Jake

GDC! Idle Thumbs Journal of Games

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Wuxtry!

GDC! The Idle Thumbs

Journal of Games

Just before GDC we put together this newspaper to share with our friends and to toss at people unexpectedly while passing them on the escalator.

The Idle Thumbs Journal of Games contains a mixed bag of video game truth, video game lies, and the expansive gray area in between, featuring a combination of old pieces by Thumbs podcasters and friends, and new material written just for print. Really, we just wanted to make a newspaper.

Digital facsimile of the printed word, now available in PDF form. Enjoy news!

Featuring written content by Chris, Steve, Marek, Duncan, and David, with Lawrence, Alex, and Spaff on the conceptual assist, layout and design by me, and some amazing illustration work by Stevan.

minipod_download_journal.png

minipod_confjournaltitle.jpg

Edited by David
fixed link

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Haha, awesome.

Did you gather any reactions from the people that read it? (except for their expressions)

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The awesome journal inspired me to do some cheap copy & paste stuff and I came up with this desktop background. It's 1680 x 1050 px. If you want a diffirent size let me know, I might be able to whip something up.

post-4-13375603100942_thumb.jpg

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Fantastic Pub! :tup:

If only our paper were put together with such care for layout, it wouldn't be a sinking ship.

Definitely going to print it at home. Might even get creative and roll out a few copies with my "printer."

plotter.jpg

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I like how your router is perched on its shoulder like some kind of electronic Salacious Crumb.

Also I'd really love to play "Return of Gamestop", except the total minkfuck of being able to play as my own ex-roomate is far too terrifying. How can I be my own ex-roommate? I'm always in the same room with myself! This game defies all known laws of logic and reason!

EDIT: Obviously I meant to say "mindfuck", but I sort of like the new word I accidentally coined. Downy-furred rodents, beware.

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The awesome journal inspired me to do some cheap copy & paste stuff and I came up with this desktop background. It's 1680 x 1050 px. If you want a diffirent size let me know, I might be able to whip something up.

Holy crap. Wallpapered.

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Here's the original, or at the very least the huge file I gave Jake.

post-10-13375603102548_thumb.png

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I had a coworker take a photo of my hands in the weird position, then I played around with liquify filters to make the fingers weirdly proportioned. The typewriter I found online and worked on separately.

Now, in photoshop I collapsed the image into grayscale (image > mode > grayscale) and burned and dodged bits and pieces to establish relatively high contrast between details that needed extra definition. It might look kindof weird in this stage and not uniformly contrasted, but it doesn't matter. You'd want it to look kindof bronzy, sharp highlights, dark darks.

So here you'd duplicate your canvas three or four times. Go to image > mode > bitmap; select output of about 300 pixels and the halftone screen as the method. Then give it a frequency of about 35 lines per inch (depends on what the dpi you picked earlier is and how tight you want your end line pattern to be) pick a neato angle, and for the shape pick a line.

Now repeat the same with different angles on the duplicates you made. Then stack them all on top of one another in multiply layers and just paint on masks to show one direction crosshatching as opposed to another for a given section. It might be a bitch at first, cause you can't see what is going on where, but you'd get the hang of it. I suggest you put an completely opaque mask on the layer and paint on the visible bits rather than the other way around.

The index finger of the left hand didn't look right in the first draft of the thing, so I basically assembled it collage style from bits and pieces of crosshatching from different parts of the image.

TL;DR: image > mode > bitmap > halftone screen > line.

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Ah, that's so cool. Always nice to get a look into the kitchen. It looks so deceptively simply handcrafted! But it was the brushy highlights on the nails that made me doubt it was made on paper.

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Here's the original, or at the very least the huge file I gave Jake.

Thanks again for making both of the thumbs illustrations. They made a newspaper look really good.

I know you think I sullied the center spread with that chunky HPLHS font, and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me some day.

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Ah, that's so cool. Always nice to get a look into the kitchen. It looks so deceptively simply handcrafted! But it was the brushy highlights on the nails that made me doubt it was made on paper.

Yeah, no. It would've taken forever to actually do on paper. I made it in a couple of hours.

Thanks again for making both of the thumbs illustrations. They made a newspaper look really good.

I know you think I sullied the center spread with that chunky HPLHS font, and I hope you can find it in your heart to forgive me some day.

Mnyah. :tup: Don't matter. Looks fine.

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It does look awesome, I'm actually ready to make some paypal cash move to get a copy of one of these if any remain...

Can that be done ? I give money you give Journal of game, then I give love to you.

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Does anybody still have the pdf of this? I'm dying to see what could've possibly left Tim Schaefer so scandalized, but the link is dead.

gdcpod_background2-300x285.jpg

Edited by Lork

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Thanks. I wish I could get ahold of a physical copy, but this is still pretty great.

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My defenses are impregnable, robot. You won't trick me.

Incidentally, I was looking for Journal of Games a while ago but I didn't find it. Thanks, robot.

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