The Giant Beastcast: Episode 197

glad everyone is seeing the true Dan... no more excuses.

If you were to tell someone half the stories Dan has recounted over the years, without knowing him he would sound like the worst, most insufferable human in the world. He's a nice guy but sure has those awful tendencies from time to time.

I've read the core Dune books twice.

@jonny_anonymous: I'm really blown away that none of the crew have read it! It has a hallowed place, not only in sci-fi, but in the pantheon of great fiction.

Dirty Work

Robot Jox

The Thing

Don't be crazy, millions of people have read Dune

@redic: I'm with you on that. The game play of trials just lends itself perfectly to portable play.

Under Night is an extremely well built anime fighting game that has a pretty strong grassroots community that is thrilled to be included on the main stage please don't disparage it for the name it's supposed to be stupid and anime sounding it's totally self-aware in that regard.

Dan knows it's wrong if he only line cuts at Wrestlemania, and that honestly makes it worse because all those people he's cutting in front of have increased desires to get back to their seats too.

I should finish the Dune trilogy...

Holy shit Dan, what the fuck is wrong with you?!

Dan is the guy that would drop stink bombs in bars to get a drink. Yeah, he's a funny dumb idiot, but there's a malice inherent to his behavior, or maybe extreme nihilism.

Did kids really buy both versions of Pokemon games? I remember it was a thing to coordinate with your friends to buy one of them so you could trade the unique stuff.

@royalghost: I'm no fighting game fan, but I get your pain my friend. Then again this is GB, where anime styled games are simply just "anime games" that only a few people give lukewarm support for. I've given up hope on such things being taken seriously here lol

I, for one, have enjoyed Vinny's ongoing February joke.

Dune is my favorite novel, and I’ve reread it every few years since middle school. The second book is a very easy recommendation as well as it’s a pretty direct continuation of the story in the first and excellent. I know a lot of people fall off at the third, but in my opinion everything set up in that one is more than worth it for the incredible payoff in the fourth novel.

Five and six are just bad imo (don’t think that’s too controversial); have only read them once. And of course everything in the expanded universe maintained by his son seems like bad fanfic that I wouldn’t go anywhere near.

If anyone’s interested in giving it a shot, the audiobook has a full cast and is excellent. It throws a ton of characters at you all at once, and having them voiced distinctly would probably go a long way towards keeping them all straight on a first read.

@anderswarming: PUBG has map waypoints

@alex Just wanted to say as a regular PS4 Overwatch player, quickplay is totally fine! It's literally all I play with my brother and there isn't a hint of the strict "meta" stuff that there is in comp. Also people being shitty and not even trying doesn't seem to happen, or at least not frequently enough that it's a real problem.

@arcadefire: hes lives in ignorance and privilege. Those people usually dont understand they're huge assholes. Regardless of the bathroom line, Dan does and says shit like this consistently enough that all I can think is privilege.

@robertspeedwagon: I listened to the audiobook last year and loved it. I was a long time fan of the universe but had never actually gotten around to reading it.

It's baffling the beastcast crew is surprised about Dan cutting the line. He takes out the disposed popcorn bags from garbage cans in movie theaters so he can eat free popcorn. I believe he cuts lines and justifies it as a good thing.

I started telling myself the story of Dune (the original novel) and that book don't make no goddamn sense. The spice on Arrakis (aka "Dune") is the basis of all star-to-star travel, but this is a secret? How? All meaningful space travel started when Dune was found, yet everyone forgot this somehow. However, the emperor knows how important and how big a secret this is, and he fears the potential of the Atreides family, so he starts a proxy war with the Atreides, but first ships them to the biggest secret place in the universe, pointing a spotlight at the place he wants no one to know about.

I also heard "write them"

The spice must flow!

Simply cutting a line is better than throwing stink bombs at people for being ahead of him in line at least.

Man, who is Dan? I generally like him but he is an actual asshole a lot of the time. And doesn't even feel bad about it.

@chaosordeal: Will try not to get too in the weeds, but to a couple of those points:

Spice is how modern interstellar travel is safely done, but it hasn’t always been that way. They used to use computers to make those calculations, but the Butlerian Jihad led to the outlawing of all computers within human society. So spice just kinda smoothly took over as the dominant space travel catalyst after known space had already been mostly explored and colonized.

As to the giving the Atreides Arrakis thing, basically Duke Leto and his forces were unassailable from their seat on their home world of Caladan. The only way the emperor could draw him into a vulnerable position was to bestow upon him the “offer he can’t refuse”-style massive position of power and honor that is the governorship of Arrakis. Then he could assassinate Leto and decimate the Atreides forces while having the believable cover story that the attackers were the jilted previous stewards of the planet and established Atreides-haters, the Harkonnen (which would be perfectly legal under their bizarre cutthroat feudal system).

