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Lords:
* Shane is a Jesuit Regent who used to make video games.
* https://twitter.com/OptimistPanda
* Donate to the Jesuit Refugee Service: https://jrs.net/donate
* Nathan makes games mostly about jumping and shooting 2D monsters.
* https://twitter.com/MommysBestGames
* http://mommysbestgames.com/
Topics:
* Beforeigners (Norwegian TV show about refugees from different historical periods showing up in present-day)
* Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASr0n5LnWnU
* Curating your child's entertainment so they grow up with good taste
* I spent half an hour watching someone solve a Sudoku and it was amazing
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4
* Brandon asks: "Taking care of children vs taking care of pets"
* Other jobs game designers would do well performing, after they leave game dev
* History of changing worldviews -- not just Darwin, but things like the Big Bang and Continental Drift were originally seen as crackpot fringe theories
Microtopics:
* Saying your names at the beginning of the podcast and activating your wonder twin powers.
* Quality inventive gameplay-driven entertainment.
* Doing an earnest plug for once.
* Figuring out how to make games for someone other than gamers.
* Your game dev heroes being in their fifties and chasing success they had in their twenties.
* Taking a vow of poverty and annoying off your wife and child.
* Needing to find a patron because your art is not commercially viable.
* No longer having your finger on the pulse of indie games.
* Assuming the internet will be all over a particular TV series but somehow there are not endless memes about it.
* Vikings apparating into modern Oslo and and solving a murder mystery.
* The show about Vikings solving a modern-day murder mystery somehow not incorporating The Immigrant Song.
* The American remake of Beforeigners where it's still about vikings so the protagonists can be white.
* Finding out that a game is only four hours long and asking if it could be two hours instead.
* Introducing video games to your child in order of release so they develop a taste for the classics.
* Figuring out how to introduce your child to the Internet without ruining them.
* Installing an internet proxy to protect your child from depraved porn by replacing it with videos of normal people having normal sex.
* Today's teens playing Bushido Blade and discovering that it has a pocket sand button.
* The classic game history situations.
* Wanting your child to like all the hobbies you think are boring.
* Watching a man repeatedly astonish himself at his own ability to solve a puzzle.
* Feeling like you are in conversation with the puzzle designer.
* Watching a movie over and over again.
* Taking the smallest possible step when a problem seems impossible.
* One of those Master Class videos if the person was discovering that they were a master while making the video.
* A five year old taking the family car to California to buy a Lamborghini with the $3 in his pocket.
* Feeling your family tree stretching out forwards into the future and behind you into the past.
* Watching your child grow agency and opinions and knowing it's your responsibility to shape them.
* You and the cat enjoying each other's company while the cat doesn't die.
* Your kid doing something bad and everybody looking at you.
* Cheering when your child goes down the stairs correctly.
* Game design teaching you to see the world as systems.
* Studying economics at an academic level and feeling like you're turning our game design skills inside out.
* Trying to convince people outside of game development that being a game developer has taught you anything meaningful.
* Being failed up to a level design role because anyone can scrub out a tile map.
* Level designers getting more respect when it started requiring technical chops.
* Needing a web page and getting your nephew to do it rather than paying an expensive consultant, because frankly 99% of people can't tell the difference.
* Trying to write your own CSS renderer because you don't want to just make it a web page.
* Trying to convince your friends that you were once a big shot in the game dev world.
* The Societate Jesu having an incredible faction progression.
* Giving people progressively cooler titles instead of raises.
* Getting an extra year of being a priest before you die.
* Doing a cool thing while you're alone and getting bummed out that nobody saw it.
* Trying to throw fruits and vegetables as close as possible to the ceiling without actually hitting it.
* Hating doing marketing so much that you invent a project where the whole point is that it's a secret and you'll never promote it.
* How South America kind of fits right into Africa.
* Hypothesizing continental drift and the scientific community telling you to fuck right off.
* The lost continent of Lemuria.
* Fringe scientific theories only gaining traction when existing scientists die.
* Taking comfort in the fact that how people in the past were wrong but what we believe now is definitely correct and we'll never have to change our minds.
* Being presented with contrary evidence and dying on the spot.
* The most delicious bolus.
* Eating cookie dough rather than ruining it by putting it in the oven.
* The variety of textures and flavors of drinking milk and then eating cookies. (Not dipping the cookies in milk.)
* The worldview shift that leads you to change your handle from Cynical Panda to Optimist Panda.
* Playing Bomberman '93 with your nine year old and eventually having to explain to him that 93 is your dad's age.
* An alternate-history Spock-with-a-goatee video game console.
* Living in your house for 30 years and suddenly discovering three additional rooms.
* Buying a NES and SNES classic even though you've been playing those games in emulation since the 90s.
