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Lords: Farbs https://farbs.org/ Hallie https://moveslow.info/ Topics: The only way to truly beat Dark Souls is to achieve enlightenment Writing is a serialization problem Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies was lead programmer on Space Station Silicon Valley for the Nintendo 64. Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn Learning by copying Meandering thread of execution: https://mastodon.social/@Farbs/112679557654266096 Microtopics: Systems where people make meaning out of joy and suffering. Weighing in on whether video games will still exist a month from now. Linking the fire or not linking the fire. Video games that were popular when saving games was expensive. Who invented corpse runs? Finishing your whole life believing you're the hero. Whether the narrator of the Dark Souls trailer is a character in the game. Doing the thing you've already proven you can do. The three stages of grief: betrayal, anger, sense of victory. Secondhand lore. Seeking paleblood to transcend the hunt. Lounging Carl: he's just chillin'. Getting all the platinum trophies to achieve enlightenment. If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. It's worth 50 souls every time! A meter going up and a bell ringing and you're a better person now! Daoism Dives. Force Witches. Tedious and annoying programming problems. Taking a nebulous interconnected cloud of data and turning it into a stream of bytes, and vice versa. Metaphorical Kevin Bacon Game. Developing your serialization scheme iteratively. Sorting your evidence by persuasiveness. Working with data in different ways. Turning a video game into a sequence of experiences. Looking at the world as a set of events rather than as a set of objects. A video game series where you steal cars. Having just one good work in you and being proud that you made that one good work. Shipping a game that's not in the Grand Theft Auto series for the first time in decades. Clicking on the blog button and it just says "nope" and then clicking on the games button and there's a PHP error. Void Bastards printing sound effects on the doorways, just like Hunt the Wumpus. Making the math do pretty things. Plugging functions into each other. Doing all your level design by writing stacked modifiers in C code. Stacking up a bunch of quality of life features and that's it, that's your content authoring system. Forever panting and forever young. A sad sack with consumption, bullied by Lord Byron. Isn't it nice to not be subject to the passage of time? This urn is never going to catch its breath. Following your feelings and always being right. Poetry as form of lossy compression. Roger Ebert claiming that poetry can never be art. Rebuilding Zelda 1 in Voxatron. Pausing the whole game while a single important thing happens. Making games inside-out. How they made games before we killed GOTO. Trying to explain setjmp/longjmp to a non-programmer. Committing to the bit and refusing to work with anyone who isn't committed to the bit. Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Explaining to Tim how Jamestown could've had online multiplayer. Rowdy in Different Ways. Talking to every doctor in order to become a doctor. Finding a tutorial and deliberately following it wrong. Acquiring facility in translating between two domains.

Lords: CisHetKayfaber Charles https://nohomework.website/ Topics: When your therapist introduces their own problems that you don't have Color as a separate sensory axis (deprioritized for some, assumption of color in black and white things, dreaming in black and white) One-handed triangle Many, Many Tekel Upharsin by Jacob Bacharach https://bsky.app/profile/jacobbacharach.bsky.social/post/3mruuexkb4k2c Screen time is a classist plot Microtopics: Ironic usernames. Bilingual global information security IT legal compliance. Knowing each other through the replies. Patrick Cosmos, L Ron Mexico and Senator Lemon Gogurt. Taking on a challenge to guest on more than one podcast per week. The legal comedy podcast ouevre. Riffing with your therapist. Your therapist getting really upset about political events and you have to calm them down and then they bill you for the hour. Finding your zen when things make you shouty. Your psychiatrist telling you you can't have a mental disorder because you've published papers. Staying with a therapist longer than is therapeutically useful. Doing your best to not worry about things you can't fix. Why everyone is to choosing to affront you, the protagonist of the universe. Surviving the chaos that being a parent introduces into your world. Therapy access in Japan. The development stage in which kids are unreasonable. Recalled image pastiche. Inability to perceive sunburn. How to tell if a light switch is working in a dream. People who can analyze that they like about music. Deprioritizing color information in the same way a color blind person would. Coming to reality with different axes of perception. Spending time around people who notice eye color. Self-describing phenomena. Converting to Catholicism so you can become white. A triangle that's not shaped like a triangle but it sounds like a triangle. Playing a triangle like a shaker. Touching the exposed bars so that it sounds like you're eating with chopsticks. The Triangle Tessitura. A one-man band on the boardwalk clapping cymbals with his knees. Not hating a thing because your emotional range just doesn't reach that far. Stomp Clap Hey Band. DannyB Fanfic. Trying to live forever via various peptides and also your son's blood. Using Jewish artifacts in a drunken reverie. Doing your own hair transplants at home. Hey buddy, can you get these peptides in Japan? The Ozymandias level of hubris that demands its own poem. Becoming a meme of yourself. Different kinds of screen time. Growing up with unlimited screen time and almost getting a PhD. Hyperpalatability. The attention economy. Not knowing about an Internet phenomenon. Developing agriculture and then it all goes to hell. Figuring out everything you have to do and then doing the easiest thing on the list. The Screen Disapproves. Taking the coping strategies that you can get. The best parenting strategy you can hope for without having infinite free time. Babe Ruth walking with choppy legs on his home run trot.

