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Lords this week:
* Tim made Jamestown and just shipped Jamestown+ on PC and Switch. http://jamestownplus.com/
* Kole makes podcasts at Duckfeed. http://duckfeed.tv/
Topics:
* 2:42 Cat trees for humans.
* Ninja Warrior. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJPP7M1hQZE
* "Find an American Ninja Warrior Gym." http://www.ninjawarriorgyms.com/
* 7:37 Non-analytical storytelling/writing (flash writing, story time, songwriting)
* Alice's Restaurant. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m57gzA2JCcM
* 15:08 The ephemerality of AI Dungeon.
* AI Dungeon: https://www.aidungeon.io/
* AI Dungeon patreon: https://www.patreon.com/AIDungeon
* Art breeder: https://artbreeder.com/
* 25:13 Brett asks: "The assertion that programming and in particular programmers are getting worse."
* 36:20 Sonder
* "This Is Water." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CrOL-ydFMI
* "Laziness Does Not Exist" https://humanparts.medium.com/laziness-does-not-exist-3af27e312d01
* 47:48 What determines if an inanimate object (car, home, golf club) gets a proper name.
* 56:09 Fruity Cheezma
* "Cheese Tea: It’s Real and It’s Spectacular" https://www.dinnerpartydownload.org/cheese-tea/
* Orbitz (drink). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbitz(drink)
* Jim's Fruity Cheezma outcome: https://twitter.com/mogwaipoet/status/1210328506359414785?s=20
Microtopics:
* Releasing the same game over and over again because it keeps being your best move.
* Suffering through and finding the magic but still believing you shouldn't have had to suffer.
* Asking yourself what the problem is and breaking it down.
* Being here for topics.
* Understanding that the question you're asking is ridiculous but asking it anyway.
* What you want only existing for children because their needs are greater.
* Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy.
* Using adult-sized playgrounds for physical therapy keeping those blades sharp.
* The through line from bouldering to Ninja Warrior to Super Mario Bros.
* Watching the first half of Full Metal Jacket and thinking the obstacle course looks really fun.
* Putting game show contestants in a video game for the viewers at home but the contestants themselves are just looking at a big green wall.
* Professional skaters having skate parks in their back yard.
* Doing American Ninja Warrior every day and getting a lot more miles on the tires.
* Tony Hawk getting away with skateboarding in a 50-year-old body because he's good enough to not faceplant all the time.
* Giving a skateboard to an average 50-year-old and saying "go for it buddy."
* Restarting civilization around your business plan.
* Making up stories for your children in real-time.
* Being a DM except nobody else gets a turn, you just keep going.
* Five years of daily practice to wake up your storytelling brain.
* Going to an Arlo Guthrie concert because you're old and go to Arlo Guthrie concerts.
* All of Arlo Guthrie's songs being twenty minute stories like Alice's Restaurant.
* Thinking that advice sounds wise for somebody else.
* David Lynch's book on storytelling turning out to actually be about Transcendental Meditation.
* Actually possibly having deep insights about the universe while being high on drugs.
* Writing a book by just writing down something you already said and it feeling like someone else wrote the book.
* Letting the story write itself and then taking credit for it.
* Having children because you want to become a great writer.
* Incurring $10,000 of hosting costs because you misconfigured your CDN.
* A text adventure telling you what you did but not telling you what happened as a result.
* Markov chain text generation.
* AI replacing musicians and ultimately most art.
* AI musicians giving you another album from your favorite band.
* Exploring AI generated music and sharing your unique discoveries.
* Seeing creative work as the last bastion of human work that AI can't take from us, but being wrong.
* Feeling wonder at the achievement but also complete dismay that we've made ourselves irrelevant.
* Basic income allowing us to look forward to the machines taking all our jobs.
* All the advantages of AI just turning into more profit for billionaires.
* Skating through a lucid fever dream and trying to make sense of the chaos, but it's really just chaos.
* AI Dungeon being a good improv partner but a terrible game.
* AI generated text being effectively sampled at an unknown granularity and having no idea if this is a unique sentence or if it's lifted wholesale from a Sonic fanfic.
* Programmers getting worse as a discipline vs. getting worse as people.
* Forcing everyone on Earth to participate in NaNoWriMo.
