189. If You Don't Know Who Your Wario Is, You're The Wario

Lords:

• Alexander
• Yaros

Topics:

• Somewhat Dim Mirror
• Unique and weird self-bootstrapping computer language - Forth
• I've been getting emails from an Online Casino Guide offering analysis of the relative popularity of characters from the Mario Bros. movie. How did they get my email, and how did they know that this is the kind of thing I want to gamble on?
• The Kraken, by Alfred Tennyson
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kraken_(poem)
• NES dev scene and new games still being released
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Yg0GAX5vw
• You have to heat a black hole to cool it down
• Winston is suddenly really into Power Rangers which I'm not super thrilled about, but it does make me happy that the appeal of cheesy MIDI rock won't be lost on future generations
• Esper says: "The tradition of taking Japanese action stuff and reworking it into an entirely different show is pretty wild, and pretty common. The original idea behind the western release of Sailor Moon was actually going to be a live action cast of young girls who transform into "cartoon scouts" or something, and the legendary anime Macross (known for animating lots of missles with cool smoke trails) was brought over here and entirely rewritten to be Robotech, an already existing western property. Power Rangers specifically comes from the Super Sentai tokusatsu series, of which there's actually two or three dozen seasons, each with more or less individual continuity. They're fun and goofy to watch if you get a chance to see the originals; I was mostly surprised by how self-aware they are."

Microtopics:

• Just playing games you already know whenever you find the time for games.
• Dystopian fiction about all the little annoying things.
• Dystopian fiction about all the terrible TV shows that are on now.
• A guy who thought his idea would work but it didn't.
• A black mirror but a little less black.
• How really shiny black things work.
• Logging in to watch people make themselves miserable.
• Reverse polish notation.
• Giving up on operating systems and deciding to live inside a Forth interpreter.
• Going back to the Cambrian period and being like "what is this shell thing and what is it trying to accomplish?"
• How Forth is like Eurovision.
• Borrowing someone's RPN calculator and being very confused for a moment.
• Your Dymaxion map of the globe.
• The next emulations of Hewlett-Packard reverse polish notation calculators.
• Online Casino Guides and the kinds of email they send.
• A gaming and entertainment experience.
• Naming your movie @ and getting incredible engagement on Twitter.
• How recently Nethack has been patched.
• Carpetology and the study of rugs and carpets even though they're not in the same phylum.
• The Dungeons and Dragons Chick Tract.
• A kid named Wario.
• The Abysmal Sea.
• Unnumbered and enormous polypi.
• Interpreting a poem as a political statement when it's clearly about how giant squids are super cool.
• Lauding this poet's skill with language even though he didn't know the difference between abyssal and abysmal.
• Calling a poem a sonnet when it doesn't meet the criteria of a sonnet just because Tennyson wrote it.
• Wanting to be huge and eat sponges, like the kraken.
• Dendy.
• Buying NES games made this year.
• Sokoban with a Twist.
• MOON 8.
• Releasing chiptunes on vinyl shaped like a square.
• Russian Roulette for the NES making good use of the Zapper.
• Two people who are really bad at archery.
• Pointing your Rambo exploding arrow at the exploding barrel sitting right next to you.
• A turn-based thing where you can kill zombies.
• Forklift simulators in VR.
• NES Maker and GB Studio.
• LLVM's NES back-end.
• Making a NES game in C and never using local variables.
• Finding the free time to do all your hobbies.
• The bigger I am the colder I am, and if you heat me up I get bigger and colder. What am I?
• A tear in geometry that just leaks shit.
• Care and feeding of your pet black hole.
• Pascal's Breakfast.
• Whether it's in your best interest to believe in waffles.
• The International Cult Registry.
• Trying to make a portmanteau of waffle and apocalypse.
• Violence against putty monsters.
• The Horsemen of the Apocalypse Power Rangers spinoff.
• A Power Rangers spinoff made in the last three years that has the exact same production values of the original.
• Writing a new TV show around the action scenes from a different TV show.
• Taking the most expensive special effects shots from every movie and putting them all in one uber-movie.
• Tricking Harrison Ford into being in your movie because he's so old now.