Lords: Erica Alex https://ludobloom.com/ Topics: Making friends with animals The 20 point platform of Count Binface The song NASA banned from space https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKzLopYRauI You Are a Dragonfly & I Am Also a Dragonfly https://www.tumblr.com/apoemaday/722022939295367168/you-are-a-dragonfly-i-am-also-a-dragonfly Using text to organize thoughts A Tale About Digging a Hole https://store.steampowered.com/app/4210530/A_Tale_About_Digging_a_Hole__The_Official_Story_Novel/ Microtopics: Eating a bunch of chocolate. Carob vs. chocolate? Caffeinated soap. Why there's so much cherry juice in everything. What the Cranberries have to say about the Ocean Spray collective. Topic Lords is a Sometimes Food. Emergency Cat Wrangling. Identifying and naming individual squirrels. The kind of friendship you have to cultivate over 20,000 years. The skunk that keeps hanging out and taunting Roy. Licensed squirrels. What moral obligations possibly having a pet squirrel confers upon you. Texas skunks with fake IDs. Squirrely chipmunks. California's Argentine ant super colony. New hypotheses in immunity ecology. Tracking the ant colony outside your house and keeping a database of when each individual ant dies. The more we learn about the squirrels, the more they know about us. The weirdo who's always hanging around on the other side of the mirror. Failing the marshmallow test because you only wanted one marshmallow anyway. Trying to bat squirrels away from your sandwich on your first date with the squirrel lady. Reaming out the president of Belgium because you hate waffles. Count Binface of the Gremloids. Replacing Lord Buckethead when he retires, like the Dread Pirate Roberts. How dare you? I'm from outer space! A t-shirt of Margaret Thatcher worrying about Lord Buckethead. Arcade grabber games to be made fairer. How regulated are claw machines in Clacton? A narrow genre to appreciate if you like screaming. Mission control deciding the music that the astronauts wake up to. A committee of 30 people who decide what music to play at what volume to wake you up at 6:45am. Mission control shutting down Pink Pony Club right before all the astronauts are about to join in on the chorus. The American teenager who wrote most of Scots Wikipedia. Slurred yelps of the song's title. Whether a 2010 blog post is more plausible than a modern Facebook post. Interviewing 90-year-old Jack Lousma about Paralyzed, by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy. What if someone answers the phone at the fake pizza hotline? Roy vs. Fake Roy. Ducking out of reading the poem every time you can. Ducking out vs. weaseling out. Cutting the green air open with our sharp blue bodies simply by being there. Dragonflies that are effortlessly in the moment. A few sentences about what a dragonfly might experience. The implications of seeing a pond for the first time. Looking at the ocean and experiencing awe. (Not the same thing as enjoying it.) The realization that any time, the Pacific Ocean could decide to kill you no matter where you are. How Jim is going to mentally process the concept of ponds. The set of things that would have to be true for you to be able to solve this puzzle. Particularization. Inventing a puzzle solving process to play video games more efficiently and then using the same process to drive cold fusion. The fantasy of producing something meaningful. Art as a product vs. art as a process. Gathering ore and selling the ore for upgrades. PDF DLC.

Lords: Kory https://kbones.fun/ Jeremy https://gamemaking.social/@SpindleyQ Topics: Forgetting that the old internet also kind of sucked, or, the Tar Pit From Hell Theory Starting over in C after a hiatus from non-pico8 game development Burning the Candle at Both Ends, by Andy Wallace https://taper.badquar.to/15/burning_the_candle.html Speedrunning figuring out how to romhack The Legend of Zelda because of a toot https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhKtbablIXrfIJf-icFkrXv94KCgEser8 https://youtube.com/watch?v=ACuk2TXoNhc Microtopics: Coming in hot. Switching to paperbacks. Cascading interpretations of a kernel of an idea. The yips for reading sci-fi. Dealing with a succession of bureaucrats as you try to get the most interesting version of your book published. Kids: they've gotten too rowdy in Korean high schools. Sending in Jason Bourne to discipline rowdy high school kids. The Fringe Game History podcast. Meowio. Forums: they were also terrible. Placing your web site on a big slab of plexiglass that floats around on the tar pit from hell. Naturally occurring toxic engagement vs. actively farming the stuff. The switch that flipped that suddenly made everyone stop caring what No Mutants Allowed thought. The naked animosity between the PalmOS community and the Pocket PC community. The Gamers Quarter. Making stuff and talking about the stuff you're making. Interesting things spawning out of stews. Cockamamie theories that survive mostly because their names are fun to say. Meeting friends on the Internet and having the ability to meet them in person. Every game eventually becomes a Zelda-like if you're not careful. Instantiating the particle system. Inventing the easing function. Inventing a thing that already exists. Applying a bunch of easing functions to make it look like you're climbing a tower. Whim-based game development. Walking around a maze and picking up pages that have spells on them. Whim-Based Development Problems. The most whims you can fit on a Pico-8 cartridge. Getting a guy moving on the screen and then making the rest of the video game. Downloading Turbo C and being like "I'm gonna program the EGA!" Running out of engine programming tasks and being forced to start on game design. Neu][ower. All the game projects that improved your life even though they never shipped. Making the game that's easy for you to make. Starting a project that requires a bunch of writing even though you get anxiety about writing. That 30% cut is coming right out of the microtopics. Inaction: it carries its own risk. CP-437 block and line drawing characters. Things to do if you value shipping a game. Emoji moving around with a CRT filter over it. Valuing the wrong paths you take for the lessons you learned from them. Jump-scaring yourself the first time you type "malloc." There's no segfaulting on a 286; the bits just fall out the back. Zelda cave merchants appearing in a puff of smoke. Wild speculation about 6502 assembly. Using FCEUX to develop a ROM hack for The Legend of Zelda. Nerdsniping. Killing the enemy in object slot #1. Why edit RAM when you could edit the ROM? Doing very untoward things to The Legend of Zelda.

