74. The Beef Bar

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Lords:

• Avery might be on Spotify!
  • https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases
• Stevie is at @hryx on Twitter, and hryx.net

Topics:

• In my home town of San Jose, CA there is a Statue of the serpent god Quetzalcoatl. It looks like a large piece of perfectly formed dog poop. Everyone calls it "the poop snake." Let's talk about bad public art.
• Some paleontologists think that T-Rex used its tiny arms to help it get up after sleeping. I wish I had a pair of tiny arms to help me get up after sleeping.
• Doom 1.0's proto-VR mode
• John asks "Philosophical questions and concepts you independently discovered as a child regardless of how well-equipped you may or may not have been to explore them in depth."
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_reverb

Microtopics:

• Putting your album on Spotify.
• Demanding your barista debate you and call him a coward.
• Reading about the philosopher who owns a coffee shop and debating them about ancient Roman tax codes for hours without buying anything.
• Going into a coffee shop just to prove a point.
• The hypothesis that the worse someone is at reading, the better they are at hearing and pronunciation.
• Inventing a time machine so you can be in the San Jose town square when the sculptor uncovers the obsidian poop snake.
• A statue of a ragdoll in a running pose with a realistic baby face superimposed on its stomach.
• A bust of Jesus made out of marshmallow Peeps.
• Trying to depict a half moon in 3D and ending up with a toenail clipping.
• The Pumpkin Fucker.
• A statue of a man being hit in the head with a bottle thrown by a babies flying biplanes.
• The statue at the border of Berkeley and Oakland they put there to remind everybody that Berkeley is us and Oakland is them.
• Being halfway through the Museum of Severed Body Parts when you decide you've had enough.
• The Dunning Kruger effect turning out to be fake.
• A strange way to find out that you have to stop being smug in this particular way.
• A T-rex curled up like a kitten.
• A T-rex sleeping hanging upside down like a bat.
• Dino Riders.
• Getting your wish for an extra pair of arms to help you get out of bed at night, but not being sure where to install them.
• The purpose of Grimace's second set of arms.
• Hiring a large unhappy looking purple guy to be your chain restaurant spokesperson.
• Hearing that the t-rex used his tiny arms to get up after sleeping and stealing t-rex arms from the local Natural History museum so you can use them to get out of bed.
• Deciding not move to the countryside and not heist any more after reading that paleontologists no longer think the t-rex uses its arms to get up from sleeping.
• The movie ending when the protagonists decide to cancel the movie's production.
• A topic you didn't write down.
• A reference to the lord because he's the lord.
• The Keck Cave.
• Some people paying thousands of dollars for a VR setup when these lab mice get it for free.
• Going to a mall in the early 90s and putting on a terrible VR headset that's guaranteed to make you throw up or your money back.
• The two independent promises of early 90s VR, one of which came to fruition decades ago.
• Connecting three monitors over an ipecac network.
• Accidentally saturating the network with packets so that nobody else can use it.
• A networked video game interpreting any incoming packets as a new game state regardless of their provenance.
• VR coming to prominence in the 90s after the Garbage Pail Kids made puking mainstream.
• The R-Zone.
• A VR setup that only shows images to one eye.
• The R-Zone chip tune rendition of the Daytona USA theme.
• Writing a program to convert MIDI music into a monophonic square wave and just accepting its output as the best possible result.
• Asking your parents for Marble Madness and they buy you the Tiger Electronics version of Marble Madness.
• A d-pad dressed up to look like a trackball, to fool your mom.
• Well-designed games that fit within the constraints of the medium.
• A Game and Watch game revealing its final boss by unlocking the hinge that lets you fold the LCD screen together like a Mad Fold-In.
• Barcode Battler.
• A slot to swipe cards.
• Trying to find the best barcode to swipe to create the swolest Barcode Battler.
• Doctoring barcodes with a sharpie by making the Beef Bar thicker.
• Learning to read barcodes by sight.
• Bleeping out a story with the R-Zone Daytona USA theme if it turns out you've already heard the story before.
• Convincing a barista to sign up for your Bitcoin wallet software so you can pay for your coffee in Bitcoin.
• Putting up QR codes of your coffee shop's menu all around the city so curious people can scan your QR code and be like "oh, luckily I was looking for a coffee shop, I wonder if this one is nearby."
• Tattooing a QR code of your coffee menu on your arm.
• Inventing the philosophical concept of the toothbrush and thinking "nah, that'd never work."
• Staring at the bathroom tiles while you invent the Pythagorean Theorem.
• Independently inventing the philosophical concept of Alf.
• Alf's real name in the Alf lore.
• Seeing Alf mourn the destruction of his home planet and realizing that one day everyone you know will die.
• A real rip-the-bandaid-off approach to introducing the concept of mortality.
• Alf Clausen, the composer of the ALF theme song.