Chris

Idle Thumbs 166: Cyberpunk Cop-Killer

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I have an American midwestern accent when I speak English.  I've been told I have an American accent when I speak Chinese, but I have no idea what that means or sounds like.

I think it just means your tones are terrible.

 

(Actually, I can hear the difference when listening, but can't describe it. And I have a pretty bad accent myself.)

 

Accents are fun!

 

Having gone to school in R.I., I have a soft spot for the R.I. accent:

In the Atlas of North American English, the city of Providence (the only community in Rhode Island sampled by the Atlas) is also distinguished by having the backest realizations of /uː//oʊ/, and /aʊ/ in North America.

Backest Realizations in the USA, boyeeeee!

 

I have to say, I'm a little sad that we don't see more explicit American accents in gaming media, while British accents are widely celebrated. Probably a result of a lot of games types being in California, which doesn't have a particularly rich aural history of its own. I'd be perfectly happy if Danielle used her regional accent in all future episodes, hooray for local flavor.

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Sean, I listen to every new idle thumbs episode hoping there's some DOTA talk.

 

The inevitable Harry Potter expanded universe series will feature a character named Dracula Vampiro. The twist will be that he is a vampire.

The twist would be that he isn't a vampire. His twin brother Alucard is!

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Telemarketers have called and incorrectly said Danielle's last name as Reindeer.  Danielle Reindeer is my new favorite wrestler/thumb/stuntwoman.

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Telemarketers have called and incorrectly said Danielle's last name as Reindeer.  Danielle Reindeer is my new favorite wrestler/thumb/stuntwoman.

 

It's mentioned near the beginning of this btw:

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I guess "cyberpunk" is just the perfect word for the Rhode Island accent. Now we need to find equivalent perfect words for all other accents.

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Re: 4:30ish in the video:

 

So wait, I'm confused. If the feminist cabal has taken over the Idle Thumbs cabal, does that mean the Idle Thumbs cabal is now part of the feminist cabal, or does it mean that the Idle Thumbs cabal operates within the feminist cabal and takes direction from it? Does this mean that all the walking simulator games are suddenly going to become lo-fi games about queer themes, or does it mean that Anna Anthropy will be getting to work on her new game where you walk down the streets of SF in the 90s after a Pride Parade?

 

Or anyone else who wants to because I kind of want to see how that turns out.

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I often have hard times distinguishing people in group commentaries and podcasts, but I really can't believe you guys get people on Idlethumbs mixed up. I can't think of any arrangement where it was hard to distinguish anyone outside of the Conf grenades and such. I'm even more weirded out that you guys can't tell Jake and Sean apart, since they speak so differently. I bet the Tone Control episode sounds hilarious.

 

Maybe this helps?

 

On the topic of cyber punk, I am not sure those words have ever been uttered in that manner before.

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Sean, being someone with an obvious affection for characters and dialogue, how could you have never seen Casablanca? The movie is absolutely rich with them, not to mention also being a troubled production with an incomplete script, studio interference, and a meglomaniacal director who threatened to fire most of the staff at one point or another.

 

PS - I have never seen any of the Godfather films.

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I love how Casablanca was just another film and everyone was glad it was over. There's a certain feeling creators get when they know that they've made something that's really, really good, and no-one felt that for Casablanca.

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I also cannot tell anyone but Chris and Danielle apart.

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I generally have a hard time telling people apart on phone conversations/podcasts/audio conferences. I realized recently that I rely a lot on visual queues to follow a conversation, thus why I hate talking on the phone. I can tell voices apart from each other when everyone is on the podcast at once, but if you were to play me a five second clip and ask who's talking, I'd probably end up about 50/50 for all of the guys on the cast except Chris.

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Sean, being someone with an obvious affection for characters and dialogue, how could you have never seen Casablanca? The movie is absolutely rich with them, not to mention also being a troubled production with an incomplete script, studio interference, and a meglomaniacal director who threatened to fire most of the staff at one point or another.

