346. Adam Doesn’t Want To Get Touchy-Feely With That

Lords: Ron https://grumpygamer.com/ Kevin https://rubixsqube.itch.io/ Topics: Do you do easy or hard tasks first? Magic (not the gathering, prestidigitation) as it exists in 2026 The thing that makes text adventures interesting The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack, by Tracy K. Smith https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55517/the-universe-original-motion-picture-soundtrack Trash vs Treasure: ultra distant galaxies, little red dots, and brown dwarfs Weird hobbies Microtopics: Forgetting what you were going to say about prescription toothpaste. Microsoft Encarta '94. Back when computers were charming. A roguelike where the screen is always scrolling. Doing the hard tasks first so you no longer have to think about them. Trying to cover air quotes audially. Protaskination. Solving a topic for the first time ever. Advertisements for card tricks. Art forms involving lying to people. Nirvana the Band the Show the Movie. Using the language of punctuation to make people lean forward. Donnie Osmond being a jerk. Self-working card tricks. One of the greatest gifts ever given to you by the universe. Winning $6000 in a single spin of roulette and then retiring from gambling. Leaving decks of cards in bars that are 80% the same card. A mail order service that emails you a video of a begloved man preparing your order to ship. Why you own a nine of diamonds single card forcing deck. Video reviews that never discuss or show what the product being reviewed actually does. Dorky magicians in the Youtube era. The text adventure community adopting the Twine community. Zork's physics system and lighting model. A medium in which a single auteur can make a complete work in a few months. The Many Worlds interpretation of Twine adventures. Implementing gamepad controls for a text adventure. Complete inability to drop items in graphic adventures. A Dropping Place. Media in which only the author be clever vs. media in which the consumer can also be clever. The "that doesn't seem to work" response. How you interact with Starship Titanic. Robots saying inscrutable stuff to you. A firm turn-around wrong-way barrier. Keeping the magic of the text parser in your head even as you figure out exactly how it works. A text adventure with auto-complete. Pulitzer-winning poetry about the entire universe. White noise and black noise. The dark we've only ever imagined, now audible, thrumming. Learning how to hear poetry. (Like, at all.) A way of thinking about how the universe was born. Modern jazz as another way of exploring existence. Reading Shakespeare and having to look up "moiety" again. Reading a modern translation of Don Quixote and being annoyed that you can't find a modern translation of Shakespeare. Retreating away from the camera in horror. Unchecked ambition and desire for power. Shakespeare except it's a bunch of lawyers. Romeo and Juliet in the Globe Theater except everybody is shooting each other with guns. Bill and Ted's Excellent Use of Febreeze. JWST images of little weird pimples. Astronomers looking at Interlopers and saying "get this trash out of here" Leaving bugs in your game because they make the game more interesting. There's no such things as trash: it's all treasure to somebody. Throwing a disc up into the fizzlers. Playing a video game and thinking of a way to really fuck your game up and being compelled to find out if the developers thought of it. Always doing exactly what the game tells you not to do. Going to the Sega booth at E3 and playing Sonic as slowly as possible. Playing games in a way that makes the Sega representative come up and talk to you. The production glitches subreddit. Comb filtering. Arguing about whether it's a mistake that you can hear Alanis Morissette inhale. Parts of games that you need to polish and parts you can leave unpolished. Jim's secret to shipping video games. Polishing and honing and perfecting so much that you ruin the finished product. Picking hobbies that don't scale. Eating the top 1000 soups in the history of planet Earth. The kind of person who gets fulfillment out of people appreciating work you've done for them. Letting your wife know that you do have hobbies, actually. The Dead Poet's Society scene about measuring the relative merits of poetry. Jamming on the coffee table synthesizer, and thinking the whole time "I should make a finished song to upload to a web site" Years of meticulous cutting and shaping.