Lords:

• Alexander
• Amanda

Topics:

• The disappointment of sci-fi stories that are just reskins of stuff that happens on Earth.
• My bitcoin.
  • https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/543952090800734209
• I can't decide whether I'm more annoyed that Wienerschnitzel doesn't serve schnitzel, or that they did for three months in 2017 as a gag.
• Jesse asks "First encountering a song through parody."
• Bad habits that adventure games teach you.

Microtopics:

• Shrinking your pony until it's really small.
• Pulling down the console and typing +mlook.
• Skyrim modding as a more convincing representation of magic than the spell system in the game itself.
• A very cryptic twitter account that just posts numbers.
• What @math_ebooks did to be suspended.
• Wanting to land on a planet and look for Bob but a different planet gets in your way first.
• Sci-fi as a safe lens for exploring our culture without getting people's defenses up.
• Reverse mystery stories.
• Starfish people who communicate through music.
• Watching Solaris because you're really into boring sci-fi.
• An alien invasion movie without the invasion.
• Final Jeopardy asking you to identify the Close Encounters of the Third Kind melody from the interval names.
• The fires of Musical Jeopardy.
• The correlation between how tightly strung your instrument is vs. how tightly strung you are.
• The Star Trek episode where the Enterprise discovers a musician planet where there's a war between the pianists and the oboists.
• Edmonton, the early Bitcoin hub.
• SETI@home never finding anything interesting.
• Losing your Bitcoin wallet.
• Buying a $40,000 coffee with Bitcoin in 2013.
• Giving your college hard drive to a friend to ask them to try to find your Bitcoin wallet without first scouring it for incriminating evidence.
• Deciding you no longer need a memes folder on your hard drive because you can easily find as many memes as you need on the Internet.
• Dressing up as the Murder She Wrote theme song for Meme Day.
• Whether the Murder She Wrote theme song is a meme.
• The barbecue joint that accepts Dogecoin.
• Going to Remedy Chai in Edmonton and getting a butter chicken wrap and a $40,000 chai.
• Liking both hot dogs and schnitzel but hating Wienerschnitzel.
• A joke that most people won't get or notice, and the people who do will be annoyed by it.
• My First Book of Space.
• Hating potatoes until you discover that they are delicious and then hating them even more.
• Your refusal to admit that actually you like potatoes as foreshadowing to every argument you ever have on the Internet.
• The Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dog burrito skipping right from marketing's brain to consumer's mouths without ever being taste-tested by anyone.
• The Brain to Mouth social movement.
• The culinary dimensional space of meat product folded into bread product.
• A hybrid chef/engineer who has an understanding of both fast food pipelines and how to prepare a tasty meal.
• Hearing every Weird Al version of a song before you hear the originals.
• Mathnet.
• Bible versions of pop culture songs so you can sing along to the radio without being full of sin.
• The guy at Bible Camp who rewrote the lyrics of pop music to be about God, who retired back when Christianity was groovy, so the most recent pop music you're allowed to sing is from the 1970s.
• It's getting cold in here, so put on all your coats.
• Sherlock Hemlock.
• Vincent Twice Vincent Twice.
• Monty Python's popularity among Americans who are completely oblivious to what it's satirizing, so a whole generation of American nerds grew up thinking inscrutable nonsense is the pinnacle of comedy. (Which it is.)
• A combination of things you usually don't see tickling your neurons in a novel way.
• The scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio show where Douglas Adams is making fun of disco.
• The missing album that the Backstreet Boys only released in Canada so they could practice being famous.
• Time traveling to past and future Space Quests.
• Doing ridiculous adventure game shit to get a book of matches when you could just go to a store and buy a gosh darned book of matches.
• An adventure game where you can do what makes sense.
• How the Infocom hard boiled detective text adventures were structured differently from traditional text adventures.
• Wanting Roberta Williams to adopt you and now you've blown it.
• The Seattle of Mexico.
• San Francisco, The Everbrown State.
• Roberta Williams tracking you down and adopting you against your will.
• Luring Roberta Williams to your house with promises of trained chickens jumping through hula hoops.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Amanda
  • akotchon@gmail.com
• Alexander is still a math professor

Topics:

• Harpsichord music in public domain for spooky chiptune soundtracks
  • The elements of chip music. https://www.linusakesson.net/music/elements/index.php
• Shareware floppies! Remember those?
  • Skunny the Squirrel: Save Our Pizzas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tceqj1x_Q8Q
  • Skunny Kart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0JzpjINeE0
• The outlandish economic world of Neopets
  • https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1297485937384001537.html
• Running a Beanie Baby arbitrage empire.

