22. Abstinent Train Polycule

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Lords:

• Ryan (@ryanikecomposer) made a great grilled cheese sandwich in an air fryer two weeks ago.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_fryer
• Alexander is a math professor at DigiPen and trades his chicken flock's eggs to a neighbor for home-roasted coffee beans.
  • https://www.quora.com/profile/Alexander-Young-2

Topics:

• 8:41 Creativity from a seed vs from a box
• 18:41 Every fucking comedy trailer in the 90s used Hall of the Mountain king and it sucked and I hated it and why don't we do that any more
  • https://www.20k.org/episodes/thebooj
• 29:04 Some guy you just met asks to install an HDMI port on your foot. You decide to go for it. When you plug in a TV, what's playing on your foot?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hawk%27s_Skate_Jam
  • https://twitter.com/tonyhawk/status/5184156673
• 40:12 David asks: "Yak shaving in your profession or hobby"
  • https://i.imgur.com/t0XHtgJ.gif
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeboxing
• 49:01 I think about the "abstinence train" from a high school health class video once a week. How can I turn this from distraction into motivation?
• 1:02:00 Multi-lingual animals

Microtopics:

• Making a transcendent grilled cheese in the air fryer.
• Dipping food in terrifyingly hot golden juice that might burn your face off.
• Walking into your friend's house and seeing an edifice.
• Esoteric kitchen appliances that we find invaluable.
• A Kevin Bacon co-working situation.
• An espresso machine where you have to screw the lid down properly or it explodes.
• The adrenaline rush of surviving the cooking process making the food taste way better.
• Trading your chicken's fresh eggs for your neighbor's home-roasted coffee beans.
• Trading jam games for fresh jam.
• Getting super excited by discovering that something is impossible.
• Proving the theorem that something can never be equal to something else.
• Using a constraint to make something new.
• AI-driven space helmets that generate plausible sounds for the space vista you're looking at.
• A naval battle In Space!!;
• Taking the script of an existing movie and adding a bunch of jokes to it.
• Everybody knowing that Shakespeare was a hack but being afraid to say it.
• Marching on the National Mall shrieking about public domain music usage in movie trailers.
• Getting nostalgic about trends you always hated.
• Aphantasia but for envisioning loudspeakers.
• Being the kind of kid that keeps a database of classical music used in film trailers.
• Owen Wilson's goblin-like face, sitting in his hall.
• Looney Tunes characters creeping around while pizzicato strings punctuate their footsteps.
• All classical music being recontextualized as Looney Tunes music.
• John Williams changing one note of your opus and now it's the soundtrack to Star Wars.
• Learning to play a mid-90s cartoon theme on harpsichord and realizing it's basically Hall of the Mountain King with every third note removed.
• The booj.
• Listening to a fake movie trailer and growing excited for a movie that doesn't exist.
• A young child singing a Judas Priest song as if it's a nursery rhyme.
• Putting the booj in trailers for Casablanca and giving 1940s audiences a heart attack.
• Playing the booj outside ancient Rome and Romans inventing the film camera because they want to see the movie so badly.
• Somehow removing even more agency from a "would you rather" question.
• The HDMI port in your foot playing pretzel advertisements.
• Asking your friend if they see the creepy guy staring at the camera in the background of this People's Court episode, but your friend can't get past that the TV episode is playing via an HDMI port on your foot.
• Being assured that whatever comes out of your foot won't kill you.
• The HDMI port in your foot not hurting unless you try to run.
• The HDMI port on your foot playing memories of you running with the Columbia City Running Club.
• Forgetting to run your brain screen saver and getting brain burn-in and the last thing someone said to you faintly ringing in your head forever.
• An AR Tony Hawk skating game where you skate on power lines by holding your phone camera up to them.
• Tony Hawk being a Pokemon.
• The cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro.
• Toddlers discovering the front yard.
• A toddler whaling on a cat but she refuses to run away and just gets annoyed.
• Getting all your cat poking and yanking out of the way as a toddler.
• Yak shaving being a metaphor, hopefully.
• Getting anxiety from hearing yak shaving explained.
• Growing up with an antagonistic relationship with sleeping and by extension your own body.
• Thinking of sleep as step 0 for anything you want to get done tomorrow.
• Wanting a free uninterrupted hour and getting it by sleeping an hour less tonight.
• The hemispheres of your brain having two different chronotypes.
• Trying way too hard to relate to the teens.
• Teens in the 90s being way into locomotives.
• Three humans dressed up as train cars heading for Abstinence Street and the caboose trying to unhook himself because he wants to feel something right now.
• The two front cars of the train polycule trying to convince the caboose that Abstinence Street is really cool actually.
• The Abstinence Train PSA being the direct inspiration for The Human Centipede.
• Ryan being the caboose in this metaphor.
• The awards organization that gives you a trophy for eating your very last peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
• An abstinent train polycule in the railyard of ideas, validating each other's impulses.
• An abstinent train polycule changing the law to allow polygamy.
• Becoming a Zen Master but when your followers think you're meditating, you're actually repeating the Abstinence Train PSA in your head.
• Finally finding the Abstinence Train on YouTube and vaporizing into the atmosphere, your purpose fulfilled.
• A homebrew recreation of the famous Abstinence Train video.
• The results you get when you type "Abstinence Train" into YouTube.
• Wanting to get a job at Google to fix YouTube's search engine so you can search for "Abstinence Train" but having to shave a yak first.
• Mean Girls but all the time and they never grow out of it.
• Chickens having a particular call they make when a hawk appears that means everyone should hide.
• A crow that knows when chickens are warning other chickens about the incipient hawk.
• Being very frustrated that the host put the topics in the wrong order.
• The host leaving the show early but the guests continuing to talk for another fifteen minutes.
• Assuring the listener that you're not bragging when you explain just how many podcasts you've been on.
• Being called out by a podcast you were listening to but not otherwise involved in.
• Being a doctor of mathematics but weighing in on whether dinosaurs were domesticable because it's Quora after all.
• Chickens being way more shareable than your latest math problem.
• Remembering the face of the human that threatened your nest.
• Making decoy nests to fool the government agency trying to get rid of you.
• A crow really just being a black pigeon.
• The sound of a juvenile crow hassling their mom for food.
• Throwing an olive at a murder of crows to meet the one crow who is willing to approach it like it's a live grenade.
• Seattle residents exchanging crow attack stories.
• Jim not being here to ask you if you want to plug anything.