February 21, 2022

122. If You're Cold, Your Oatmeal Is Cold

58 minutes

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Lords:

Maxx

https://mechcem.itch.io/

https://www.instagram.com/maxxyamasaki/

Ananda

https://www.instagram.com/a__gabo/

Topics:

Rare videos of European Hamsters.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf06WJQ4FnE

Would you rather eat: the last dragon or a human being?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu

What happened in the editor culture that made medical and mathematical Wikipedia absolutely useless for lay readers, and is there anything we can do to fix it?

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, by Richard Brautigan

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/

Esper Quinn adds: "I grew up very techno-utopian in that particular Y2K post-history stripe, where everything will be Extreme Sports and Peace Summits for the rest of existence once we can get everybody hooked up to 'broadband'. I loved the idea of the singularity, humanism, the maybe naive idea that once everybody can just understand how everyone feels by way of livejournal posts or brain implants we'll all be friends and start working together on things. I still have a lot of love for that era, and my dream video game concept I tinker with every couple months is an extremely Y2K-aesthetic snowboarding-ballsport called CYBERXROSS. I had heard this Brautigan poem before, though a bit late for that era; I want to say it was around 2012, just when Facebook (and post-bubble Silicon Valley Capitalism) began to really bare its teeth and sink into the world's throat, shattering the idea of technology as a Total Positive entirely. Oh well. I still love the poem."

Diatomite and our weird relationship to tiny cursed skeletons.

Making fermented foods. I want to make stinky tofu.

Microtopics:

Choosing to believe when somebody last ate oatmeal.

Outside oatmeal vs. inside oatmeal.

The wide world of breakfast goops.

Writing your to-do lists in calligraphy.

Minutes from the meeting where you are every member of the board of directors and you agree with yourself that you should remain CEO.

Jodorowsky's Hamster.

Videos of aggressive wild hamsters that they don't want you to see.

Ethical hamster breeders in your area.

Shipping a hamster in a box with a potato and when it arrives there's no potato but there's a potato's worth of feces.

The kind of habitat that pet hamsters need.

A German naturalist's hamster cage.

King Solomon's Ring, by Konrad Z. Lorenz.

Importing an entire pond into your house so you can observe it more efficiently.

A cheese shop in a small town staffed by the same person who runs the travel agency and the general store.

Imitation cannibalism hoax "Hufu."

Whether Winston can say good night.

Whether a three year old understands the ethical calculus behind eating or not eating the last dragon.

Eating raw dragon and getting Mad Dragon Disease.

Whether biomagnification would be worse in dragon or human meat.

Whether Wikipedia pages for difficult ideas should have tutorials.

A series of date nights in which you make Powerpoint presentations about armadillos for each other.

The Seven-Banded Armadillo.

A detailed technical description of the scoots on the Seven-Banded Armadillo's fourth moveable band.

Volunteer opportunities to study Paraguayan fauna.

Spending four years in Paraguay discovering and describing a new species of armadillo by going to the museum where they are stuffed and mounted.

The relief of discovering that other people fail at things too.

Mutually programming harmony, like pure water touching clear sky.

A cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics.

The counterculture era of hippies and computers.

Solving every problem.

Making a machine to water your plants and going back to sleep.

Making art that is deeply alarming but also incredibly pleasant.

Violently bright emotions for short moments.

How to recognize utopias from the outside.

Fixing a poem you almost like and posting the result on Instagram.

Crypto bros perishing in the wildfires of this cybernetic ecosystem.

Exploring and coming to terms with the complications of the field you were uncomplicatedly excited about as a kid.

The set of questions that don't have words attached to them.

The Mossman Lock Collection.

Branches of technology that we didn't take.

Using a slab of diatomaceous earth as your bath mat.

The multivarious uses of the skeletons left behind after the primordial seas dried up.

Surrounding your pantry with ancient dry skeletons so when ants step on the skeletons they think "oh gross, this skeleton is so dry" and they go away.

Pouring nitroglycerin into ancient tiny skeletons to invent dynamite.

Scrubbing the exposed parts of your skeleton with much smaller skeletons.

Late night snack vendors.

Sarcophagus tofu.

Preserved organ dishes.

The difficulty of acquiring stinky tofu during a global pandemic.

Fermented meat products.

How to tell when your stinky tofu turned out wrong.

Drinking the band-aid beer.

Paying a nominal fee for a lab to DNA sequence your mystery meat.

Comparing sludge notes.

Adding kimchi to pizza sauce.

Drawing the Instagram logo out of diatomaceous earth on the floor and going to sleep in it and waking up and now you are Instagram and whenever someone uploads a video they're uploading it into your head.

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