March 28, 2022

127. Let's e e cummings This Up

1 hour 13 minutes

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Cort

https://twitter.com/postgoodism

Fabian

https://twitter.com/rygorous

Topics:

Black Square Day (inventing holidays and subsequently forgetting everything about them)

Nostalgia for old computers isn't because they were good, but because they sucked in ways that were simple to understand

The Dirtywave M8 tracker

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost

https://www.greatestpoems.com/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening/

Microtopics:

The music videos of Max Cooper.

Styptic pencils.

Doing archaeology on your own Google calendar.

A stable time loop where your future self adds "Black Square Day" to your calendar.

Bringing a palindrome to the palindrome party.

Telling your visitors "it's Black Square Day; dress appropriately."

Celebrating the day you really burned the casserole.

Black Squaroling.

A way that your community organizes itself.

Getting in a pissing contest with your neighbors about whose house has the most black squares.

Booting up to a BASIC prompt so you need to write a short BASIC program to load the program you want to run (probably another BASIC program)

How the Commodore 64 BASIC determined where the line you were editing started and ended.

How Commodore 64 BASIC stored lines of code internally.

Survivorship bias among early microcomputer users.

Accepting a certain level of brokenness because fixing the problem will take an unbounded amount of time.

Machines that are simple enough for a single human to understand vs. those that are not.

What percentage of the Commodore 64's ROM is dedicated to implementing floating point math.

Varying levels of nostalgia for developing for the Playstation 3.

The room in London that the Playstation 2 had instead of a debugger.

The Tool PS2.

Fetishization of the mid-2010s tower PC

Second order nostalgia, for what 90s emulation of 80s games looked like.

Nostalgia for objectively terrible art style.

All the walls swimming all the time.

The 15 year nostalgia gap where nobody wants to remember the early 3D console games.

Making music on the toilet every day.

Trackers.

What Trackers are better at vs. traditional DAWs.

Music that ships with its own source code.

Technical limitations transforming into a unique aesthetic.

How to hide a second song in the same tracker module.

Doing a thing on the screen while music loops.

A portable device to edit spreadsheets that only has a trackball.

Looking at your song through a straw.

Loading a ProTracker module in FastTracker.

Trying to identify which tracker created the MOD you're reading by looking for file format bugs unique to that tracker.

Fixing bugs by hex editing an executable and that becomes the version everybody uses now.

What you call it when an archaeologist writes the file spec.

Unknown sources of dubious quality.

Lore of unknown provenance about how to play a mod file.

Watching dense notation scrolling by.

Loading tracker music into various players to see how their performances of the same material vary.

Trying to load up music you wrote fifteen years ago and needing to source old versions of all the plugins you used.

Watching the woods fill up with snow.

A very evocative one of those.

Whether sleep represents death in this poem or if it's just sleep this time.

Why write a poem.

Interviewing the author of a poem and then interviewing everyone who ever read the poem before writing the authoritative interpretation of that poem.

A joke that doesn't really seem like a joke at all.

Rating a poem on a five star scale and then deciding how many of those stars belong to each of the stanzas.

The Three Musketeers sequels that nobody has read.

Getting paid by the line and adding a character to your story that speaks only one word at a time.

How to write 300 books a year.

Taking out the but because there's nothing for it to but.

Ceramic clown statues.

Support Topic Lords

...more

View all episodes

By Jim Stormdancer

4.8

1212 ratings

March 28, 2022

127. Let's e e cummings This Up

1 hour 13 minutes

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Cort

https://twitter.com/postgoodism

Fabian

https://twitter.com/rygorous

Topics:

Black Square Day (inventing holidays and subsequently forgetting everything about them)

Nostalgia for old computers isn't because they were good, but because they sucked in ways that were simple to understand

The Dirtywave M8 tracker

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost

https://www.greatestpoems.com/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening/

Microtopics:

The music videos of Max Cooper.

Styptic pencils.

Doing archaeology on your own Google calendar.

A stable time loop where your future self adds "Black Square Day" to your calendar.

Bringing a palindrome to the palindrome party.

Telling your visitors "it's Black Square Day; dress appropriately."

Celebrating the day you really burned the casserole.

Black Squaroling.

A way that your community organizes itself.

Getting in a pissing contest with your neighbors about whose house has the most black squares.

Booting up to a BASIC prompt so you need to write a short BASIC program to load the program you want to run (probably another BASIC program)

How the Commodore 64 BASIC determined where the line you were editing started and ended.

How Commodore 64 BASIC stored lines of code internally.

Survivorship bias among early microcomputer users.

Accepting a certain level of brokenness because fixing the problem will take an unbounded amount of time.

Machines that are simple enough for a single human to understand vs. those that are not.

What percentage of the Commodore 64's ROM is dedicated to implementing floating point math.

Varying levels of nostalgia for developing for the Playstation 3.

The room in London that the Playstation 2 had instead of a debugger.

The Tool PS2.

Fetishization of the mid-2010s tower PC

Second order nostalgia, for what 90s emulation of 80s games looked like.

Nostalgia for objectively terrible art style.

All the walls swimming all the time.

The 15 year nostalgia gap where nobody wants to remember the early 3D console games.

Making music on the toilet every day.

Trackers.

What Trackers are better at vs. traditional DAWs.

Music that ships with its own source code.

Technical limitations transforming into a unique aesthetic.

How to hide a second song in the same tracker module.

Doing a thing on the screen while music loops.

A portable device to edit spreadsheets that only has a trackball.

Looking at your song through a straw.

Loading a ProTracker module in FastTracker.

Trying to identify which tracker created the MOD you're reading by looking for file format bugs unique to that tracker.

Fixing bugs by hex editing an executable and that becomes the version everybody uses now.

What you call it when an archaeologist writes the file spec.

Unknown sources of dubious quality.

Lore of unknown provenance about how to play a mod file.

Watching dense notation scrolling by.

Loading tracker music into various players to see how their performances of the same material vary.

Trying to load up music you wrote fifteen years ago and needing to source old versions of all the plugins you used.

Watching the woods fill up with snow.

A very evocative one of those.

Whether sleep represents death in this poem or if it's just sleep this time.

Why write a poem.

Interviewing the author of a poem and then interviewing everyone who ever read the poem before writing the authoritative interpretation of that poem.

A joke that doesn't really seem like a joke at all.

Rating a poem on a five star scale and then deciding how many of those stars belong to each of the stanzas.

The Three Musketeers sequels that nobody has read.

Getting paid by the line and adding a character to your story that speaks only one word at a time.

How to write 300 books a year.

Taking out the but because there's nothing for it to but.

Ceramic clown statues.

Support Topic Lords

...more

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127. Let's e e cummings This Up

127. Let's e e cummings This Up

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