43. You Vs. The One Your Mom Told You To Worry About

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Lords:

• Alexander teaches math at the college level, which has been quite an experience the past few months.
• Jonah makes music for video games, for example Pony Island.
  • http://works.rip/

Topics:

• TI-83 games. Specifically, Tie Fighter / Bobsled / Indy500.
• The jazz fusion act that inspired all video game music.
  • This is the concert we refer to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBD1_mrRUIk
  • But these are the specific T-Square songs included in the episode:
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZaUPGjjA4c
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRRmA1I3UNY
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V3KDQh9DVI
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYie77YHkns
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWI_%28musical_instrument%29
  • "Pronounced EE-wee also known as a robo-oboe"
  • This particular Adventure Playground seems to imply the purpose of the nails is to allow children to build things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Playground_(Berkeley)
• Wikipedia in different languages has different opinions on stuff.
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome
• Quill asks: "My name is [name] and i'm here to say [...]" rap cliche can be dated back to a 1940's Chiquita banana commercial"
  • https://youtu.be/RFDOI24RRAE
  • https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/whomst-among-us-let-the-dogs-out/
  • http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME05/Oldsweetsongs.shtml
• Jamming at full leisure speed.
  • https://jsenzel.itch.io/old-friends
• Cartography and meteorology on weirdly-shaped fantasy worlds.
  • https://imgur.com/a/AFwvAoB
• The Doctor Who theme was created before widely available synthesizers.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75V4ClJZME4
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIEkLww3lg
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0aflcF0-ys
  • https://goodak.weebly.com/
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide-predicting_machine#/media/File:099-tpm3-sk.jpg
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_KLF
  • https://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/

Microtopics:

• Using only the funny TLDs.
• Trying to figure it out as you go.
• Getting seriously into online homework grading.
• Learning the weird object-based Perl they use for checking homework answers.
• A podcast with a larger than normal demographic of math teachers.
• The most accessible way to develop very small games.
• Whether Tie Fighter / Bobsled / Indy 500 is one game or several.
• Swapping games over the audio port.
• Adding a line from Cool Runnings and renaming your racing game to Bobsled.
• Remaking the entirety of Pokemon Red in a TI calculator.
• All real world work being done in ways that would get you expelled if you were still in college.
• Commissioning your high school classmate to make a bowling minigame in TI-Basic.
• A thousand years in the future when nobody knows where TI calculators came from or how they work, but they're still the only calculator allowed on standardized tests.
• Jazz fusion's towering influence over video game music.
• Thinking a work is wholly original because you have no context for its inspirations.
• Playing a riff from Kirby's Dream Land in a solo over Chick Correa's "Spain."
• A band fronted by duelling wind controllers.
• Having fun exploring and jumping on things.
• Jumping into any part of a three hour concert and hearing a water level.
• Japanese video games' sense of mystery benefitting from the American ignorance of their influences.
• Deliberately exposing children to risk in play.
• Rigorous safety procedures pushing back against incredibly unlikely outcomes.
• Small children being basically indestructible.
• 48 hours of sitting in a room with fans blowing on you, and you're a ghost.
• Getting a lot of nosebleeds and hearing everyone's pet remedy for nosebleeds.
• Trying all the nosebleed remedies and ending up with a bunch of cool hobbies.
• Your favorite nosebleed remedy being dipping your french fries in the chocolate shake, not because it stops the bleeding but because it's delicious.
• Wikipedia's surprising plausibility.
• Reading Wikipedia and believing things on it even though anyone can edit it at any time.
• Private services that seem like they really ought to be a branch of the government.
• The pre-history dark ages from which we have no mind uploads.
• Each of the Rice Krispies elves singing a verse about their onomatopoeic sound.
• Grandmaster Flash watching that Chiquita Banana commercial in the 40s and being like "someday I'm gonna be a rapper and bite that one line."
• Tracing a Miami Bass chorus back to a football chant.
• The Cool S and the Epic of Gilgamesh being of similarly obscure origins.
• The intense frustration of not being able to tell the difference between writing a song and remembering a song.
• The damning similarities between "Yesterday" and "Georgia on my Mind."
• Music lawsuits being decided by juries of non-musicians.
• A Midsummer Night's Dream containing a performance of the Greek play that Shakespeare ripped off when writing Romeo and Juliet.
• How to pronounce Ludum Dare.
• Taking the weekend to do a game jam and making a game in about four hours and then deciding to watch a movie and relax.
• Acrobats with extreme control of their bodies, except for time management.
• Learning to scope on the fly by doing game jams.
• Starting with a bouncing ball no matter how big your game idea is.
• Doing an entire company's worth of git merges and everything collapses into a steaming heap.
• Joining a game jam as a scrum master.
• Putting separate minigames together into a single game.
• Having no idea how to estimate the time it takes to do tasks you do every day.
• Making a spreadsheet to find out whether you're making a new web site for your Fall class.
• Playing Frog Fractions 2 to find Alexander's chess jam game.
• A problem with no fully satisfying solution but hundreds of partially satisfying solutions.
• Peeling an orange and then try to make the peel as flat as possible.
• What the day/night cycle would be like on a donut planet.
• Trying to imagine the political machinations informing the cartography of a fantasy race.
• A tide chart for if you have two moons and you're inside a donut.
• Land-biased maps where the land is displayed intact but oceans are cut into pieces.
• A map displaying any given straight-line path from the front of a penny to the back.
• Unwittingly making merciless caricatures of Mr. Lincoln.
• You vs. the one she told you not to worry about vs. the one you told her not to worry about vs. the one your mom told you not to worry about vs. the one your mom told you to worry about.
• The performance of the 1963 Doctor Who theme.
• Doing what feels like interesting work enabled by modern tools and finding out someone did similar work 100 years ago using much more primitive tools.
• Cutting audio tape into microscopic strips and rearranging them into interesting sonic textures.
• A weird proto-physical synth non-synth thing.
• Moving your hand in physical space with no visual reference like a chump.
• Artists doing laborious work with primitive tools when they could've just waited 100 years and it would've been so much easier.
• A phone app that you take photos with but you have to wait three days after you finish the roll to see the photos.
• All the joy of constraint and none of the headache of actually working with 8-bit hardware.
• Inventing the math and physics to predict the tides as you're building your tide-predicting machine.
• Writing a song about how to get a #1 single and then doing it.
• Having a bunch of hit singles and then burning the money you made.