• Chris
• Fabian
  • https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/

Topics:

• Oops, my 3D printer became a hobby
• GTA's AI is not trying to screw with you with its sudden lane changes and T-boning you at intersections, it's just oblivious. (Probably.)
  • Esper says: "I can confirm the traffic AI in Cyberpunk 2077 is still hilarious. I set my car to 'auto drive' and after maybe 30 seconds it took a hard right into the ocean. Maybe that’s lore accurate, who knows."
• Alberic Whale and the Enigma Layer
  • https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/31-12-2018/summer-reissue-the-mystery-of-zach-new-zealands-all-too-miraculous-medical-ai
  • https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/13-01-2020/rip-zach-probe-finds-serious-wrongdoing-over-miracle-medical-ai
• Between What I See and What I Say…, by Octavio Paz
  • https://www.wisdomportal.com/PoetryAnthology/OctavioPaz-Anthology.html

Microtopics:

• A coffee shop that exists here because of the port of Oakland.
• Popping unroasted coffee beans into your mouth like peanuts.
• The worst tasting and most caffeinated cup of coffee you've ever had.
• Your local library.
• Things that should not be businesses.
• Three possible purposes of universities.
• Finding a new hobby (derogatory)
• 3D printing a selection of action figures for your wedding.
• That one person you know who's really into 3D printers.
• Why having a broken 3D printer counts as a hobby where having a broken refrigerator is just a situation.
• Yanking out some gunk with pliers in hopes that that'll fix it.
• Your 3D printer breaking halfway through your wedding figurine project so you have to make the other other half out of milled aluminum.
• IBM Selectric Typewriters shipping with a repair guy who lives in your spare bedroom in case it breaks.
• Amazon sending an Amazon warrior to repair your 3D printer but since you only paid for the cheap extended warranty she's allowed to attack anybody including you.
• Whether Balatro is trying to deliberately find weaknesses in your build.
• Higher fidelity graphics coming with expectations of higher fidelity traffic modeling.
• Car AI in open world games being as dumb as the developers can get away with, except for in Cyberpunk 2077, where they're dumber than the developers can get away with.
• Whacking at it until it's good enough to ship.
• Traffic tuning in GTA Vice City.
• Playing games with really smart, effective AI, like Chessmaster 2000 and X-Com, and realizing that actually having really smart AI is no fun.
• Skating around with rollerblades on your elbows and knees.
• Everything's a tuna can.
• Three car accidents in six weeks.
• Conscientiously objecting to military service so they insist you get a driver's license instead.
• Driving through a haunted house to train the braking reflex in response to being startled.
• Whatever happened to ol' Alby Whale?
• The AI assistant named Zack turning out to just be a dude named Zack.
• Adorable tiny food delivery robots who turn out to just be remote controlled by a guy hiding around the corner.
• Waymo cars blocking major thoroughfares for hours at a time.
• Multitasking between all the most stressful, confusing driving situations.
• Self-driving cars (allegedly) turning self-driving off half a second before impact so the impact is blamed on the human operator.
• Several hundred tons of liquid nitrogen cooled supercomputer.
• Blaming your spelling errors on The Enigma Layer.
• Having seen more proof of your AI assistant than you have of god.
• It's scammers and hucksters all the way down.
• Whether DLSS is taking away game developer jobs.
• What happens when you go from a three word Markov model to a five word markov model.
• A giant prank with no particular end-game in sight.
• Acts of speech.
• Poetry as synesthesia.
• Trying to explain in words why that cat is acting weird when the cat doesn't think in words at all.
• My Psychosis, my Bicycle and I, by Fritz B. Simon.
• Trying to figure out how football works when you can't see the players, only the referee.
• Feeling some type of way.
• Trying to take musical ideas and apply them outside of the realm of music.
• Creating words that dance around concepts.
• Getting stuck forever in your cringe phase.
• Opportunities to write the same program over and over again.
• A melancholy linked list implementation.
• Passive-aggressive C code.
• Java Enterprise Abstract Singleton Proxy Factory Bean.
• Remember printed manuals?
• The international obfuscated C code contest.
• What made the 3D accelerated demo scene interesting again.
• How much code you can fit in 64k if you don't link to anything.
• Secret Topics.

Support Topic Lords

Lords:

• Cort
  • https://twitter.com/postgoodism
• Fabian
  • https://twitter.com/rygorous

Topics:

• Black Square Day (inventing holidays and subsequently forgetting everything about them)
• Nostalgia for old computers isn't because they were good, but because they sucked in ways that were simple to understand
• The Dirtywave M8 tracker
• Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost
  • https://www.greatestpoems.com/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening/

Microtopics:

• The music videos of Max Cooper.
• Styptic pencils.
• Doing archaeology on your own Google calendar.
• A stable time loop where your future self adds "Black Square Day" to your calendar.
• Bringing a palindrome to the palindrome party.
• Telling your visitors "it's Black Square Day; dress appropriately."
• Celebrating the day you really burned the casserole.
• Black Squaroling.
• A way that your community organizes itself.
• Getting in a pissing contest with your neighbors about whose house has the most black squares.
• Booting up to a BASIC prompt so you need to write a short BASIC program to load the program you want to run (probably another BASIC program)
• How the Commodore 64 BASIC determined where the line you were editing started and ended.
• How Commodore 64 BASIC stored lines of code internally.
• Survivorship bias among early microcomputer users.
• Accepting a certain level of brokenness because fixing the problem will take an unbounded amount of time.
• Machines that are simple enough for a single human to understand vs. those that are not.
• What percentage of the Commodore 64's ROM is dedicated to implementing floating point math.
• Varying levels of nostalgia for developing for the Playstation 3.
• The room in London that the Playstation 2 had instead of a debugger.
• The Tool PS2.
• Fetishization of the mid-2010s tower PC
• Second order nostalgia, for what 90s emulation of 80s games looked like.
• Nostalgia for objectively terrible art style.
• All the walls swimming all the time.
• The 15 year nostalgia gap where nobody wants to remember the early 3D console games.
• Making music on the toilet every day.
• Trackers.
• What Trackers are better at vs. traditional DAWs.
• Music that ships with its own source code.
• Technical limitations transforming into a unique aesthetic.
• How to hide a second song in the same tracker module.
• Doing a thing on the screen while music loops.
• A portable device to edit spreadsheets that only has a trackball.
• Looking at your song through a straw.
• Loading a ProTracker module in FastTracker.
• Trying to identify which tracker created the MOD you're reading by looking for file format bugs unique to that tracker.
• Fixing bugs by hex editing an executable and that becomes the version everybody uses now.
• What you call it when an archaeologist writes the file spec.
• Unknown sources of dubious quality.
• Lore of unknown provenance about how to play a mod file.
• Watching dense notation scrolling by.
• Loading tracker music into various players to see how their performances of the same material vary.
• Trying to load up music you wrote fifteen years ago and needing to source old versions of all the plugins you used.
• Watching the woods fill up with snow.
• A very evocative one of those.
• Whether sleep represents death in this poem or if it's just sleep this time.
• Why write a poem.
• Interviewing the author of a poem and then interviewing everyone who ever read the poem before writing the authoritative interpretation of that poem.
• A joke that doesn't really seem like a joke at all.
• Rating a poem on a five star scale and then deciding how many of those stars belong to each of the stanzas.
• The Three Musketeers sequels that nobody has read.
• Getting paid by the line and adding a character to your story that speaks only one word at a time.
• How to write 300 books a year.
• Taking out the but because there's nothing for it to but.
• Ceramic clown statues.

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