Breaking Brad: Breaking Brad: Volgarr the Viking: Part 02

Gah thank you guys for getting these up so quick. Missed this live and was so profoundly bummed, but this'll still do for getting work done

But Brad doesn't count.

Had to leave at death number 24... looking forward to the rest of this!

Glad Brad took my general tips and kicked ass tonight. Thanks Brad!

SO FAST.

GB video crew r00lz

I missed this, happy to see it up so fast. Thanks, guys!

Damn seriously that's fast

Vincent "Fast Post" Caravella?

Thanks! I can only hope for more Shoemaker slander.

I honestly don't think I could beat that water boss. I'm impressed Brad did.

I bought the game to play along with the stream

Brad was ultimately broken 59 times.

I'm with Vinny. The Shannara series is great. It actually takes place in the far future after humans have bombed themselves back to the stone age. The world also gets solar-powered airships and fight ancient cyborgs eventually.

has the html 5 player been acting hella broken recently? I'ts started acting up on me for some reason .

Awesome, sorry I missed this today!

I like how every single video has 'that was so fast' underneath it. At which point does it just become a normal speed to get a premium video up? :)

I just beat this game less than an hour ago. Took me a total 2 hours 34 mins, 91 total deaths. But admittedly, I bought the game after watching Brad play it the first time, so I got to watch him suffer through a lot of deaths to learn the first couple levels.

That being said, boy is he in for a surprise when he beats the game, if he can even get there. Final level is no joke.

Ooooh can't wait to watch this!

Which working relationships will Brad damage in this video through viking-related frustration? Wait! Don't spoil it for me.

Vinny read MythAdventures as a kid too! Yay!

Also they should just play Dungeon World for tabletop things.

Will Rorie make another inadvertent bomb threat?! I must know.

Math is definitely discovered, not invented.

History :)

Bradgar the Shoeking!

I hope Brad is nicer to Vinny in this one :P

I could impress people from centuries past merely by knowing how to read and write. Literacy was a rare thing back then.

As for teaching people basic sanitation - that may impress them, but not straight away. Remember, people back then didn't know about microscopic organisms and merely assumed that it was spirits and "vapours" that caused illnesses. The idea that disease could be caused by super-tiny organisms was implausible to them. Many learned people, even as late as the 18th and 19th centuries, still refused to believe that germs could cause disease. Virchow, one of the greatest pioneers of medical knowledge, adamantly refused to believe in Germ Theory, because it was so new. The first doctor who tried to get his fellow doctors to wash their hands was dismissed as a crank and eventually he lost his mind and died in an asylum.

@upsidedownace: Oh, that was a topic? Cool. Absolutely right, I believe, just like we don't invent physics, only ways to describe it. But people confuse properties of math with interpretations of it.

When base-10 Hindu numerals were created, including the concept of zero, they didn't also say "let's make every possible number multiplied by nine, a string of digits which add up to nine." That shit just works, without someone saying it should. The choice of base is in fact irrelevant, in base-8 the property exists with 7; with base 16 it's F. In all bases we start at zero, so it's N-1.

For Base-N: (N-1)*X = d1d2d3... and d1+d2+d3... = N-1. That isn't something we made up just because we have ten fingers. The universe came that way. ;)

I got excited when he said Volgar the Vicoden. Have you got any? Vicoden.

@brackynews: Exactly, we create interpretations. We did not "invent" something as utterly addition, subtraction, etc. even the idea of "inventing" such a thing is preposterous. Humans don't need to exist to understand having one rock, and then another is having two rocks.

The music discussion was awesome as well. The development of music and its place in society as well as its relationship with technology is fascinating. Especially at the turn of the century once music started slowly being removed from being solely being something of an aristocratic splendor (i.e. classical/art music) and then bridging into more humble(there's a better word/phrase that I cannot recall that isnt working-class) forms; jazz, blues, traditional / folk, and eventually into R&B and rock music, it's pretty cool.

After all the terrible movies the guys like how can Vinny hate Battlefield Earth?! That movie is GREAT in a terrible way.

