169. Topicless

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January 16th, 2023

1 hr 12 mins 4 secs

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About this Episode

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Lords:

Topics:

  • America's self-denying culture of compartmentalization
  • Deus Ex: Revision is a mod for Deus Ex that changes maps just enough that it feels like a new game without losing what made the original special.
  • Napster pranks and more generally, fun with the early internet's poor security
  • The Last Titan
  • Topic Lords update: A review of the Gros Michel (aka "Big Mike") banana
  • If AI can tell better stories than you, is it still worth telling them (and why)?

Microtopics:

  • Planning around time zone differences.
  • What bots are left after the bot purge.
  • Text parsers that make it sound like you have silly accents.
  • C++ Coroutines for Everyone!
  • Playing the Frog Fractions soundtrack on mandolin at Jim's wedding reception.
  • Seeing friends catch up.
  • Waiting until the weekend to celebrate your birthday because weekdays are not for fun things.
  • Topicless Topic Peasants.
  • Planning to do things all week so you have things to look forward to all week.
  • How to schedule a movie night.
  • How to hang out with your friends on weekends.
  • Hanging out with your friends once a week because your internet audience demands it.
  • Setting traps for yourself so that you involuntarily have fun.
  • How you felt in the Fall of 2014.
  • Embracing making bad things.
  • Making bad art and dropping it in the company Slack.
  • April cameos.
  • What to do when Jim makes a mistake.
  • Watching a 3D film on a 2D viewing apparatus.
  • New super duper secret places to sneak around in.
  • Lay D Denton.
  • Let me tell you about my Napster pranks.
  • A very specific example of Napster interactions.
  • Authorless messages.
  • Renaming your band's music to have the same name as popular songs so people will download it on Napster.
  • A very benign internet security prank.
  • Telling your friend that you've made an AI chatbot but actually it's you typing the replies and she falls in love with the AI and wants to talk to it all the time.
  • Philly Boys.
  • Taking bets on whether any given domain name leads to porn.
  • Writing a cease and desist letter to the owner of a domain name that you want, claiming that you need it for your nonexistent porn company.
  • Getting out of legal jeopardy by constructing a gay porn web site.
  • An old god, his glory lost to memory.
  • A computer named Roboticus that you can't bear to decommission.
  • Looking on a diorama of dusty objects that represent your lost past.
  • Banana history.
  • A banana that you've never tasted.
  • Buying fruit from the Miami Fruit Organization.
  • The shocking flavor of electrolytes.
  • Fat Mike vs. Big Mike.
  • Quantifying 45 apple varietals without realizing that there is also wide variance within varietals.
  • Having to eat 10,000 bananas before you can safely say you know what they taste like.
  • Eating a bunch of types of bananas and realizing that they all pretty much taste the same.
  • Cotton candy flavored grapes.
  • Strawberries the size (and flavor) of a human heart.
  • Grapples vs. grapples.
  • A banana that is certainly a banana that you can eat.
  • The time Deep Blue glitched out and made a random chess move and Garry Kasparov couldn't figure it out and resigned the match.
  • Teaching a computer how to get flummoxed.
  • The purpose of making art.
  • What about Mario coins?
  • K-Mart music.
  • Smarty Pants, Brain Quest and Booty Blocks.
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