16. I Don't Want To Be Skin Dad

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February 10th, 2020

1 hr 8 mins 7 secs

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Lords this week:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Releasing the same game over and over again because it keeps being your best move.
  • Suffering through and finding the magic but still believing you shouldn't have had to suffer.
  • Asking yourself what the problem is and breaking it down.
  • Being here for topics.
  • Understanding that the question you're asking is ridiculous but asking it anyway.
  • What you want only existing for children because their needs are greater.
  • Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy.
  • Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy keeping those blades sharp.
  • The through line from bouldering to Ninja Warrior to Super Mario Bros.
  • Watching the first half of Full Metal Jacket and thinking the obstacle course looks really fun.
  • Putting game show contestants in a video game for the viewers at home but the contestants themselves are just looking at a big green wall.
  • Professional skaters having skate parks in their back yard.
  • Doing American Ninja Warrior every day and getting a lot more miles on the tires.
  • Tony Hawk getting away with skateboarding in a 50-year-old body because he's good enough to not faceplant all the time.
  • Giving a skateboard to an average 50-year-old and saying "go for it buddy."
  • Restarting civilization around your business plan.
  • Making up stories for your children in real-time.
  • Being a DM except nobody else gets a turn, you just keep going.
  • Five years of daily practice to wake up your storytelling brain.
  • Going to an Arlo Guthrie concert because you're old and go to Arlo Guthrie concerts.
  • All of Arlo Guthrie's songs being twenty minute stories like Alice's Restaurant.
  • Thinking that advice sounds wise for somebody else.
  • David Lynch's book on storytelling turning out to actually be about Transcendental Meditation.
  • Actually possibly having deep insights about the universe while being high on drugs.
  • Writing a book by just writing down something you already said and it feeling like someone else wrote the book.
  • Letting the story write itself and then taking credit for it.
  • Having children because you want to become a great writer.
  • Incurring $10,000 of hosting costs because you misconfigured your CDN.
  • A text adventure telling you what you did but not telling you what happened as a result.
  • Markov chain text generation.
  • AI replacing musicians and ultimately most art.
  • AI musicians giving you another album from your favorite band.
  • Exploring AI generated music and sharing your unique discoveries.
  • Seeing creative work as the last bastion of human work that AI can't take from us, but being wrong.
  • Feeling wonder at the achievement but also complete dismay that we've made ourselves irrelevant.
  • Basic income allowing us to look forward to the machines taking all our jobs.
  • All the advantages of AI just turning into more profit for billionaires.
  • Skating through a lucid fever dream and trying to make sense of the chaos, but it's really just chaos.
  • AI Dungeon being a good improv partner but a terrible game.
  • AI generated text being effectively sampled at an unknown granularity and having no idea if this is a unique sentence or if it's lifted wholesale from a Sonic fanfic.
  • Programmers getting worse as a discipline vs. getting worse as people.
  • Forcing everyone on Earth to participate in NaNoWriMo.
  • Building software on top of a teetering stack of dependencies 1,000 feet high because your company probably won't last out the year.
  • Programmers getting better in the same way speed metal guitarists are getting better.
  • Just making the thing and not caring how you make it because it just doesn't matter.
  • Not bothering working really hard to do the easy part really well because the hard part is what matters.
  • Companies being possibly good at their focus and everything else being good enough at best.
  • Some of your best friends being assholes.
  • The best programmers you've met being super sociable and cooperative.
  • Staying and asshole and flaming out because nobody wants to work with you or maturing and sanding off the rough edges and becoming more productive and less of a drag.
  • Not being sure if your co-workers are nice to everyone or just you because you have seniority.
  • The coming generation of programmers seeing programming as a hobby or a career rather than an identity.
  • Blocking the guy driving too fast on the freeway but then it turns out the guy driving too fast was going to the hospital.
  • Doing your best to live like people invented in storybooks.
  • Realizing that everyone around you has lives just as complex and nuanced as you or anyone you know.
  • The violence of walking past someone on the street and dismissing their entire context and history because you have no choice if you want to get on with your life.
  • Projecting an arbitrary order onto the chaos and definitely being wrong.
  • Definitely being wrong anyway so why not think a positive thing rather than a negative one.
  • Changing how you see somebody by imagining them differently.
  • Conceiving of a universe without yourself at the center.
  • Flying off the handle because you've had shit piled on you all day and not because you dislike Kole specifically.
  • Running late about 5% of the time you're driving and also being annoyed by about 5% of drivers going too fast because they're just irresponsible people.
  • Working hard to build positive interactions and trying to see the best possible version of somebody.
  • Instagram being a source of misery because you're comparing yourself to the prettiest people's prettiest moments.
  • Comparing your backstage to someone else's front stage.
  • Choosing to shape your world such that you're not walking around angry all the time.
  • Having a boat and the boat having a name.
  • Not giving your cat a name but permitting it to have a name.
  • Anthropomorphizing the objects you rely.
  • Calling it "the mud room" even though there's no mud and no room.
  • Naming furniture that hurts you "kneebreaker charlie" and not hating it so much because it's a little bit funny.
  • Thinking of an old car that's always breaking down as being like an old friend who's kind of a pain in the ass but you've been through so much together.
  • Being happier loving things.
  • A generic bunny holding an Easter Egg that nobody plays with until you give it a name.
  • The only time you've bought a plant in your life being that time they put googly eyes on a cactus.
  • Your roommate who took all the bows off of the presents under the tree and then shit on the floor.
  • Not wanting to be the skin dad.
  • Having animals to project love onto so your society is more placid and malleable.
  • Cats being way more lovable than most human children.
  • Empathizing with the kid crying on the airplane because you feel like crying too.
  • The kid who's allowed to scream in the grocery store when if you screamed you'd get thrown out of the store or arrested.
  • Putting hundreds of googly eyes on a Roomba because you can't just buy two googly eyes and calling it "Kos-ba."
  • Putting two eyes on the outside of the Roomba and the rest on the inside because you don't want to freak out the squares.
  • What's fruity, cheezma?
  • Trying to get your friends to follow the script of your joke but they keep making their own jokes instead.
  • Tweeting about there being no hits for "fruity cheezma" and now there being one hit for "fruity cheezma."
  • The cheese tea rocking the boba world.
  • Copping to a certain amount of midwestern provincialism.
  • The probability of inhaling boba being very high but it's great though.
  • Blowing a tapioca ball directly into the mouth of your enemy right as they're inhaling.
  • The end of your boba beverage being like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
  • A dare than someone should not have taken and that someone having possibly been you.
  • Cream cheese and fruit going together.
  • The kind of logic you don't want to be applying to food.
  • Putting all your old food combo ideas on the menu without testing any of them because Fruity Cheezma worked out somehow.
  • Wanting peanut butter to work with sliced cheese because you can roll it up like a taquito.
  • Figuring out that milk and Cheerios go together because they're both kind of off-white so next you try orange juice and Cheez-Its.
  • Cheez-Its staying crispy in orange juice because they're so oily.
  • A Cheez-It being named Arthur and loving its mother.
  • The driver in front of you making a right turn on red from the third lane over because she was in a hurry to get to the library and walking up to her to ask for reparations.
  • A telling being told or not being told.
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