• Adam
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/2769410/Ash__Adams_GOBSMACKED/
• Linker
  • https://linker.itch.io/

Topics:

• Ways you've changed in the last 20 years that have surprised you
• Examples of x animal software running on y animal hardware (ie. fox being cat software on dog hardware)
• This argument about whether erasure poetry is poetry
  • https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/753096096947011584
• Favourite RPG (videogame or tabletop; open to interpretation)

Microtopics:

• Launching a game in the deep past.
• Indiepocalypse.
• After Journey's End vol. 2.
• The Monthly Tape Club.
• Games that are big enough or marketable enough.
• Getting excited about this month's PC Gamer demo disk.
• Zine-like game distribution.
• Making a small game to express a thought.
• Making a living making weird shit.
• The methods of marketing a small game.
• Practices that have existed for thousands of years.
• The boom and bust cycle and why you might or might not get in on the next boom.
• Making a shit-ton of money and continuing to pay your employees rather than laying them off.
• Whether Gen Z is savvy to the MBA brain worms.
• Whether Jim has a college degree.
• New England Sarcastic.
• Learning about having kids and wondering what it'd be like to have a purpose in life.
• Being legally responsible for the survival of the worst roommate imaginable.
• Other People's Dogs.
• How is your life different from when you were 6 years old?
• Becoming a permanent resident of Canada.
• A local theater company producing your play.
• Frog Fractions: it came from space.
• A thing that expresses the maelstrom going on in my head (or soul)
• The six 70s funk songs with a long enough stretch of isolated drums that they became the drums for every song ever.
• How to make art as an expression of human needs.
• Video games: they shouldn't exist.
• Expressing a thought with the skills you enjoy flexing.
• The virtues of having playtesters.
• Bug software running on mammal hardware.
• Tiny cats in the bodies of big cats.
• Service dogs for cheetahs.
• Remaining calm around humans because your dog buddy loves humans.
• Erasure Poetry.
• Oh Someone Oh God And Then Me.
• Formalized rules for determining who gets credit for what when a bunch of people make a piece of art.
• Legal precedents for copyright and reproduction rights.
• Magnetic fridge poetry.
• Inventing an art form that's even more constrained than pixel art somehow.
• Unity of effect.
• Looking at a blurry 16x16 tile and not being quite sure what it's supposed to be.
• RPGs: what even are they?
• What you can get away with within the aesthetics of a black and white Game Boy game.
• Whether Breath of the Wild counts as an immersive sim and whether immersive sims count as RPGs
• Getting into the topic weeds.
• Chained Echoes.
• Observing the sand running through the hourglass.
• Social anxiety preventing you from enjoying tabletop RPGs.
• Playing tabletop RPGs with a bunch of weird theater people.
• Meeting your friend at a bar to catch up on the latest events in his tabletop RPG sessions.
• How to use your name on social media.

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• Ichiro
• Adam

Topics:

• I learned how to animate by watching cartoons as a child (and I'm curious what else folks absorbed as a child that impacted the kind of adult they became)
• I created a Totally Human Rapper that can read up on a game and cut a rap video.
• Frog Fractions is banned from AGDQ
• "Frog Fractions" by Totally Human Rapper
• Tiny Mass Games small games cycle.

Microtopics:

• One of the episodes with a cold open.
• Live from New York, it's.
• Using ocean water as a mixer.
• Being of poop and returning to poop.
• Using the Boston river as a mixer.
• Learning everything you know about love from Robotech.
• Losing your fiancee and marrying an alien instead.
• Paying $6/hr to play a MUD.
• Corresponding with your MUD lover via dead tree letters.
• Playing a MUD and cheating on one avatar with another avatar and eventually realizing that they are played by the same person.
• Sleep is Death.
• The cool part of the Metaverse circa 2005.
• Learning what human relationships look like by watching Saturday morning cartoons.
• Sarah and Duck.
• Pocoyo.
• Busting ghosts. (A very important time in a boy's life.)
• Retired Men's Nude Beach Volleyball League.
• The center of your Venn diagram as a creator.
• Ichiro Paydirt.
• If Tank Girl were a streamer.
• Endless Seinfeld pulling a Microsoft Tay.
• The year of the deluge of AI generated crap.
• Making a BBS door game about traveling into space.
• Zooming out of yourself and looking at it with ghost eyes.
• A game that appears to be family-friendly but is actually porn-adjacent.
• The Timic skip.
• A very respectful way to play Frog Fractions.
• The two concessions Jim made to game design in the Frog Fractions remaster.
• Catering to the you demographic.
• Blanking on Tim Ambrogi's name.
• Noted base jumping game "ahh"
• An underlying engine that just won't swear.
• Saying something interesting enough to be debated by a bunch of people.
• Stemming the tide of mediocrity across streaming platforms.
• The value of making dinner for two people vs. making art for millions of people.
• Having a thought in your head and wanting people to hear it.
• Gluing all the ports shut.
• Games that gradually destroy themselves.
• Follow the Frog, an arcade action adventure.
• Where Totally Human Rapper gets his ideas.
• How to jailbreak ChatGPT.
• A deck building auto battler without the deck.
• A well-scoped game design.
• Not really having anything to say but loving to wrestle with language.
• An AI generated game about AI generated games.
• Polishing a prototype enough to put it in front of a mass audience.
• Rating AI-generated food.
• Synergies and combinatorics.
• The development process for each Frog Fractions game.
• Answering to ask things.

