96. Get Down With Some Bugs

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early! Lords Kev https://twitter.com/kevzettler Quil Whisper your secret to a snail. Topics Ephemeral digital music Being a guest on a podcast that you normally listen to is a weird experience because it feels like you're not supposed to talk An update on Bug Mars Dancing in the Street https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HasaQvHCv4w Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/3O9JRuv3WXA If you were to meet an adult who has never even heard of video games, what would you give them to demonstrate what they are? You are not allowed to interact with them in any other way Microtopics: An awkward silence where you can't decide who goes first. Having to deliver all the chapters of a book at once. Kanary. Cooling it on making internet people mad ever since you had a kid. Overstepping your own boundaries. Lending a certain patina to your Twitter thread. Midis and meedees. Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than your had as a child. Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than the composer used. Proc-gen game soundtracks. A kill cam except it's a kill jingle Your online game detecting when someone draws a penis in the game's graffiti system but not when they draw a penis in the music editor's note grid. Ways of converting an image to audio. Deciding it's not worth going into detail but going into detail anyway. What executables sounds like and why they sound like that. Spelling the word "minimum" in a spectrograph by singing swooping pitches. A video game that induces four friends to sing cacophonously together. Three strangers having a conversation that your don't get to be a part of. Parasocial relationships. How to instantly become friends with a famous person you are a fan of. Two asymmetrical relationships snapping together to become a single symmetrical relationship. What you could've had if you just picked two friends host your podcast instead of all of them. A small company named after a throwaway joke. Spinning up a cricket farm. The Amazon of cricket protein. Alternative and synthetic protein. Receiving a care package of bug protein that you're definitely not going to eat. Whether a cricket burger is still better for the environment than a beef burger if you have to ship it across the country. Being grateful that other people will save the world in the ways that you don't. A brick wall, folks. SCP or rolled up carpet? A leprechaun with a mullet. Wearing a trench coat over a floral print jumpsuit. Racing In The Street. Everybody, where "everybody" means two people. Not being able to afford lighting after renting that crane and asking every crew member to point their car headlights at the dancers. Whether you still trigger counterfeiting laws by putting realistic money in your movie. An extended shot of Mick Jagger guzzling a generic can of beer. Dancing In A Stairwell. Dancing In The Void. Freeze frame on a couple of butts. A derelict flour mill that appears in every Brit-pop music video. How to tell how well you're doing in a Match Three game. Choosing to not introduce the mind virus of casual games to an indigenous tribe. Whether Bejeweled is more market-tested than Pong as an introductory video game. The invention of the platformer. Super Mario Bros. 3's budget and development timeline. The ways that the developers had to make Super Mario Bros. worse to make it viable as an arcade game. Finding an adult who has never heard of Mario, jumping, video games or television and locking them in a room until they beat Super Mario Bros. Looking at an image on a flat surface and interpreting it as analogous to a physical scene in the real world. Synesthesia but for ideas. Whispering a secret to the snail.