Jake

Idle Thumbs 193: General Interest

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Then the day after I bought my replacement car, it wouldn't stop accelerating and I couldn't put it into park or neutral and I couldn't turn it off. So I basically just had to pull the emergency brake, slam on my brake, and skid around the streets of Chicago at 5 miles an hour until the 911 operator I was talking to just told me to drive it into a park and do donuts until the cops could figure out what to do. Eventually it got stuck in the mud and the engine gave out and I was able to turn it off.

 

Holy crap! The worst I've had was a car that had the idle speed somehow ended up being too low so it would stall if you ever let your foot off the gas, but I still managed to get it to the service place by putting it in neutral and revving the engine when I had to be at a stop.

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Then the day after I bought my replacement car, it wouldn't stop accelerating and I couldn't put it into park or neutral and I couldn't turn it off. So I basically just had to pull the emergency brake, slam on my brake, and skid around the streets of Chicago at 5 miles an hour until the 911 operator I was talking to just told me to drive it into a park and do donuts until the cops could figure out what to do. Eventually it got stuck in the mud and the engine gave out and I was able to turn it off.

 

Wow, I've seen / done / heard of my fair share of nutty malfunctioning car stuff, but this story is up there. Incredibly dangerous/unlucky situation - if you don't mind my asking, what make/model/condition of car gets simultaneously stuck in gear AND can't be turned off?

 

Regarding multiplayer and the feeling of not wanting to let down a team: I've found games with higher player counts - eg 64-player Battlefield 4, hundreds in Planetside 2 - to be suitably large/chaotic to where you can improve over time at your own pace without worrying too much about dragging the team down, BUT you still get to feel like you're "helping out the team" when you're doing well. Also helps immeasurably if you have at least one friendly buddy on voice comms in your squad.

 

Some people might struggle to get into my example games for reasons of subject matter/mechanics but if you're generally into FPSes and want to try multiplayer, I think they're worth a look. Caveat: I haven't played Planetside 2 for quite a while now, not sure what player base is like these days... but at least it's free!

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Yeeeeeeah so um... I'm gonna need that cheese story

You cheesy tease. You left us with a cheesy dangler

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story: there was smelly cheese in my car and I couldn't find it among the garbage. then I found it and threw it away.

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story: there was smelly cheese in my car and I couldn't find it among the garbage. then I found it and threw it away.

So many unanswered questions. Was the cheese smelly because it's a smelly fresh-cheese or was it smelly because it was old / expired?

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Random thoughts:

 

I want to make an Idle Thumbs Venn Diagram generator based on Chris's overlap of QWOP, Kerbal, and Naut.  The center of every one is Chris's face with Spelunky underneath.

 

I'm amused that Spelunky is still constantly brought up as Chris's thing when I'm pretty sure that he hasn't played it in months and all the recent activity on his Steam account for the game has actually been Sarah.

 

When I heard the terms of Disney's housing contract, I noted that one of the groups of people who couldn't be held responsible was shareholders.  Does this mean I could buy some stock in Disney and get away with murder?

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The way the episode ended, I assumed my download was broken, so I redownloaded it. Dagnabbit!

 

That Disney stuff is insane. I'm related to someone who is in some kind of managerial position at Disney World; I'm not sure what he's doing now. For a long time, though, he was in charge of the Moroccan restaurant (also, he is Moroccan). I suspect he could shed some light on the mystery of the Moroccan house, though it could be weird for me to bring up since I probably haven't spoken to him in more than 20 years.

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Just a probably annoying and nitpicky note on the PT Anderson conversation: Apart from Inherent Vice, There Will Be Blood was also based on a book, albeit loosely. Haven't read Oil!, so not sure how much so.

 

But yeah neither holds a candle to his originals. Punch Drunk Love especially, for me.

 

edit: wait, I haven't seen Inherent Vice.

 

Still.

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Yeah, it's true that it is technically an adaptation, and is credited as such, but I think it is a transformative enough work--far beyond even a fairly liberal adaptation--that it basically qualifies as an original screenplay.

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This talk of transformative adaptation just immediately flashed to mind that Fellini short film "Toby Dammit" that was based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story that he never actually read. I don't have any point to make, I always just found it an amusing story.

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Oh man, I love Jake's Jetta saga so much, but... are there not junkers or wreckers in San Francisco? The last two cars I've totaled, I just handed it off to the wrecker who towed it in exchange for a few hundred because he had a business relationship with a parts yard. I guess I figured they all do, but maybe I've just gotten lucky, albeit not lucky enough to be still driving my original 1985 Chrysler New Yorker, which did have the amazing digital dash and voice warnings.

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it basically qualifies as an original screenplay.

