood. It's based on some temporary code that I shat out at 4 in the morning when we were launching the first episode, and I've been grossly stretching it out over time since then. One day something more real will exist. It's currently not representative of anything. That said, to end users, it doesn't really matter as long as it gets the job done.

* I'm not arguing against clean code here. I'm arguing that CSS driven code looks pretty to the person who wrote it, but to outsiders, even those familiar as hell with CSS, it can be just as fucked to untangle as any other piece of script or markup.

Cough. Anyway. Video games!

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I do too. It's a podcast now, not what it used to be. The Thumb doesn't really need a huge site.

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Why use an 8 bit png? I can understand why using CSS can be worthwhile, but holy fucking shit people need to get off of their high horse about PNGs/CSS/etc. It's an image file. When someone tells me to arbitrarily use 8-bit PNGs over GIFs, I immediately picture them wearing one of those shoulderbags with a car seat buckle for a snap, and some t-shirt from Hot Topic. Sorry!

CSS can theoretically be great for instantly repurposing or re-flowing content simply by changing the stylesheet, but I have almost never, ever, seen this actually carried out in practice. More often, all of the data that is re-flowed in those situations is already stored in a database system, so when the new design is made, both the CSS and displaying HTML are rewritten or heavily modified, and only the tokens which call back to the database fields are entered in.

Also most CSS driven designs that I see are still filled with crazy hacks and workarounds to get "only in CSS!" type tricks to work. I see guys at work spend hours poking at something to get a piece of content to move 5 pixels to the left and its something that I could do in about 20 seconds in my grizzled hobo-style hybrid code which dates to use a table for something other than tabular data.

I'd eventually like to get my markup prowess up to a point where I could do a page in pure compliant CSS-driven markup, mostly to get my familiarity with layers and overlapping elements a lot stronger, because that aspect of CSS driven design has actual tangible benefits as a visual and functionality designer, but (and I imagine this is sadly the appeal for a lot of people) less because it makes the code looks pretty.*

Amen to that! Trying to get some layouts working with CSS can be a lot more difficult than using tables sometimes. CSS is definitely not a complete solution to the layout problem. That doesn't mean it's ok to use tables everywhere, of course.

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I do too. It's a podcast now, not what it used to be. The Thumb doesn't really need a huge site.

Yeah, I like it too.

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The site could be a lot better than it is, both in terms of presentation of information (wouldn't it be cool to be able to check in on Steve and Duncan and Marek's excellent blogs, for instance?) and under the hood (the front page is basically one giant background image right now, which is horrible!).

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yeah, the site is horrible

wait what? oops, wrong door.

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yeah, the site is horrible

wait what? oops, wrong door.

actually the modern version of that is "oops, wrong chat window"

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My machines don't have windows you insensitive cloth.

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