Jake

Idle Thumbs 177: The Good Ones

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All seasons really. Either Giles, Spike, Angel, even Xander fill that paternalistic, I'm-your-stand-in-father role.

(I was a teenage Buffy devotee who has since strongly soured on the show but I will always love season 3.)

I meant that in the last season of Bufffy, Buffy herself turns into the mentor character to train a bunch of younger women but it also kind of falls apart both within the story, and AS a story.

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I actually think the trope of a young woman being trained by an older, wiser man is fairly common. The most egregious example I could come up with is Buffy, where there were two prominent male characters who filled that role. Sadly, I can't think of any examples where an older woman trains a younger woman in anything but seduction techniques or how to be a good wife/mother.

The CW's recent (and under appreciated!)Nikita reboot has a whole lot of woman-on-woman mentorship action, though obviously it's a show on the CW so it had a very limited audience.

And, yeah, she was being taught how to beat up people.

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All seasons really. Either Giles, Spike, Angel, even Xander fill that paternalistic, I'm-your-stand-in-father role.

(I was a teenage Buffy devotee who has since strongly soured on the show but I will always love season 3.)

Except most of those folks, besides maybe Angel, are pretty worthless at it. I always saw it as Buffy basically humoring them and making them think they were being helpful.

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Off the top of my head I can't think of a specific example, but I'm sure I've seen TV shows or movies where an older, mentor figure woman taught witchcraft or magic to a younger woman.  But of course that's still limiting it to a subject that is usually gendered anyways, so it doesn't really go against the model of the existing trope (and often has several other tropes nested in it).

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The unread Harry Potter email reminded me of a send off to the series that Sady Doyle wrote where she reimagined the books as if Hermione were the hero. It's a good take down of the dopey male hero trope discussed in the past two episodes. http://globalcomment.com/in-praise-of-hermione-granger-series/#

Doyle received a lot of hate for this piece, but I think her point is really strong.

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Hello! I'm new to the forum, and this is my first post, so hopefully I don't come off like too much of a blundering dimwit. Essentially the only internet forum I regularly engage with these days is criterionforum.org, so that I can learn arcane information about Criterion and Masters of Cinema releases and weird, inconsequential video distributor information, like the fact that the estate of Jacques Tati was so dismayed that Studio Canal (a bad European video distributor) whisked away the U.S. distribution rights to Tati's films and forced Criterion to put theirs out of print that they fought tooth-and-nail until they got Studio Canal to agree to let Criterion have the U.S. rights again. (And thus, Criterion has a forthcoming "Complete Jacques Tati" box set, which is going to be the most incredible home video release of all-time. Seriously, read the disc features on the product page for it; the amount of supplements and material in it is just gobsmacking. Seeing "Mon Oncle" on Blu-ray is going to be a revelation. So excited!)

 

Hope the minor introductory digression is allowed, as it seems in keeping with "Idle Thumbs" parlance. My point being, this forum seems like literally the only other one I've come across that would be worth engaging in. I'm fairly new to listening to the podcast (just started roughly a year ago), but have listened to a lot of past episodes (all of the GDC ones and any that had Steve on). I find it to be an incredibly smart and informative podcast, mostly due to the fact that it transcends its subject matter. I hope you folks never feel bad about going "off-topic" and not talking specifically about video games, because that's often the best and most interesting material. 

 

That said, to actually say anything of substance related to video games and the discussion thereof, just wanted to chime in about the Steam Curators thing. Maybe I'll have to re-listen to the discussion of it, but I honestly think everyone is making it out to be way more useful than it actually is. After you follow some curators, the only place that those curator-selected games show up is a small sliver of a section half-way down the front page that says "Steam Curators." And it's just a selection of four different games from the various curators you follow. The new section that Chris talked about (the one which you can endlessly scroll through that is at the bottom of the front page) is much more akin to how Netflix and Amazon recommend content to people (as Jake noted); algorithmically-made recommendations based on games and specific genres of games that you own and have played (as well as games you've recently viewed, added to your wishlist, and so on). I do not think these selections are impacted by the curators you follow; rather, every once in a while you'll see a selection in that new section that says "Recommended by a Steam Curator you follow," differentiating it from all the other algorithmic-based selections. As far as I can tell, that's the only way in which the curators you've followed impact what you see on the front page: a tiny section with four random selections and an occasional curator-recommendation in the new endlessly scrolling section. Oh, and they spam your friend activity feed with games recommended by curators you follow, which feels unnecessary and obtrusive. 

