68. Unprotected Left In A Hard Vacuum

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

Lords:

• Mara plugs Libby. https://libbyapp.com/welcome
  • maracaelin@gmail.com
• Derek plugs LibriVox. https://librivox.org/
  • https://twitter.com/derekcaelin
  • https://mastodon.technology/@argus

Topics:

• Should we spare our children from our own game nostalgia?
• Working libraries of famous people getting acquired by institutions
• Winston's latest thing is that before peeing in the potty he'll find a hairball on the floor and put it in the potty so he can pee on it
• John asks "In watching my 3 year old develop her own sense of comedy I have realized that comedy might actually be a kind of innate human reaction to interesting incongruity. She likes toilet humor quite a lot despite my partner and I never liking those kinds of jokes. However, I think she likes it because it's very easy for her to understand something like singing 'Happy Birthday to Poop!' whereas other subtler kinds of humor are out of her reach right now."
• Toddlers who secretly compete in pro-gaming tournaments

Microtopics:

• Libby.
• A really good way to use your public library without leaving your house.
• Getting one of those hollowed out books from a Poirot novel where the vial of poison goes except you put your phone in there so people think you're reading books rather than looking at your phone.
• Librivox.
• Listening to some randos reading public domain books.
• Square jawed scientists taking on the world and neither the government nor their frail wives can hold them back.
• Trying to show your four year old Wind Waker and he's annoyed that it's not the Wind Waker remaster for Wii U.
• Subtly guiding your child away from games that prey on gambling addiction.
• Planning a closed environment where you can introduce the history of video games to your child in chronological order, and then realizing that that's how we got modern gamers.
• How to revisit your nostalgia when it's locked inside early Macintosh educational games with bad emulation support.
• Wandering isolated in a sad soundscape.
• Whether World of Warcraft caused your depression or whether losing your job (because of World of Warcraft) caused your depression.
• Eve Online.
• Going into nullsec where there is no sec.
• Forgetting about Eve Online for ten years and coming back to find that your avatar has been practicing whittling cedar this entire time and is now a grandmaster cedar whittler.
• Going to turning left school for five years.
• Collecting all the books in a famous author's working library so scholars can catalogue all the Cheeto fingerprints.
• Studying the working library of the greatest American novelist of all time and it's just autographed copies of all the Twilight novels and the board game "Wits and Wagers."
• Filling your working library with books to impress the scholars studying your life in a hundred years.
• Giving your source code to the Video Game History Foundation for safe keeping.
• The difficulty of preserving the history of online video games.
• Whether an economy based on trading nudes can sustain your video game preservation endowment.
• That time of year when Wikipedia is begging for the nudes again.
• Toilet Mimics
• Whether you have to pee on Cheerios or whether any cereal will do.
• A man's irrepressible need to piss on a fly.
• Monetizing urination.
• The alternate reality where all video games are controlled by a stream of urine, and some fringe developers are making games you control with your hands, and people are like "Is that even a game? You don't even piss on it!"
• Being cornered at a party by an inventor describing his idea for a toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.
• The brown note as a consent issue.
• All-singing, all-dancing, all-peeing.
• Calling your mom on the toilet phone so she can whistle at the frequency that makes you pee.
• Two-factor authentication for pooping.
• When you can't poop because your smart toilet can't connect to the wifi.
• Toilet uptime.
• Every child independently inventing the "happy birthday to poop" song.
• Singing "happy birthday to poop" when the poop has no way to blow out the candles.
• The fecal stage of the Freudian theory of child development.
• The calculus of why we don't find the same joke funny again.
• A gingerbread house that is an architect's nightmare.
• Adults and children making jokes past each other.
• Pete of the Chickens.
• Four year olds who are incredibly good at Rocket League.
• Swearing that you are only four years old so Epic doesn't kick you out of the Rocket League League.
• How physics-driven video games are the perfect constrained environment for a child to excel in.
• Whether your Rocket League skills translate to any other aspect of your life.
• A four year old gamer complaining about noobs.
• Saying "don't forget to like comment and subscribe" instead of "goodbye."
• Being leery of playing video games because every time you touch a controller the truck video stops.
• Texting your grandmother a thousand emojis.
• An app that lets your four year old pretend to text his grandma a thousand emojis.
• Your true self on the Fediverse.
• The realest person on Mastodon.