Phil Speer

@gamedevlist.bsky.social Feel free to add me!

So happy you landed a job up there! We'll have to grab lunch or something next time I'm in town.

Such a perfect Simpsons joke, in its prime.

And finally, the moment in the car, where he's so excited and so worried that someone else is going to get the trampoline before him, he rams a car backing out of its driveway just on the off chance it could possibly be someone off to steal his free trampoline.

Why crutches? Because they're so utterly mundane and useless, and also just... Crutches? Really? So many answers and unanswered questions in such a short amount of time.

Then there's the other reactions. Bart with an almost dismissive confusion, Maggie just staring, and then Marge interfering that this has happened before many times, not understanding what Homer was excitedly yelling about, and warning him not to bring home more useless junk. Specifically crutches.

See, Homer is so excited he can't even say the damn word and he doesn't care, he just gives up after two times and runs off. One would have been funny, but maybe confusing. Two, okay that's the joke. Hilarious! Three would have been excessive and overstayed its welcome. The timing is also perfect.

Then it subverts your expectations yet again because it is indeed something stupid,a free trampoline. But oh no, that's just the setup. It goes further. First we get Lisa's reaction, which is genuine concern, contrasting with the deeply unserious revelation we've just experienced.

First you have Homer getting absolutely flabbergasted by something he's reading in the paper, and because it's Homer, you know it's going to be something stupid, but then the music stinger with the zoom pulls you in, yanking you back and making you think it's something dramatic just out of habit.

I want to also explain why this clip is pure genius. It crams more humor into 20 seconds thqn most shows do an entire episode.

Free trampoline | The Simpsons YouTube video by Jaime Lopez Gil

Literally me last night playing Enshrouded: youtu.be/a_VTvQLAfaE?...

At approximately 2:23 AM this morning, I awoke with George Harrison's "Got My Mind Set On You," a song I haven't heard or thought about in years, much less have any strong memories of, stuck in my mind for no discernable reason, and decided to post about it.

Important PSA:

A tweet from John Fugelsang reads in all caps: "NO FOOD FOR YOU UNTIL THE DEMOCRATS LET US TAKE AWAY YOUR HEALTHCARE" – US House Speaker Mike Johnson.

This perfectly encapsulates what the GOP position is on the shutdown.

Seriously, I've said it before, but Gunn is truly a master of his craft.

A comic book show about one of the world's dumbest anti-heroes shouldn't be one of the best shows on TV, but it is. #peacemaker #jamesgunn

Life Pro-tip: if you need Taco Sauce, order one packet from Taco Bell and you'll have enough for a whole year.

Ok, thanks for the advice, but I'll keep doing things my way and you can do them your way.

Well, you're free to throw up your hands and do nothing then. No one's forcing you to boycott them. Have a good day

Sure, but they don't know that unless you contact them to let them know why you're not shopping there.

I checked who's advertising on The Daily Caller in this article, and it looks like Walmart is running an ad on their site right now. I reached out to them to tell them I can't shop there if this is the sort of rhetoric they are associating with their brand.

Fulfilling soft power fantasies is just as important as fulfilling hard power fantasies, if not more so, because it reminds us of our humanity and our civility towards others.

And given how many players I've seen say they do this, I have to believe that there's a good many people out there who would do the right thing if they could.

They're about things you can't normally do in real life - otherwise you would. So sometimes the power fantasy is as simple as being as rich or unworried about money that you can just give a total stranger $10,000 to make their life better.

I'm sure I got feedback during production that there wasn't much of a point to this, because the player doesn't get rewarded. But, games are about allowing you to explore power fantasies. And power fantasies aren't always about beating the bad guy with the most powerful weapons you can amass.

And do you know what rewards they get for doing that? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not even an achievement. They just give up the money. Some lines of dialogue as a thank you and some followup dialogue, and that's it.

I'm proud to have written two of those characters, because it goes to show you that some people will go out of their way to give a few virtual humans large sums of fake money that they still had to put real effort into earning, instead of buying more virtual guns or spaceships or whatever.

I was reading a thread on Reddit about Starfield and a commenter mentioned that in all their playthroughs, they always give money to a few NPCs who are poor, downtrodden, or need it for some other reason.

Just to remind people that there is still good in the world.