124. Call Me Da5id; Da4id Was My Father

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Lords:

• Tyriq
  • https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
• Xander

Topics:

• The year was 1998, and choosing a name with numbers in it was a completely normal thing to do.
  • http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning
• How do you overcome the inertia of old familiar tools when trying to learn new ways to do the same thing?
• I confused Daniel Day-Lewis with Lou Diamond Phillips for years, thinking they were the same person. I'm not sure why but my hypothesis is that it's because they both have three names and they both have that "lou" sound in there.
  • If you really have to know: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/dtxjg/til_that_limp_bizkit_actually_means/
• Sweater Weather: a Love Song to Language, by Sharon Bryan
  • https://www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3Fp=5543.html
• I'm gonna try to make a bartop arcade machine with unconventional controls, I think. Anybody have any tips or suggestions or anything? Also more generally: How about that meatspace creativity? Anybody make anything that occupies real world space lately?
• Ithkuil: the inscrutable conlang that was co-opted by Russian Buddhist cultists

Microtopics:

• Making games and albums.
• In the pluggable range.
• The history of Byzantium.
• The weird mysteries of what happened, what we know, what we don't know, and what didn't happen.
• An average of all the books that don't exist.
• Taking the average of two books.
• The square root of negative Garfield.
• A lossy compression algorithm for plain text.
• The most information dense thing you can change.
• LLLL Cool J.
• Beware the LLs of March.
• All the numbers you might append to your user name.
• Wanting or not wanting to be like Xeno746.
• Social signaling by putting numbers in your user name or by not putting numbers in your user name.
• Role-playing having sponsors because all your idols are influencers.
• Using the term "Information Superhighway" unironically.
• Visually decorating your name.
• Putting card suit emojis around your name and then appending "-chocolate"
• Encoding your identity in emojis and adding them to your user name.
• The double inertias of trying to move plus leaving your comfort zones.
• Jim's advice for learning a new tool.
• Working with a tool the way it's intended to be used.
• Petting a cat the wrong way as a metaphor.
• Actors we confuse with each other.
• Hearing two bands on the same mixtape and getting them confused for the rest of your life.
• Refusing to explain a gross band name on the show.
• Trying to figure out what sex act your parents named you after.
• That Tom Lehrer song that's just a list of all the elements, except it's all your favorite turns of phrase.
• Making a melody so dissonant and weird that the listener dissociates from music and just hears a sequence of pitches on its own merits.
• Having a tongue party in your mouth.
• The Sultan of Swat.
• Loose Lips Buck Up.
• Lifty Nifty, Bright and Shifty.
• Making a bartop arcade machine with unconventional controls.
• The kinetic feel of throwing and catching a flywheel.
• Flipping a series of switches in quick succession.
• A totally arbitrary control scheme that would be weird and interesting for one game but it's been used for thousands.
• Designing your pinball table so that players nudge your pinball cabinet a bit but not too much.
• Reasons for subtle variation in how pinball tables play.
• Buying banned pinball parts at the pinball black market.
• A pinball simulation of shooting cans with a gun.
• The seesaw lever thing for going along the rails.
• Bowling with a shuffleboard.
• Being over monetizing your art.
• Non-Functional Bullshit.
• Non-Fungible Game Experiences, such as when the party you're DMing tries to intimidate NPCs with a severed leg.
• Hobbies that feed your family.
• Making sure your game remains mysterious by ensuring nobody cares enough to solve them.
• Simmering on a thought before you express it.
• Crunchy conlangs.
• Idiosyncratic Oblasts of Russia.
• Telling your boss at the DMV that you need time off to go speak to Russian Buddhist alien abduction cultists about the obscure conlang you invented.
• Taking something functional and making something non-functional out of it to find out what it would look like.
• A Dewey Decimal System for individual words.
• Inventing a categorization system for all human knowledge that's extremely focused on maritime concerns.