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

00:00:00
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01:00:44

October 12th, 2020

1 hr 44 secs

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Lords:

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?
  • 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?
  • Nintendo Labo is an industrial design marvel.
  • 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.
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