And the part where the spice being key to interstellar travel being a secret... I honestly don’t remember it being treated as such. Maybe I’m just forgetting something and am due for a reread, but people know the Spacing Guild are the largest consumers of the spice; even the Fremen know to bribe them with it to keep their terraforming effort on the DL. What exactly the Guild Navigators are and the mechanics of interstellar navigation are secrets for sure, but most of that can be chalked up to no one wanting to piss off the Guild by digging into their affairs because they monopolize literally all interstellar travel. Would be curious to know if I’m wrong about the secrecy thing, though. If so that’s somehow just a detail that has never stuck with me.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, Bakalar. Don't try to pawn Dan over on us europeans by suggesting we have a culture of cutting in line. He is an american monster, and I'll thank you to own that. We formally register our disgust at his attrocious actions.

Alright so I was slowly coming around on Dan these past couple of years.

But I guess I was just a mark. Fuck line cutters (and also line backdoorers). This had better be factored into his next performance review.

There is no one here that will defend Dan. Even the "several other people" that do, THEY at least most likely KNOW what they're doing is wrong and have no shame. Dan is like, 10x worse with this shit by thinking he's morally justified in this case. Unbelievable.

Without a doubt, but Dan at least, IIRC, realized that that was a very shitty thing to do. In this case he genuinely seems to think he has found some sort of moral loophole which is like, really gross, especially considering EVERYONE is telling him otherwise. It makes me legitimately think he is just an inconsiderate person and extremely lacks any self-reflection.

I don't think anyone bought both. You would've had to also buy two gameboys if you actually wanted to get all the pokemon by yourself.

Heel Dan wins again.

What an achievement Stardew Valley is.

Cutting in line isn't the worst thing in the world. Yes, it's very rude and all you nice people shouldn't do it. But it's not a crime.

8chans's policy on Obscenity: https://8ch.net/obscenity.html If they hosted Child Porn the government would have shut them down. I can't read anything on it because it seems to be full of unreadable garbage but at least it doesn't censor people.

A Waking Life

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

The Big Lebowski (team Jeff)

Here's the thing about the physical vs digital re: library preservation discussion - there isn't really a difference anymore.

Yes, they can flip a switch and take away access to digital purchases. That is absolutely true. However, they can absolutely flip a different switch, and make it so your console won't boot the physical disk anymore. If they are willing to change the EULA, or whatever other licensing terms they use, to let them deny a user access, there is nothing stopping them from applying it to physical media as well as digital. This is the fear of "always online" requirements - all they have to do is require some handshaking that they then refuse.

Is it a good thing? fuck no. It is, however, a real possibility and not something just affecting digital purchases. There could easily come a day when your physical disk becomes exactly as worthless as a digital key.

Another thing about InfiniteChan is that Google doesn't link directly to and some ISP's also block their website. You can still find their social media links through Google, and through those find your way to the site itself. And by just looking at their social media, THQ should have been able to figure out that InfiniteChan isn't something you want to be associated with.

The video game in Russian Doll looking like a Flash game made sense since it was her first video game she made I believe, they were also playing Tomb Raider just before that.

Dan is an actual monster, pray he never chooses to run for government.

@grizzlyponcho: Did that just occur to you now?

Alex! I can refute your nobody has read Dune theory. I have, in fact, read it. The whole thing. All six books Frank Herbert wrote. Skipped the ones his son wrote after he died though. The first three are great. After that it becomes a different kind of story and very bizarre.

I don't want to make cutting in line more serious than it is but Dan Ryckert always slides into abusive boyfriend tactics whenever anyone calls him on his bullshit and it's genuinely upsetting, no matter how minor the offense. It's why I stopped listening to Beastcast for a time when he joined and it seemed like he'd been getting better, but nah, that toxic shit is deep in his soul. Telling stories about dumb bad shit you do is one thing, it's the defense of the behavior that really bums me out and makes me not want to have anything to do with him or any content containing him, which is everything out of the East Coast, which fucking sucks.

@hiimzev:

@mordja:

Gotcha, thanks.

I find it hard to believe that more people enjoy The Big Lebowski than The Fifth Element. Are there a bunch of Francophobes out there?

@chaosordeal: As mentioned below, Spice being the key to interstellar travel is no secret, it is in fact a widely known fact and bargaining chip. Guild Navigators need spice to thread safe passage during interstellar jumps. The Spacing Guild needs the spice for it's navigators and the empire needs the spacingguild to travel from planet to planet, otherwise all these worlds would become stranded in their own corners of the galaxy. Other houses use the spice for other purposes as well.

One of the key points of God Emporer of Dune (apart from some theology that Herbert enjoyed discussing) is that Leto II controls spice absolutely making the Spacing Guild as well as all the other houses completely dependent on him. Also there was the thing where he bonded with sand trout to become a giant sandworm that lived for thousands of years and was prescient.. so yah there was that.

Dune is fucking cool.