* Building software on top of a teetering stack of dependencies 1,000 feet high because your company probably won't last out the year.
* Programmers getting better in the same way speed metal guitarists are getting better.
* Just making the thing and not caring how you make it because it just doesn't matter.
* Not bothering working really hard to do the easy part really well because the hard part is what matters.
* Companies being possibly good at their focus and everything else being good enough at best.
* Some of your best friends being assholes.
* The best programmers you've met being super sociable and cooperative.
* Staying and asshole and flaming out because nobody wants to work with you or maturing and sanding off the rough edges and becoming more productive and less of a drag.
* Not being sure if your co-workers are nice to everyone or just you because you have seniority.
* The coming generation of programmers seeing programming as a hobby or a career rather than an identity.
* Blocking the guy driving too fast on the freeway but then it turns out the guy driving too fast was going to the hospital.
* Doing your best to live like people invented in storybooks.
* Realizing that everyone around you has lives just as complex and nuanced as you or anyone you know.
* The violence of walking past someone on the street and dismissing their entire context and history because you have no choice if you want to get on with your life.
* Projecting an arbitrary order onto the chaos and definitely being wrong.
* Definitely being wrong anyway so why not think a positive thing rather than a negative one.
* Changing how you see somebody by imagining them differently.
* Conceiving of a universe without yourself at the center.
* Flying off the handle because you've had shit piled on you all day and not because you dislike Kole specifically.
* Running late about 5% of the time you're driving and also being annoyed by about 5% of drivers going too fast because they're just irresponsible people.
* Working hard to build positive interactions and trying to see the best possible version of somebody.
* Instagram being a source of misery because you're comparing yourself to the prettiest people's prettiest moments.
* Comparing your backstage to someone else's front stage.
* Choosing to shape your world such that you're not walking around angry all the time.
* Having a boat and the boat having a name.
* Not giving your cat a name but permitting it to have a name.
* Anthropomorphizing the objects you rely.
* Calling it "the mud room" even though there's no mud and no room.
* Naming furniture that hurts you "kneebreaker charlie" and not hating it so much because it's a little bit funny.
* Thinking of an old car that's always breaking down as being like an old friend who's kind of a pain in the ass but you've been through so much together.
* Being happier loving things.
* A generic bunny holding an Easter Egg that nobody plays with until you give it a name.
* The only time you've bought a plant in your life being that time they put googly eyes on a cactus.
* Your roommate who took all the bows off of the presents under the tree and then shit on the floor.
* Not wanting to be the skin dad.
* Having animals to project love onto so your society is more placid and malleable.
* Cats being way more lovable than most human children.
* Empathizing with the kid crying on the airplane because you feel like crying too.
* The kid who's allowed to scream in the grocery store when if you screamed you'd get thrown out of the store or arrested.
* Putting hundreds of googly eyes on a Roomba because you can't just buy two googly eyes and calling it "Kos-ba."
* Putting two eyes on the outside of the Roomba and the rest on the inside because you don't want to freak out the squares.
* What's fruity, cheezma?
* Trying to get your friends to follow the script of your joke but they keep making their own jokes instead.
* Tweeting about there being no hits for "fruity cheezma" and now there being one hit for "fruity cheezma."
* The cheese tea rocking the boba world.
* Copping to a certain amount of midwestern provincialism.
* The probability of inhaling boba being very high but it's great though.
* Blowing a tapioca ball directly into the mouth of your enemy right as they're inhaling.
* The end of your boba beverage being like The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
* A dare than someone should not have taken and that someone having possibly been you.
* Cream cheese and fruit going together.
* The kind of logic you don't want to be applying to food.
* Putting all your old food combo ideas on the menu without testing any of them because Fruity Cheezma worked out somehow.
* Wanting peanut butter to work with sliced cheese because you can roll it up like a taquito.
* Figuring out that milk and Cheerios go together because they're both kind of off-white so next you try orange juice and Cheez-Its.
* Cheez-Its staying crispy in orange juice because they're so oily.
* A Cheez-It being named Arthur and loving its mother.
* The driver in front of you making a right turn on red from the third lane over because she was in a hurry to get to the library and walking up to her to ask for reparations.
* A telling being told or not being told.
