40. I'll Show Them... I'll Invent Superman!

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July 27th, 2020

1 hr 11 mins 27 secs

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jesse john

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Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being a playable character in Frog Fractions 2.
  • Ranking every Biker Chick from worst to best.
  • Regretting not having more Canadian Lords on the show.
  • Still making your TV PSAs even though nobody watches TV any more.
  • The big robotic articulating arm on the space shuttles.
  • That time Quebec was going to quit Canada.
  • A group shot with one teen of every ethnicity and gender configuration.
  • Reenacting the time someone told the creator of Superman that nobody will care about Superman.
  • Canada's revolting safety PSAs.
  • Hanging maple syrup for treason.
  • The biggest man-made explosion prior to the invention of nuclear weapons.
  • Celebrating the people who people who became successful after leaving your country.
  • Trading on the low-key anti-Americanism that is part of the Canadian national identity.
  • Taking a 45 minute break to worship the military.
  • Deciding that an idea is important and jamming it into the brain of millions of people.
  • Doing your best to enjoy yourself even though you are the worst musician at this particular jam session.
  • The high pressure world of game jamming.
  • The anxiety of waiting to be picked for a sports team.
  • Trusting your collaborators.
  • Not being a mentor so much as a friend who is around to answer questions.
  • Feeling like you failed your tutoring student but he was pleased and passed his course, so probably it was fine.
  • The ongoing war between R programmers and Python programmers.
  • Making your favorite programming language tolerable by totally replacing the syntax.
  • The smoke effect in Super Mario 64 looking like the MS Paint graffiti tool.
  • Goldeneye slappy hands.
  • The difficulty of going back to the video games of the Ugly Period.
  • Playing old video games on an unreasonably large CRT TV that you can't move by yourself.
  • Using modern technology to remove the texture filtering from Nintendo 64 games.
  • Conditioning gamers to desire the next step in graphical realism.
  • An epic story with three CDs full of cutscenes.
  • The old movie connoisseurs who want to see only the best examples of terrible stilted 1940s acting.
  • Making a video game in the mid 00s and having to support both SD and HD aspect ratios.
  • Moving your web site from Geocities to a cooler hosting provider in France who then stops hosting web sites because of a change in French law.
  • A gap in your personal history where no written records exist because they were on the early internet.
  • Letting a web site expire because you built it on old technology that your hosting provider now charges extra to support.
  • A government form asking you to remember every place you've lived for the past fifteen years.
  • The threshold for memory sticking.
  • What we would do with our missing histories if we had them.
  • Allowing yourself to remember a period in your life and then putting it in deep storage.
  • The object as a record of a moment.
  • Dredging the river near the defunct Paramount Records factory in Wisconsin, in hopes of finding pre-war blues records.
  • Old blues music now being exclusively the province of rich white boomers.
  • Writing and recording a fake Willie Brown song to prank record collectors.
  • Recording blues albums so you can sell phonograph cabinets to Black folks who can finally afford nice things.
  • Your record company being unable to obtain shellac during World War 2, so you go back to making chairs.
  • Training a neural network on old blues records to recreate a song using the single shard of the shattered shellac record you found.
  • Finding shards of different shattered shellac records that happen to fit together, and mashing them up.
  • Digitizing LPs by putting them on a flatbed scanner.
  • That time a news broadcast showed the QR code of someone's Bitcoin wallet on screen and someone immediately emptied it.
  • Cutting a new key based on a photograph of someone's key ring, when it's way easier to just break a window.
  • Recovering ancient room ambience by analyzing the striation on ancient pottery.
  • Breaking a code by beating the decryption key out of somebody and not having to read any cryptanalysis white papers.
  • Putting fake information about yourself on Spokeo as part of your personal ARG.
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