Lords: Rebecca Martin Topics: Running a home server: Easier than you might think and very useful to do The best place to find poetry is on vacation Winston reading every sign in Target Zampiceni's Marketplace, by Margaret Szumonski https://toots.ravenoak.dev/@rebecca/116899616527167036 Hot dog research thursdays and bad dracula nights Microtopics: Tomato season: the tomatoes look pretty good. Mozart in the Park. Actors: they're not fussy like cellists. Ancient Greek plays where they stab each other. 10 hours of Star Trek engine noises. An illicit hacker breaking into your Jellyfin server and watching your Star Trek. Listen to Data putter around. A recurring thing with a database that you have to keep debugging. Building a normal computer out of normal parts. Everybody being each other's encrypted off-site backup. Opening books and closing them, then opening them again and closing them again. The one about the horny grocery store. Having a difficult time finding delicious food in Massachusetts. The kind of food they feed you on a weaving retreat. Sitting in a Starbucks, staring at the internet and rotting. Walking into an indie music store and perusing the local music section. Getting mad on vacation because you miss your cats. Nothing Beats Doing Nothing. Buying grape juice from vineyards and making wine at home. All the little guys that help you make wine and cheese. Wrapping your wine fermentation vats in blankets so all the bacteria are more comfortable. Folks who assume you know about wine because you're from California. An advertisement exhorting you to go where you already are. Abag & Iclei?? What does that mean? Puzzling out the vanity plates. Growing up watching only PBS and then falling for every ad as an adult because you have no ad literacy. Seeing a targeted ad and feeling like you failed as a person because you want to buy the thing. How Instagram ruined hash tags. Getting off-topic but it's okay because it's a different topic. Prose poems and deconstructed sandwiches. Absolutely! No parking! For Buca di Beppo! Having notes on this sign. Seeing a sign and thinking "hmm, someone must've parked for Buca di Beppo here." Your tight five on East Coast Fallouts ruined the Fallout TV series. The grocer cutting open the pomegranates so you can touch them. Muscles building like coconuts, lifting whole regimes of bananas. Why are husbands so wrong about Zampiceni's Marketplace? Moammar Gaddafi's obsession with Condoleezza Rice. Getting curious what Danny Devito was doing in the 1970s. The invention of No-Fault Divorce. Be sure to marry someone you can go to the grocery store with. (Especially the sexy grocery store.) Saving the horny onions for your next appearance. What to do with all the write-in topics now that we don't have a write-in segment. Who to turn to for pizza research now that the Pizza Research Institute has shut down. A pizza that's more like a heaping roasted salad. Inventing the peanut butter and pickle hot dog once a week. Putting peanut butter on noodles. Food wizards. As much star anise as you could possibly ever use. Learning to cook in a no-onion environment. Fermenty Black Beans. Medium to high-effort hot dogs. Dracula just trying to be a good dad. Quitting Bad Dracula Day for good. Lucy pulling the football away. (The football is good Dracula movies.) A movie where karate guys do kick-ass moves while children are being trafficked. Michelle Yeoh as Cop Lady. Fast forward 200 years and it's 1972 and there's a funk soundtrack. Hosting your own patreon, and other ideas that will definitely work. Being on the Fediverse to post and on Bluesky to cry. What Gene Siskel thinks of the Blacula sequel.

Lords: Felicia Andrew https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/ Topics: My dad's indestructible mailbox Ares doesn't emulate the timing of the Reality Display Processor Moo box vs. Groan tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GQ126DUsyQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tOsucpdD7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QyvFNZZ1fs Front mission 2's window color configuration menu https://bsky.app/profile/guilewinquote.bsky.social/post/3mozyqq2ibk2g Trying to get The Incredible Machine 3 running in Wine only to realize 2 is exactly the same and runs in DOSBox and finally solves a dialogue sfx mystery Microtopics: The cheezburger TLD. A show that has a big reputation to live up to because the name sounds similar to Totoro. Prehensile rainbow hair. Sensible anime naming logic. A little guy running around like in a video game, except in real life. Matter Senators, the only place on the Internet you can hear matters discussed. Issue Ombudspeople, the only place on the Internet you can hear issues discussed. Agnes Tachyon. (Agnes is his surname.) Mailbox Baseball. Making a new mailbox post out of a 1 foot diameter oil drilling pipe. The floral anatomy of a mailbox. The neighborhood in Albuquerque that has the least destructible mailboxes. An iron iceberg embedded in the sidewalk tearing a gash in your RV. Wikipedia redirecting your search for Mailbox Baseball to the page for Property Crime. Calling your daughter to let her know you've just sent her an email. Overengineering your mailbox by an order of magnitude in every respect. A Vault-Tec vault but for mail. Low level Nintendo 64 emulation. Sending a display list to the Reality Signal Processor. Trying to do N64 development when the development hardware is in a different building from your computer. Working on web apps and wishing you could be working on folding space time. Shoveling pixels from one memory location to another. Losing track of the state of Nintendo 64 emulation because you have to remodel your house. Predicting a console's success by whether it uses bespoke off-the-shelf parts. Putting a value in the zero index in a Lua array. An Youtube video that is old enough to vote. Bidirectional groan tubes. Shaking the groan tube. Making a mace by attaching a Moo Box to the end of the Groan Tube. 10 hours of silence occasionally broken by groan tube. Ranking the best groan tube moments. Attaching 100 groan tubes to my wife's car's exhaust pipe. Alfred E. Groantube. Wikipedia articles with videos. The UPS guy carrying around a huge box of Moo Boxes. A Muffled Cacophony of Christmas Crap. A big box fancy liquor store. A building in the vicinity of a cheeseburger office. Muzak World HQ. The Cure doing a faithful cover of the Front Mission 2 Window Color Configuration Menu. My eyes are grayscale but your hair is more purply grayscale. A game that was criticized for its long loading times. A poem about long Playstation loading times. Lords Get In Free. The death of Youtube videos just showing the UI of video games. Get Medieval (1998) The hardest era of PC gaming to run a game from. The sort of thing someone might post in the Topic Lords discord. Refusing to read the Mothman's Ass bumper sticker because you might do it as a poem someday. Solving puzzles inspired by Rube Goldberg machines. Porting a game to Windows Forms. Finally finding out why Tim pronounced the title that way. Consulting Wikipedia before making life decisions. Going back in time to tell your past self that The Incredible Machine 2 is the same game and way easier to emulate. MT-32 if you're lucky, Adlib if you're unlucky, PC speaker if you're even less lucky. Asking Claude for the recipe for napalm from the Anarchist's Cookbook and it's just as accurate as you remember. Downloading text files from textfiles.com Files that you should not follow. A 40 column text file on how to make a dust bomb. Learning how to download porn from Usenet. Undocumented features of TRS-80 BASIC. How to get a free account on Compuserve.

