131. GDC Santa Rides Again

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Lords:

• Mike
• Kev
  • http://www.radcade.com/

Topics

• Embracing creative chaos is very hard but paradoxically extremely common?
• Thanatosensitivity
• GDC happened this year! They really did it
• Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy By Thomas Lux
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48483/tarantulas-on-the-lifebuoy
• Being left handed in a right handed world

Microtopics:

• Wanting to learn to program and moving to Maine.
• Learning to program by implementing a meticulous copy of Metroid for the NES.
• Choosing to live a life that feels like an anime training montage.
• How to learn to program while having kids.
• Radical content for radical gamers.
• Having one's mind blown by works of art, as one does.
• The "stone soup bubblegum and baling wire everything went wrong" method of making art.
• What happens when the plan makes contact with the enemy.
• Writing a film with the magic of wintertime as a core theme and not being able to get the permit to film until spring.
• Iterating on your idea with insights you've gleaned from working on your idea.
• Ascertaining the recoverability of any given error.
• The kind of disaster that happens when a culture accustomed to low-cost-error problems tries to work on high-cost-error problems.
• Improvising bridges.
• Programming vs. the disciplined engineering fields.
• The pros and cons of storing a bunch of elephants on the roof.
• The user experience of death.
• Digital ghosts on LinkedIn.
• Logging in to LinkedIn for the first time in eight years and getting a bunch of IMs from a friend who died six years ago.
• Dealing with your dead friend's estate and having to close out all the relationships they were maintaining on OkCupid.
• Thanatechnologies.
• The human events taking place on a separate flow of time than internet time.
• Slug World.
• A human brain computer interaction conference at Noisebridge.
• alt.ctrl.GDC
• Spending all of GDC on the lawn.
• A GDC talk except instead of talking to an auditorium full of 500 people, you're talking to a hotel room full of five people.
• The Unconference Phenomenon.
• Substance-to-fluff ratios.
• Your three GDC lives.
• Going to the talks where they talk about the stuff we're doing to figure out how we can do our stuff better.
• The ascended platonic GDC.
• Getting all Dunbar's Numbered-out and spending all your time talking to people you know.
• Showing your game at a conference to increase the odds that one of the seven people at Sony who can get your game into the Spring Fever promotion will walk by and notice you.
• Making a leveraged play on your charisma and luck stats.
• GDC Santa with the sack of boxed copies of Glittermitten Grove.
• A map of TXT World stitched together out of screenshots, like in the good old days.
• A greybeard coming out of the woodwork to admire your ANSI art map.
• Disrespecting the expo.
• Realizing that somebody is about to ask you how your GDC is going and getting the drop on them by asking how their GDC is going first.
• Katie hauling off and gassing you up.
• The hazards of being Jim Stormdancer.
• A reward for not loving the death of the ugly and even the dangerous.
• The tangled underworld of your socks.
• Pretending to not be afraid of spiders because you don't want your son to be afraid of spiders.
• Growing up with rhino beetles in Liberia.
• Hog snakes.
• The extremely specific feeling of a desperate beetle clinging to your pruny fingertip.
• Formative bug experiences.
• Millions of termites growing wings to do their big ol' termite sex party.
• Sweeping up all the termites who are taking a nap after mating season to fry in palm oil as a special treat.
• The morning where the entire town is covered in bugs which sucks but you get to eat them which rules.
• Reminiscing about which body parts of a termite are saltiest.
• Getting accustomed to eating termites by the time you get to the bottom of the bag.
• Left-handed zippers.
• Trying to use the wrong scissors and assuming that you have some kind of developmental problem.
• The Uniball Jetstream Rollerball, with a pressurized ink reservoir.
• The prince who was promised.
• Fretting with your dominant hand.
• Picking a specific guitar string at speed.
• Whether handedness exists.
• Drawing with gross motor movements.
• Left-handed mugs.
• Left-handed drums vs. open-handed drums.