332. Boston: It's Not a Year

Lords:

• Jin
  • https://awesomedonut.github.io/
• Brad
  • https://rainwarrior.ca/

Topics:

• The shareware games business model
• Thoughts on how to define femininity?
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqloPw5wp48
• The Great Molasses Flood
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrnRNfXm_k4
• Entrance by Rainer Maria Rilke
  • https://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2010/10/rilke-entrance-from-german.html
• Combining magic and science in science fantasy.

Microtopics:

• Lizard for the NES.
• Retrofuturism in ancient China.
• Silkpunk Origins.
• Ultima-inspired indie RPGs from 1994.
• Passing around public domain games on floppy disks.
• Registering shareware to get rid of the nag screen.
• Adventure game hint books as a second channel of income.
• Asking your mom to get a money order to register the shareware version of Impulse Tracker so you can get the Stereo Wav Writer.
• Front loading all the good levels in the shareware episode and selling the crap in the registered episodes.
• The Ur-Quan Masters.
• Printing to PDF.
• Uploading your music to mp3.com.
• Cracking shareware using a known plaintext attack.
• Drawing an image with so much entropy that the Save Robot dances for longer than usual and then plays a sad sound.
• A three hour deep dive on the very popular vampire novel Twilight.
• Going online and googling masculine and/or feminine traits.
• The Four Pillars of Femininity.
• Pants: they're for barbarians.
• Whether Stephanie Meyer was trying to write a treatise on idealized gender roles or whether she was just writing what she thought was cool and fun.
• Popular depictions of women who are masculine in behavior but feminine in appearance.
• Why can't your girlfriend both look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and eat hamburgers like Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
• Why women work so well as horror protagonists.
• Do people cry less in Marvel movies?
• Someone crying so hard in a movie that you start to worry about the actor's social life.
• Tolkien adding a second female character to Lord of the Rings just so he can make the "I am no man" linguistic joke.
• Boston: it's not a year.
• Painting your giant molasses tank brown so it's harder to notice that it's leaking.
• All the children in town walking up and licking the giant leaking molasses tank whenever they feel like a snack.
• Waking up in a pile of dead bodies with your mouth full of molasses.
• Big Enough to be Horrible.
• Getting your architectural plans approved by a government body.
• Gilding the lily when the lily is already extremely memetic.
• Fame: look what it does to people.
• Building a giant tank of anything in the middle of a city.
• Where do you put your 50 million gallons of molasses?
• What happens if you poke the Demon Core with a screwdriver?
• Scientists getting too excited to keep being careful.
• A black and slender tree.
• A word kept in the mouth to grow.
• Eveningfall.
• Putting a tree in the sky while you're creating the world.
• The game you're making giving you ideas about the game you're making.
• Navigating the scientific method in a fantastical universe.
• Lit RPG.
• Dungeon Crawler Carl.
• Using a quarter of the words in your novel to explain the rules of the world like a board game manual.
• Jedi using their powers to boil water for tea.
• Enslaving Jedi to run your steam engine with their mind powers.
• Jedi Inflation.
• Two words that sound good together and now it's your name.