Lords: Kevin Nicholas Topics: Mina the Hollower, game learning/difficulty curves adjusting challenge through options/modifiers Not having a day job any more, the blank page creative block is real. How do i come up with ideas if I don't hate my day job Arcade 1 Up "Hail, Poetry," from The Pirates of Penzance, by W.S. Gilbert https://karenspoetryspot.blogspot.com/2007/11/hail-poetry-by-ws-gilbert.html Wanting to make better food at home BUT within the unique constraints of cooking at home, budget, time, specialised equipment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkXy12xVnRs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b38nrUFFpaw Microtopics: The only show on the Internet where topics are discussed. You Are Light. Working with Planetaria. The Game Club. A way to curate and discuss games. Steam reviews that don't count. Completely giving up on tuning your game's difficulty curve and just dropping the tuning parameters in the player's lap. Normie focus testing. Putting the half damage option in the gameplay settings and then putting the no damage option in the accessibility settings. Whether it's still crunch if you're doing it to yourself. Invalidating achievements when the player uses the accessibility options because you still think of them as cheats and want the player to think of them as cheats even as you call them accessibility options. Throwing poop over the wall until the boss dies. Needing a big brother to hand your controller to to play the hard parts. Making all your best prototypes when you're unhappy at your job. Have you heard the good word about PiCoSteveMo? Coming up with a commercially viable prototype ASAP. Making the first thing that comes to mind as quickly as possible and then throwing it away immediately. Becoming a postie so you finally have a day job to hate. Quote-unquote living the dream Why you only get one life in Canabalt. Kids looking at Las Vegas and thinking it looks like b******t for old people but they still like the feeling of gambling so the play a lot of Binding of Isaac instead. Opening up Pokemon cards packs on Twitch. Opening the pack of Magic cards because you want to feel that rush but you feel nothing because you don't play Magic and don't know what cards are good. Looking for the Magic cards with the coolest quotes on them. Installing a Pac-Man cabinet to liven up your living room's aesthetics. An arcade cabinet that has no controls, it just cycles through the attract modes of various arcade games. Why you want the arcade cabinet to be taller than you are. Putting a tablecloth over the cocktail arcade cabinet when you have your fancy guests over but it keeps making the weird noises so they're like "what's going on down there??" Topic Lords off-season attract mode game jam. Creepypasta attract modes. The four player Avengers arcade game where the attract mode was just the entire running time of Avengers: Age of Ultron. The Minecraft Dungeons arcade machine. Arcade games extruding collectible hero cards. The F-Zero arcade game that you can put your GameCube memory card into to unlock exclusive levels. Zoomers no longer having access to video games because legally they're considered "experiences." Gilbert and Sullivan. Divine Emollient: it's life's moisturizer. Stopping what you're doing to go listen to Pirates of Penzance. Kevin Kline as the Pirate King. Constant emollients on hand. Poetry getting down on one knee and proposing to you. The state of musical theater in the late 1800s. Contexts in which you hear about flowing founts. Poetry's ability to make you want to moisturize. Being into cooking but everyone else suddenly getting way more into cooking. The Mr. Beastification of food Youtube. Using broth from concentrate and it's fine because you don't know any better. Finding new vegetables and trying to figure out how to cook them. Whole spices vs. pre-ground spices. Team Less Time. Why you keep hearing exhortations not to deep fry a turkey. Deep frying gnocchi. Slapped silly by the Fondue Vortex. Which family gets the onion bloomer this week and is eating nothing but blooming onions all week. Relative onion size on different continents. WoW Classic but for fast food.

