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    <fireside:hostname>app03</fireside:hostname>
    <fireside:genDate>Mon, 21 Sep 2026 09:28:08 +0000</fireside:genDate>
    <generator>Fireside (https://fireside.fm)</generator>
    <title>Topic Lords - Episodes Tagged with “Farbs”</title>
    <link>https://topiclords.com/tags/farbs</link>
    <pubDate>Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0700</pubDate>
    <description>Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week.</description>
    <language>en-us</language>
    <itunes:type>episodic</itunes:type>
    <itunes:subtitle>The only place on the internet you can hear topics discussed!</itunes:subtitle>
    <itunes:author>Jim Stormdancer</itunes:author>
    <itunes:summary>Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week.</itunes:summary>
    <itunes:image href="https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-images-2024/podcasts/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/cover.jpg?v=5"/>
    <itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
    <itunes:owner>
      <itunes:name>Jim Stormdancer</itunes:name>
      <itunes:email>jim@goombas.org</itunes:email>
    </itunes:owner>
<itunes:category text="Comedy"/>
<itunes:category text="Education"/>
<itunes:category text="Arts"/>
<item>
  <title>361. Making the Math Do Pretty Things</title>
  <link>https://topiclords.com/making-the-math-do-pretty-things</link>
  <guid isPermaLink="false">2d559fe6-2db9-4b63-92a3-2409afa8fb10</guid>
  <pubDate>Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0700</pubDate>
  <author>Jim Stormdancer</author>
  <enclosure url="https://aphid.fireside.fm/d/1437767933/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/2d559fe6-2db9-4b63-92a3-2409afa8fb10.mp3" length="71299449" type="audio/mpeg"/>
  <itunes:episodeType>full</itunes:episodeType>
  <itunes:author>Jim Stormdancer</itunes:author>
  <itunes:subtitle>Lords: Farbs and Hallie. We discuss beating Dark Souls by achieving enlightenment, writing as a serialization problem, Leslie Benzies making Space Station Silicon Valley,, Ode on a Grecian Urn by John Keats, and learning by copying</itunes:subtitle>
  <itunes:duration>1:13:59</itunes:duration>
  <itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
  <itunes:image href="https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-images-2024/podcasts/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/cover.jpg?v=5"/>
  <description>&lt;p&gt;Lords:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Farbs&lt;br&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="https://farbs.org/" rel="nofollow noopener"&gt;https://farbs.org/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Hallie&lt;br&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="https://moveslow.info/" rel="nofollow noopener"&gt;https://moveslow.info/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Topics:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The only way to truly beat Dark Souls is to achieve enlightenment&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Writing is a serialization problem&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies was lead programmer on Space Station Silicon Valley for the Nintendo 64.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats&lt;br&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn" rel="nofollow noopener"&gt;https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn&lt;/a&gt;&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Learning by copying&lt;br&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Meandering thread of execution: &lt;a href="https://mastodon.social/@Farbs/112679557654266096" rel="nofollow noopener"&gt;https://mastodon.social/@Farbs/112679557654266096&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Microtopics:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Systems where people make meaning out of joy and suffering.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Weighing in on whether video games will still exist a month from now.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Linking the fire or not linking the fire.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Video games that were popular when saving games was expensive.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Who invented corpse runs?&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Finishing your whole life believing you're the hero.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Whether the narrator of the Dark Souls trailer is a character in the game.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Doing the thing you've already proven you can do.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The three stages of grief: betrayal, anger, sense of victory.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Secondhand lore.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Seeking paleblood to transcend the hunt.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Lounging Carl: he's just chillin'.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Getting all the platinum trophies to achieve enlightenment.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. It's worth 50 souls every time!&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;A meter going up and a bell ringing and you're a better person now!&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Daoism Dives.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Force Witches.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Tedious and annoying programming problems.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Taking a nebulous interconnected cloud of data and turning it into a stream of bytes, and vice versa.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Metaphorical Kevin Bacon Game.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Developing your serialization scheme iteratively.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Sorting your evidence by persuasiveness.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Working with data in different ways.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Turning a video game into a sequence of experiences.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Looking at the world as a set of events rather than as a set of objects.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;A video game series where you steal cars.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Having just one good work in you and being proud that you made that one good work.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Shipping a game that's not in the Grand Theft Auto series for the first time in decades.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Clicking on the blog button and it just says "nope" and then clicking on the games button and there's a PHP error.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Void Bastards printing sound effects on the doorways, just like Hunt the Wumpus.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Making the math do pretty things.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Plugging functions into each other.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Doing all your level design by writing stacked modifiers in C code.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Stacking up a bunch of quality of life features and that's it, that's your content authoring system.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Forever panting and forever young.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;A sad sack with consumption, bullied by Lord Byron.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Isn't it nice to not be subject to the passage of time?&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;This urn is never going to catch its breath.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Following your feelings and always being right.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Poetry as form of lossy compression.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Roger Ebert claiming that poetry can never be art.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Rebuilding Zelda 1 in Voxatron.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Pausing the whole game while a single important thing happens.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Making games inside-out.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;How they made games before we killed GOTO.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Trying to explain setjmp/longjmp to a non-programmer.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Committing to the bit and refusing to work with anyone who isn't committed to the bit.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Legitimate Peripheral Participation.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Explaining to Tim how Jamestown could've had online multiplayer.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Rowdy in Different Ways.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Talking to every doctor in order to become a doctor.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Finding a tutorial and deliberately following it wrong.&lt;br&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Acquiring facility in translating between two domains. &lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
</description>
  <content:encoded>
    <![CDATA[<p>Lords:</p>

