281. Mr. Nukem Was My Father

Lords:

• Stevie
• Bri

Topics:

• 3D modeling and my lack of visual imagination
• Cutthroat compounds (my linguistic specialty) – current pursuit is "verb-em" last names – I'm researching the origins of the fictional law offices of Dewey Cheatum and Howe
• Pocket Warwick and other lost software
• For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper, by Joseph Fasano
  • https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/1fvzv1f/poem_for_a_student_who_used_ai_to_write_a_paper/
• Colma's city motto "It's Great to Be Alive in Colma" is great marketing

Microtopics:

• Silly inventor and brainstormer.
• Writing code that generates audio.
• Giving talks at the Odd Salon.
• Coffeehouse revolutionary thinkers.
• Classic Hughes Behavior.
• Looking at Blender again every seven to ten years.
• Imagining a place in any level of detail. (Other than the name.)
• The memory of what a tiger looks like, and whether it rotated on a Lazy Susan.
• Whether seeing things in a dream feels similar to visualization.
• Needing a license to operate as an engineer, but anyone can call themselves an Imagineer.
• Weenies and MacGuffins.
• Drawing something in 2D and tracing it in Blender.
• Different ways to approach level design.
• Thinking of something and putting it in your game.
• Getting your game design playable as soon as possible so you can find out if it's any good.
• A verb and its direct object.
• Misers and drunks and cowards and gluttons.
• Kick 'em Jenny.
• Bop It!
• Plastic keys where the point of the key is that it immediately breaks and you have to buy a new one.
• Lawyer jokes from 19th century Australia.
• Whether Nukem is his last name or just a nickname.
• Syntactic freezes.
• Rude slang words that end up on listicles.
• How "cacafuego" became "spitfire."
• Etymonline shrugging and giving up.
• Not knowing about the alternate pronunciation of parentheses and processes until you get an office job.
• Choosing a comma as one of your hills.
• A unit of sound and meaning that you use to modify another unit of sound and meaning.
• How to pronounce Warwick Davis.
• A Jib Jab.
• A Tamagotchi Situation.
• Boatswains and forecastles.
• Adding redundancy for clarity and also removing it for efficiency.
• If you still have a Jaz disk, what do you even do with it?
• Going to MagFest to see a chip metal band called Master Boot Record and he's throwing floppy disks with Deluxe Paint on them into the crowd.
• Sharing a birthday with a Kentucky Derby winner but not being sure if he's a person or a horse.
• The Friendliest Friend!
• Stu Sutcliffe, the sixth Beatle.
• International Snooker 2012 and Seven Wonders: Ancient Alien Makeover.
• Fantasy consoles that only run Final Fantasy games.
• If it's your first time at Nice Club, you have to Nice.
• Seeing a generation grow up using automation to do a task that you had to do by hand and feeling one way or another about it.
• How to tell whether somebody can reason about a topic and express their thoughts clearly.
• Underpants Gnome Plans.
• Polishing your thought processes until you find one that you agree with.
• Defending Your Thesis, directed by Al Brooks.
• The only place on the Internet you can hear advice about going to college.
• Colma Secrets.
• Noone ever stops in Colma (on purpose)
• Everyone who came to San Francisco and died.
• Go By Train.
• Calling the Colma Historical Society to see if they have a living volunteer there that day.
• Calling a song "Going to Colma" and hoping that the phrase catches on as a euphemism for Kicking the Bucket.
• The Joy of Actual Citizens and People Involved in Government.
• Encyclopedia Briannica.