 

PS - I have never seen any of the Godfather films.

 

This is my entire point. Sometimes people just haven't seen a movie. I have never dodged TRYING to see Casablanca and I'm sure I've been sitting on the couch going over and over Netflix, stumble on Casablanca and say "I want to watch this, but man, I'm tired and might not make it through. I'll wait til I can sit down with it or see it at The Castro."

 

The entire HOW CAN YOU NOT HAVE SEEN thing is just a big pet peeve for me.  My answer is usually "because there's literally infinite things to do in a life and that isn't one I've got to yet."  

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For whatever reason, American accents generally seem to be easy to understand for me (I'm Irish) while there's some Irish accents that can make me pause when they're extra heavy.

 

I remember at one point catching a bit of some Irish soap opera, and I understood exactly zero words. There are definitely some intense regional accents!

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People used to be so vocal at me for not seeing The Godfather series. It really blew their minds for some reason. I think the people basically yelling at me incredulously for years made it really fucking hard to care about that movie. When I finally saw it I thought it was good but it didn't strike me as amazing. It actually took a couple years of having seen it and letting it stew, separate from the "WHATTTT???"s, before I could go watch it again with something closer to fresh eyes, and really get into it and see why it is regarded the way it is.

I still think Spinal Tap is not a funny movie because people got SO UPSET over my not seeing it (while also quoting all the good lines at me) for a decade+ that when I actually saw it, every moment was met by me with either resentment or just being unimpressed. ;( So it goes. That movie's fine.

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I love when Chris said that he had the instinctual reaction to Danielle as suddenly a different person when she spoke with her accent, because I had just been reading about the Capgras delusion at work.

 

Basically, we learn who people are in two ways: through their physical traits observable to us and through their past actions remembered by us. One links to the other in our brain, causing recognition. There are several types of mental illnesses, called "delusional misidentification syndromes", that disconnect the two processes, making obviously familiar people and places appear somehow unrecognizable anyway because their physical traits don't connect to any memories in the brain.

 

The same thing can be accomplished temporarily in healthy people through a substantial physical alteration of a person, like a drastic haircut, a major disfigurement, or, say, the adoption of a hitherto unheard accent. The pathways that our brain is used to using to associate the physical presence of someone with our memories of them are suddenly useless and the brain has to scramble a bit to rig together new ones.

 

So yeah, awesome moment for an awesome accent.

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I still think Spinal Tap is not a funny movie because people got SO UPSET over my not seeing it (while also quoting all the good lines at me) for a decade+ that when I actually saw it, every moment was met by me with either resentment or just being unimpressed. ;( So it goes. That movie's fine.

 

I hope all those people also earned your resentment and being unimpressed. OOoh, I hate it when people who profess to be film fans trample all over others' enjoyment of films.

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People used to be so vocal at me for not seeing The Godfather series. It really blew their minds for some reason. I think the people basically yelling at me incredulously for years made it really fucking hard to care about that movie.

 

This experience for me has caused me to heavily temper how I recommend things to other people.  The more someone insists that I must read, play or watch something, the less and less interested I become in it.  I have a small section in a bookshelf of books people have pressed on me, insisting that I must read them.  But every time I look at them, I feel like there's too much responsibility inherent to the act, because someone else is anticipating me having a positive reaction.  Realizing that I must do this myself at times to other people, now I generally try to be nonchalant and non-judgmental about it.  Like, "Oh, yeah, that's really good and worth checking out at some point."

 

The thing I've noticed over the last few years is the push so many people have about various TV shows.  OMG, you haven't watched Mad Men, or Breaking Bad, or Dexter, or whatever.  And it's like yeah, those things are huge time commitments and I don't give that kind of attention to television anymore.  I think I've offended people by insisting that I really don't want to dedicate 50-100 hours to one show and they take that as me judging them for having done it.  And it's not!  I waste a lot of time in my life, just not on television. 

