114. Memento Maury Povich

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Lords:

• Maxx
  • maxx.infinity@gmail.com
• Elena
  • https://propinquity.me/

Topics:

• Been playing Celeste recently and I'm real into the themes of conflict with oneself vs acceptance of oneself
• The museum of Jurassic Technology and when it's okay to lie to your audience
• Human jaw shrinkage
  • https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_jaw_shrinkage
• Feeding the Worms, by Danusha Lameris
  • http://poetrytreeonthecharles.net/2020/09/feeding-the-worms-by-danusha-lameris/
• Linguistics of Swearing and Taboo
  • The weird Mummy trailer with the missing audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1jg5YlQuT8

Microtopics:

• Getting a lot of calories for your money.
• All your amino acids right there.
• Superman grabbing the bumper and lifting the entire gestalt of the car.
• A "superfood" in the sense of being beyond the concept of food, e.g. antidepressants.
• Whether you get better at running events after running events for a decade.
• Ultimately reconciling with yourself after making a video game about reconciling with yourself.
• A platformer about depression and panic attacks.
• The checkbox in a hard game's accessibility options that allows you to give yourself permission to use the disability options.
• The 8-way joystick gate on the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube.
• Installing little pigeon spikes on the thumb stick to remind yourself to use the d-pad when playing Celeste.
• Iterating when everything you do is slightly difficult.
• A mixed record of enjoying platformers.
• Putting in the effort to making someone's holy video game genre, such as the scrolling shooter or the masocore platformer, accessible to a non-believer.
• A culture of something.
• Being unable to process what's going on in a movie so you look up the Wikipedia plot summary mid-movie.
• Media-related experiences that you miss out on because your priorities lie elsewhere.
• Hating very difficult platformers but also being so good at platformers that you only get mildly frustrated at platformers that are generally considered very difficult.
• An art installation that pretends to be a museum.
• Visiting a museum and at the end of it being unsure what a museum is.
• A glitch in your house where rooms occasionally disappear.
• The genre of joke that takes the form of telling a lie, and the failure modes where the listener believes the lie and gets confused, or where they don't realize it's supposed to be amusing and think you're trying to deceive them.
• Listening to someone tell a story from their life with growing horror and only realizing midway through that they're describing a dream.
• Subscribe to Nitro on Discord and needing to write a SQL query to find the right emoji reaction.
• Using a normally innocuous emoji in a way that is not innocuous on this particular Discord server.
• Using emoji reactions to replace the parental paratextual back channel of information that body language gives you in a real life conversation.
• Whether "human jaw shrinkage" refers to over an individual lifetime or over millennia of evolution.
• Human jaws getting smaller not because of evolutionary pressure, but because we aren't chewing tough grains and nuts as much as our ancestors did.
• Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety and not realizing it until you're in your sixties.
• Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety so you only feel mild disappointment when you get a cut on your foot and your dog eats your foot while you're not paying attention.
• The tickly sensation of yanking metal wire out of the ground.
• Recreational anaphylaxis.
• Drinking hot tea to burn your tongue so your dad won't be disappointed when you react to incredibly spicy ramen.
• The sweetness of apples permeating the pores all over your stringy body.
• The feathery tops of carrots.
• At what point things become gross.
• High and low variance fruit.
• Mush that is beyond comprehension.
• If going on the bus to work was that chaotic Willy Wonka tunnel.
• Getting more reminders of life in your life.
• Google procedurally generating a vacation montage of the time you visited a Holocaust memorial, and playing a jaunty tune over it.
• Giving people unlabeled interfaces that they subconsciously learn how to use.
• Using a fishing rod to hanging a sad mannequin head in front of the lens when you're taking photos that you don't want Google to create a jaunty montage of three years from now.
• Ling 269.
• What that guy is saying in the weird Mummy trailer.
• Pan-Pan the Human Man.
• Studying the brain of the guy who can only say "pan," and there in his brain wrinkles you can read the word "pan" in the place where most people have the dictionary etched.
• An aphasic situation.
• A comprehensive timeline of euphemisms for genitals going back to the 12th century.
• A novel mince to your swear.
• Practicing minced oaths until they are internalized enough to move into swear storage in your brain.
• Finding a stranger in the Alps.
• Americans coming back from World War I with a bunch of new slurs.
• The Holy Shit Shift, where the offensive part of the phrase "holy shit" shifted from one word to the other over time.