54. Stab 'Em Into Place

Topic Lords

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Lords:

• Adina is @FeyTechnologist on Twitter.
• Alex is @ThemsAllTook on Twitter.
  • https://www.youtube.com/user/adiener

Topics:

• Anarcho-communism for basic bitches
• How I overcame my inability to stick with a project for the long haul
  • https://pomodoro-tracker.com/
• Simulating the fluidity of natural group conversations in voice chat
• Stephen asks: "The Damascus steel of maze generation algorithms"
  • https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190919-the-maze-puzzle-hidden-within-an-early-video-game
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
• The hidden worlds of each person's living space
• Learning every craft to become the ultimate craft wizard
  • https://consumerist.com/2016/12/12/a-few-pen-strokes-on-this-mcdonalds-coffee-cup-give-warmest-greetings-a-new-meaning/

Microtopics:

• Fabric and circus arts.
• Getting private trampoline lessons at the largest nonprofit circus in Seattle.
• Being happy with an audience size that doesn't require you to moderate very much.
• Forming smaller communities to take care of the people left behind by large governmental systems.
• Empowering smaller communities to take care of each other.
• Knowing your neighbors and caring more about them than people you don't know.
• Cultivating a neighborhood to make sure you live near people you want to know.
• The long term viability of the nuclear family.
• A commune of queer people funded by a couple of tech jobs.
• Motorizing two wooden planks and hooking them up to the internet to get hugs online.
• Getting a whole lot done when you don't have internet access but now there's internet access everywhere.
• Adding a physical ritual to a mental activity to make it feel real.
• Putting the tomato on a different shelf to indicate that you are done with it.
• An accountability mailing list where people might hypothetically judge you for what you haven't gotten done.
• Fake accountability that feels real.
• Trying to replicate a warehouse full of indie game devs on Discord.
• Asking you for friends' lunch table to be enlarged so you can fit.
• Writing a Discord bot that replicates the chat of every voice channel in every other voice channel.
• Solving a social problem with social change rather than software.
• How many clicks it takes to switch chat rooms.
• Running through a procedurally generated maze.
• Doing floating point math by aliasing the bytes to an integer and subtracting it from a weird magic number.
• Code that is so self contained and stable that it's not really a problem that nobody understands it.
• Old programmers retiring and their knowledge leaving with them because they didn't document anything.
• Writing a megabyte long brain dump of everything you know about a project before it leaves your head.
• The talk Jim didn't give describing the shaving cream technology in Glittermitten Grove.
• Being too tired from your shaving cream rendering R&D project to do a good job on your beard rendering R&D project.
• Wario Ware except with relaxing minigames rather than stressful ones.
• Porting your game from modern systems to MS-DOS so you can sell it on a floppy disk.
• How scratch and sniff failed where a Smell-O-Vision video gaming peripheral will succeed.
• A swear filter but for smells.
• The Femicom museum.
• Going for walks around your neighborhood and seeing the outside of someone's house.
• The hidden interior of a stranger's home as an allegory for their unknowable mind.
• Peeking into your neighbor's window whenever you get the chance.
• Which service jobs let you go into people's houses and see how they live.
• How it's okay to let the cleaning service employees see your secrets because you don't consider the working poor to be real people.
• Whether house cleaners get a small amount of joy in knowing the weird secrets of rich people.
• The guy who comes in every few months for repairs because your computer is completely full of porn.
• Seeing someone's deepest darkest secrets and being like "it was aight"
• Wanting a nicely interior-designed house but not wanting to put in any effort.
• Wanting to paint your house and painting one wall and thinking "I'm good."
• Getting the kind of paint that seems like a normal wall color but changes to a garish color after it dries, to fool your wife.
• Being ready to learn all the new hobbies as lockdown starts but someone already bought all the sewing machines and felting needles.
• How many more ways you can fuck up a sewing project vs. a knitting project.
• Pulling out all the stitches in a pleated skirt for the third time and deciding you want a different hobby.
• Taking natural animal fibers and stabbing them into place.
• A sewing project having to hang on someone's body in a particular way.
• Learning every game development skill so you can make games without ever talking to anyone.
• Smearing goo on a white surface and it becoming a picture somehow.
• The hobbies we'd have if we had infinite time.
• Looking at a painting and seeing which parts the painter messed up by looking for the parts that are thickest.
• The "warmest greetings" coffee cup.
• The animated gif where they poke a hole in the coffee cup and coffee spurts out.
• Making a d-pad feel like a fresh control scheme by attaching a jetski to it.
• Inventing a solution while also entertaining your audience.
• Co-op TIS-100, where each player gets their own CPU cell.

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