46. Fetch Me A Renaissance Italy Nostalgia!

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Lords:

• Elena plugs whale sharks.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_shark
  • Good whale shark faces:
  • https://www.businessinsider.com/whale-shark-was-caught-on-camera-trying-to-mate-2019-7
  • https://www.livescience.com/55412-whale-sharks.html
• Kappa is Kappa on glowfic.com and viniferavaria on Twitch.
  • https://www.twitch.tv/viniferavaria

Topics:

• Whale sharks.
• Ask Me About My Bizarre Quasi-Fanfiction (Animorphs/Madoka thematic fusion, sword of truth retake, lilite satanist narnia...)
• Did you see that video where the Super Monkey Ball superfan went on a quest to find the narrator's voice actor?
  • Quest to find narrator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inUkotGb-K4
  • A supposed new SMB game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA4bjZm902c
• A ZZT community member recreated the lost ZZT source code from scratch and it compiles to a byte-identical executable
  • https://blog.asie.pl/2020/08/reconstructing-zzt/
• Josh asks "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuai_Kuai_culture"
  • Van Halen and the brown M&Ms http://www.compliancebuilding.com/2009/08/03/compliance-van-halen-and-brown-mms/
• Bug reports and changelogs from video games that are just close enough to real life to be surreal

Microtopics:

• The whale shark's incredibly silly face.
• Lilite Satanist Narnia.
• The Satanist version of what Narnia is to Christians and Golden Compass is to atheists.
• Telling your best friend about the magical key you just found and going off together to have adventures.
• Suddenly becoming monarch of a place you've never heard of and having to set policy when you're thirteen years old and have never taken an economics class in your life and also it's a magical kingdom so it uses magic economics anyway.
• Building a paradise for people against their will.
• Seeing enough sexism that you have to invent a splinter sect to get rid of it.
• Nostalgic fiction from people with really weird backgrounds.
• An 80s-ass computer terminal with an extremely full ashtray next to it.
• Nostalgia for 16th century Polynesia.
• Second-hand nostalgia.
• Going on a quest to find the voice actor of a beloved video game.
• Whether or not Sega is currently producing another Super Monkey Ball.
• Whether or not you should monkey some balls.
• Turning dials at the edge of a board and a ball bearing falls into a hole.
• Going into the recording both with no context for the lines you are about to read.
• Actors reading individual lines in a vacuum rather than reacting to each other.
• Not having a good way to order the lines in your branching script so you deliver the lines to the actor in alphabetical order.
• Using CD audio to store your sounds so you can only have 99 individual things you can play.
• The last of the Guild of Weavers.
• All the adults getting turned into swans and flying away.
• An adventure game where you play a sequence of notes to select a verb.
• Not having perfect pitch but being glad that there is a game mode for people who do.
• Trying to summon a demon from beyond time.
• Escaping reality with the other Weavers and all your friends are horrifically murdered and their ghosts are angry at you.
• Pointing a decompiler at the game and typing in Pascal until it basically matches.
• Comparing two executables by loading them both in a decompiler, rapidly switching between the windows and looking for differences on the screen.
• Using the decompiler released by the NSA to reverse engineer ZZT, so you know the NSA must've reverse-engineered ZZT internally decades ago.
• Whether or not the ZZT source code was lost in an interesting way.
• How ZZT and Unreal were both sold as a video game but really the part people were interested in was the level editor.
• More man-hours than a man has.
• MMO developers releasing the client source code but not being allowed to release the server source code.
• Nobody wanting to port a million line code base to another language.
• Doing your best to elide over the more boring details.
• Fixing about 30 complier errors and getting about another 30 because the compiler doesn't have great error recovery.
• Going back to Flickr to find even higher resolution photos of bugs having sex.
• Changing all the stars on the American flag to bugs.
• What was going on in France.
• How to fix the problem when your game is crashing in France.
• One browser interpreting your integer as a percentage and the other interpreting it as a decimal.
• Upending all of science because it's easier than disabling auto-formatting dates in Excel.
• Approaching a project with the design goal of being as outrageous as possible.
• Playing a game where you're unsure whether the time it crashed was intentional.
• The rigid set of best practices for using snack foods to ensure machinery keeps working correctly.
• The Van Halen brown M&M story as a conscientiousness filter.
• That time Van Halen refused to play because there were brown M&Ms backstage and also the stage wasn't strong enough to hold all their equipment.
• Rules that exist mostly as a way to determine how much the participant cares about being a good member of the community.
• Forgetting your girlfriend's birthday and going back in time to get her a present.
• Spending all day evaluating your list of people you might want to castrate.
• Satanists ritually sacrificing themselves.
• Being attacked by necromantically re-animated yak hooves and hair.
• Your memories of seeing a lovely waterfall being amputated and necromantically re-animated and trying to drown you and it's extremely unclear how to kill the memory of a waterfall.
• The process of getting dwarves to a place where they can do dwarf stuff.
• Sadness that the badgers never made it into Faeries vs. Badgers.
• A son waking up any minute now.