281. Mr. Nukem Was My Father

Lords: * Stevie * Bri Topics: * 3D modeling and my lack of visual imagination * Cutthroat compounds (my linguistic specialty) – current pursuit is "verb-em" last names – I'm researching the origins of the fictional law offices of Dewey Cheatum and Howe * Pocket Warwick and other lost software * For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper, by Joseph Fasano * https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/1fvzv1f/poemforastudentwhousedaitowriteapaper/ * Colma's city motto "It's Great to Be Alive in Colma" is great marketing Microtopics: * Silly inventor and brainstormer. * Writing code that generates audio. * Giving talks at the Odd Salon. * Coffeehouse revolutionary thinkers. * Classic Hughes Behavior. * Looking at Blender again every seven to ten years. * Imagining a place in any level of detail. (Other than the name.) * The memory of what a tiger looks like, and whether it rotated on a Lazy Susan. * Whether seeing things in a dream feels similar to visualization. * Needing a license to operate as an engineer, but anyone can call themselves an Imagineer. * Weenies and MacGuffins. * Drawing something in 2D and tracing it in Blender. * Different ways to approach level design. * Thinking of something and putting it in your game. * Getting your game design playable as soon as possible so you can find out if it's any good. * A verb and its direct object. * Misers and drunks and cowards and gluttons. * Kick 'em Jenny. * Bop It! * Plastic keys where the point of the key is that it immediately breaks and you have to buy a new one. * Lawyer jokes from 19th century Australia. * Whether Nukem is his last name or just a nickname. * Syntactic freezes. * Rude slang words that end up on listicles. * How "cacafuego" became "spitfire." * Etymonline shrugging and giving up. * Not knowing about the alternate pronunciation of parentheses and processes until you get an office job. * Choosing a comma as one of your hills. * A unit of sound and meaning that you use to modify another unit of sound and meaning. * How to pronounce Warwick Davis. * A Jib Jab. * A Tamagotchi Situation. * Boatswains and forecastles. * Adding redundancy for clarity and also removing it for efficiency. * If you still have a Jaz disk, what do you even do with it? * Going to MagFest to see a chip metal band called Master Boot Record and he's throwing floppy disks with Deluxe Paint on them into the crowd. * Sharing a birthday with a Kentucky Derby winner but not being sure if he's a person or a horse. * The Friendliest Friend! * Stu Sutcliffe, the sixth Beatle. * International Snooker 2012 and Seven Wonders: Ancient Alien Makeover. * Fantasy consoles that only run Final Fantasy games. * If it's your first time at Nice Club, you have to Nice. * Seeing a generation grow up using automation to do a task that you had to do by hand and feeling one way or another about it. * How to tell whether somebody can reason about a topic and express their thoughts clearly. * Underpants Gnome Plans. * Polishing your thought processes until you find one that you agree with. * Defending Your Thesis, directed by Al Brooks. * The only place on the Internet you can hear advice about going to college. * Colma Secrets. * Noone ever stops in Colma (on purpose) * Everyone who came to San Francisco and died. * Go By Train. * Calling the Colma Historical Society to see if they have a living volunteer there that day. * Calling a song "Going to Colma" and hoping that the phrase catches on as a euphemism for Kicking the Bucket. * The Joy of Actual Citizens and People Involved in Government. * Encyclopedia Briannica.