 

True. After a wiki glance at Oil! it seems like PTA used a couple of characters, sort of, maybe, and riffed on a couple of the book's millions of storylines.

 

 

This talk of transformative adaptation just immediately flashed to mind that Fellini short film "Toby Dammit" that was based on an Edgar Allan Poe short story that he never actually read. I don't have any point to make, I always just found it an amusing story.

 

That's pretty great. Did someone... describe it to him or something?

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I became familiar with vaping this Christmas, as it turns out that my uncle (who lives in a suburb of San Francisco, by coincidence) is starting up a vaping liquid wholesaling business (i.e., they sell to vape stores rather than directly to consumers), apparently because he wants to help people quit smoking. He had a little case of sample bottles and a whole rundown on the subject that he gave to my mom and grandma while I happened to be at the table. They didn't seem real sold on the idea, but then, neither of them have ever smoked to my knowledge. Later he gave the sample case to my Marine cousin and his wife, who have both switched to vaping instead of smoking since last I saw them and have managed to cut out the nicotine as well. (My uncle is also a personal trainer and is teaching TRX classes part time at the local YMCA. It's such a stereotypically Californian set of vocations...)

 

On the subject of Meundies, I was disappointed to discover that although they have multiple varieties of male underwear, boxers aren't actually among them. The closest they get are boxer briefs, and that is not close enough for me. The pricing doesn't seem particularly unreasonable, though. My favorite boxers are the flannel ones Land's End sells and those are normally $19 a pair.

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This vaping thing is so weird to me because I've known about it (in regards to marijuana) and also e-cigarettes for a couple of years now! But I guess it's really caught on as a hip thing. I don't smoke personally but I've tried my boyfriend's e-cig and it's great if you want that stressed writer feeling at your desk because you can puff away hands-free and not worry about ashing. It's great if you want to feel very film noir-ish as well.

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story: there was smelly cheese in my car and I couldn't find it among the garbage. then I found it and threw it away.

 

That friend of mine once left butter in his car, in the summer. He only found out about it after a lovely smell occupied his car a couple of days later, and all he could find was the wrapping paper.

Apparently it's not easy getting rid of that smell once it has settled in the cars interior.

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The Disney disclaimer thing seems like it's a lot of legal wrangling so they don't get sued if Jose Mexico falls off a ladder and cracks open his skull, I've ended up signing pretty similar stuff when I worked retail. Although with the legal/monetary power the company has, I wouldn't be surprised if they could cover up a murder.

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Of course the Disney stuff is about protecting themselves legally, but they go WAY WAY far with their stipulations.

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Yeah, the actual language of that contract is insane and probably not enforceable, but the trick about getting people to sign a document that extends that far is because it means you are basically maximally covered.

 

I had an NDA/no-compete thrown at me in a previous job where it was similarly insanely restrictive.  Like, part of it said that if I was fired, I couldn't go work any other computer programming job for a year.  I got a labor law attorney to review it, and basically his opinion on the contract was that they'd written something that was not legally enforceable to the extent that of what's in the actual text, but that any challenge to the contract in court would still leave them as protected as they could possibly be under labor law.

 

That makes a lot of sense, if you think about it.  Like, Disney doesn't really expect that they're going to be protected from a civil suit if, say, one of their employees fucks up in fumigating and ends up killing people in the housing units.  But the courts don't just say "This contract is ridiculously illegal, so much so that we're just throwing out the whole thing wholesale."  And so by writing this insane contract that makes you agree that you waive any rights to anyone being able to sue over Disney murdering you in your sleep, any challenge in court would whittle the contract back to "just" something that protects Disney as much as is legally allowable under the law as it stands when someone challenges the contract.  If they just wrote the contract to the maximal standards of the time, then they wouldn't be able to avail themselves of any future court decisions that expanded their protections even further. 

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I just finished listening to the podcast and haven't had time to look much over the thread but just had to add this. 

 

Jettas and water do not mix. I had a black Jetta station wagon a few years ago when we had a huge rainstorm here in Philly. It lasted several days. Apparently a mouse had made a nest at some point in the drains under the windshield blocking them up. So, rather than draining onto the ground, all of that water got diverted into the car. When I got in it there was a good 4-6 inches of water on the floor on the driver's side. I bailed out the car as best I could and took it to the dealer who told me that all of the vital electronics were stored where else but under the floor on the driver's side. Further, there was no way of knowing how much if any damage had been done to them. Basically, they said I'd be driving along at some indeterminate time in the future and the electronics would all simply fail. So I sold it. Nothing compared to Jake, but still an ordeal at the time.

 

 And for Disney, I can at least confirm their policy regarding water guns. I had a cousin who was I think still in training to work there when he was fired and evicted when he was discovered with one. 

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