Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords)
Lords:
* Jeff is an event planner at https://www.acesup.com/ and blogged at https://80isenough.wordpress.com/ back when he was unemployed.
* Joe is.
Topics:
* 0:52 Not having time to be a geek.
* 10:21 Pickled egg ordering paranoia.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickledegg
* 20:04 This topic is mostly an excuse to ask Joe how he raised such good kids.
* The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheBlankSlate
* 33:05 Quill asks: "What sort of art did you make when you were younger?"
* Double reed instruments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doublereed
* 45:44 Augmented reality killer app: the etymology explorer
* The Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/
* 49:46 80% is enough.
Microtopics:
* Having nothing to plug.
* Consuming all the media available because you're in high school and it's the 80s.
* Not being sure if the media you're consuming, or about to consume, is worth your time.
* Forgetting everything else as a prerequisite for getting anything done.
* Humans figuring out what to do with their drive to make art once computers are better at making art.
* Collectively choosing to limit the art you consume to create an artificial culture in your collective.
* A fake band invented by the internet come alive.
* Computers taking over art curation, too.
* Making a statement in a specific context that can't be as easily transplanted into another context and that making you a luddite weirdo.
* Cultivating a healthy creative space being super weird now, but will make more sense in the future when the creative.
* Liking pickled eggs but not being able to find them in any local store.
* The hypothetical fraughtness of purchasing pickled eggs online.
* Buying a bunch of gross stuff and being disappointed.
* Hating the pickled eggs you bulk-purchased and feeding them all to your dogs.
* Pickled sausages -- a southern specialty.
* Selling your pickled products at a discount because they're past their sell-by date.
* Pickled Thai eggplant about the size of marbles.
* Not being diligent enough to look up how to include Pickled Banana Blossoms in a prepared dish and just eating them like popcorn and being disappointed.
* The entire egg pickling community thinking your egg pickling method is heretical.
* Asking everybody in your family for pickled eggs for Christmas and throwing a pickled egg party to get rid of all your danged pickled eggs.
* Consuming twenty pounds of pickled eggs on a Topic Lords live show.
* Being really impressed by somebody's child-rearing technique.
* The "blank slate" theory -- that children are born with no personality -- being total bullshit.
* A sample size of three technically counting as a pattern.
* Having a dialog with your children rather than just telling them what to do.
* Growing up hating authority and how that informs parenting strategy.
* Doing the bare minimum and getting great results because everyone else just sucks.
* Parents who are basically still children themselves.
* Not having any parenting books to read because you are the first person who has ever been a parent.
* Doing everything being indistinguishable from doing nothing.
* Not having any good way to choose between all the available child-rearing options.
* Not knowing why you read a particular parenting book twenty years ago and also not being sure if it shaped your parenting strategy.
* Making bad decisions because we're all human and we all make bad decisions.
* Being well-equipped to adapt to a changing world.
* Not making a lot of art because your penmanship is terrible and it would just be a blob of nothing.
* Your parents forcing you to take guitar lessons because it would help you get into a good school and it actually getting you into a good school.
* Kids rarely being good at anything.
* The amazing child drummer who amazingly turns into a commensurately even more amazing adult drummer.
* Noodling around with a keyboard as an adult being informed by a decade of rigorous piano lessons as a child.
* Loving Mechwarrior and spending all of grade school drawing spaceships and giant robots.
* Growing up a Scream Tracker kid.
* Loading up a song you like into a tracker and digging deep into its technical details.
* Explaining that this song is only four channels and 200 kilobytes and your mom remaining unimpressed.
* An incredible technical feat that is entirely meaningless to anybody not embedded in its context.
* Coming from a position of empathy and charity by default.
* Two wooden reeds tied together like a duckbill creating a much smoother sound than a wooden reed resting against a hard surface.
* Your band teacher not knowing enough about the bassoon to critique your bassoon playing and your next band teacher switching you to piano.
* Trying to remember all the words you want to look up the etymology of next time you're at a computer.
* Conjectural etymology that seems sensible but isn't actually backed up by evidence.
* Reading ahead because you are bored in class, but that just meaning you'll be even more bored later.
* Getting to 80th percentile of a skill or subject and then moving on to another skill or subject.
* Accidentally hiring someone pretty good at both social work and IT work but it being ridiculous to try to hire someone like that on purpose.
* The multivarious sub-skills required to run a UPS store.
* Not recommending anybody follow your career path because your resume looks like you have some kind of personality disorder.
* Nobody wanting to hire a generalist.
* Just shipping at 90% done because most likely that's good enough.
* Making the news one day but in a year a kid breaking your record.
* Everybody being sad because they're not the best in the world and the best in the world being sad because they're not even better.
* Getting really good at a skill and then computers taking your job anyway.
* Enjoying learning for the intrinsic value of learning.