Yeah, definitely getting reports of it being pretty funky. We're shifting over to the new GameSpot video player pretty soon, though, so unfortunately bugs for the current video player are not a huge priority right now.

Oh man, just noticed that I have a 25% off coupon for Volgarr in my inventory. Might have to pick it up soon

Does that mean GB will be getting 60fps videos as well?

Humans 100% invented even the basic concept of addition and subtraction, just like we invented the concept of causality. The concept of addition and subtraction are a byproduct of how we perceive reality. If we were the sort of creatures who, for example, had the ability to perceive objects at the quantum level, the idea of delineating between rock a and rock b won't make any sense to us because everything would be sort of fading in and out of existence. There are no axioms in any discipline that are not a byproduct of human interpretation. No one knows what reality is independent of human observation.

Brad, more then any other game I've seen you play, I feel your pain with this one. I got it after seeing the first breaking, thinking it can't be THAT tough. It REALLY is.

Love Breaking Brad!

I really enjoy this feature. Keep up the good work (and conversations!)

@drewbert@brad

Don't worry! Toxoplasmosis is incredibly rare, and you and your cat need to be seriously, seriously filthy for it to be a likely thing.

http://www.winnfelinehealth.org/Health/zoonotic-diseases.html

Most cats are never ill with the disease and the period during which they are infectious to humans (through eggs shed in the feces) is very brief, usually in the first 2-3 weeks of infection. What all of this means is that pregnant women should be more concerned with a cat that has a very low or negative

antibody titer, since that animal has not developed natural resistance to the disease and could become actively infected at any time. It is only during the initial infection that the eggs are shed, posing a risk to humans. Dr. Wolf indicates that she usually tries to get her clients to get themselves tested

(before they become pregnant, if possible). There is a 40% positivity rate in people and if they alreadyhave the antibodies, they cannot get the active infection unless they are immune suppressed. More importantly, people are more likely to acquire an infection by handling or eating raw meat, or handling

raw vegetables and not washing their hands well.

Of course, gamers tend to be pretty immunocompromised, so they're at slightly greater risk.

@brackynews: Base-8 is just like base-10

@oldguy said:

That was delightful.

@rorie Vinny is right, Shannara is fucking great. Only The Sword of Shannara was a LOTR clone. To me Brooks changed the tone with Elfstones. One of his Shannara trilogies takes place in Alaska and one of the prequels takes place in the ruins of Seattle.

That's actually pretty good for playing 2 hours

That reddit post about 'navy seals going back to Rome' sounds WAAAAY too similar to Jonathan Hickman's Pax Romana . I think he'll be owed some royalties.

Rorie was into fantasy as a kid but now he is all grown up and...doesn't read books.

This has convinced me to buy this game now.

@aceofspudz: I'm exactly the same. Read a lot of books as a kid, especially fantasy, but have no interest in fiction as an adult. I still read some non-fiction books, but now I mainly read the current affairs magazines I subscribe to (New Yorker, The Economist, The Atlantic and Vanity Fair). I lost all interest in fiction in my late teens, and don't think I've read a book of fiction in almost 10 years now.

Loved Shannara and Master and Margarita. Russian lit. discussion is interesting

Just keep in mind that we did get ten codes from the developer and will be giving them out during Pathfinder and UPF!

Can I say I love this post? I love this post.

@rorie:duly noted, Rorie. Thanks!!!!

@k9: But even "concepts" are just human interpretations of things happening in the universe around them. Addition and subtraction would still happen even if no human would be around to define their characteristics. As such most "inventions" often are just different interpretations of things that did already exist before, in some form or another.

In essence the first law of thermodynamics applies even to imagination, we don't create things out of "nothingness", we just re-interpret and re-combine already existing elements. What we humans define as "invention" could just as well be considered information entropy.

For that reason i believe the whole thought experiment of "If a tree falls in a forest and nobody is around..." to be kind of cocky. Of course there is an reality outside of humans perception, of course that tree is still gonna make a sound. Those sound waves don't need humans defining them for them to be existing in the first place.