136. Thanks For Inventing Dengue Fever, Mark Rosewater

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

• Erica plugs increasing optional mask compliance by farting
• Jenni plugs birds
• Jim plugs metaplugs repeating plugs

Topics:

• The System, and by extension, The Talenti Cup System
• Decentralizing social media is gonna be real good for people not yelling at each other & kinda bad for sharing specialized information
• We just taught Winston about "peeing in the woods" when we were going on a hike and now he wants to "pee in the woods" everywhere
  • https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud
• Mark Rosewater designed devil fruits
• Esper says: "As a longtime (since 1999, with only one substantial break) Magic: the Gathering player, it does my heart good to hear Mark Rosewater come up. His GDC talk about lessons he's learned in designing games is really sharp stuff (if a little 101 in places), check it out sometime."
• Decarbonizing the language

Microtopics:

• Meta-plugging repeating plugs.
• Bee Movie but it’s text to speech.
• Increasing optional mask compliance by farting.
• Mass: the volume of gas inside you, and how to increase its compliance.
• A meme that people teach to each other.
• Packing a shoe into a box and opening up a big box of mold years later.
• Categories of things that fit into one-pint gelato cups.
• The Body Box.
• How to make itinerant lifestyles bearable and possible.
• Organizing your entire house into the House Box.
• Using your Dunbar number to keep track of your house plants.
• Getting on Topic Lords by searching "pineapple on pizza"
• Social media platforms that are owned by a rich asshole.
• Drastically improving productivity in the workplace by banning the email forwarding of news articles.
• The overwhelming feeling of shame when you don't have a take on the latest discourse.
• Going on Tori Amos AOL chat to talk to your social group.
• Buddha's list of 89 things that make you angry.
• We've invented a new way to be angry.
• Repeating topics because you've forgotten what you were just talking about.
• Peeing in the laundry closet and calling it peeing in the woods.
• Explaining to a three year old when it's ok and when it's not ok to pee outside.
• Pee-ka-boo.
• Everything sucks and I have no control over anything but I can poop in the front yard.
• Taking increasingly larger shits in Richard Kind's cat box.
• How George Clooney gets away with poop modification.
• Taking increasingly larger shits in the Li-Cor machine that measures leaf respiration.
• Whether playing Tom Jones at work constitutes sexual harassment.
• Tom Jones in his leisure suit.
• Cleaning up the lyrics to make rock and roll palatable to white people but leaving in the line about the "one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store."
• Whether it's still sexual harassment if nobody points out that it's sexual harassment.
• Jocund company.
• Telling the story of the time you saw a bunch of daffodils.
• Seeing a bunch of daffodils and shouting "Fuck! These fucking flowers are fucking pretty as shit!"
• Conceiving of yourself as an indoor person, separate from the outdoors.
• Reading a Japanese dictionary of dirty words and saying "Fuck! These fucking dirty words are fucking good as shit!"
• Conceiving of interior spaces as being one with exterior spaced.
• You can't unpee the bush.
• Finding and eating devil fruits.
• Eating the fruit that lets you talk to dragons when dragons don't exist.
• Seeing a gun dog and assuming that it was a dog that ate a gun fruit but actually it was a gun that ate a dog fruit.
• What happens if you eat a second devil fruit.
• Dengue fever creeping up into Texas from Mexico.
• The best place to contract Dengue Fever.
• Burning the candle at both ends of the day.
• Eating the burrito from both ends.
• Harvesting the bioluminescent fungus.
• Turbines on a windless morn.
• Burning solar panels as a fuel source.
• The worst thing to happen to Twitter/the best thing to happen to Mastodon.
• The Dunbar Number for plants.
• Voting someone out of the marriage because there's only room for one person in here.