57. A Rationale For Mountains

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Lords:

• Jonah
  • https://works.rip/
• Aaron
  • https://aaronsee.media/ku.html

Topics:

• Graffitti based arguments
• Unphysical physically-motivated procedural content generation
  • Mandelbulb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTpbP5BVtiA
• The inventor of "None Pizza With Left Beef" went on to create "Young Sheldon"
  • The 10th anniversary of None Pizza Left Beef: https://gizmodo.com/reflections-on-the-10th-anniversary-of-none-pizza-with-1819692097
• Jesse asks: "Hobo code"
  • https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a25174860/hobo-code/
• Designing a game around semantic prime theory

Microtopics:

• A game that is not about toppling governments.
• Seeing a political message spray painted on the wall and painting a reasoned response beneath it.
• Going around Athens and restenciling graffiti to be more legible.
• Going to the bathroom to catch up on the latest stall graffiti.
• Graffiti as art versus graffiti as a forum for communication.
• Seeing that there is no graffiti on the bathroom walls at your new office job and bringing a mechanical pencil to work in order to get the party started.
• Sticker bombing your school with stickers saying "good source of fiber" and "for rectal use only."
• The potential of industrial glues.
• Waiting for a telephone pole to be covered with posters thick enough that you can carve a room out of the posters to have your band practice in.
• A city on a massive hill where the hill is made of all the previous cities that were conquered in that place.
• The best edible band flyer glues.
• Generating Perlin noise and picking an elevation for the water level to generate your video game world.
• Simulating tectonic plates to generate your video game world.
• Exploring the Mandelbulb.
• A rationale for mountains.
• Making an apple pie from scratch and having to invent the universe, except it's not an apple pie, it's an alien planetary body.
• Attempting to solve a problem with no reasonable way to validate your solution.
• Doing world building but it's not just putting orcs in a mountain range inventing a way for planets to work that is not plate tectonics.
• The new Frog Fractions game spoiling for all of pop culture including itself.
• A photograph of a disc of plain dough with meatballs scattered loose in the box.
• Hacking the Domino's garlic bread by ordering a pizza with just garlic on it.
• Hatewatching your favorite sitcom.
• Moving to Greece and everybody finding out that you're a nerd and being like "oh I know what your favorite show is."
• Making a TV show where the whole joke is that the main character has Asperger's.
• Finding Chuck Lorre's email address and writing to ask why the show is called "The Big Bang Theory."
• One level of pun connoisseurship up from "what's up dog"
• Ungoogleable questions such as "why is the show called 'big bang theory'" and "what is the volume of a parakeet"
• Finding out the volume of a parrot via water displacement.
• Emailing every combination of letters at gmail.com and asking them all why the show is called "the big bang theory" and hoping that one of them is show creator Chuck Lorre.
• A duck that means "free telephone"
• The canonical hobo object.
• Sitting around the fire with a lead mug you're drinking chili out of.
• How often you need to pretend to faint.
• Reading Wikipedia aloud and going "huh!"
• An alternative Topic Lords podcast with train noises dubbed over it.
• Recording a podcast where you read a stack trace for ten minutes and your seatmate moving to a different place on the train.
• A podcast episode where the host gets carted off in handcuffs and yells "avenge me!" and hits upload with their toe.
• Being arrested on live TV and your fans assuming that it's another mysterious lore drop.
• The optimal minimal subset of all languages.
• The 65 words that can express any human idea.
• A Pinteresty soundbite of knowledge.
• Deep philosophical conversations with your toddler.
• A semantic substrate that is our natural world.
• Persuasive systems having some fundamental level of plausibility because at some level the system has to function.
• Making a career out of building persuasive systems.
• Overcoming difficulty with persistence.
• Telling the story of overcoming difficulty with persistence via a masocore platformer.
• A couple of sentences on a sheet of paper that you then enact.
• Investigating an opaque system and taking away a message.
• Some Frank Lantz tweet threads.
• The indie game community transitioning from focusing on game design to focusing on art design.
• How juicy you should make a game.
• How good the screen shake was on Rod Humble's "The Marriage."
• Spreadsheets like you've never felt them before.
• Cracking knuckles on the juice hose.
• Eating the concept of frying something.