291. Nair and Nnail: Keratin Erasers

Lords:

• Alexei
• Evan

Topics:

• Silt clouds & underwater visibility as a game mechanic
• The bass pro shop pyramid and the utility calculations of weird buildings
• What happens when your Firefox root certificate expires?
• The Ailing Mirror-Smith
  • https://medium.com/@EvanBalster/the-ailing-mirror-smith-9c4b5a76cd#9520

Microtopics:

• Roguelike Celebration.
• Virtual conferences.
• How to be in a conversation with one person in a room and not the whole room.
• Drinking a polymorph potion to put a different animal emoji next to your user name.
• Roguelikes and Roguelikers.
• Topic munching and topic grazing.
• How to design non-violent roguelikes.
• Spending your paw prints on the "become water" skill so when a human tries to pick you up, you just flow out of their hands.
• Imitone.
• Abruptly tooting a horn.
• Reading an email and then pointing at it and yelling "sold!"
• DSP for game developers.
• Video essays about maritime disasters.
• Penetration diving.
• Huge warning signs in front of every underwater cave.
• Silt Warnings.
• Guideline Entanglement.
• Moving in more directional axes than you normally do.
• Fast things that live underwater.
• Panicking and forgetting that the game is turn based.
• Playing Nethack with a screen reader.
• Multi stage dives to deliver oxygen further and further into a cave system.
• Retrieving the bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald.
• Inventing special hells to put yourself through because the existing hells aren't good enough.
• Gabe Newell's lack of fear response.
• Remembering the time you blacked out and thinking "the brain is really cool."
• Borrowing some time from your cat attack to give to the car crash.
• Scout the Floof.
• Running out of adrenalin and being extremely calm.
• Entering and exiting Tennessee in a state of intense unreality.
• Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt.
• The acoustic properties of a gigantic metal pyramid.
• Getting married inside the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid.
• Hotel rooms attached up the back of the giant fish.
• Why the Egyptians built pyramids rather than other cooler shapes.
• A procedurally generated lady in Canada.
• Importing the Burning Man from Burning Man.
• Stopping at Saskatchewan for gas.
• Home of the World's Biggest Dad.
• Building Ram Pumps in Dwarf Fortress.
• Great Pyramid Ram Pump.
• Mummy Tea.
• A terrible waste of tax dollars that brings joy to children all around the world.
• Firefox telling you "oh shit, you need to update now, dog."
• Configuring Windows Firewall to not allow Windows Updates.
• Protecting your users from malware by opening the floodgates of Internet ads.
• Encino Man.
• Handing Firefox a Baby Ruth and it's like "this tastes like plastic."
• Picking tiny hills to die on as a way to remain mentally stable.
• Escalating lack of politeness from a UK security firm.
• Nitric Acid Piano: sounds great but hurts like heck to play.
• 3D printing new fingernails right onto your bare cuticles every morning.
• Working on a long project in which you see more potency than clarity of purpose.
• Valorizing craft for the sake of craft, disconnected from the use of it.
• In the worst case scenario, how could your tool be used?
• Avoiding doing evil by making morally neutral art.
• Sitting on multiple generations of Cold War techno-optimism.
• Keita Takahashi's manifesto about being a video game romantic.
• Designing things that people can do and enjoy in the world we want to live in.
• Striving to bring people some small amount of a positive emotion.
• Making curry for your colleagues and going totally overboard on it.
• I'm going to go do evil with this curry.
• Learning the flavors of new herbs and spices.
• Fenugreek leaf.
• The worst time in history to get enthusiastic about cooking quiche.
• Trying to figure out how to post.