<ul>
<li>Farbs<br>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://farbs.org/" rel="nofollow noopener">https://farbs.org/</a><br></li>
</ul></li>
<li>Hallie<br>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://moveslow.info/" rel="nofollow noopener">https://moveslow.info/</a></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>

<p>Topics:</p>

<ul>
<li>The only way to truly beat Dark Souls is to achieve enlightenment<br></li>
<li>Writing is a serialization problem<br></li>
<li>Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies was lead programmer on Space Station Silicon Valley for the Nintendo 64.<br></li>
<li>Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats<br>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn" rel="nofollow noopener">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn</a><br></li>
</ul></li>
<li>Learning by copying<br>

<ul>
<li>Meandering thread of execution: <a href="https://mastodon.social/@Farbs/112679557654266096" rel="nofollow noopener">https://mastodon.social/@Farbs/112679557654266096</a></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>

<p>Microtopics:</p>

<ul>
<li>Systems where people make meaning out of joy and suffering.<br></li>
<li>Weighing in on whether video games will still exist a month from now.<br></li>
<li>Linking the fire or not linking the fire.<br></li>
<li>Video games that were popular when saving games was expensive.<br></li>
<li>Who invented corpse runs?<br></li>
<li>Finishing your whole life believing you're the hero.<br></li>
<li>Whether the narrator of the Dark Souls trailer is a character in the game.<br></li>
<li>Doing the thing you've already proven you can do.<br></li>
<li>The three stages of grief: betrayal, anger, sense of victory.<br></li>
<li>Secondhand lore.<br></li>
<li>Seeking paleblood to transcend the hunt.<br></li>
<li>Lounging Carl: he's just chillin'.<br></li>
<li>Getting all the platinum trophies to achieve enlightenment.<br></li>
<li>If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. It's worth 50 souls every time!<br></li>
<li>A meter going up and a bell ringing and you're a better person now!<br></li>
<li>Daoism Dives.<br></li>
<li>Force Witches.<br></li>
<li>Tedious and annoying programming problems.<br></li>
<li>Taking a nebulous interconnected cloud of data and turning it into a stream of bytes, and vice versa.<br></li>
<li>Metaphorical Kevin Bacon Game.<br></li>
<li>Developing your serialization scheme iteratively.<br></li>
<li>Sorting your evidence by persuasiveness.<br></li>
<li>Working with data in different ways.<br></li>
<li>Turning a video game into a sequence of experiences.<br></li>
<li>Looking at the world as a set of events rather than as a set of objects.<br></li>
<li>A video game series where you steal cars.<br></li>
<li>Having just one good work in you and being proud that you made that one good work.<br></li>
<li>Shipping a game that's not in the Grand Theft Auto series for the first time in decades.<br></li>
<li>Clicking on the blog button and it just says "nope" and then clicking on the games button and there's a PHP error.<br></li>
<li>Void Bastards printing sound effects on the doorways, just like Hunt the Wumpus.<br></li>
<li>Making the math do pretty things.<br></li>
<li>Plugging functions into each other.<br></li>
<li>Doing all your level design by writing stacked modifiers in C code.<br></li>
<li>Stacking up a bunch of quality of life features and that's it, that's your content authoring system.<br></li>
<li>Forever panting and forever young.<br></li>
<li>A sad sack with consumption, bullied by Lord Byron.<br></li>
<li>Isn't it nice to not be subject to the passage of time?<br></li>
<li>This urn is never going to catch its breath.<br></li>
<li>Following your feelings and always being right.<br></li>
<li>Poetry as form of lossy compression.<br></li>
<li>Roger Ebert claiming that poetry can never be art.<br></li>
<li>Rebuilding Zelda 1 in Voxatron.<br></li>
<li>Pausing the whole game while a single important thing happens.<br></li>
<li>Making games inside-out.<br></li>
<li>How they made games before we killed GOTO.<br></li>
<li>Trying to explain setjmp/longjmp to a non-programmer.<br></li>
<li>Committing to the bit and refusing to work with anyone who isn't committed to the bit.<br></li>
<li>Legitimate Peripheral Participation.<br></li>
<li>Explaining to Tim how Jamestown could've had online multiplayer.<br></li>
<li>Rowdy in Different Ways.<br></li>
<li>Talking to every doctor in order to become a doctor.<br></li>
<li>Finding a tutorial and deliberately following it wrong.<br></li>
<li>Acquiring facility in translating between two domains.</li>
</ul><p><a rel="payment" href="http://patreon.com/topiclords">Support Topic Lords</a></p>]]>
  </content:encoded>
  <itunes:summary>
    <![CDATA[<p>Lords:</p>

