351. The Flushable Soda Can
July 13th, 2026
58 mins 45 secs
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About this Episode
Lords:
Topics:
- Remembering the Dynowarz
- Instagram private server, and social media thoughts every Mastodon user had already
- Why don't CPUs do analog arithmetic?
- Leaves, by Ursula LeGuin
Microtopics:
- DogTroid, the first Metroid ROM hack to star a dog.
- Self-finishing games.
- Sparkling water: it's like water but a lot more interesting.
- Caffeine Free Diet Pepsi.
- What sodas foam the most in response to a mento.
- Foam persistence.
- Foaminess reactions of a mento on various vintagesn of Diet Coke.
- Jolt Cola: all the sugar, twice the caffeine, three times the foam.
- A can of soda that's safe to open in a bathroom stall.
- Artisanal Coca Cola cans on Etsy that finally allow you to open a can of soda in a bathroom stall without anyone realizing you're drinking a Coke on the toilet.
- Flushable soda cans: as flushable as a flushable wipe.
- Why do toilets have pee traps when the pee deserves to be free?
- The second worst game in your NES collection.
- Desert Chrome title screens.
- Playing as a little spaceman until you enter the dinosaur mech.
- Shooting some alien brain or maybe a heart.
- 8bitnintendo.science
- How to pick what video games to buy in the late 1980s.
- How Metroid improved on the maze-with-keys genre.
- Nanosaur.
- A velociraptor with a techno-backpack.
- A game that is exhilarating and scary and endless when you're a child turning out to be a twenty minute trifle when you're an adult.
- Trespasser (1998)
- Simulation dinosaur emotions but you can't find a good balance so you just permanently lock them all to angry.
- Installing a violent action game about dinosaurs in the elementary school computer lab because dinosaurs are technically educational.
- Revisiting games that perplexed you as a child.
- Playing bad video games because no matter how bad they are they're still better than going outside and talking to people.
- The one where Kirby eats a car.
- The Roblox-like games you can find by logging into third party Minecraft servers.
- Starting your own Pixelfed server.
- Following the only person you know on Mastodon.
- Bluesky's recommendation algorithms recommendeding you nothing but bots.
- Inventing Internet forums from first principles.
- When your brain makes up garbage and you need a void to shove it into.
- Doing your part to make AI worse.
- CSS Crimes.
- How to find people to follow on Cohost.
- Signing up for a social media site and looking around and realizing you doing know anyone here.
- Mining and reposting.
- The ongoing maintenance requirements of running a Mastodon server.
- Ways you can interact with your family that only work if you have an iOS developer in the family.
- Off-box SQL database backup.
- Hypothetical IRC servers that support chat logs.
- Hardware random number generation.
- The pot of boiling water every Intel CPU draws thermal noise from for random number generation.
- The most commonly used analog computers in 2026.
- The market forces that led to semi-modular synthesizers being available for $300.
- Using your analog CPU to run a million instances of Lunar Lander at once.
- A rustic summer retreat ranch in the hills of Napa Valley, California.
- What makes us perceive the gradient of identities over the course of someone's life as a single identity.
- The most ephemeral thing possible.
- Musing for a few sentences and then thinking "hmm, I could put some line breaks in here and then publish it."
- Musing about the nature of identity, with line breaks.
- Topic Slingers.
- Topics: throw them around a lil bit. They love it. A lot of people don't know that.