167: Dance For Your Machine Gods (feat. Dan Olson) 

"You enter into adulthood right after 9/11, which sets us all immediately on the back foot" I heard a thing once that has stuck with me: In order to understand Millenials (and especially Elder Millenials, referred to by Dan as "Generation Y") it's important to understand that the happiest period of our life was the 142 days in between the release of Shrek and September Eleventh.

My pet theory is that when the world starts ending hard enough culture returns to the 70s

i love to hear more from dan. folding ideas has taught me a lot in media literacy

42:09 "If you're a website that exists in a 3D space with *neighbors,* you now need to care about *who your neighbors are.* Maybe you don't want your memorial website to be across the street from a virtual weed store. Maybe you don't want it to be right next to, like, the Modern Mario House!" Even after watching Dan's original video multiple times, I didn't grasp just how bad this system would really be until he said it like this.

What happened before 9/11? The rise of domestic terrorism in the US... Waco in '93, the Oklahoma City bombings in '95, militias. I realize that may not have been as big a deal in Canada but 9/11 didn't happen to our northern neighbors either, soooooo... Guess that really got memory-holed after 9/11 when the US could blame foreigners for terrorism again.

Small point on the UK's left behind towns: Most of these places are less than 10 miles away from where their young people moved to.

Having moved to northern Europe, I see the current times as far worse in the USA than any of the earlier crises that were covered except Vietnam. The upper tier is outright predatory on the lower tier. World's highest medical and dental procedure prices, pharma prices, university tuition, stagnant wages, stagnant transit, housing being bought by hedge funds, reduced work hours, on and on. Am I exaggerating? Life expectancy is going down while the Social Security age is going up. And we might get World War 3 while the upper tier get rich on unprecedented military spending.

I remember watching Desert Storm war coverage on the news in my 5th or 6th grade social studies class. I had to move away from my small town to find work, because it seemed like the 1990 recession lingered there, only to then be compounded with the Dot-Com Crash. While I was in Banff working as a hotel cleaner, 9/11 happened. I later moved to the other side of Canada worked as a manufacturing temp through the 2008 crash. Several adventures later, I am an RV tech in Kamloops waiting for the other shoe to drop because I am at the most steady place in my life almost ever. I got accustomed to some level of chaos in my life, it doesn't feel quite right to have something like an expected life.

LEIGHTON if you're getting awful hang nails regularly, your cuticles might be dry. I was having that problem over the winter so bad, so I got some cuticle butter and started rubbing on the skin around my nails and they cleared up a lot. It won't help the nail biting part but it'll help with the hang nails

I think what's interesting for me is that my "formative disasters" are less a singular large incident, and more just a chain of dozens of small similar disasters. I'm on the older end of gen Z (born in 2000), so my formative disasters consist of things like Sandy Hook and dozens of other mass shootings, hurricane Sandy, the boston marathon bombings, the BP oil spill, the 2008 recession, etc. The types of things that i think were shocking in the 90s and early 2000s were kind of just mundane to my generation. I grew up doing school shooter drills in elementary school without ever questioning it, there has been an ongoing war literally my entire life, I've never really had a stable home because renting means I move every 3-4 years which means constantly shifting social circles (and i was largely off the internet until i was 14 or 15). I sometimes wonder how that's messed me up. Life, gen Z is definitely kind of strange, and I have to wonder how much of that is just the complete normalization of horror.

I'm at 32:30 and I just realized that high production value video essays are just documentary filmmaking for the gig economy. Folding Ideas is Door Dash David Atenborough.

What’s Poppin for me: If This Book Exists, You’re in the Wrong Universe by Jason Pargin is a cosmic horror novel that’s also fucking hysterically funny and (like his other books) it can be reread over and over because of how the story is constructed. it reveals information very carefully and lets the reader put some of the pieces together through a combination of a deeply unreliable narrator and a warped sense of time

Me, listening to this at like 3am: 'I was a ninja on the internet' Me: Wah- Ninja Brian?... Me, listening it again at 5pm: 'My daughter Audrey' Me: OKAY YEAH DEFINITELY NINJA BRIAN

this was great, thank you guys for having Dan on

Great episode! Dan always has such interesting shit to say

I know I said this in IG too but wow, what a great episode! Y'all had such great chemistry and just a delight to listen to!

My girlfriend recently coaxed me into playing Dead by Daylight. And honestly, I'm still not completely sure as to why some things happen in the game. It desperately needs some hover over tooltips because you'll get inflicted with a debuff and it's not exactly a game that you can pause to tab out to a list of debuffs that explains what is what. And, it seems like the game developers will refuse to add any accessibility options unless they are dragged kicking and screaming to it. According to her, the color blindness options were added after more than half a decade because the developers got sick of hearing about it and one of the PR people snapped at some folks.

What's hilarious is that Brian pitched his "dot" game idea where you just click at the dot untill you win and here we are June 2024 and one of the most played games on steam is "banana" where you... just click a bannana untill you win xD Bet you have some regrets about no following through on the idea, don't ya?

Dead by daylight is the digital version of playing the backyard game ghost in the graveyard, but with way more arguing

There are some candidates for "formative disasters" between oil crisis and 9/11 such as Lomo Prieta Earthquake or Challenger

LOS CAMP MENTIONED: WHAT THE FUCK IS MENTAL HEALTH 🔥🔥🔥🔥‼️‼️

I've seen Garden of Earthly Delights in person, it is an impressive piece.

Point a computer at your computer 😂

God I miss toon town.

1:20:30 I agree, Dan. Malenia sucked the fun out of the game for me. I beat her and I didn't feel any joy for the rest of the game.

Lol the 60s absolutely came back in the early 2000s. 80s came back in the early 2010s. We’re in a 70s revival right now, but as always, people ahead of the curve are already at ytk/2000s revival. Also, this has been going on a long time, the 50’s came back in the 80s, the 40s came back in the 70s. Hell, even the 30s came back in the 60s

Isn't the idea of "Dot" from Brian just that Curiosity cube game Peter Molyneux came up with?

I saw Nuts. It's wild and the ending so sad...

Was not expecting to have something I know from Behind the Bastards, the goat gonads guy, be referenced in something I'm watching for Dan Olson.

I so appreciate the DbD talk. It's my favorite game I can't recommend to anyone whatsoever.

Can I be invited to talk about game design and game economy design?

When are we going to get back to the groovey 60s?

Whats poppin' (for me): world war z, the audiobook. Solid 11/10 book. Damn.

The reason gen x is nearly invincible, is we had to deal with a constant chain of generational trauma..from our ww2 /depression era grandparents, Nam+, assination traumatized parents, own LA riots, challenger tragedy, and gulf war trauma, subsequent social media apocalypse,gen..now we have to be adults and make sure everything works

Wanted more from Dan and less from the hosts!