 

Honestly, to me it doesn't feel like a very thoughtfully integrated system. I'm sure it'll evolve over time, and perhaps the curator's selections will be more factored into the main "New/Recommended For You" sections at the top of the front page, but even then I don't know how useful or necessary it is. I'd rather just read curator's selections in a list separate from Steam, like Idle Thumbs's goty.cx articles, and then go about looking into/deciding whether I'm personally interested in playing any of those selections. 

 

And if you go back and read/listen to Gabe Newell and other people at Valve talk about their vision of a user-curated Steam (which they've been talking about for several years now), it was a way crazier and unstructured vision. Valve basically wanted to stop employing anyone whose job it was to constantly add new releases and deal with putting new content/ads on the front page. They wanted to off-load all of that work onto users, and stop dealing with it/caring about it. It would have been a god damn hilarious nightmare, because it would have been a discordant grab-bag of content dictated by certain users and groups of people. You could easily imagine certain collectives on the internet banding together and making it so that only certain content was visible on the front page. So even though I just spent a fair amount of time complaining about how lackluster the current implementation of the curator system is, I am glad that it is so tame and pared down compared to what they intended to do. But I guess I feel like it's been diluted to the point of being unnecessary, and I'm not sure there would be a middleground way of implementing it that would be necessary. Oh well. Perhaps after a short while people will forget that it even exists and it will be less prominently-featured, like Greenlight has become. And perhaps then, too, Valve will decide to get rid of it altogether, which they've said they will do with Greenlight. We'll see.

 

 

Edit: Here's a link to Gabe talking about what he envisioned the Steam store becoming in January of 2013. You'll notice what he envisioned and what Valve actually just released are wildly different. This link is time-stamped (conversation regarding store takes place from 43:31 to 48:09): 

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I was also concerned when I saw the "popular new releases" search which seemingly merged two separate search types into one. However now I see that there is a pure new game search at the bottom of the page, so I'm glad that's still there at least. In general I hate the layout of the new store page, I feel like I have to scroll down pretty far to find what I'm actually interested in.

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I haven't watched it, but "Sabrina the Teenage Witch" I'd guess?

Yeah, I think it did it some with the Aunts, though that was often pretty goofy "mentorship" at best, and the same with the male cat's advice. I did like that show though.

On a totally different topic, hopefully Chris doesn't mind these being linked (he specifically mentioned the Times one in the episode, so I'm guessing not). Here are two different obituaries of his distant relative: Times and the Post. Guy sounds like he had an incredible and fascinating life, but there are only little glimpses of it as he protected the privacy of the families he served all the way to his death, other than the odd minor anecdote here and there.

Also, I particularly love the phrase Chris used of "disposable curation." It feels very apt for something like Steam Curation.

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Yeah, I think it did it some with the Aunts, though that was often pretty goofy "mentorship" at best, and the same with the male cat's advice. I did like that show though.

On a totally different topic, hopefully Chris doesn't mind these being linked (he specifically mentioned the Times one in the episode, so I'm guessing not). Here are two different obituaries of his distant relative: Times and the Post. Guy sounds like he had an incredible and fascinating life, but there are only little glimpses of it as he protected the privacy of the families he served all the way to his death, other than the odd minor anecdote here and there.

Also, I particularly love the phrase Chris used of "disposable curation." It feels very apt for something like Steam Curation.

