Idle Thumbs 138: A Christmas Blast

[Jake]

Hey! Hat Barons! Other stuff! Our gift to you: this mailbag podblast. It seems both December 25 and January 1 land on Wednesdays this year, making for the best podcasting schedule of all time. Enjoy!

 

Download and listen here! https://www.idlethumbs.net/idlethumbs/episodes/a-christmas-blast

[mikemariano]

Merry Christmas Jake!  Merry Christmas to all of you!

[feelthedarkness]

Happy Holidays thumbs! Thanks for another year of good times!

[Dez]

Can't listen until later, but the intro is already pretty great. I wish you all an Honorable Festive Holiday Season!

[Flynn]

Haven't heard of litecoin?  Litecoin is dead.  The world has moved on.  I guarantee the Hat Baron is now dealing in this:

 

(not a joke, is real coin that people are trading in high volumes)

[elmuerte]

The problem with wifi is not the badwidth, but the latency. It's nice that you can have a bandwidth of 300Mbps, but the latency still sucks big time. With wifi you have LAN latency + wifi overhead latency.

Eitherway, it's still much much much better than streaming from OnLive

 

Haven't heard of litecoin?  Litecoin is dead.  The world has moved on.  I guarantee the Hat Baron is now dealing in this:

 

(not a joke, is real coin that people are trading in high volumes)

 

Dogecoin...

There also like these 20+ other crypto currencies: http://coinmarketcap.com/ripple.html

 

Time to make a wizard coin. You keep your ziward coins in a horsebag.

[melmer]

God, how easy is it to buy and sell these coins, some of them had doubled in price in the past 24hours.

[feelthedarkness]

re: Inside Llewyn Davis, my girlfriend thought 'Hey Mr Kennedy' was a reference to 'Hey, Hey LBJ':

 

 

A certain care for fidelity was one of the things that kept LA Noire working for me, though video games seem to bump into a different problem than film/tv in that if you render a Chevy there are some licensing issues, where TV people just black out the logos. 
 
 

[clyde]

The question of what makes something seem like it belongs to the fictional world in which it exists is an interesting one. This is the type of discussion that I listen to the podcast for.

I think that games will eventually surpass the other artforms in this respect, largely because of my view on how that illusion is created effectively. My view of the world is that artifacts are created and shaped by the systems within which they exist. More specifically, I believe that worlds are filled with the artifacts of the method by which things are produced. Of course this is far too general to be of much use, but I see it as the direction that illusions are headed in. As games get more and more impressive with their procedural generation, I imagine that instead of populating worlds with hand-crafted art-assets placed directly with a few rules, they will begin to be filled with evolving AI's that develop ways to exploit the simulation for their own survival (leaving artifacts of their success behind). I think procedural-generation is going to lead games into worlds that are purely homeostatic systems that the player is able to explore. It'll be a while, but I've gotten a taste of what it's like andI love it.

[Bjorn]

God, how easy is it to buy and sell these coins, some of them had doubled in price in the past 24hours.

 

I've got a friend who is nuts about bitcoins and other crypto currencies.  The more he tells me, the more I become convinced it's all just an elaborate form of gambling. 

[clyde]

I have some comic-book trading-cards that I will sell. They are going to eventually double their worth. Get in early.

[robotslave]

If you do not edit together the Hat Baron saga and release it as a standalone, then, um, I guess I'll have to do all that work myself.

 

Also, if you do not get that Captain Invictus fellow on the show for a Very Special Episode, then I will have to find names other than Remo, Rodkin, Breckon and Vanaman for my next four cats (why start with just one?).

[sclpls]

I've got a friend who is nuts about bitcoins and other crypto currencies.  The more he tells me, the more I become convinced it's all just an elaborate form of gambling. 

 

That's exactly right. It's a pure speculative commodity replacing the function gold has had (only gold at least has a few industrial uses, so it was only mostly a speculative commodity) whose value is tied to what you think other people (who are trying to guess what you think it is worth) think it is worth...

[clyde]

The thing about currency speculation is that whenever someone is cashing out, that means that other people lost that money. I understand that the participants are willing to risk loss for the possibility of robbing someone else, but it just looks like a bunch of people trying to take advantage of each other to me. I imagine it can be exciting, but you inherently can't profit without someone else's loss and knowing that removes any possibility of achieving anything I'm personally interested in.

[melmer]

Knowing how the world works is not knowing how to work the world

- les savy fav

I hope Sean got some nice jumpers for Christmas. I too recently had a pullover intervention when I came to the realisation that I've worn a hoodie almost everyday for the past ten years #gross. So I had a massive splurge on jumper sans hood and have never looked back. One of my jumpers in particular gets lots compliments, it has a bird (kestrel) print and has literally made people fall in love with me left, right and center

News years resolution readers! No more hooded garments, unless it's raining or you actually intend to mug that old person

[tegan]

I'm not sure if I've ever owned a hoodie. I don't like long sleeves.

[CaptainFish]

Hoodies are fine. Not sure why some choose to only wear them, but they're nice in moderation.

[Twig]

Sean, I don't know what you were on this episode, but your wacky Christmas shenanigans absolutely sleighed me.

[Bjorn]

Hoodies are fine. Not sure why some choose to only wear them, but they're nice in moderation.

 

Moderation in all things is the key to a satisfied life.  But some people just can't resist the allure of the hoodie.

