March 16, 2020

21. Strip Laser Tag

1 hour 7 minutes

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Lords:

Josh makes Thunk. https://www.youtube.com/user/THUNKShow

Elena is on the Topic Lords discord.

Topics:

2:29 Procrastination, or, avoidance as a protective coping mechanism

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass

13:08 Newcomb's Problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox

19:46 Celebrating Christmas by saying you have a machine gun

https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1210729053465931781

26:16 Kevin asks: "The fear that other podcasts will steal your idea to discuss topics."

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

http://bash.org/

32:09 McMaster-Carr

https://www.mcmaster.com/

http://thistothat.com/

"Satisfying Spiral Liquid Bubbler Timer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFLNpSqzn7o

41:34 Conlanging with toddlers

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

50:26 Preserving old software

THUG Pro. http://www.thugpro.com/

"Ozimals did give rabbit owners a brief chance to save their rabbits. Before shutting down, they gave away items which make rabbits not need food – and leaves them sterile. Some rabbits will live on forever, the last of their kind." https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/05/19/second-life-ozimals-pet-rabbits-dying/

The Lifecycle of Software Objects. https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/8/644/files/2017/08/Chiang-Lifecycle-of-Software-Objects-q3tsuw.pdf

Rolled Out, the Super Monkey Ball clone. https://blog.rolledoutgame.com/

Microtopics:

Being old and knowing nothing.

Finding out that you can buy citric acid and put it in your drinking water.

Finding out that you can buy concrete and put it in your toilet.

The refreshing concrete toilet.

Regretting agreeing to do a thing you really enjoy.

Defeating procrastinating by discovering what you're afraid of and reframing it or interceding.

Worrying that you're incapable of surviving in a capitalist system.

Tracing every fear back to a fear of dying alone, like how every page on Wikipedia leads to Philosophy.

Wanting to do a thing but having no effective mechanism to prefer any given thing over any other and doing nothing.

Hearing syllables and then "ass" and pretending you understand.

Learning a word that you didn't know and then explaining it to other people.

Breaking your task into small steps and doing the first step.

Listening to your emotion and being like "what's your deal"

Self-acceptance helping when beating yourself up doesn't.

Instead of writing, taking copious notes and then skipping right to editing the notes into a completed text.

Laying out an outline and then finishing the essay by removing the bullet points.

Having an idea in each hand and holding two more in your left foot and trying to squinch them together into a linear series of thoughts.

Everything being related to everything else.

Giving people the tools they need to engage with topics.

A future-knowing genie who knows you're going to have pizza tonight.

Someone having done this topic already on a different podcast.

Being the genie you want to see in the world.

Causality seeming to flow in reverse.

Reassuring the genie that you're not the kind of person who takes two boxes.

The genie turning out to just be a guy with a rubber duck.

An odd Christmas greeting that you are here for.

Living next to people who think it's festive to announce how armed they are.

Knocking on your neighbor's door and asking for a cup of machine gun.

A corpse wearing a santa hat.

Trying to think of any movie that doesn't depict a corpse that could've worn a santa hat.

Some of your best friends having machine guns.

Being charmed by the utilitarian and efficient design of firearms.

Crying in a VR game and the tears filling up the mask until you drown.

Strip laser tag.

A topic peasant just waltzing in and talking about topics.

Editing out the guy hiding with a gun in post.

Having an unconscionable amount of bash.org memorized.

Waking up from your drugged haze to a flaming burnt cake in the oven and your house is burning down.

Being sad because the folks at Chipotle forgot your burrito but then your wife reminds you that you've eaten it already and you just forgot.

Everything that you could possibly need to build a thing.

Spinning around in an enormous magical hardware store with arms outstretched and an inventory robot fluttering around your skirt and landing on your finger.

Metal boxy objects of mysterious provenance.

The reaction speed of your transition lenses.

Welding masks transitioning to near-opaque in less than a millisecond because at any moment you might use a plasma beam that is brighter than the surface of the sun.

Installing permanent earplugs powered by your greasy earwax.

Not needing McMaster-Carr after Josh just tells you the answer.

An oil timer forcing a door to open or close slowly.

Having an idea for a cool Youtube video and assuming there's probably a cool Youtube guy who's already done it.

A toddler teaching you how to teach dragon language and the dragons being annoyed you didn't ask them.

Asking one of the indigineous people what the name of the hated rival tribe is named and them saying a slur and then being like "okay you're all that now."

Circumlocuting around the concept of the color green.

Summing up your engineering degree as "f=ma" and "you can't push a rope" and saving your listeners five years.

A fairly ingenious use of math that we've had sitting around forever.

Sliding rules getting us to the moon because we hadn't invented calculators yet.

The content being the same but the context changing.

The NES being the game dev platform that is most likely to survive the next thousand years.

Trolling through aerospace source code looking for funny comments.

Deleting your source code to free up space because nobody is ever going to need to port or revise Final Fantasy 7.

Planning a heist to retrieve the floppy disks stashed above the acoustic ceiling tiles of a dry cleaning service.

Games being reasonably well-preserved but other kinds of software being mostly lost because teenaged nerds don't care about it.

AI pets dying because the company that manufactured them went out of business.

Your GMO dog dying because the manufacturer's SSL certificate expired.

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