• Ron
  • https://grumpygamer.com/
• Kevin
  • https://rubixsqube.itch.io/

Topics:

• Do you do easy or hard tasks first?
• Magic (not the gathering, prestidigitation) as it exists in 2026
• The thing that makes text adventures interesting
• The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, by Tracy K. Smith
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55517/the-universe-original-motion-picture-soundtrack
• Trash vs Treasure: ultra distant galaxies, little red dots, and brown dwarfs
• Weird hobbies

Microtopics:

• Forgetting what you were going to say about prescription toothpaste.
• Microsoft Encarta '94.
• Back when computers were charming.
• A roguelike where the screen is always scrolling.
• Doing the hard tasks first so you no longer have to think about them.
• Trying to cover air quotes audially.
• Protaskination.
• Solving a topic for the first time ever.
• Advertisements for card tricks.
• Art forms involving lying to people.
• Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie.
• Using the language of punctuation to make people lean forward.
• Donnie Osmond being a jerk.
• Self-working card tricks.
• One of the greatest gifts ever given to you by the universe.
• Winning $6000 in a single spin of roulette and then retiring from gambling.
• Leaving decks of cards in bars that are 80% the same card.
• A mail order service that emails you a video of a begloved man preparing your order to ship.
• Why you own a nine of diamonds single card forcing deck.
• Video reviews that never discuss or show what the product being reviewed actually does.
• Dorky magicians in the Youtube era.
• The text adventure community adopting the Twine community.
• Zork's physics system and lighting model.
• A medium in which a single auteur can make a complete work in a few months.
• The Many Worlds interpretation of Twine adventures.
• Implementing gamepad controls for a text adventure.
• Complete inability to drop items in graphic adventures.
• A Dropping Place.
• Media in which only the author be clever vs. media in which the consumer can also be clever.
• The "that doesn't seem to work" response.
• How you interact with Starship Titanic.
• Robots saying inscrutable stuff to you.
• A firm turn-around wrong-way barrier.
• Keeping the magic of the text parser in your head even as you figure out exactly how it works.
• A text adventure with auto-complete.
• Pulitzer-winning poetry about the entire universe.
• White noise and black noise.
• The dark we've only ever imagined, now audible, thrumming.
• Learning how to hear poetry. (Like, at all.)
• A way of thinking about how the universe was born.
• Modern jazz as another way of exploring existence.
• Reading Shakespeare and having to look up "moiety" again.
• Reading a modern translation of Don Quixote and being annoyed that you can't find a modern translation of Shakespeare.
• Retreating away from the camera in horror.
• Unchecked ambition and desire for power.
• Shakespeare except it's a bunch of lawyers.
• Romeo and Juliet in the Globe Theater except everybody is shooting each other with guns.
• Bill and Ted's Excellent Use of Febreeze.
• JWST images of little weird pimples.
• Astronomers looking at Interlopers and saying "get this trash out of here"
• Leaving bugs in your game because they make the game more interesting.
• There's no such things as trash: it's all treasure to somebody.
• Throwing a disc up into the fizzlers.
• Playing a video game and thinking of a way to really fuck your game up and being compelled to find out if the developers thought of it.
• Always doing exactly what the game tells you not to do.
• Going to the Sega booth at E3 and playing Sonic as slowly as possible.
• Playing games in a way that makes the Sega representative come up and talk to you.
• The production glitches subreddit.
• Comb filtering.
• Arguing about whether it's a mistake that you can hear Alanis Morissette inhale.
• Parts of games that you need to polish and parts you can leave unpolished.
• Jim's secret to shipping video games.
• Polishing and honing and perfecting so much that you ruin the finished product.
• Picking hobbies that don't scale.
• Eating the top 1000 soups in the history of planet Earth.
• The kind of person who gets fulfillment out of people appreciating work you've done for them.
• Letting your wife know that you do have hobbies, actually.
• The Dead Poet's Society scene about measuring the relative merits of poetry.
• Jamming on the coffee table synthesizer, and thinking the whole time "I should make a finished song to upload to a web site"
• Years of meticulous cutting and shaping.

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