339. Become Uncoffinable

Lords:

• Watson

• Wren

Topics:

• Faction design in historical strategy games

• Linguistics makes it easier and harder to name things

• You belong in SLUSD. What is SLUSD?

• The Cremation of Sam McGee

• https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45081/the-cremation-of-sam-mcgee

• The magic systems of Brandon Sanderson

Microtopics:

• The Three-Body Problem (Not That One)

• Jade City; Jade Legacy.

• Making any non-creamy soup into a creamy soup.

• Boiling an entire civilization down to a concept simple enough to program.

• Getting to the end of the tech tree first and winning science.

• Greece as the origin of many of our modern ideas about government.

• Grand strategy games where you spend most of your time trying to not to be assassinated by your family.

• Dwarf Fortress except it's obsessed with the royal family.

• Hiring Charles Babbage to invent the analytical engine because otherwise all your game jams will have to be board game jams.

• Playing a TTRPG and having to name something so first you have to create thousands of years of linguistic history.

• The World Builder's Disease. (A.k.a. having a delightful hobby)

• What you might have named somebody back in Zelda Times.

• Developing a set of phonotactics so that you can name something plausibly.

• What is SLUSD?

• The webp of 3D model formats.

• Trans people: they belong in Ohio.

• Putting up a billboard and hoping people will look away from the road to see your content.

• What investigative journalists might do if investigative journalism still existed.

• Solving the SLUSD mystery.

• Reconstructing the history of civilization from the Topic Lords vaults.

• What did people with ADHD do before Topics?

• Strange things done in the midnight sun.

• Cremating Sam in the wreck of the Alice May.

• The secret tales of the Arctic trails that would make your blood run cold.

• A poet who mostly writes about burial rituals in the arctic circle.

• Stompin' Tom.

• Bits to Try if You Think You're About To Die.

• Supernatural small-town Alaska death promises.

• Why SETI@Home looked for three spikes.

• At what point to Doom clones become first-person shooters, and at what point do you become a conspiracy theorist for pointing out all these games are the same.

• Gandhi becoming so peaceful that he integer underflows.

• Video games as a way to cope with the outcome of civilization.

• Sanderson's four laws.

• A fictional branch of physics.

• Various metals that do various things.

• Consuming metal filings that have magical effects based on this funky diagram.

• Eating a burrito wrapped in aluminum foil.

• Coinshots shooting people with coins.

• Soothing and inflaming various emotions.

• The element of thinking about stuff in various kinds of ways, and its atomic number.

• Forcing a Mistborn to burn aluminum, as a prank.

• Creating a magic system by working backwards from the premise that tinfoil hats are effective in this universe.

• A fandom wiki. Made by fans…