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Jake

Idle Thumbs 149: A Divine Exodus of Snakes

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I feel like The Simpsons has had as much of an impact on my everyday speech as William Shakespeare. It isn't so much making jokes and references, as creating words and turns of phrase that you've forgotten didn't exist before.  

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This is such a good episode.

 

"You somehow Mr. Magoo'd your way through a minefield."

 

That is exactly how I reflect back on my teen years.  We were so dumb, such assholes and so lucky.  There were a lot of pranks, and a fair amount of vandalism, but the worst were the cars.  Most of us were farmers' kids, so we had been working and getting paid since we were like 10 years old.  Which meant that my brother and I were both able to buy ourselves older muscle cars when we were like 15 years old.  This was a terrible idea!  But my dad liked fast cars, so I think he lived vicariously through our cars when we were teens.  But gawd, what the fuck were our parents thinking?  Sure it was our money, but c'mon!  My brother had a '69 Barracuda and I had '70 Firebird.  One of my buddies had a '69 AMX.  It's a miracle that none of us killed ourselves or someone else with those steel sleds of death. 

 

My daughter is a sophomore in college now, and the couple of guys she dated in high school were so much like me and my old friends it was spooky.  Part of me, as the mature father, wanted to hate these little shitheads.  But then I would remember how fucking terrible I was, and couldn't bring myself to really judge these guys that much.  If anything, they were probably a lot better kids than we were. 

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My daughter is a sophomore in college now, and the couple of guys she dated in high school were so much like me and my old friends it was spooky.  Part of me, as the mature father, wanted to hate these little shitheads.  But then I would remember how fucking terrible I was, and couldn't bring myself to really judge these guys that much.  If anything, they were probably a lot better kids than we were. 

 

Yeah, I'm on the whole really glad I'm (at least in some respects) a very different person than I was in high school and college.

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Yeah, I'm on the whole really glad I'm (at least in some respects) a very different person than I was in high school and college.

 

Yeah, I wouldn't want to be too similar to who I was in high school or college, but on the same hand, I don't really regret much about those periods in my life either.  Luckily no one was ever hurt (maybe some adults were irritated or disappointed) and some funny stories came out of it.  Teenagers are also, biologically, selfish and self-centered, which is where a lot of that behavior comes from.  There's a reason we don't just become older versions of those kids, our brains literally grow out of that stage.  That research also helped me as a parent when I'd observe the behavior of our kid and her friends, and know that there was ultimately a reason behind it and that they'd outgrow it eventually. 

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Thanks very much for that article, Bjorn, fascinating.

On the subjects of Spelunky and speedruns (and to continue the cross-pollination of pods between the two sites), Giant Bomb's Patrick 'The Other Scoops' Klepeck talked to Speedlunker and high score record holder Bananasaurus Rex the other day:

http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/it-s-never-enough-for-bananasaurus-rex/1600-783

(why don't mobile browsers make copy pasting links more straightforward?)

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Thanks Nick for mentioning that 4-way Super Metroid speed run. It was as good as advertised.

 

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I only have one Legendary rarity card. It's a card with decent stats that essentially replaces itself once when it dies.

 

Cairne Bloodhoof? He's awesome, two Chillwind Yetis for the price of one!

 

Take heart young ones

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One of the best episodes in months. Whatever you guys changed in your podcasting setup, it's a the donuts.

 

Great to hear -- we're on couches now and have the mics on these excellent swing arms which basically means we're comfortable the entire time. We felt like it definitely made the conversation more relaxed and are happy with the chang

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Great to hear -- we're on couches now and have the mics on these excellent swing arms which basically means we're comfortable the entire time. We felt like it definitely made the conversation more relaxed and are happy with the chang

Sean was cut off in mid sentence by the Big Dog, which has managed to right itself and kill everyone at Campo Santo.

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Calling it: Next episode, Sean will introduce it by saying "Episode 150: Isn't it Nifty".

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Great to hear -- we're on couches now and have the mics on these excellent swing arms which basically means we're comfortable the entire time. We felt like it definitely made the conversation more relaxed and are happy with the chang

 

They're pretty sick of Chang over at Greendale Community College so it's nice to see he's fitting in on Idle Thumbs.

