19. A Pickled Egg Christmas

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Lords:

• Jeff is an event planner at https://www.acesup.com/ and blogged at https://80isenough.wordpress.com/ back when he was unemployed.
• Joe is.

Topics:

• 0:52 Not having time to be a geek.
• 10:21 Pickled egg ordering paranoia.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickled_egg
• 20:04 This topic is mostly an excuse to ask Joe how he raised such good kids.
  • The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate
• 33:05 Quill asks: "What sort of art did you make when you were younger?"
  • Double reed instruments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_reed
• 45:44 Augmented reality killer app: the etymology explorer
  • The Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/
• 49:46 80% is enough.

Microtopics:

• Having nothing to plug.
• Consuming all the media available because you're in high school and it's the 80s.
• Not being sure if the media you're consuming, or about to consume, is worth your time.
• Forgetting everything else as a prerequisite for getting anything done.
• Humans figuring out what to do with their drive to make art once computers are better at making art.
• Collectively choosing to limit the art you consume to create an artificial culture in your collective.
• A fake band invented by the internet come alive.
• Computers taking over art curation, too.
• Making a statement in a specific context that can't be as easily transplanted into another context and that making you a luddite weirdo.
• Cultivating a healthy creative space being super weird now, but will make more sense in the future when the creative.
• Liking pickled eggs but not being able to find them in any local store.
• The hypothetical fraughtness of purchasing pickled eggs online.
• Buying a bunch of gross stuff and being disappointed.
• Hating the pickled eggs you bulk-purchased and feeding them all to your dogs.
• Pickled sausages -- a southern specialty.
• Selling your pickled products at a discount because they're past their sell-by date.
• Pickled Thai eggplant about the size of marbles.
• Not being diligent enough to look up how to include Pickled Banana Blossoms in a prepared dish and just eating them like popcorn and being disappointed.
• The entire egg pickling community thinking your egg pickling method is heretical.
• Asking everybody in your family for pickled eggs for Christmas and throwing a pickled egg party to get rid of all your danged pickled eggs.
• Consuming twenty pounds of pickled eggs on a Topic Lords live show.
• Being really impressed by somebody's child-rearing technique.
• The "blank slate" theory -- that children are born with no personality -- being total bullshit.
• A sample size of three technically counting as a pattern.
• Having a dialog with your children rather than just telling them what to do.
• Growing up hating authority and how that informs parenting strategy.
• Doing the bare minimum and getting great results because everyone else just sucks.
• Parents who are basically still children themselves.
• Not having any parenting books to read because you are the first person who has ever been a parent.
• Doing everything being indistinguishable from doing nothing.
• Not having any good way to choose between all the available child-rearing options.
• Not knowing why you read a particular parenting book twenty years ago and also not being sure if it shaped your parenting strategy.
• Making bad decisions because we're all human and we all make bad decisions.
• Being well-equipped to adapt to a changing world.
• Not making a lot of art because your penmanship is terrible and it would just be a blob of nothing.
• Your parents forcing you to take guitar lessons because it would help you get into a good school and it actually getting you into a good school.
• Kids rarely being good at anything.
• The amazing child drummer who amazingly turns into a commensurately even more amazing adult drummer.
• Noodling around with a keyboard as an adult being informed by a decade of rigorous piano lessons as a child.
• Loving Mechwarrior and spending all of grade school drawing spaceships and giant robots.
• Growing up a Scream Tracker kid.
• Loading up a song you like into a tracker and digging deep into its technical details.
• Explaining that this song is only four channels and 200 kilobytes and your mom remaining unimpressed.
• An incredible technical feat that is entirely meaningless to anybody not embedded in its context.
• Coming from a position of empathy and charity by default.
• Two wooden reeds tied together like a duckbill creating a much smoother sound than a wooden reed resting against a hard surface.
• Your band teacher not knowing enough about the bassoon to critique your bassoon playing and your next band teacher switching you to piano.
• Trying to remember all the words you want to look up the etymology of next time you're at a computer.
• Conjectural etymology that seems sensible but isn't actually backed up by evidence.
• Reading ahead because you are bored in class, but that just meaning you'll be even more bored later.
• Getting to 80th percentile of a skill or subject and then moving on to another skill or subject.
• Accidentally hiring someone pretty good at both social work and IT work but it being ridiculous to try to hire someone like that on purpose.
• The multivarious sub-skills required to run a UPS store.
• Not recommending anybody follow your career path because your resume looks like you have some kind of personality disorder.
• Nobody wanting to hire a generalist.
• Just shipping at 90% done because most likely that's good enough.
• Making the news one day but in a year a kid breaking your record.
• Everybody being sad because they're not the best in the world and the best in the world being sad because they're not even better.
• Getting really good at a skill and then computers taking your job anyway.
• Enjoying learning for the intrinsic value of learning.