257. Stinky Judo

Topic Lords

Lords:

• Nathan
  • https://store.steampowered.com/app/2976260/ChainStaff/
• Tom

Topics:

• During the summer olympics, France introduced breakdancing as an event, which was invented in America. They stole it from us! What new event should we steal from another country when the Olympics comes to LA in 2028?
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzy_(mascot)
• Getting to an age where media is good: the writers are your contemporaries so their work doesn't feel stodgy anymore.
• How are you saying goodbye to trigraphs?
• Rain by Raymond Carver
  • https://readalittlepoetry.com/2012/12/13/rain-by-raymond-carver/
• Jumping levels of abstraction while explaining computery things, how to pronounce angle brackets and command-line flags
• 3rd tetris playtest developed ("rolling"), ponder an entirely new approach to a game (or medium, or problem) that comes nearly 40 years later.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV5DIZyqsaw

Microtopics:

• Whether the chain staff is also the grappling hook.
• How all games ought to be made.
• Using an ancient alien artifact as an immersion blender.
• Getting the steamer arm upgrade before you can steam the milk.
• Space Opera by Catherynne Valente.
• Books where you read a couple paragraphs and you're done for the day.
• A sport where if you reach just a little bit further maybe you can touch your opponent's face with your foot.
• Stealing cheese rolling from France at the 2028 Olympics.
• Hosting the Olympics: a huge money-loser.
• Shouldering the terrible burden of hosting the 2028 Olympics.
• Aging up the 1996 Olympics mascot so they'll be the right age for the 2028 Olympics.
• The Chinese Olympics mascot Jim keeps confusing for Tingle.
• Olympic announcers just assuming everyone knows what a "B-Boy" is.
• This right here is a horse.
• Arranging a competition as bracket of 1v1 matches when it could just as easily be individually scored performances.
• Gymnasts all over the world chalking their hands because humans are more alike than they are different.
• Running fast at the Olympics.
• Hiring Topic Lords as Olympic announcers.
• Synchronized swimming except you need to synchronize with all your competitors.
• Getting out the shotgun mics to televise basketball players trash talking each other.
• Liking television alongside people who share your generational values.
• Enjoying being part of a target demographic until you get too old.
• Making an effort to appreciate new art more.
• The inexhaustible supply of old movies you haven't seen.
• What is lost and what is gained now that we're not all watching exactly the same TV shows every night.
• Realizing your social values match the media you're consuming because you didn't roll your eyes at the Very Special Episode.
• All the video games where you build a bionic arm for an NPC.
• Two guys in a missile silo arguing to keep trigraphs in the C standard.
• Boring programming situations where memory leaks are impossible.
• A guy drinking a beer looking over your shoulder while you program who says "yep" whenever you do something he approves of.
• Compiling C++ to a web site.
• Writing a web assembly program by typing opcodes into a Javascript string.
• What website people are into.
• Music that plays while you're waiting for a game to load.
• Loading the loading screen.
• Some things are being destroyed and other things rebuilt.
• Waking up and it's raining.
• Saying you have no regrets when of course you have regrets – everyone has regrets, fool!
• What cities were destroyed in December 2012?
• Scraping information so you can stick it in a file system.
• Complete List of Destroyed Cities.
• How grumpy Raymond Carver was as a six year old.
• How to communicate about what you want someone to type.
• What they call curly braces in other countries.
• Smooth brackets.
• How Mandarin speakers write C code.
• Drawing weird shit with Unicode glyphs, making it your URL, printing it on the side of a bus and making people figure out how to type it.
• Mathematicians giving all their variables single letter names.
• Embarrassing yourself by begging the compiler to not reformat your code.
• Choosing to do the easy part of your job right now.
• How to play Tetris faster.
• Strumming arcade buttons to press them faster.
• Weird ways of holding the NES controller to move Tetris pieces faster.
• A new way to interact with this piece of plastic.
• Turning the back of the controller into a giant button.
• What high jump competitors thought the first time they saw the Fosbury Flop.
• Learning to do close-up magic and getting frustrated because you can't literally make the card vanish.
• Funding a weird game and finding out later if it ever ships.
• Whether the folks who made ZPF considered any better names.

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