77. A Vocal Quirk Of Your Mind (For Other People)

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01:08:14

April 12th, 2021

1 hr 8 mins 14 secs

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Topics:

Microtopics:

  • A game that has been in early access for 7,000 years.
  • Coming back to software you last used a decade ago and finding that it has a night theme now.
  • Old vs. new Game Maker.
  • Knowing the context a word is borrowed from and assuming more meaning carried over than actually did.
  • Terms that programming borrowed from philosophy, like "monad" and "blockchain."
  • Function-shaped functions.
  • Seeing people misuse a tool and trying to decide whether it'd be better to teach them how to use the tool, or make a new tool that works how they expect.
  • That time someone tried to port Catacomb Kids to C++ before realizing that someone had been adding features to this game for ten years.
  • The Dark Theme era.
  • Jim just happening to know how many lines of code the Frog Fractions remaster is.
  • How many lines of code is reasonable for an action roguelike that one person has worked on for ten years.
  • Measuring code complexity by zipping it and looking at the file size.
  • Designing the rules of a game to stop people from ruining it for themselves.
  • How your laugh maps to your blood type.
  • Deciding that when a character says "..." that means that they farted, and suddenly being able to enjoy Visual Novels.
  • Whether Jay Gatsby saying "old sport" all the time is the same phenomenon as Moogles always saying "kupo."
  • Typing in a swear word when an Animal Crossing character asks you for a new catchphrase and returning the cartridge to GameStop who will sell it to a small child and it'll end up on the local news.
  • Incorporating goat noises into your speech in a subtle enough way that people aren't sure if you just made a goat noise.
  • Everybody having their own weird noise that they made repeatedly instead of just having a face.
  • Deciding that your signature isn't cool enough and hiring a signature designer to help you out.
  • Whether "signature designer" is a real job you can make a living doing.
  • Designing a different unique fart for every character in your JRPG so they each have a fart that fits your personality.
  • Why making a fart noise with your tongue is called a "raspberry."
  • How nobody can tell you've got a duck call under your COVID mask until it's too late.
  • A showerhead plugged into a wall outlet.
  • Heating water as it passes through the showerhead.
  • Reassuring onlookers that you've been showering in an electric shower for decades and you've only been shocked a few times and you just have to not touch the metal plumbing.
  • Wearing rubber shoes in the shower so the electric showerhead doesn't electrocute you.
  • How nobody posting in the thread about electric showers has died.
  • Electric showers waking you up even more effectively than regular showers.
  • Not knowing what people want from things.
  • Nuclear pacemakers.
  • The number of nuclear pacemakers still in use today.
  • Your nuclear pacemaker keeping your heart beating long after the rest of you has died.
  • The Council of the Nuclear Hearts.
  • Plugging your electric shower right into your nuclear heart.
  • Electric flamethrowers.
  • Lighting your cigarette with a tiny taser.
  • 24 seconds of zooming in on the forest canopy.
  • A video which is very dense with frames.
  • A video which is exactly the kind of video that video codecs are be bad at encoding.
  • Star Turns.
  • A web site where people can repost your content uncredited and go viral.
  • A guest accidentally unplugging their headphones followed by thirty seconds of "can you hear me? I can hear you."
  • Standing on a floor that is painted to give you vertigo.
  • Buildings that are cool in this video.
  • Getting really excited every time you see aerial photography.
  • Freeways.
  • Starting with macro shots of urban environments and transitioning to wider shots of rural environments.
  • Canopy shyness.
  • Voronoi diagrams.
  • Preserving aspects of human culture that don't take the form of a physical object.
  • Intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.
  • Intangible culture lost in the natural process of human becomingness.
  • Whether history is worth knowing.
  • A series of Duke Nukem strategy guides collected in the Library of Congress, rebound to look like a hardcover from the 1950s.
  • What it takes to preserve a skill that a community of people practices over the course of their lives.
  • Dance notation for very constrained types of dance.
  • Tugging rituals.
  • Avalanche risk management.
  • Notation for bee dances.
  • Dance notation which is just a list of where all the ping pong balls were.
  • How every culture agrees that Kiki is the spiky one and Bouba is the round one.
  • Wine horses.
  • A very Western centric view of how many instruments have ever existed.
  • How to make the number four out of only letters.
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