I Don't Want To Be Skin Dad

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords)
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.

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

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/mogwai_poet/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.

Support Topic Lords