 

I hadn't seen that Post obituary; thanks for linking it.

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That said, to actually say anything of substance related to video games and the discussion thereof, just wanted to chime in about the Steam Curators thing. Maybe I'll have to re-listen to the discussion of it, but I honestly think everyone is making it out to be a way bigger deal than it actually is.

 

Welcome to the forums!

 

Please bear in mind that when we discuss Steam Curation, we are not discussing Steam Curation as it is now, but Steam Curation as it factors into the Big Dog Future under the (o course, correct) assumption that Boston Dynamics will establish a method for co-opting Valv3's algorithms and user data, hand in hand, as a crucial step on the way to establishing our inevitable flesh-slave existence in its terrifying new world order.

 

Again, welcome.

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Awesome intro for this episode :tup:

 

 

I dislike the steam curator and personalized store front. This will just introduce me to things I already know about. It will not broaden my interest. Given that fact that I buy pretty much all humble bundles and therefor have a shit load of indie games Steam is recommending me games similar to those that I acquired via Humble Bundle. But, the fact is that I do not really like most of the games I acquired via Humble Bundle.

This is like targeted ads. When you need a new fridge you search the internet for fridges. After a while you've found the fridge you want and bought it. Days after you already bought the fridge you get advertisements for fridges, because that was your interest back then.

Half the time I do not know what I like until I see/try it.

 

ps, the Steam music player is also horrible. It has the same flaws as all music players that rely completely on meta data stored in the files.

This is simply bad:

FPfacJ5.png

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Mention of the both console port of Diablo 3 and the new Gauntlet in the episode made me want to email in about the similarities between the two; it would probably be a pretty tedious email to read out, however, so I'll air them here instead. I've never played the PC version of Diablo 3 (But I was super into Diablo 2), so I can't really speak of the specific changes they made for the console port. Since I started playing the 360 version (And more recently the Xbone port of Reaper of Souls), however, the similarities with with the original Gauntlet have been at the forefront of my mind, mostly because of the vast swathes of enemies you come up against. The way the controls have been adapted for gamepads, the way same-screen co-op works, the way the loot system has been seriously streamlined, the speed with which you now level up, it all makes the game feel way more arcadey than I imagine the PC release was. And it's a really great couch co-op game. Watching the new Gauntlet trailer, it seems like they went in a pretty similar direction, although with less focus on you being able to just stand there and take a bunch of hits. My initial reaction to it was 'why do we need this, when the console versions of Diablo 3 exist', but maybe that focus on more precise combat will set it apart.

 

By the way, not to derail this further, but the reason I started talking about TotalBiscuit last night is that, while searching for the Idle Thumbs tastemaker list, I noticed that immediately above them in follower count was this bastion of ethics and journalistic integrity.

This made me really quite angry.

 

La-Mulana. I haven't played it myself but it definitely has a following.

The original release of La-Mulana comes from the same period of Japanese indie development as Cave Story, and had a pretty similar following on places like TIGSource. For some reason I never got around to playing it, though!

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If no one else is going to say it, I will
 
CHRIS, HOW HAVE YOU NOT SEEN BACK TO THE FUTURE?!?!?!?!
 

 

Gang beasts is such a hilarious looking game.  I think my favorite levels are the fan one, the Ferris wheel, and the one on top of the trucks.  I think the Thumbs should bring back the Saturday Streams and play it.
 

 

Oh man, Sunless Sea talk finally happened! It's fun seeing how people who aren't familiar with the Fallen London setting interpret the weirder corners of it.

 

Is Sunless Sea actually related to Fallen London?  I've played Fallen London but I know nothing about Sunless Sea apart from what was discussed on the cast.

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Oh yeah, DANIELLE THE OTHER KONGS ARE SO SHITTY

 

 

 

dRpM7Et.jpg

 

UGH

 

SZR3sJd.jpg

 

OOF

 

bTBrJNI.png

 

WHAT

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Oh yeah, DANIELLE THE OTHER KONGS ARE SO SHITTY

 

 

UGH

 

 

OOF

 

 

WHAT

The Shittiest Kongs.

