This is the pre-show banter and topic negotiation for episode 364, ft. Maxx and Avery:

Microtopics:

• Strumming a guitar on a Zoom call.
• A topic that's just a story.
• Cassowary Joe.
• Something rotten in Denver.
• Whether Carmen Sandiego is a pun on the city of San Diego.
• How the Diablo game series sounds to people who are not from the Bay Area.
• The mythical Kingdom of Bethesda, where you might go meet Liv Tyler.
• Whether you're from San Diego. (It's complicated.)
• In defense of the Murder Cassowary.
• The tiger climbing up your friend and stalking you throughout the zoo.
• Being the coolest kid in your apartment complex until somebody gets a Super Nintendo.
• Cargo Cult Entertainment Green Light.
• Offering a poem and immediately regretting it.
• The RSS feeds for individual Lords.
• The eight hour Avery-only episode.
• Reminding you buddy not to say goodbye to the Alexandria that you're losing.
• Pretty Wacky in Every Language.
• Getting excited when you have something to contribute to the video game discussion.
• Trying to turn your video game podcast into Topic Lords.
• The Idle Thumbs Steering Direction.
• Sharing a show on a radio station with your friend who only plays Ska and when they go to the bathroom you play Elliott Smith.
• Timeless Topics that Will Never Grow Old.
• Why is my computer automated?!
• The shop in your local mall in San Jose where you can rent videos that people home-taped in Japan and mailed to the shop.
• Gradually replacing all the water in your body with British game shows.

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.