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Lords:

• Mike
  • https://twitter.com/mikeambrogi
• Adam
  • https://twitter.com/adamdeGrandis/

Topics:

• Cooking is awesome
  • https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1023147-tuna-crunch-sandwiches
• Profound kid questions ("how do you like something?")
• Mr. Jaws
  • https://youtu.be/JeYCOFblZRg
• Distant Regard by Tony Hoagland
  • https://condofire.com/2018/12/16/poem-of-the-week-distant-regard-by-tony-hoagland-via-alison-mcghee/
• Having very tight standards that you hold in one part of your creative life that you totally ignore in other parts. As a game artist, it drives me crazy when people make creative decisions without solid design to back them up ("My game has a PSX art style because I think that's neat"), but as a musician I played in a garage rock band without any reason other than "50 year old music is neat".

Microtopics:

• Desktop Dungeons Rewind.
• A rug that looks like a cat's face.
• Starting a game studio with your life.
• How the whole butch/femme thing works.
• After the fall of civilization when the guy with an iPod is the most important person in the village.
• Your FK-IK rigging skills really paying off in the post-apocalypse.
• How much kayfabe is happening right now?
• Whether the PS5 exists and whether you can play Jamestown Plus on it.
• A great way to nurture and nourish your loved ones while also staying away from them.
• Soaking Ls.
• Whether Jim has a sister-in-law.
• Top three texture-bothers-me foods.
• Jim's position on eating eyeballs.
• A snack that can look back.
• Sucking on the window to the soul.
• Ordering your tuna salad extra starchy.
• A deep appreciation of the sandwich arts.
• Making a Youtube series where part of the bit is that it's really professionally made but also that means you need to do all the dang work, and also maybe you're not good enough to do it as professionally as you think.
• Getting a real video editor to do the parts that are edited like a normal video but editing all the parts that are bullshit yourself.
• A daughter in rock climbing camp.
• Describing Cosmic Cat socks to your dad.
• How to enjoy things.
• A series of experiences that enter your body via your sensory organs.
• Laying a framework for understanding the self.
• Encoding your musical taste in a C program.
• Configuring human behavior on an iPad.
• Feeding the Reddit grist mill with season 4 of Westworld.
• Living near a pleasing combination of straightaways and turns so you have to hear people racing motorcycles at all hours.
• The emotional status of the teenager who flipped his car in front of your house.
• What to say after a car accident to convince passers by to not call 911.
• An SUV that looks like a t-rex just tried to eat it driving the wrong way on the Bay Bridge.
• Bombing back into San Francisco in your exploded car.
• Seeing someone driving recklessly but it's okay because the car has a bumper sticker saying "Everything is fine. We're not drinking in here."
• Taking a joke that someone else made and making another joke out of it.
• As topical an artifact as you can imagine.
• Repetitive and familiar two-minute chunks of sound.
• The They Might Be Giants album that has the giant squid on the cover.
• Singing Fingertips from start to finish.
• The amount of work that went into the cover art of Dickie Goodman's Mr. Jaws.
• DJing from a dinghy.
• Writing a thank you note to your travel agent.
• The clouds blowing overhead like governments and years.
• Secular Americans having to reinvent gratitude since they don't pray.
• Parts of you that you think make you a better person.
• Valuing something in yourself but not being sure how you got there.
• Having taught yourself a bunch of hard things and learning to trust the process of learning a skill.
• Civilization: something we agreed to do.
• The difference between doing something professionally and doing it for fun.
• Trying to sneak into a giant hovering ball of rock.
• People who are hungry for topics refusing to hire you.

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