[Invictus]

If you do not edit together the Hat Baron saga and release it as a standalone, then, um, I guess I'll have to do all that work myself.

 

Also, if you do not get that Captain Invictus fellow on the show for a Very Special Episode, then I will have to find names other than Remo, Rodkin, Breckon and Vanaman for my next four cats (why start with just one?).

Well, A: I'm in Boston which is a TEENSY bit too far from the Idle Thumbs offices, B: I have zero on-air experience, and C: I have no webcam for Skype or whatever.

 

I wouldn't be averse to sending more emails in in the future, but I don't know how well an entire episode about it would fare, and that's assuming they even wanted to do one.  I think a chunk every few weeks in the emails section is good enough, personally.

[Nappi]

What is it with songs about American presidents trying to send civilians into space?

 

(The original is by Love and Rockets)

 

Also, remember when you promised to post [a thing] on the blog? Well, you never did. Please, upload the donkey balloon picture somewhere. Thanks!

(You didn't actually promise to share it this time but I think you mentioned it - or some other donkey picture - in one of the previous casts.)

[TychoCelchuuu]

Great podcast. Funny, insightful, full of Dishonored date references, sound effects, discussion at the end about fashion, etc.

 

1: All this hat stuff is fascinating forever.

 

2: If you all are anything like me then this kind of effusive praise probably makes you want to throw up, but I'll say it anyways - when someone talked about how that one sentence in the email that started with "From Mario to Gone Home..." sounded like the beginning of an awards speech or something and Chris chimed in and said "I was thinking the exact same thing" that sort of encapsulated one of the things I love about this podcast so much. A group of people like the Thumbs who go around primed to see the world in various informed ways (in this case, a group of people who, among other things, go around with an understanding of the sorts of tropes that occur in speeches at awards ceremonies such that they are able to recognize phrases that fit the tropes) are just genuinely interesting to listen to. 

 

So much of life, and so many podcasts, are full of rote contemplation and regurgitation that fits established ways of seeing the world and talking about the world, and we get stuck in these ruts and never break free in weird, surprising, off-kilter ways. Even something as small as saying "this email made me think of awards speeches" is the sort of thing that not everyone would do and that not everyone would feel like bringing up in a conversation with others, and it's not so much that as it is the tendency to examine life from different angles that that instance represents which I think makes Idle Thumbs such a great cast to listen to. 

 

It's not like the Thumbs are awards ceremonies buffs who go around primed to hear sentences that sound like the beginning of awards ceremonies speeches. Rather, the Thumbs are observant people conversant in the things that (for better and for worse) suffuse our culture, and they're ready, able, and willing to constantly link these things together and see everything they experience in light of everything else they've experienced. It's just one small little piece of the sort of attitude that makes people read books and watch movies and play games with an eye towards seeing what's interesting about them and with an eye towards forming a coherent view of the world that's made up of interrelated parts that all fit together. 

 

So few people are willing to do that, consistently, and so few podcasts are made up of people doing that. It's this sort of attitude that is inimical to the sorts of things some other podcasts do when they talk about games: the rote recital of various opinions about various topics ("what did you think about the graphics," "what did you think about the plot," etc.) even though the Thumbs talk about the exact same things.

 

It's being those kinds of people with that kind of brain forming those kinds of connections and being brought up in these kinds of conversations that leads to the great conversation that took place in the back half of the podcast about fidelity, specificity, the Coen brothers, and so forth. That Chris saw these sorts of things in Inside Llewyn Davis and wanted to link it, however tangentially, to the topic at hand, and that games like Blood Dragon and Grand Theft Auto got folded in so naturally to the conversation, is a result of this interconnected, informed way of looking at things that makes Idle Thumbs great to listen to.

 

3: Chris mentioned not having seen Oscar Isaac in any other movies but I think I recall Chris having watched Drive, which not only has Oscar Isaac but also Carey Mulligan, who was also in Inside Llewyn Davis. Pretty funny how those two ended up in another movie together.

 

4: The "Please Mr. Kennedy" song has a pretty interesting history, at least if Wikipedia is telling the truth:

 

The humorous novelty song "Please Mr. Kennedy", a plea from a reluctant astronaut, appears to be a fourth generation derivative of the 1960 song "Mr. Custer", also known as "Please Mr. Custer", about the Battle of the Little Bighorn, sung by Larry Verne and written by Al DeLory, Fred Darian, and Joseph Van Winkle. A Tamla-Motown single followed in 1961: "Please Mr. Kennedy (I Don't Want to Go)", a plea from a reluctant Vietnam War draftee, sung by Mickey Woods and credited to Berry Gordy, Loucye Wakefield and Ronald Wakefield. In 1962 using a similar theme, The Goldcoast Singers recorded "Please Mr. Kennedy" on its Here They Are album, with writing credits to Ed Rush and George Cromarty. The Llewellyn Davis version credits Rush, Cromarty, Burnett, Timberlake, and the Coens.

[Sean]

thanks, tycho. your post pretty much encapsulates what i loved about chris and jake from the moment i met them.

[Invictus]

Did someone ask for donkeys?!  These are those God Damn Winged Donkey Balloons I was talking about.

 

 

 

You might think "why, that's not very big!", but then you should first slap yourself for saying something stupid and then notice that even if he stood up straight, the donkey balloon would still be crotch-high.  That's really pretty big.

 

They're made of beach ball-like material, at least that's what it feels like.  Really durable-feeling.