21. Strip Laser Tag

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March 16th, 2020

1 hr 7 mins 53 secs

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About this Episode

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Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Being old and knowing nothing.
  • Finding out that you can buy citric acid and put it in your drinking water.
  • Finding out that you can buy concrete and put it in your toilet.
  • The refreshing concrete toilet.
  • Regretting agreeing to do a thing you really enjoy.
  • Defeating procrastinating by discovering what you're afraid of and reframing it or interceding.
  • Worrying that you're incapable of surviving in a capitalist system.
  • Tracing every fear back to a fear of dying alone, like how every page on Wikipedia leads to Philosophy.
  • Wanting to do a thing but having no effective mechanism to prefer any given thing over any other and doing nothing.
  • Hearing syllables and then "ass" and pretending you understand.
  • Learning a word that you didn't know and then explaining it to other people.
  • Breaking your task into small steps and doing the first step.
  • Listening to your emotion and being like "what's your deal"
  • Self-acceptance helping when beating yourself up doesn't.
  • Instead of writing, taking copious notes and then skipping right to editing the notes into a completed text.
  • Laying out an outline and then finishing the essay by removing the bullet points.
  • Having an idea in each hand and holding two more in your left foot and trying to squinch them together into a linear series of thoughts.
  • Everything being related to everything else.
  • Giving people the tools they need to engage with topics.
  • A future-knowing genie who knows you're going to have pizza tonight.
  • Someone having done this topic already on a different podcast.
  • Being the genie you want to see in the world.
  • Causality seeming to flow in reverse.
  • Reassuring the genie that you're not the kind of person who takes two boxes.
  • The genie turning out to just be a guy with a rubber duck.
  • An odd Christmas greeting that you are here for.
  • Living next to people who think it's festive to announce how armed they are.
  • Knocking on your neighbor's door and asking for a cup of machine gun.
  • A corpse wearing a santa hat.
  • Trying to think of any movie that doesn't depict a corpse that could've worn a santa hat.
  • Some of your best friends having machine guns.
  • Being charmed by the utilitarian and efficient design of firearms.
  • Crying in a VR game and the tears filling up the mask until you drown.
  • Strip laser tag.
  • A topic peasant just waltzing in and talking about topics.
  • Editing out the guy hiding with a gun in post.
  • Having an unconscionable amount of bash.org memorized.
  • Waking up from your drugged haze to a flaming burnt cake in the oven and your house is burning down.
  • Being sad because the folks at Chipotle forgot your burrito but then your wife reminds you that you've eaten it already and you just forgot.
  • Everything that you could possibly need to build a thing.
  • Spinning around in an enormous magical hardware store with arms outstretched and an inventory robot fluttering around your skirt and landing on your finger.
  • Metal boxy objects of mysterious provenance.
  • The reaction speed of your transition lenses.
  • Welding masks transitioning to near-opaque in less than a millisecond because at any moment you might use a plasma beam that is brighter than the surface of the sun.
  • Installing permanent earplugs powered by your greasy earwax.
  • Not needing McMaster-Carr after Josh just tells you the answer.
  • An oil timer forcing a door to open or close slowly.
  • Having an idea for a cool Youtube video and assuming there's probably a cool Youtube guy who's already done it.
  • A toddler teaching you how to teach dragon language and the dragons being annoyed you didn't ask them.
  • Asking one of the indigineous people what the name of the hated rival tribe is named and them saying a slur and then being like "okay you're all that now."
  • Circumlocuting around the concept of the color green.
  • Summing up your engineering degree as "f=ma" and "you can't push a rope" and saving your listeners five years.
  • A fairly ingenious use of math that we've had sitting around forever.
  • Sliding rules getting us to the moon because we hadn't invented calculators yet.
  • The content being the same but the context changing.
  • The NES being the game dev platform that is most likely to survive the next thousand years.
  • Trolling through aerospace source code looking for funny comments.
  • Deleting your source code to free up space because nobody is ever going to need to port or revise Final Fantasy 7.
  • Planning a heist to retrieve the floppy disks stashed above the acoustic ceiling tiles of a dry cleaning service.
  • Games being reasonably well-preserved but other kinds of software being mostly lost because teenaged nerds don't care about it.
  • AI pets dying because the company that manufactured them went out of business.
  • Your GMO dog dying because the manufacturer's SSL certificate expired.
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