Microtopics:

• Programming industrial robots to lift really heavy things.
• Trying teach kids Python when you don't know Python, but it's okay because knowing how for loops work gets you 90% of the way there.
• The consequences of buggy code when the robot is lifting a test tube vs. a car.
• Whether three rotary axes mounted on a big linear slide counts as a robot or is just a fancy conveyer belt.
• A failed branch on the evolutionary tree of keyboard instruments.
• Having to retune your harpsichord multiple times a day if not multiple times per song.
• A harpsichord jumping into organ territory.
• A medieval troubador who is not playing power chords.
• The Famichord.
• Omitting the note that is most heavily implied by the other three notes.
• Conflating Super Mario World and Link to the Past because they both use spooky harpsichord music.
• The difficulty of synthesizing a piano sound.
• A really slow early version of machine learning.
• Conveying musical intensity when you have no volume control.
• Sharpening your own crow quills to maintain your piano.
• Sneaking broken harpsichords into somebody's house while they're sleeping.
• Rompler rock.
• Recognizing a Bach piece because once you typed it into your Commodore 128 as a PLAY statement.
• A floppy disk that you bought in a grocery store when you were six.
• Whether Sir Mix A Lot is actually dead or just represents a dead person in this analogy.
• The internals of the Quake engine.
• A C-like language with no arrays so you need to do everything with linked lists.
• How long humans have been taking square roots for.
• Real-time operating systems.
• Putting your audio code in the same thread as your game code so the audio breaks up if you frame rate dips too low.
• Sending Jim a sample of moustache man.
• A pinball game that plays sound effects at significantly different rates depending on the version of the sound chip.
• Buying a shareware game on a floppy disk at a grocery store for the same price as a blank floppy disk.
• Playing the shareware episode of Doom and being like "I played Doom already, I don't need to pay for it."
• Getting a call from your harpsichord landlord because you haven't paid your harpsichord loans and he refuses to take the harpsichord back.
• Harpsichords requiring daily maintenance or they break down over the span of months.
• Putting your harpsichord in a sauna to keep it moisturized.
• A squirrel in ancient Rome fighting with gladiators over pizza.
• A folder hidden by your mom's inability to do a recursive directory listing.
• Deciding, as a culture, that the way to advance the 2D platformer as a genre is to make it as hard as possible.
• Getting perforated printer paper at the library and drawing your own Prince of Persia levels.
• Writing your opus with fire flowers and station wagons.
• Whether or not it's cool that Mario Paint Composer graduated to twelve tones.
• Back when there was a point to writing songs in different keys.
• 1-800-harpsichord-facts.com
• Delving into Neopets as an outsider and seeing real life principles of economics mirrored in a distorted reflection.
• Making a bad search engine for the player shops so non-competitive shops run by inexperienced players get as much shop traffic as the competitive ones, and so finding a particular item feels like a discovery rather than a given.
• Exploring the outcomes of a search engine that is bad in an interesting way.
• Neopets voter fraud.
• Designing daily quests to keep player shop prices high.
• Writing gradient descent optimized algorithms to optimize your Neopets casino strategy.
• Learning to code because you want the nicest Neopets shop.
• Pushing HTML5 to its limits to get a really big sparkling snowflake in the middle of your ice themed Neopets shop.
• Intentionally broken search bringing back the art of gift giving in the digital age.
• Intentionally not buying something for yourself so someone can give it to you for your birthday.
• Winning a trophy for reading books to your Neopet.
• Reading 140 of the 150 possible space themed books to your Neopet to get that Neopet on the space themed books high score table.
• A nine year old running a Neopets crime syndicate.
• Pre-PayPal digital currencies.
• Convincing your grandma to get you a PO Box and bank account so you can run an underground Beanie Babies empire.
• The minimum and maximum permitted age for legal Beanie Baby arbitrage.
• Editing a magazine and asking them to pay you in online gift cards so they won't figure out you're ten years old and not a 55 year old graduate of the University of Vermont.
• The responsible young scammer who takes the profits from their Beanie Baby arbitrage and uses it to pay for less than their first semester of college tuition.
• Getting an insider tip that Ty is going to retire every Beanie Baby at the end of 1999 and the market is going to tank but not being able to act on it because eBay kicked you off because you're 12 years old.
• Going to juvie for insider trading.
• Living off of Wonder Bread for four months after you get out of your oppressive parents no-wheat household.
• Asking your dad what the internet is and the next day he prints the W3 consortium HTML spec at work and comes home and hands it to you.
• Meeting your best friend in college because you both learned a variant of C++ that will only compile in Microsoft's compiler.
• Making your own podcast, "Ask a Harpsichord," to put all the remaining harpsichord facts that didn't fit in this episode.

Support Topic Lords