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Happy at Patricks day everyone. Once again I'm thankful to live in a country with a minimum of dangerous animals, insects and plants.

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Please make a Wuthering Heights mod pack called "Heathstone".

 

Ah, if only I could! I haven't found a way of introducing new graffix into the game.

 

I *did*, however, find a way to replace all of the artwork I don't like with artwork from other cards! So now I am happily playing the game again with a Mage that looks like a Swamp Ooze, and so on. B)

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I just wanted to chime in on the whole "could Hearthstone be Blizzard's DOTA" thing. I think you guys were conflating a competitive scene with a professional scene. A game can have a very robust and successful competitive scene without having any pro players. For instance, people run Netrunner tournaments all the time and it's very successful for Fantasy Flight (although obviously not at DOTA levels), but there are not to my knowledge any professional Netrunner players, as in nobody makes money off of playing Netrunner. But that doesn't mean that people don't take the competition seriously.

 

Also, you guys should totally get Nels to play Netrunner with you! I think there's a lot there for you to like.

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TTC (time to "conflate"): 67 posts!

 

Er, I mean, good point about professional vs. competitive. ^_^

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I just wanted to chime in on the whole "could Hearthstone be Blizzard's DOTA" thing. I think you guys were conflating a competitive scene with a professional scene. A game can have a very robust and successful competitive scene without having any pro players. For instance, people run Netrunner tournaments all the time and it's very successful for Fantasy Flight (although obviously not at DOTA levels), but there are not to my knowledge any professional Netrunner players, as in nobody makes money off of playing Netrunner. But that doesn't mean that people don't take the competition seriously.

 

Also, you guys should totally get Nels to play Netrunner with you! I think there's a lot there for you to like.

 

I found that discussion very perplexing in general. It seemed like Sean intuited rightly that games had competitive and even professional scenes before streaming blew up, but couldn't articulate how, and Chris' categorical statement that the money had to come from somewhere just stopped everyone cold. It hasn't been the case with video games for very long, but collective card games have a sufficiently high buy-in that tournaments more than pay for their prizes with the purchasing they stimulate.

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Thanks Nick for mentioning that 4-way Super Metroid speed run. It was as good as advertised.

 

 

At some point during the run, the commentators mention that there is a new trick the runners are going to try that could shave a meaningful amount of time off the run. And by "new" they meant developed in late 2013, for a game that was released in 1994. Which is crazy to me. Part of the appeal of those speedruns isn't just mastering them, it's developing new tricks and shortcuts. So it's not stagnant at all in a current speedrun community, like Chris suggested was part of it lacking appeal.

 

 

e: http://www.giantbomb.com/podcasts/it-s-never-enough-for-bananasaurus-rex/1600-783/ Patrick Klepek did a Dumptruck with Bananasaurus Rex, who is/has been the Spelunky Speed Run world champ, score champ, and accomplished the first ever uncontested solo Eggplant Run. They discuss Spelunky, but also previous games he used to speed run and he says the discovery and challenge of "designing" a run is a huge part of the appeal.

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I was listening to this in the background while playing some Shadowrun Dragonfall and heard Sean say @ 21:24, "It's combat in the [manor] of a lord." (originally "manner") And my mind was blown by the homophone.

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Yeah, part of the fun of watching a speedrun (or a glitch run) is familiarity with the space, and seeing people do something that's seemingly impossible with the space. I remember a Let's Play of Link's Awakening that presented itself as a regular run, commenting on the weird difficulty spikes, odd graphics and disconnected story of a glitch run that broke the game wide open. It was as mindblowing as someone showing me there's a tunnel near my house that gets to my parent's house in 10 minutes when they live in a different city two hours away.

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Thanks Nick for mentioning that 4-way Super Metroid speed run. It was as good as advertised.

 

 

The low percentage hard-difficulty Zero Mission speedrun from the same livestream was also really, really amazing.

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Guys, I linked to both of those videos on the first page of this thread. I also linked to videos that didn't have a bunch of unnecessary, not-even-readable twitch chat on the margins! 

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For what it's worth, i did see your links.

I just still thought it was worth an embed.

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