156. Society Is Moving In A Direction

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Lords:

• Alex
  • https://twitter.com/alexicographic
  • https://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames/
• JP
  • http://vectorpoem.com/

Topics:

• Your gravestone has a button people can press to play a sound clip, 10 seconds or less. It can loop or be a one-shot, your preference. What sound clip does your gravestone play?
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u8Fd7EHYAg
• Counting the beats in eenie-meenie
• SoundScan and the SoundScan Era
  • https://www.theringer.com/music/2021/5/25/22452539/soundscan-billboard-charts-streaming-numbers
• There Will Come Soft Rains
  • https://poets.org/poem/there-will-come-soft-rains
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(short_story)
• The scorched-earth strategy for Lowest Positive Unique Integer
• "Leaving beautiful ruins" in a videogame

Microtopics:

• A return of many-storied adventure game developers.
• A point and click adventure game that changed the trajectory of your life.
• Suspenders as an architectural feature.
• Onesie pajamas with a trap door.
• People sneaking up behind you and trying to unbutton your poop flap.
• Thoughts that are meant to remain unthought.
• The famous elongated "some."
• A marketing executive saying "nobody will know what a 'tetralogy' is."
• Whether your game studio logo has a sound.
• Console startup noises.
• The button your loved ones can press on your gravestone to hear the Dreamcast startup sound.
• King Solomoning the gif-vs-gif debate.
• The governing body that decides whether your death is cool enough to warrant a gif of your death on your tombstone.
• The kind of people who gravitate to a job that rates everyone's deaths on a five-star scale.
• The IP situation surrounding your gravestone's looping wav button.
• Your tombstone jukebox that plays David Bowie songs when people put a quarter in and the quarters all end up in your casket and if David Bowie wants them he can damn well come and get them.
• Wagering on your ability to read emergent situations.
• Electric Football.
• Covering a metal plate with quarters and flipping the switch that makes the plate vibrate, creating the quarter configuration for optimal money gouging.
• Becoming really good at beating a rigged game.
• Becoming really good at funnel cake.
• Dentists not understanding the motivations people have for drinking soda.
• Largest Sip.
• The liminal space between a Sip and a Gulp.
• Gaming the outcome in Eenie Meenie Miney Moe.
• Whether Eenie Meenie Miney Moe is a solved game.
• A great opportunity to practice believing the lies that we form our wesociety on.
• When Billboard switched from a call-stores-and-ask data collection system to an automated system to gather song sales data, and rap and R&B suddenly started dominating the charts.
• Rockists fudging the numbers.
• The pros and cons of getting a Billboard Hot 100 hit.
• Jukebox charts.
• The Billboard Humming chart based on them listening to the songs people are humming to themselves on the street.
• Who loves the radio hits that everyone you know hates? (People you don't know.)
• Knowing where to stick that quarter.
• White dudes making 17 minute songs.
• Axis of Discourse.
• A directory of mp3s in your Jellyfin server.
• Napster pivoting to NFTs but nobody notices or cares.
• Nostalgia for the Spanish Flu.
• A giant ball of iron with life forms clinging to it.
• The earth continuing to be a lump of iron no matter how badly we treat it.
• Potential human extinction and whether birds would notice it.
• A fully-automated human house of the near to far future.
• A band of roving pranksters in the post-apocalypse who are running around transmitting bad Roomba firmware updates.
• Rolling up on prom with your entourage of four Half-Life scientists and five Barneys.
• Rolling up on the rap battle with your entourage of backup singer Roombas trailing behind you.
• The Mad Max series as prepper porn.
• A good shelf to rest on in the collective psyche.
• Friend deterrent strategies.
• How strategy disclosure alters the gameplay of Rock Paper Scissors.
• Disclosing ahead of the game or Rock Paper Scissors that your strategy will be to punch your opponent repeatedly, and how that affects the way the game is played.
• Satisfactory: an open-world factory building game.
• Building your factories and then leaving them behind.
• Emergent haunted houses in abandoned player-built structures in persistent-world multiplayer games.
• Having an idea for a game feature and having to build the whole game to try the feature out.
• Being scared of weird old crap.
• Adding Pokemon to Minecraft.
• The last gasp of mainstream PC gaming before phones happened.
• An 11 year old game developer getting thrown into the Capitalist snake pit.
• The Human Attention Zoo.
• Kids (or adults) having goofs.
• The Golden Age of the Moddable Game Engine.
• Getting a job based on your Roblox portfolio.