51. I Don't Want To Eat This Bug, Obviously

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Lords:

• Ben is not on the Internet but is just happy to be here. He recommends Lindsay Ellis, an excellent film critic:
  • https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG1h-Wqjtwz7uUANw6gazRw
• Ryan is The Man Who Messed Up Walking His Dog So Badly It Made The News.
  • http://ryannorth.ca/
  • https://twitter.com/ryanqnorth

Topics:

• Being able to cook a recipe from your mind without being able to explain how.
  • Every recipe has a step called "to taste" that is a mini version of this. How much salt, pepper, chili powder and cumin do I add to these chilaquiles? I donno, it's just muscle memory. But the muscle memory only works for three eggs. More or fewer, I screw it up.
• How many times a day do you remember something stupid you've done in the past? Am I normal and developing as I should?
  • The Ice Magic jingle in Ben’s head for the rest of his life: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0rfL9d4MDJY
• I miss making a game that was immune to bug reports.
• Dan asks: "What would we have in common with intelligent aliens? It seems common for analytical-minded people to claim that mathematical theories are discovered rather than invented. There's a programming theory personality named Phillip Wadler who's claimed that if we met aliens, they would have Lambda Calculus. Another programming personality (on the 'math is invented' side) posted a hypothetical conversation between a human programmer and an alien programmer that went like this:
  • Human: How do you avoid race conditions?
  • Alien: We just look at the different futures and pick one without data races.
  • Alien: How do you calm arithmetic when it's angry?
  • Human: Our math is not sentient."
  • The Atari 2600 screenshot Jim was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
• What's the worst thing you've ever put in your mouth?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_razor_clam
  • Flake in Australia is a deep fried fillet of fish you can order at fish and chip shops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flake_(fish) Usually about the length of a dinner plate.
• Nintendo Labo is an industrial design marvel.
  • Watch someone transform a Nintendo Labo keyboard into an actual synth! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CjLOElL0rY
• Has anyone else noticed that long-anticipated events eventually "happen" and are thereafter "in the past"?
• For years my personal blog was the top internet resource for earlobe cysts.

Microtopics:

• Traveling to E3 from Australia.
• Making games for the Nokia N-Gage.
• Just now realizing that "Squirrel Girl" rhymes.
• Bluffing your way through a title pun because there's limited time in a game jam.
• A pun that you need to be both from England and New Zealand to get.
• Procedures for recreating an unknown recipe when the recipe changes as it's observed.
• A discrete series of steps that can be reproduced
• A bottomless measuring cup that keeps track of how much a substance that passed through it.
• A measuring cup that tells an anonymous third party you how much of a thing it holds, but doesn't tell the user.
• Whether or not anything comes up if you search the internet for minestrone soup recipes.
• Getting owned on Twitter after posting about the Ship of Theseus.
• Feeling dumb and then later feeling dumb about how you felt dumb.
• The mortifying ordeal of being known.
• Dismissing intrusive thoughts with a vocal tic or a spasm.
• Remembering advertising jingles from the 1980s all the goddamned time.
• Whether or not the Zest jingle invented the word "zestfully"
• Corporations owing serious back rent on the space in your brain taken up by advertising jingles.
• Crackly choc-ice.
• Going into a deep existential dread about a forty-year-old t-shirt.
• Calling it the "WC" when it takes way longer to say "WC" than "water closet"
• Asking the waitress where the toilet is and she gives you a weird look and says "in the bathroom, sir."
• Offering your top hat for the nobleman to micturate into.
• Having an audience who sees cool literary references in your work and assumes you did them on purpose.
• Writing an impossible season cliffhanger believe that you're quiting the show, but then not quitting the show and having to somehow resolve the cliffhanger.
• The biggest spoiler being whether or not a work is good or not.
• Living vicariously through someone watching your favorite TV series for the first time.
• Meeting an alien race with sentient math.
• Having just the one math but being certain that it's the only math.
• Doing your best to communicate with intelligent aliens but you can't think of anything to talk about.
• Only trying to contact alien races that you have enough in common with to meaningfully communicate.
• What kind of math a salt-leech would invent.
• Coherent systems of mathematics that don't reflect reality.
• Maths that would hypothetically reflect reality better than ours, and how ours could do better.
• The guy waking you up from your cryogenic sleep explaining to you that we know how to divide by zero now.
• Knowing that if the laws of physics change, your program will break.
• Recompiling once a year to make sure your program breaks when mathematical laws are updated.
• Realizing that the anecdote you're about to tell actually happened to your brother, not you.
• Discovering that ants are extremely sour.
• Ordering a shark kebab and the guy asks if you want crickets on it and you're certain you misheard him so you ask "what are those?" and he says "they're tiny bugs!"
• Crickets just being crunchy until you look at them and realize that you're definitely eating an entire being right now.
• Being stuck with your lame fish and chips when Australians have badass shark and chips.
• Things you learned as a kid and never critically examined as an adult.
• Razor clams: the meal that bites back.
• Building a fully functional steering wheel, with levers and adjustable dials that click, out of cardboard and rubber bands.
• The visual programming environment that comes with Nintendo Labo.
• Buying toys for an eight year old when your son is born because one day he'll be eight.
• Artisanal reprinted Nintendo Labo cardboard components on Etsy.
• Taking your cardboard Nintendo Labo synth on tour and seeing how many gigs it lasts for.
• Everybody really wanting to hear Jim's earlobe cyst story.
• Jim's primary claim to fame before Frog Fractions.
• Jim's top 3 earlobe cyst tips.
• Just how deceptively close to the jugular the earlobe is.
• Getting to watch a stranger's kid grow up because they don't believe you when you say they've got the wrong email address.
• The kind of person who just assumes their email address is their name at gmail.com.
• Holding onto the last vapors of 2012 Twitter.
• Like finally talking to T-Rex.