361. Making the Math Do Pretty Things

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.

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