127. Let's e e cummings This Up

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Lords:

• Cort
  • https://twitter.com/postgoodism
• Fabian
  • https://twitter.com/rygorous

Topics:

• Black Square Day (inventing holidays and subsequently forgetting everything about them)
• Nostalgia for old computers isn't because they were good, but because they sucked in ways that were simple to understand
• The Dirtywave M8 tracker
• Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost
  • https://www.greatestpoems.com/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening/

Microtopics:

• The music videos of Max Cooper.
• Styptic pencils.
• Doing archaeology on your own Google calendar.
• A stable time loop where your future self adds "Black Square Day" to your calendar.
• Bringing a palindrome to the palindrome party.
• Telling your visitors "it's Black Square Day; dress appropriately."
• Celebrating the day you really burned the casserole.
• Black Squaroling.
• A way that your community organizes itself.
• Getting in a pissing contest with your neighbors about whose house has the most black squares.
• Booting up to a BASIC prompt so you need to write a short BASIC program to load the program you want to run (probably another BASIC program)
• How the Commodore 64 BASIC determined where the line you were editing started and ended.
• How Commodore 64 BASIC stored lines of code internally.
• Survivorship bias among early microcomputer users.
• Accepting a certain level of brokenness because fixing the problem will take an unbounded amount of time.
• Machines that are simple enough for a single human to understand vs. those that are not.
• What percentage of the Commodore 64's ROM is dedicated to implementing floating point math.
• Varying levels of nostalgia for developing for the Playstation 3.
• The room in London that the Playstation 2 had instead of a debugger.
• The Tool PS2.
• Fetishization of the mid-2010s tower PC
• Second order nostalgia, for what 90s emulation of 80s games looked like.
• Nostalgia for objectively terrible art style.
• All the walls swimming all the time.
• The 15 year nostalgia gap where nobody wants to remember the early 3D console games.
• Making music on the toilet every day.
• Trackers.
• What Trackers are better at vs. traditional DAWs.
• Music that ships with its own source code.
• Technical limitations transforming into a unique aesthetic.
• How to hide a second song in the same tracker module.
• Doing a thing on the screen while music loops.
• A portable device to edit spreadsheets that only has a trackball.
• Looking at your song through a straw.
• Loading a ProTracker module in FastTracker.
• Trying to identify which tracker created the MOD you're reading by looking for file format bugs unique to that tracker.
• Fixing bugs by hex editing an executable and that becomes the version everybody uses now.
• What you call it when an archaeologist writes the file spec.
• Unknown sources of dubious quality.
• Lore of unknown provenance about how to play a mod file.
• Watching dense notation scrolling by.
• Loading tracker music into various players to see how their performances of the same material vary.
• Trying to load up music you wrote fifteen years ago and needing to source old versions of all the plugins you used.
• Watching the woods fill up with snow.
• A very evocative one of those.
• Whether sleep represents death in this poem or if it's just sleep this time.
• Why write a poem.
• Interviewing the author of a poem and then interviewing everyone who ever read the poem before writing the authoritative interpretation of that poem.
• A joke that doesn't really seem like a joke at all.
• Rating a poem on a five star scale and then deciding how many of those stars belong to each of the stanzas.
• The Three Musketeers sequels that nobody has read.
• Getting paid by the line and adding a character to your story that speaks only one word at a time.
• How to write 300 books a year.
• Taking out the but because there's nothing for it to but.
• Ceramic clown statues.