Lords: Gabe https://store.steampowered.com/app/4076590/GAARL__Gabes_Action_Arcade_RogueLike/ Andrew https://pancelor.com/ Topics: Building your own synthesizer will not save you any money Clipboard proprioception The latest podcast description length drama Fig, 6. “I I I Strong Stronger Strongest” Braggadocio Rap Rerebrace, by Douglas Kearney https://poems.com/poem/fig-6-i-i-i-strong-stronger-strongest-braggadocio-rap-rerebrace/ Esper says: "Comic lettering is certainly done digitally these days, but there's a lot of traditional and even hybrid lettering too. A whole world out there." Conversations in real life vs. discord Having “over a decade of experience in the interior design industry” Microtopics: Gabe's Action Arcade Roguelike. Spelunky with less secrets and more upgrades. Randomized item behavior. Tasteful Pranking. Using earbuds as earplugs in a pinch. The short but wrong description. Timed Mashing Games. A building that exists continuously. Why would you pay someone else to do something that you can do yourself? A 70%-complete noise maker. Deliberately building your modular synthesizer to be incompatible with every modular standard so you're not tempted to buy any modules. Synthesizers as folk instruments, every one unique and owned by a weird uncle. SDL taking your sine wave and making it pretty. An online MIDI thing which is pretty annoying. Video: it has so much more data than audio. How to make your audio engine samples play at the right time. Electricity: it just happens. Hitting undo on the breadboard when you blow up some capacitors. Making a synthesizer by drawing a circuit with a graphite pencil. Being old enough to have once seen a PCB that was laid out by hand. Having something important in your clipboard and knowing you'd better put it somewhere soon before it's lost. Sending files to your phone over the local Wi-Fi. Parts of your body you doing trust. Prodding the clipboard until it reluctantly copies the text like a surely teenager. Emailing support and slowly realizing that support is actually the guy who makes the decisions. What life could be like if venture capital didn't exist. Putting a warning on the 4001st M&M. How to send an edible arrangement without knowing someone's address. Inventing something that already exists. Inventing a process and thinking "that's too simple to work" but later you find out it does and has a name. Getting sick of using a rhyming dictionary to write poems so you just cut and paste a list of rhyming words right into the poem. A poem that it feels wrong to read aloud. What is a line break but moving to a new place where the next word starts? A poem that is approved by the Comics Code Authority. How all the comic book letterers came to have the exact same handwriting. A word that starts with a through e and ends with song. Talking online vs. talking in person. Trying to quietly talk to your neighbor in discord voice chat. Why Discord doesn't allow you to place voice chats participants in Dolby 7.1 space. Tuning your proximity happening settings. Three people pairing off and having two conversations at once. The next talk show guest coming out and everybody moving one chair over. That time Andy Richter tried to have a side conversation with Norm MacDonald while Conan O'Brien was talking to the next guest. That thing where two people are hard to tell apart because their voices are similar to each other. Your e-commerce platform giving your image a random four digit number. Choosing guests based on whose voice compliments yours. Being on a weekly video game podcast and realizing you'd better play some goddamn video games this week or you won't have anything to talk about. Changing topics when there are three minutes left on the show. Trying to finish recording the show when your laptop is at 7% battery life. An incredible way to pull rank. Telling the airline employee that you work in aerospace and you deserve more leg room. Promising your Kickstarter backers to go to Denny's for lunch. Bluesky handles that are a palindrome of themselves.

Lords: Tyriq https://store.steampowered.com/app/3276700/Scrubbin_Trubble/ Linker https://linker.itch.io/ Topics: Favourite piece(s) of Greek mythology/history related media The accordion children of BART Esper says: "When I lived in Washington there was a guy with one who would ask for money outside the grocery store quite a bit. He’d have a full setup, accordion, speakers, sheet music, the whole deal. I saw him out there for probably two years before someone pointed out there’s no such thing as an electric accordion; he was just playing CDs through the speaker and pretending to perform the whole time. Genius grift." Adult Arnold Palmer Batman's Aff His Nut by Robert Florence https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/10hy8nv/poem_batmans_aff_his_nut_by_robert_florence/ https://sco.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frog Do animals have pareidolia particular to their own instincts? Childhood obsessions that we circled back to in adulthood Microtopics: Mym's Sword What does a dog need with a sword? Elephantasy but it's a roguelike. Whether PiCoSteveMo counts as a conference. Waiting until you've forgotten what happens to reread a book. Refusing to reconsume any media. Rereading a book now that you are a different person. Works that you can't scrute. Katabasis: the state of being katabasal. Reading a novel about Greek mythology and recognizing that boss you fought in Hades. PEBCAKing it because you forgot to PEMDAS it. Jason and the Argonauts, with those fun stop motion skeletons. The wine-dark sea. Plinth fans. Neoclassical: it's too new. Inventing columns and getting really excited about it. Making a log cabin out of Greek columns. Buskers bringing a boom box on a train and proceeding to pop and lock. A real kid-looking kid holding an accordion, ready to bust some notes. Evan the accordion-master. According squeezing patterns. Hunting and pecking on the piano. Hand and limb separation. The lute as a s****y guitar. Playing piano vs. playing around on a piano. Having a piano-shaped set of notes in your head and trying to localize it onto a guitar. Too Sparse for Buskers. Performance vs. Rigamarole. Seeing a new genre of busker. Thumbing a hundred bucks to save the clock tower. Situations where you're socially obligated to drink a glass of lemon juice. Sour Screams and other flavor sounds. Being a grownup and having to wear a suit and tie and drink horrible drinks and drive a 6000 pound death machine. The kid the DMV pays to run out in front of you when you're taking your driving test, and whether you're supposed to tip him. Learning to drive and realizing that driving is fun, and then realizing that this is terrible because nobody should do this incredibly unsafe activity for fun. Using your fidget spinner to help you focus better while driving. Do you ever look at the world and feel like it? Scots Wikipedia. Frogs biding with their long shanks. Having a good Scottish accent because you have a theater degree and watched Shrek over and over. Predators who like to go for the neck seeing necks everywhere, like humans see faces everywhere. The Hello Crow. Birds that like to make chainsaw noises. Hunters hunting things that look like the thing they they hunt. Bees that think you are an enormous flower. Wasps that can't tell you're made of meat because your shirt is covering up your meat. Re-enjoying your childhood Legos. Making the Lego/Legos distinction on purpose. Lego vs. Legoids. Growing up a K'nex kid and making the K'nex Rollercoaster. Overconsuming root beer. One of the tamed microbes. Building things with Legos with your child. Making sense out of the random pieces. You say Lego, I say let go of me, let's call the whole thing off.

