Playdate: American Truck Simulator (11/17/2017)

Please do a Assetto Corsa stream teaching Dan to drive manual.

Oh Dan, you are a true treasure of humanity.

You guys should do a Breaking Dan type series where you set a goal of a time in a track of Assetto Corsa (brands hatch maybe) and continue until he reaches that time. Has to be a pretty low time to make the series worthwhile.

Course would maybe help having someone else on the team that knows about driving :).

I think this is a very rational and rarely seen stance on the matter. Whenever stick vs. automatic conversations come up, people that love stick will often talk about it like it's the only way to drive a car when in fact what you said is very true. Driving stick in bumper to bumper traffic is a pain for prolonged periods of time and in fact city driving by itself can be ardous and not rewarding, unless you want to be that doofus that peels out of a red light only to stop at the next red right up ahead because it's a city and not a raceway.

If you live somewhere up in the countryside ripe with wide open winding roads or with plenty of uncongested highways then you can have some fun with a stick. If you live in a tightly packed city like New York and are going from red light to red light or doing groceries around the corner, an automatic is a much better choice. The gas savings isn't even a real argument anymore, not to mention that you need to be actually good at driving stick to use less fuel, and plenty of people that think they're awesome at it honestly aren't.

Dan is the best. He's always entertaining.

Abby breaking down as she she talks about movies Dan has not seen is was really funny to me for some reason

What film school did Dan go to? Because if I didn't go to any of my Film classes I would have been kicked out.

Machine Fuckin' Head \m/ @33:35

Dan, seriously, can't dance, can't sing, sartorially challenged, as cultured as a sterilized petri dish, and you hate NPR?

Okay, GB East, you need to give him a 1-2 punch of black and white and subtitled: Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night!

But yeah Vinny, that shout out to KQED FM!

The best Jack Black movie is Bernie.

DOESN'T EVEN KNOW HOW GEARS ON A BIKE WORK!?

I wasn't paying attention too closely, but doesn't Dan say "Dennis Hopper" at some point (he was in both Speed and Ed TV)?

Also: Willem Dafoe was the villain in Speed 2 and was in Finding Nemo.

@glots Oh thank god for that website, its was the song after faith no more, finally found it - Michael Schenker - Live And Let Live, thanks so much for the info, it was driving me insane.

i was so sad for alex , watching him all i could think of was him trying to process how far back his career save was being set, as abby and dan did their stuff i glimpsed occasional winces of pain, that was the face of a man whos zen garden was being trampled before him . (im over dramatizing)

also seeing alex in a backwards cap took me way back to the gamespot days :)

Loved ETS2, found new music i'd have never listened to without those streaming radio chans. Reaaaally wish the devs had started on the east coast for this game though. I bought it but it didn't grab me like ETS.

Dan's vibe on the auto/manual segment had me thinking more intensely than usual about the typical reaction to the automatic vs. manual discourse.

Being comfortable enough to not have to think about what you're doing in all situations with a manual can sometimes take a long time, but it happens eventually.

I think I'll look to getting American/Euro truck sim now...seems so chill.

I don't know if I count Portugal the Man as pop... like it's definitely on top 40 radio or whatever, but it just doesn't strike me as pop. Maybe because I've been listening to them forever, but calling them pop bothers me.

Would have been hilarious if they had to pull over and stop every time someone had to get up and go to the bathroom or snacks or something.

Remind me never to be in a truck with Dan Ryckert. :D

This was chill af and I loved it.

I'm surprised how small major cities are. I'm from AZ and the trip through Phoenix is a long trek through busy traffic and a narrow Highway on I-17. The highway north to Flagstaff also has some steep grades getting up and down to Camp Verde and then back up to Flagstaff. I'd think these are some tense driving scenarios that they'd like to exploit, but the drive Alex did was fairly smooth. Phoenix was nothing more than a couple warehouses. I was thinking that this game would be great for VR, but I would need some more realistic scenarios when driving through cities.

That PTM song is definitely pop, which is so different from their history of more indie rock. Makes me upset that it feels like they sold out to create such a cookie cutter song to get on the radio.

Dan saying "Alexa, turn on NPR" at 32:50 activated my dad's Amazon Echo thing. That was a confusing 10 seconds.

Ours was 101.9 the fox (which is basically whatevers popular and the last 20 years or so) ... you know you're old when you graduate to gold FM for the 60s-80s

Steve Buscemi was in Fargo with William H Macy, who was in Boogie Nights with Mark Wahlberg, who was in Pain and Gain with The Rock. BAM!

@mythdark: Those Damned Blue-Collar Tweekers

I feel like it's more pop-y, but I won't go so far as to say it's full pop... maybe it's John Gourley's voice that makes me want to set it apart or what. I don't mind the song, but I definitely don't like it as much as their other stuff.

i loved the part between film major Abby and "film major" Dan.

I am pretty immune to Dan's bullshit, but I just can't imagine waking up every morning and drinking two soda's.

@ssully: I once tried to "pull a Dan" and had a can of Fanta with my breakfast. I had to force it down because it was so hard getting it down.

As for the whole "automatic vs. manual transmission" discussion: is it just me or does automatic gears seem like a very American thing? I'm European so I don't know anyone who drives an automatic car. "Everyone" just drives manual.

@ssullysaid:

Dan is part hummingbird. There's no other explanation.

This video is just relaxing to watch and listen in the background. It's getting me through a final review for a major exam tomorrow! GBeast is amazing!

Great that American Truck Simulator still scratches the same itch as Euro Truck Simulator 2. It's great that the developer is still working on both of them simultaneously too.

Caffeine doesn't make you more alert than the average person. It perks you up for a little bit, but after your body is used to it, it means you need caffeine to get to your "normal." Basically, a glass of water in the morning will put you at the same spot as someone who drinks coffee every morning, except the person who drinks coffee can never experience the actual benefit of caffeine because of their dependency.

Slogging through the mornings is just a fact of being a morning or night person. Caffeine is a placebo, basically.

As someone who has had to train new drivers in real trucks, watching Dan try to figure out shifting was amusing. I hope he never gets within 50 feet of a real truck lol. To be fair, part of me thinks it might be a little harder to get a feel for shifting from a game like this, where you can't actually feel the truck.

My favorite memory was telling a confused dude to "straighten out his wheel" and seeing the look of pure confusion spread across his face as he stared at the steering wheel.

Also, Alex said truckers love podcast. Brother, you have no idea. :)

@vinny aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa cable managementtttttt

"It's the Citizen Kane of movies." - Vinny, talking about Citizen Kane