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When recommending stuff in recent times I've taken to only giving information piece by piece until the person seems to have a spark of interest and then I stop so the work itself can try sell them on it instead of listening to my dumb fanspeak about it.

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Haha, it's funny, when there's someone who hasn't seen something I think most people have seen, I usually express some shock but then play it down because I don't want to hype anything and it might be terrible for the person. One of my good friends hasn't seen anything Monty Python related and she has probably heard a million quotes at this point. I figure it most likely suck for her to watch so my recommendation was that Python is maybe good for a rainy day.

 

I don't know what it is, but going in to something that has been hyped as great really doesn't work out half the time as me. Either it's a case of my tastes having a very hard time matching up with the general public (I've noticed most things I like have very mixed reviews) or credits or it tends to be "boring" things that are revered. I saw Casablanca and I was fucking bored. I saw Citizen Kane and I was fucking bored. Taxi Driver, so god damn bored. Recently I tried Unforgiven, which is supposed to be this amazing and different cowboy store and so so bored. When I got around to seeing The Godfathers, I quit somewhere in the second one because that is some boring shit. Why do people love such boring films?

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Why do people love such boring films?

Obviously because they don't find them boring.

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I guess I am just one of those ADHD brats people complain about on imdb that need things to be paced much faster than the usual movie. I feel like a film maker has to earn slow moving and drawn out parts with me by putting more dynamic scenes between to create those hills and valleys. One of my favorite movies in terms of pacing is The Princess and the Warrior because the ebbs and flows are so expertly crafted and spaced that there is not one scene in the movie that does not feel essential and beautiful. However most of Tom Tykwer's other films besides Run Lola Run are either very slow or very poorly paced, which is a shame.

 

Although things like most Pixar films and comedy movies that have the actors on the cover cut out over white backgrounds also bore the shit out of me despite being paced very quickly. Cookie cutter movies are just as exhausting.

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YOU KNOW WHAT SYNTHETICGERBIL? YOU'RE BORING!

I have literally seen none of those movies, so I'm not trying to defend them. I just like yelling. AT YOU IN PARTICULAR.

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I saw Citizen Kane and I was fucking bored.

 

I don't have anything to add beyond what Chris said about the other films, but Kane is a weird case because all of the things that make it "great" have been internalized and can be seen in use, not just in other "great" films, but in basically any modern film all the way down to the schlockiest tripe you care to name. So if you're not coming from a context of having been fed a diet of exclusively pre-Kane films, then IMO there really isn't that much to recommend it. Welles' performance is fine, but the story is ehh and what else have you got?

 

 

I feel like a film maker has to earn slow moving and drawn out parts with me by putting more dynamic scenes between to created those hills and valleys.

 

How do you feel about

(wikipedia)? :getmecoat

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It's cool, I'm not very exciting. And I have a thing for people who type in all caps sometimes.

 

I should also note that those particular movies I named as boring all have well crafted narratives for the most part and might be better as a novel for me.

 

Also, is

really worth 7 hours of viewing or are you pulling my leg?

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Also, is

really worth 7 hours of viewing or are you pulling my leg?

 

Full disclosure, I haven't actually watched Satantango so I can't tell you whether its worth 7 hours of viewing, but in general I am a fan of leadenly paced stuff: Tarkovsky in particular, but also what Bela Tarr stuff I have seen like Werckmeister Harmonies and The Man from London. I think it's maybe a different kind of pleasure than that of being told a story.

 

Satantango is rather highly regarded by respectable critics though. I mean you could maybe make the case that this is some kind of Stockholm Syndrome or sunk cost fallacy situation at work, but I dunno.

 

Tarr has said

I despise stories, as they mislead people into believing that something has happened. In fact, nothing really happens as we flee from one condition to another ... All that remains is time. This is probably the only thing that's still genuine -- time itself; the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

 

Which I think is exciting in it's own way.

 

Werckmeister Harmonies is much more manageable in length but from what I've read it's largely an expression of the same aesthetic. (it isn't, though, available in it's entirety on youtube from what I gather).

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