 

Jesus, Candy Kong is fucking awful. And she never got any better!

candy_kong_02_595.png

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I'm going to edit this into my first post in this thread, but thought it probably warrants a new post, as well.

 

Here is Gabe Newell talking about how the front page of Steam functioned, and how they wanted to change it, in January of 2013. Interesting to compare his loopy vision for what he thought the Steam front page/store would become and what they just ended up releasing in the Steam Discovery Update.

 

He wanted users to be able to create their own customized stores and present it however they saw fit, and for users to be able to choose what "curated store" they would see and buy from. (He was even talking about the store curators receiving a small percentage cut of sales made via their custom store.) It sounds like Gabe and Valve are tired of spending time managing Steam itself as a store and want to be rid of the burden. The issue being that their solution would have been awful, and that this particular burden happens to net them incalculable amounts of Scrooge McDuck vault money every second. You'd think they'd be willing to employ more people to deal with Steam as a store and curate it themselves (doing as best a job at both tasks as they possibly can) considering how much they profit off of it.

 

This link is time-stamped (conversation regarding store takes place from 43:31 to 48:09): 

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Awesome intro for this episode :tup:

 

 

I dislike the steam curator and personalized store front. This will just introduce me to things I already know about. It will not broaden my interest. Given that fact that I buy pretty much all humble bundles and therefor have a shit load of indie games Steam is recommending me games similar to those that I acquired via Humble Bundle. But, the fact is that I do not really like most of the games I acquired via Humble Bundle.

This is like targeted ads. When you need a new fridge you search the internet for fridges. After a while you've found the fridge you want and bought it. Days after you already bought the fridge you get advertisements for fridges, because that was your interest back then.

Half the time I do not know what I like until I see/try it.

 

ps, the Steam music player is also horrible. It has the same flaws as all music players that rely completely on meta data stored in the files.

This is simply bad:

 

Your post reminded me of why I really dislike algorithms trying to guess what sort of things I like, but also why it seems like we're inevitably heading in that direction anyway. Because this is where we are with listening to music at this point. Things like Pandora are incredibly popular right now, and seem to have largely replaced things like word of mouth, music reviews, or a well curated record store. Those old systems of spreading information were less efficient in an economic sense, but they had the benefit of exposing people to things they wouldn't have been aware of otherwise, and allowed people to form social bonds. The new system with the algorithms is much more impersonal and because it is by definition a formula (even if it is a complicated one) it risks flattening the experience of the range of music that people listen to, and musicians are incentivized to create.

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The conversation around Ziggurat (and then going and seeing a video of it) reminded me a great deal of the Wheel of Time game from 1999.  I remember buying WoT, and being SOOOO disappointed when I installed it, because I was expecting some kind of RPG epic, and it was just like, "What, this is just like Doom with wands and shit."  Which was completely unfair, and WoT was apparently a very good game.  But the dissonance between what I was expecting and what I got was so much I was never able to get into it. 

 

WoT also has a badass female protagonist, which was pretty novel for a game that was trying to compete against the other big FPS franchises of the late 90s. 

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Is Sunless Sea actually related to Fallen London?  I've played Fallen London but I know nothing about Sunless Sea apart from what was discussed on the cast.

 

Considering that videos of Sunless Sea show a place called "Fallen London", I'm going to say that they're related.

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Danielle: did I just hear you doing the first four notes of the George Michael's Careless Whisper sax riff? y/n, thx

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The conversation about tropes where some shitty guy becomes the chosen one made me think about how for all the noise Americans make about the desirability of a meritocracy, American audiences sure do seem drawn to narratives that are absolutely not that.

 

Also, this was just a really, really funny episode. I love it when Idle Thumbs rips on these lazy conventions and random marketing garbage.

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