Lords: Alex Shannon Topics: What's a ghost? And other questions you can't explain to a 3 year old. Trophic memory, deer, and a truly unique scientific object- Copied from thoughtforms.life https://thoughtforms.life/trophic-memory-deer-and-a-truly-unique-scientific-object/ Summer Homework Otzi Awake, by Max Lavergne https://www.tumblr.com/dat-soldier/787624576603619328/beingharsh Microtopics: Game Changer and other Drop 7 shows. What real Topic Heads know. California Extreme, the pinball and arcade machine expo. Getting in on the ground floor to become the only place where topics are discussed. Dropping soup cans into a jacuzzi to record the Frog Fractions splash noises. Dropping the Frog Fractions lore. Releasing art and watching people get it in the way you wanted them to get it. Seeing the Human from Frog Fractions in real life and wondering "where do I know this human from?" A pin-up calendar where you draw your own pin-up each month. Conveying the concept of a ghost to a three year old. Whether it's okay to tell the truth to a small child Realizing that the three-year old only knows about fantasy skeletons and explaining that actually, skeletons are inside of us. A two-minute soliloquy about where mama owls come from. Doing your best not to adopt a child's adorable mispronunciation of restaurant. Hearing Dust in the Wind in a car commercial and being like "That's my dad's guitar song! That's the song my dad plays on guitar!" Accepting that you are responsible for shaping this child into a good, healthy adult human, but also, wouldn't it be funny if... Training your child to ask for "hot guys on Instagram" when she wants to look at pictures of unicorns and waterslides. Finding and ankylosaurus in the bedsheets. The age at which children develop a sense of fear. An entire song about not being afraid of ghosts and also how to bust them. One of the major delights of being around a child. Big bones sticking out of your head for a few months until they fall off. A New Fork in the Antlers. Whether it's advantageous to have more complicated antlers. Growing antlers in the lab. Owning a bunch of deer and collecting and labeling all their antlers. Telling the bone cancer what to do. Watching a moose shake its head and the antlers just pop right off. A moose dropping antlers to distract a predator. Trying to get on a plane with your new antler growth. Eating enough calcium to do all the antler growing you need to do. Scoring deer by counting the antler points. Moose lifespan. Seasonal Antler Disorder. The Dim Sum moose with one dumpling on every point of its antlers. Your 2nd grade teacher calling you up to assign you math homework to do on your honeymoon. Homework: what is it for? Homework as anti-union training. Striving to care less about your job. An after-school program that helps kids finish their homework by having an adult just do all the homework, like the parents would if they had the time. The cat on Jim's head. Finally hearing about a behavioral problem from your kid's teacher, that he likes reading too much. Doing the social norms because you are in a group who is all doing the social norms. Otzi the Preserved Carcass. A pretty dang old guy. An ice-age man with almost as many tattoos as a modern teenager. Gen X Cuspers. The earliest known human with Lyme disease. Wanting to make a gutstring bow but there are no guts around. What being any celebrity is like. What percentage of humans are related to Otzi the Ice Man. Being chased through the alps by people who want to kill you with arrows and the next thing you know scientists are rummaging through your stomach contents. An ancient form of Grindr. How old does a corpse need to be before you can buy and sell it? How lost does a corpse need to be before you can find it? Which natural laxatives the ice man used.

Lords: Chall RT-55J https://samarantes.neocities.org/ https://metroidconstruction.com/hack.php?id=878 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 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148293/leaves-5bd9e153d78b2 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.

Lords: Jenni Tyriq https://store.steampowered.com/app/3276700/Scrubbin_Trubble/ Topics: Doctor Lips Tropic Olds Cold Sri Top Scold It Pro Clod I Sport Pic Rod Lost Disc or Plot Doc Rip Slot Stolid Crop Lo, Cod Strip! Cod Trip Sol Corps Do Lit Cold Pis Tor Clipt Roods Microtopics: Trying to make a joke out of your own name: it's impossible. Listening to this episode first. The ice: it's not gross. (At first.) Reverse osmosis water. Shipping a game and selling more than one copy. Selling enough copies of your game to be in the black with Steam. Repaying debts until you end up in the black, because once you go black you never go back. Getting old and having creaky bones so you like being warmer. Standing in a parking lot in a melancholy mood and looking at the sky. The most genetically and financially successful people you know. Finishing off your successfulness in the Retirement State. Star Tropic Olds. Muppet Geriatrics. Everyone is born the baby of themselves. Geriatric MacGyver training a new younger MacGyver. MacGyver vs. O'Gyver. Going to Target and buying the sriracha t-shirt to establish your allegiance in the sriracha wars. The Hangover and the sequel, Baby Hangover. Too Young or Too Homeschooled? Bruh bruh bruh, pass the sri. Microsoft naming their word processor Word even though there are other kinds of words. Y'all It or It Al as the plural for It. Putting the Skip It around your ankle. Pushing the buttons you understand on a Simon. (Just the volume buttons.) Games you are guaranteed to lose, and soon. Different short term memories for different senses. Dual N-Back. Doing a single bicep curl and deciding that you understand exercise and you're done now. Clod vs. Klutz. The clumsiest people in the world in fierce competition. Things you wish you were allowed to laugh at. Things you're allowed to laugh at as long as you make a donation. Optimizing your laughter to minimize the amount of money you have to put in the laugh jar. Last One Laughing, taking the laughter out of comedy one pained grimace at a time. Clods of peanut butter. Earthen Peanut Butter. Shaping peanut butter with your earth manipulation spell. A device you can use like a dowsing rod to find dick pics in a room full of hard drives. The scene where The Dude shades the notepad. Proof that robots can get embarrassed. Waiting to watch a movie until after you know every plot twist. Everyone's favorite game show: Disc or Plot? Innova Leopard. Some sort of DJ equipment, for spinning records. Disc Golf vs. Disk Golf. Floppy Discs and Compact Disks. Devices Carrying Sound. A guy on Reddit with 8 upvotes. Seeing 8 inch floppy disks in the back of someone's car. Dr. Ripslot. The most stolid vegetable. (Ronald Reagan.) Doozers making their Doozer Sticks out of radishes. Secret Fraggle Lore. Mutualism between Doozers and Fraggles. The most emotive crop. Crop with a c, not with a k. Saying "Lo!" all the time. Thinking "betimes" frequently but never saying it out loud. Always forgetting to use "whilst." Whomst'd've. Pregnancy antihistamines. Different kinds of fake dartboards. Under the thumb of Big Velcro. Throwing fish sticks at the sun and missing. Corps Du Lit, WI Book clubs that only do books that are two or three words long. Librarian: Tidy up the Arcane Library. Relaxing by reshelving books. Complimenting housework any time you see it happen. Picking up trash from the ground and finding a place to throw it away and wishing someone would congratulate you. Hansel and Gretel and Chancellor Stormdancer. Tongue Root Harmony. Paying attention to where your tongue is at all times. What takes your cold piss away? Trunk Kevin Crap, Look at That Low Flying Plane.

