44. Oops! All Biogel

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Lords:

• Jenni is emailable at jenni@jennipolodna.com and plugs Chris's cooking channel on Youtube.
• https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRsnCRAIi-VsRPPX4AtzVGQ/
• Maxx is on Twitter as @mechcem or emailable at maxx.infinity@gmail.com and plugs their game bookclub thing.
• https://groups.google.com/g/game-book-club/about

Topics:

• Not caring if you're duplicating thought work that was done by a ton of people forever ago because you're having a good time.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square
• Correction on Japanese crop microbiome.
• The PXL-2000 camcorder
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000
• This is the first Wikipedia page for a movie that has the entire movie embedded in the page:
  
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Bali
• Search and rescue as an excuse for robotics research.
• What if poop worked like, you ate dinosaur chicken nuggets, you got dinosaur poops.
• It's annoying that it took me so long to realize I love writing dialog trees.

Microtopics:

• Thinking that other people have had sex, when they haven't.
• Making a very good one about fried green boys.
• The dominant recessive two alleles punnett square stuff.
• All the mystery flowers that have been reproducing willy nilly.
• Finding out about Redstone and reinventing computing from scratch.
• Whether figuring out all the crafting shapes is a good part of Minecraft.
• Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility and enjoying the plastic bag upgrade tree.
• Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility but there's lots of fish sticks so you just eat fish sticks.
• Whether fish sticks are frozen fish or are born sticks.
• Making a stick into a spear by holding it in your hand.
• A shopping cart breaking into almost enough pieces to make a new shopping cart.
• The soul of the shopping cart ascending into heaven so you have to play a fishing minigame to get it back.
• A good starter project where after your finish it there are birds in it right now.
• Beginner knowledge work projects feeling useless because somebody already wrote the program you just wrote.
• 3D printer projects resulting in a physical artifact even when there's an error.
• Constantly being annoyed that you're not a scientist in the 1300s.
• How Tycho Brahe was the "greatest naked eye astronomer" because he owned a sextant and had a bunch of spare time that he spent looking up.
• An "octant" possibly being 33% more than a sextant but nobody on the podcast is sure.
• Trying to figure out what "congresstant" means.
• Japanese far right nationalists being terrified of Koreans touching their rice.
• Hearing a Japanese person say a fact about Japan and just assuming that it's true.
• Wes Anderson accidentally validating far right Japanese nationalists by putting their caricatures of a foreigner in Isle of Dogs.
• Watching Japanese television because your Japanese isn't good enough to tell who's being a far right douchebag.
• Muting a TV show and procedurally generating subtitles whenever someone speaks.
• Localizing an anime without knowing what characters were originally saying.
• Sitting there with your 2020 sensibilities going "oh my god."
• Saving video to audio cassette.
• The camera that filmed the two minute performance art scene in Richard Linklater's Slacker.
• Not having time to watch Monty Python movies but hanging eventually internalizing the whole oeuvre from when fans quote it.
• Picking a movie and having to communicate only in lines from that movie for the rest of your life.
• Looking for the movie with the most words in it but Google only wants to tell you the movie with the most f-words in it.
• Not having seen Casino but deciding to say only things that they say in Casino from now on.
• According to this one web page Jim found, Team America World Police only having 1600 words in it.
• Hearing a line from Casino and immediately forgetting it.
• Singing Come to my Window by Melissa Etheridge except with blueberries.
• A mask that covers your eyes but plays a tone in your ears based on the distance of the closest object in front of each eye.
• Watching the entire movie inside the Wikipedia page for the movie.
• Embedding Myst in Wikipedia.
• Putting on your business card that the Frog Fractions Wikipedia page is rated "GA" for "good article."
• Plugging the Wikipedia article for Frog Fractions into GPT-2 and learning facts about future sequels.
• Insect-inspired robots.
• People asking what your robot design is for and always saying "search and rescue" and everybody believing you even though search and rescue people never use robots.
• Making robots that are too small to get military funding because they can't carry a payload.
• Taking an ultrasound of a fly while it's flying.
• Inventing the idiom "cheap as a moth."
• Harvesting antennae from dead moths and attaching it to your circuit board with Bio Gel and your circuit board has a sense of smell until the antenna rots away an hour later.
• Moths not having a circulatory system but they do some stuff with liquids.
• Whether or not Jim's wife needs an army of robot bugs for her park ranger crew.
• Your life goal being to annoy your neighbors with the self-replicating robot mosquito you invented.
• Smearing bio gel on you battery connectors and then inserting any foodstuff into the battery compartment.
• Putting flies on leashes.
• A robot-fighting praying mantis with a perfect record.
• The mantis refusing to fight any given robot more than once.
• Oops, All Biogel.
• Enjoying looking at all your little dinosaur poops.
• Eating alphabet soup consecutively and sending a photo of the toilet to your message recipient.
• Discovering your superpowers at a baby food tasting party.
• Eating baby food for the first time and vienna sausages bursting from every pore.
• Identifying a strange substance by putting it in your mouth.
• Tasting the ash of a cremated person and pooping out their face, then applying the electricity and they come back to life.
• Not discovering that you love writing dialog trees until you're 41.
• Making a mixtape of Nintendo DS ROMs for your partner.
• Writing a dialog tree into a stressful email so you get all the future stressful emails out of the way too.
• Your girlfriend reading your dialog tree linearly so she thinks you want to break up, get married, have a baby, and move to Pittsburgh.
• Gmail basically being a dialog tree nowadays.
• The Gmail Labs feature that predicts the three suggested responses that your recipient will see, so you can rewrite your email until they only get three variations of "Wow, what a great email!"
• Ostensibly being a comedy writer but laughing harder at dialog written by an algorithm.
• Japanese people making an acknowledgement noise for every word you say, and feeling way too validated.
• Reading RPG-style text and imagining somebody making a grunting noise every time a letter appears.