59. 1-800-Ask-A-Harpsichord.com

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! (https://www.patreon.com/topiclords) Lords: * Amanda * [e-mail] * Alexander is still a math professor Topics: * Harpsichord music in public domain for spooky chiptune soundtracks * The elements of chip music. https://www.linusakesson.net/music/elements/index.php * Shareware floppies! Remember those? * Skunny the Squirrel: Save Our Pizzas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tceqj1x_Q8Q * Skunny Kart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0JzpjINeE0 * The outlandish economic world of Neopets * https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1297485937384001537.html * Running a Beanie Baby arbitrage empire. Microtopics: * Programming industrial robots to lift really heavy things. * Trying teach kids Python when you don't know Python, but it's okay because knowing how for loops work gets you 90% of the way there. * The consequences of buggy code when the robot is lifting a test tube vs. a car. * Whether three rotary axes mounted on a big linear slide counts as a robot or is just a fancy conveyer belt. * A failed branch on the evolutionary tree of keyboard instruments. * Having to retune your harpsichord multiple times a day if not multiple times per song. * A harpsichord jumping into organ territory. * A medieval troubador who is not playing power chords. * The Famichord. * Omitting the note that is most heavily implied by the other three notes. * Conflating Super Mario World and Link to the Past because they both use spooky harpsichord music. * The difficulty of synthesizing a piano sound. * A really slow early version of machine learning. * Conveying musical intensity when you have no volume control. * Sharpening your own crow quills to maintain your piano. * Sneaking broken harpsichords into somebody's house while they're sleeping. * Rompler rock. * Recognizing a Bach piece because once you typed it into your Commodore 128 as a PLAY statement. * A floppy disk that you bought in a grocery store when you were six. * Whether Sir Mix A Lot is actually dead or just represents a dead person in this analogy. * The internals of the Quake engine. * A C-like language with no arrays so you need to do everything with linked lists. * How long humans have been taking square roots for. * Real-time operating systems. * Putting your audio code in the same thread as your game code so the audio breaks up if you frame rate dips too low. * Sending Jim a sample of moustache man. * A pinball game that plays sound effects at significantly different rates depending on the version of the sound chip. * Buying a shareware game on a floppy disk at a grocery store for the same price as a blank floppy disk. * Playing the shareware episode of Doom and being like "I played Doom already, I don't need to pay for it." * Getting a call from your harpsichord landlord because you haven't paid your harpsichord loans and he refuses to take the harpsichord back. * Harpsichords requiring daily maintenance or they break down over the span of months. * Putting your harpsichord in a sauna to keep it moisturized. * A squirrel in ancient Rome fighting with gladiators over pizza. * A folder hidden by your mom's inability to do a recursive directory listing. * Deciding, as a culture, that the way to advance the 2D platformer as a genre is to make it as hard as possible. * Getting perforated printer paper at the library and drawing your own Prince of Persia levels. * Writing your opus with fire flowers and station wagons. * Whether or not it's cool that Mario Paint Composer graduated to twelve tones. * Back when there was a point to writing songs in different keys. * 1-800-harpsichord-facts.com * Delving into Neopets as an outsider and seeing real life principles of economics mirrored in a distorted reflection. * Making a bad search engine for the player shops so non-competitive shops run by inexperienced players get as much shop traffic as the competitive ones, and so finding a particular item feels like a discovery rather than a given. * Exploring the outcomes of a search engine that is bad in an interesting way. * Neopets voter fraud. * Designing daily quests to keep player shop prices high. * Writing gradient descent optimized algorithms to optimize your Neopets casino strategy. * Learning to code because you want the nicest Neopets shop. * Pushing HTML5 to its limits to get a really big sparkling snowflake in the middle of your ice themed Neopets shop. * Intentionally broken search bringing back the art of gift giving in the digital age. * Intentionally not buying something for yourself so someone can give it to you for your birthday. * Winning a trophy for reading books to your Neopet. * Reading 140 of the 150 possible space themed books to your Neopet to get that Neopet on the space themed books high score table. * A nine year old running a Neopets crime syndicate. * Pre-PayPal digital currencies. * Convincing your grandma to get you a PO Box and bank account so you can run an underground Bea