Lords: Cort Martin https://steamcommunity.com/app/2111550 Topics: What does Thomas The Tank Engine do when he gets an itchy nose? The end of Destiny Glittermitten Grove's undisclosed AI content Iroha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iroha I need to add bears to my threat model What thing would you like to be entangled with? Microtopics: Setting arbitrary deadlines to get things done and taking them seriously. Lord Walker. Writing 20 songs in 12 hours. Schrodinger's Cat Burglar. A video game that everyone in the world will love. Jimbo and the Jet Set. Soulful butt-licking. Do Fish Itch? What twisted idiot god would make a fish itch. The cosmology of Thomas the Tank Engine. Itchy planes flying very close to a mountain so they can scratch their faces. Whether trains can die in the Thomas the Tank Engine universe. Trains trying to live up to human standards of beauty. Pixar Cars needing eye surgery. Destiny's Final Update. Patrolling the moon in search of wizards. T-shirts with the insignias of obscure PVP factions. The logo of a football team that doesn't exist. Destiny shipping as MusicPlayerDemo.exe. Six people at the peak of their skill doing weird crap. Extremely obscure, elaborate secrets in MMOs. The CEO wanting to write a bunch of game lore so the developers have to find a place for him to put it Deliberately burning yourself out on an MMO and then deleting it forever. Vaulting Justifications. Clarity of Biome. Great ideas for a company that has infinite resources. RuneScape Modern and RuneScape Classic. Quitting WoW with your fiancee because you have a wedding to plan. The additional fee Blizzard charges for hosting your wedding inside of World of Warcraft. Fantasy heroin vs. Sci-Fi heroin. Stephepoa, Jasquosius, Dovanice and Jixandlia. Little dudes persisting between missions, if they survive. Naming all the fish after your Kickstarter backers. Doing all the same things the target your satirizing does, except you're doing them ironically. Lemmings as a squad-based tactical war game. A joyous approach to an anti-war message that makes war seem like a ton of fun. Violating the Geneva Convention by putting the Red Cross in Duke Nukem 3D. The video game that has committed the most real life war crimes. Poems you can't look at. Arriving today at the deep mountains of evanescent existence. Perfect pangrams. How they decided on the order of the Japanese phonetic alphabet. Who does Shakespeare think he is? Localizing Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffalo Buffallo into foreign languages. Poorly localized advertising campaigns. Who is the Pilot? Reading Kingdom Hearts sequel titles as poetry. A Language Built for Poetry. Coyotes begrudgingly scampering away after you honk loud enough. A small family of black bears walking down your street and effortlessly demolishing all your trash cans. Dressing your dogs up like bear cubs so the mama bear takes care of them. How are you going to keep your trash safe? Trying to design a trash can lid that can be operated by a drunk human but not by a smart bear. Putting up bear crossing signs on every street in hopes that you'll discourage traffic driving through your neighborhood. What is this, an overpass for bears?! A salmon tube but for bears. Things in nature that want to kill you that you routinely interact with. Animals that are great except they have way too many legs. Entangled Burglars. Sharing thoughts and sensory inputs over long distances. Wrapping yourself in mummy wrappings so nobody can observe you directly. The Timid Butthole. Where does the cat end and the cat fur begin? Sneaking into the archives and discovering a picture of your dad's butthole in the files and wondering "How did they get this? Why do they have this?" The Three Names of an Elf. Why Cort is one of the most researched developers on Mobygames.

