54. Stab 'Em Into Place

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * Adina is @FeyTechnologist on Twitter. * Alex is @ThemsAllTook on Twitter. * https://www.youtube.com/user/adiener Topics: * Anarcho-communism for basic bitches * How I overcame my inability to stick with a project for the long haul * https://pomodoro-tracker.com/ * Simulating the fluidity of natural group conversations in voice chat * Stephen asks: "The Damascus steel of maze generation algorithms" * https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190919-the-maze-puzzle-hidden-within-an-early-video-game * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fastinversesquare_root * The hidden worlds of each person's living space * Learning every craft to become the ultimate craft wizard * https://consumerist.com/2016/12/12/a-few-pen-strokes-on-this-mcdonalds-coffee-cup-give-warmest-greetings-a-new-meaning/ Microtopics: * Fabric and circus arts. * Getting private trampoline lessons at the largest nonprofit circus in Seattle. * Being happy with an audience size that doesn't require you to moderate very much. * Forming smaller communities to take care of the people left behind by large governmental systems. * Empowering smaller communities to take care of each other. * Knowing your neighbors and caring more about them than people you don't know. * Cultivating a neighborhood to make sure you live near people you want to know. * The long term viability of the nuclear family. * A commune of queer people funded by a couple of tech jobs. * Motorizing two wooden planks and hooking them up to the internet to get hugs online. * Getting a whole lot done when you don't have internet access but now there's internet access everywhere. * Adding a physical ritual to a mental activity to make it feel real. * Putting the tomato on a different shelf to indicate that you are done with it. * An accountability mailing list where people might hypothetically judge you for what you haven't gotten done. * Fake accountability that feels real. * Trying to replicate a warehouse full of indie game devs on Discord. * Asking you for friends' lunch table to be enlarged so you can fit. * Writing a Discord bot that replicates the chat of every voice channel in every other voice channel. * Solving a social problem with social change rather than software. * How many clicks it takes to switch chat rooms. * Running through a procedurally generated maze. * Doing floating point math by aliasing the bytes to an integer and subtracting it from a weird magic number. * Code that is so self contained and stable that it's not really a problem that nobody understands it. * Old programmers retiring and their knowledge leaving with them because they didn't document anything. * Writing a megabyte long brain dump of everything you know about a project before it leaves your head. * The talk Jim didn't give describing the shaving cream technology in Glittermitten Grove. * Being too tired from your shaving cream rendering R&D project to do a good job on your beard rendering R&D project. * Wario Ware except with relaxing minigames rather than stressful ones. * Porting your game from modern systems to MS-DOS so you can sell it on a floppy disk. * How scratch and sniff failed where a Smell-O-Vision video gaming peripheral will succeed. * A swear filter but for smells. * The Femicom museum. * Going for walks around your neighborhood and seeing the outside of someone's house. * The hidden interior of a stranger's home as an allegory for their unknowable mind. * Peeking into your neighbor's window whenever you get the chance. * Which service jobs let you go into people's houses and see how they live. * How it's okay to let the cleaning service employees see your secrets because you don't consider the working poor to be real people. * Whether house cleaners get a small amount of joy in knowing the weird secrets of rich people. * The guy who comes in every few months for repairs because your computer is completely full of porn. * Seeing someone's deepest darkest secrets and being like "it was aight" * Wanting a nicely interior-designed house but not wanting to put in any effort. * Wanting to paint your house and painting one wall and thinking "I'm good." * Getting the kind of paint that seems like a normal wall color but changes to a garish color after it dries, to fool your wife. * Being ready to learn all the new hobbies as lockdown starts but someone already bought all the sewing machines and felting needles. * How many more ways you can fuck up a sewing project vs. a knitting project. * Pulling out all the stitches in a pleated skirt for the third time and deciding you want a different hobby. * Taking natural animal fibers and stabbing them into place. * A sewing project having to hang on someone's body in a particular way. * Learning every game development skill so you can make games without ever talking to anyone. * Smearing goo on a white surface and it becoming a picture somehow.