<ul>
<li>Farbs<br>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://farbs.org/" rel="nofollow noopener">https://farbs.org/</a><br></li>
</ul></li>
<li>Hallie<br>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://moveslow.info/" rel="nofollow noopener">https://moveslow.info/</a></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>

<p>Topics:</p>

<ul>
<li>The only way to truly beat Dark Souls is to achieve enlightenment<br></li>
<li>Writing is a serialization problem<br></li>
<li>Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies was lead programmer on Space Station Silicon Valley for the Nintendo 64.<br></li>
<li>Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats<br>

<ul>
<li><a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn" rel="nofollow noopener">https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn</a><br></li>
</ul></li>
<li>Learning by copying<br>

<ul>
<li>Meandering thread of execution: <a href="https://mastodon.social/@Farbs/112679557654266096" rel="nofollow noopener">https://mastodon.social/@Farbs/112679557654266096</a></li>
</ul></li>
</ul>

<p>Microtopics:</p>

<ul>
<li>Systems where people make meaning out of joy and suffering.<br></li>
<li>Weighing in on whether video games will still exist a month from now.<br></li>
<li>Linking the fire or not linking the fire.<br></li>
<li>Video games that were popular when saving games was expensive.<br></li>
<li>Who invented corpse runs?<br></li>
<li>Finishing your whole life believing you're the hero.<br></li>
<li>Whether the narrator of the Dark Souls trailer is a character in the game.<br></li>
<li>Doing the thing you've already proven you can do.<br></li>
<li>The three stages of grief: betrayal, anger, sense of victory.<br></li>
<li>Secondhand lore.<br></li>
<li>Seeking paleblood to transcend the hunt.<br></li>
<li>Lounging Carl: he's just chillin'.<br></li>
<li>Getting all the platinum trophies to achieve enlightenment.<br></li>
<li>If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. It's worth 50 souls every time!<br></li>
<li>A meter going up and a bell ringing and you're a better person now!<br></li>
<li>Daoism Dives.<br></li>
<li>Force Witches.<br></li>
<li>Tedious and annoying programming problems.<br></li>
<li>Taking a nebulous interconnected cloud of data and turning it into a stream of bytes, and vice versa.<br></li>
<li>Metaphorical Kevin Bacon Game.<br></li>
<li>Developing your serialization scheme iteratively.<br></li>
<li>Sorting your evidence by persuasiveness.<br></li>
<li>Working with data in different ways.<br></li>
<li>Turning a video game into a sequence of experiences.<br></li>
<li>Looking at the world as a set of events rather than as a set of objects.<br></li>
<li>A video game series where you steal cars.<br></li>
<li>Having just one good work in you and being proud that you made that one good work.<br></li>
<li>Shipping a game that's not in the Grand Theft Auto series for the first time in decades.<br></li>
<li>Clicking on the blog button and it just says "nope" and then clicking on the games button and there's a PHP error.<br></li>
<li>Void Bastards printing sound effects on the doorways, just like Hunt the Wumpus.<br></li>
<li>Making the math do pretty things.<br></li>
<li>Plugging functions into each other.<br></li>
<li>Doing all your level design by writing stacked modifiers in C code.<br></li>
<li>Stacking up a bunch of quality of life features and that's it, that's your content authoring system.<br></li>
<li>Forever panting and forever young.<br></li>
<li>A sad sack with consumption, bullied by Lord Byron.<br></li>
<li>Isn't it nice to not be subject to the passage of time?<br></li>
<li>This urn is never going to catch its breath.<br></li>
<li>Following your feelings and always being right.<br></li>
<li>Poetry as form of lossy compression.<br></li>
<li>Roger Ebert claiming that poetry can never be art.<br></li>
<li>Rebuilding Zelda 1 in Voxatron.<br></li>
<li>Pausing the whole game while a single important thing happens.<br></li>
<li>Making games inside-out.<br></li>
<li>How they made games before we killed GOTO.<br></li>
<li>Trying to explain setjmp/longjmp to a non-programmer.<br></li>
<li>Committing to the bit and refusing to work with anyone who isn't committed to the bit.<br></li>
<li>Legitimate Peripheral Participation.<br></li>
<li>Explaining to Tim how Jamestown could've had online multiplayer.<br></li>
<li>Rowdy in Different Ways.<br></li>
<li>Talking to every doctor in order to become a doctor.<br></li>
<li>Finding a tutorial and deliberately following it wrong.<br></li>
<li>Acquiring facility in translating between two domains.</li>
</ul><p><a rel="payment" href="http://patreon.com/topiclords">Support Topic Lords</a></p>]]>
  </itunes:summary>
</item>
  </channel>
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