Lords: Kate Andrew Topics: Movies that are supposed to be good and kind of annoyingly are actually good Making friends when you're old Paris's pneumatic mail system Forgiven, by A. A. Milne https://www.poeticous.com/a-a-milne/forgiven-i-found-a-little-beetle-so-that-beetle-was-his-name Microtopics: The skill to make the noises that are in your head. Writing quests for Hello Kitty Island Adventure. Sanrio's NDA-enforcing snipers. A crocodile that was invented in 1978. Writing quests that force the artists to figure out how a crocodile would wear sunglasses. Writing the dialog tree as the player is clicking on options, like Gromit placing tracks right as the train is about to roll over them. Spending five years shipping the first part of a live service game and then shipping additional parts every few weeks. Trying to rebuild a house while someone is living in it. Lingo 2. Dungeon Gals. The kind of game you can't draw a map of. Teetering on the razor's edge of "I'm a genius" and "I don't understand anything." What does the developer tooling look like for games that have non-euclidean spaces? Duplicated spaces with secret warp volumes. The kind of movie that an Infinite Jest reader will recommend. Terry Cavanagh's game about making tea. Egg Game? Astonishing movie running times. Five minutes of two men intensely looking at each other. An adventure movie about two best friends who hate each other. James Joyce: maybe he's good? A guy who lives in the middle of nowhere who thinks about politics a lot and never talks to anyone. Gerry, starring Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. The art is coming from inside the head. Pro Shots vs. bootlegs. Jukebox musicals. Shawshank Redimension. Shawshank Redemption 2: Shawshank Herdemption. Communicating between cell blocks by flushing the toilet. Loove a.k.a. Flushed a.k.a. Lavatory Lovastory. Mixing your DNA with someone you've never seen. Florida Writing. Gravity Slingshotting around your hobbies to reach friendship. Going to GDC and making a bunch of game dev friends. Plateauing at two digits. Getting hobbies that put you in a room with people of your desired gender. Your co-worker at the call center who's married to the CEO of Twinings. Playing puzzle games on the Internet in front of a chatful of puzzle experts. The protagonist getting stuck on a puzzle and the narrator turning to the audience and saying "chat, help us out with this one." Making friends vs. keeping friends. The friendships that you both care enough about to have maintained. I Love a Thoont. Building a pneumo to relieve congestion on the telegraph system. When the telegraph was invented vs. when pneumatics were invented. Why banks had pneumatic drive thrus rather than the teller just handing you the stuff through the window like a fast food drive thrus. Whimsical coffee preparation. The cost of building a giant tube between the coasts of North America. The Alameda-Weehawken Burrito Tunnel. Inventing a frictionless tube. Preparing burritos to be magnetically fired. Rifled sewers. Plunging into the Lithosphere. A diagram that shows how the burrito gets heated. The Taste of Breaking the Sound Barrier. Getting your poem voice on. Whether A. A. Milne knew about hash tags. Non-Fungible Beetles. Oh great, the same beetle came back! The kind of look that means "it's me, the same beetle!" The XIX and XX centuries. Writing Very Blackly. Why Does Pooh Own a Shotgun? All the talking Winnie the Pooh animals turning out to be aliens, like Starfox. A pneumatic tube, except instead of burritos you're firing cork. Writing your thesis on pop guns and continuing to do post doc research on pop guns. Spud Guns vs. Potato Cannons. A Normal Spud Gun for Normal Children. Seeing that Wikipedia considers Spud Guns low importance and thinking of ways to make Spud Guns more important. Too Many Posts.

Lords: Erica Krissy Topics: The Battle of Food Dog and Valley Jump Park The Wilson Wolfe Affair, or, how I spent $350 on the mysterious wolfe in the sky This tabletop RPG with scripting support https://mastodon.tomodori.net/@vga256/116246406043573614 Why the heck are we making everything smart these days? And why is the security so terrible (A.K.A. The Lovense Story) The Naming of Cats by T.S. Eliot https://poets.org/poem/naming-cats Microtopics: The first and still only place you can discuss topics. Writing down your plugs ahead of time. The happy ending you deserve. A small child crawling into your bed in the middle of the night and asking the questions that keep him up at night, such as "can you one-shot a Silver Boss Bokoblin with a regular arrow and a Lizal strong bow?" Giving your child a classical education. (In Zelda and Mario games.) Living in Virginia near a bunch of Confederate monuments. Looking at the battle map to see where the soldiers come down from the Food Lion. The monument to not building anything. Sonically-enforced exclusion zones. Whether there's sound in the eye of the hurricane. What they call the Wal-Mart in Puerto Rico. Podcasts on which it's okay to hate the French. Quebecois LARPing as French. History: it's all around us, and it keeps happening. Wanting to spend $350 on the wolf in the sky but the wolf just won't take your money. Simulacra Games. Spinning a zoetrope. Questioning the palness of these supposed pals. Little mom and pop shops exhorting you to solve this unsolved cold case murder. Side stories extending the lore. Applying heat to make the secret message appear, then applying cold to make the message disappear so that the next person can apply heat to make the secret message appear. Being so busy making your video game that you don't have the spare energy to solve an interesting puzzle. Kitchen table ARGs. Dang you, Mr. Stormdancer! Always coming up with your schemes. What happened to the Twinbeard corporation. Paying $800 a year in something something taxes to keep your corporation going. Incorporating in the state of Delaware. Licensing the Frog Fractions brand for a dollar. Retiring and making Pico-8 games for the rest of your life. It's like PiCoSteveMo all year! Reading your program aloud to the DM who executes it in his head. Reading your program aloud to the DM who tells you there's a syntax error on line 397. Writing out a program to present to the class. You went over my helmet?! Programming in Logo and watching the turtle move around the screen. Rehabilitating the image of Lisp-like languages by changing the parentheses to square brackets which are much cooler. Are you a friend of humans? Crossing your legs into a storytelling position. Picking your job based on what's funniest. How smart do you have to be to be a fridge. Pulling out your phone and opening your banking app to see how much cash is in your smart wallet. Hacking smart butt plugs. Whether hacking an insecure smart butt plug is funnier or less funny than making the smart butt plug in the first place. Login functions that don't require a password. Can you get a virus from a smart butt plug? The consequences of your smart butt plug getting taken over by hackers. Messaging all your Facebook friends explaining that your smart butt plug was hacked and if the butt plug sends a message saying "help I'm trapped in a butt plug," it's not really from you. Working for the U.S. govt hacking pacemakers. The chat is coming from inside the butt. The three names of a cat. Munkustrap, Quaxo, Coricopat, Bombalurina, and Jellylorum. A cat in profound meditation. Looking up TS Eliot in the phone book. Child Jordan Mechner looking up the lyricist of the Wizard of Oz in the phone book and calling him up. Doing a Doctor Who joke that nobody gets. How many members of The Who are still alive. Effanineffability. Up to the Neck in Weber.