307. The Bad Boy Of Crossword Construction

Lords:

• Ben
• Avery

Topics:

• The Mishima Incident, in which one of the most famous authors in Japan created his own private militia of young men, attempted to overthrow the government and, upon failing, committed ritual suicide.
• City-wide game of hide and seek
• How to stick it to bad Bluetooth actors
• The Carrotman's Lament, by E.L. Hubert
  • https://x.com/sweetstench/status/1724958011754504568
  • Esper says: "Avery’s anecdote about the carrot poem being something he’d do in high school reminded me of something I did in high school, where I took the song 'The Cha Cha Slide' and removed every instance of 'slide to the right' and added a bunch of 'slide to the left' so that people eventually collapsed into the wall. I got to do it at a little party with friends, and it paid off nicely."

Microtopics:

• Where to play some crosswords.
• Cruciverbalism.
• Putting the black squares where the letters don't go.
• Putting structural jokes in your crossword puzzles.
• The cleverer the gimmick, the less fun the crossword puzzle.
• Talking into your phone's transcription software during a five hour drive and having five hours of gibberish at the end of it.
• Fifth caller wins a t-shirt!
• Impossible Owls.
• Squishy details.
• Taking on an apprenticeship with a nobel prize winner.
• The Japanese Self-Defense Force.
• Dressing in bee keeper outfits and hitting each other with sticks.
• Buying swords for your right wing ultra nationalist militia with the proceeds of your prize-winning literature.
• Exhorting the troops to reinstate the emperor of Japan but nobody can hear you because there's a helicopter flying overhead.
• A poster of a kitten next to a poster of a samurai, with diametrically opposed mantras about how you ought to handle failure.
• Topics that leave you speechless.
• Founder Brain.
• Debunking a thing from philosophy.
• The Philosophy of Reversing a Linked List.
• The alternate universe where Banksy is a totalitarian dictator.
• Vladimir Putin tagging up the streets of Bristol in the 90s.
• Top hat, eyeball and coattails.
• The Residents of Theseus.
• Rednex.
• David Bowie starring as Tesla in The Prestige and self-driving off the set.
• The percentage of Teslas on the street
• Nice Stylized T as a Screw Shirt.
• Brainstorming places to hide in Copenhagen.
• The problem of how to define the bounds of the hide and seek legal play field.
• Playing hide and seek and knocking on a stranger's door and asking if you can hide in their house.
• Knocking on the door of the company that moved into the building your company was in six years ago, asking to use the conference room because you're six years late for a meeting.
• Journey to the End of the Night.
• Playing music and speaking in riddles.
• At what point it becomes morally correct to join the zombies.
• Why is it okay to name a thing after another thing? Why is it okay to name a band after someone else's song?
• Whether Skibidi Toilet has been cool, is currently cool, will become cool temporarily, or will become cool and stay forever.
• A meme based on a Youtube thing.
  
• Dadaist comedy Internet videos made in Garry's Mod.
• Changing the head so it's not owned by Valve.
• Generations starting the alphabet over, like hurricane names.
• Turn of the millennium coffee shop war stories.
• Drinking coffee at 2 AM on January 1st, 2000, looking out the window and waiting for the satellites to come crashing down.
• Tech folks successfully convincing people that the Y2K bug is a problem, but not what the problem actually was.
• What the Y2K bug was and how we solved it.
• The Corolla Must Have Control.
• The phone is too eager and the car is too greedy.
• The phone and the bluetooth speaker agreeing to connect, and isn't there somebody you forgot to ask??
• We invented this new thing but we don't know what it's for. Let's try to solve every problem with it and see if anything sticks.
• Everybody migrating to TempleOS to get away from LLMs.
• A lightweight operating system designed to be the Third Temple from the Hebrew bible.
• Writing to your colleague to retract the continuum hypothesizing.
• God's Chosen Programmer.
• Off-Topic Lords.
• A poem on the back of a bag of carrots.
• A poem having been added to a bag of carrots by a scoundrel.
• How many carrots you need to eat before you can be called a carrot man.
• Explaining hidden tracks by first explaining that music used to come in this form called "albums."
• If you have topics to talk about, we have a show for that, you don't put it on a hidden track on a CD in the 1990s.
• Living to regret your self-own.