Feature Creep: Built-in Microwave

Ned and Meg discuss the phenomenon of decision fatigue as it relates to dinnertime. It's a cruel trick that at the end of a day of decisions, one still must decide what to have for dinner, and at a time when one is most incapable of making choices. Is this a cultural disease? Is this why we have restaurant delivery from horrible companies who are bottoming out our economy? Also, crab parasites, WT...

Meg and Ned talk about how a lot of solutions are really just another problem, and our rabbit hole discussion of immanentizing the eschaton leads to a book recommendation, Douglas Rushkoff's Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. You know it has to be good because of the colon in the title. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick!

Ned sent Meg a KEXP video of a band named Angine de Poitrine and it consumed her entire day from the moment she woke up and into the next day, the day we recorded this podcast, which is about the anonymous Canadian rock orchestra that Meg now cannot live without. A serious internet rabbit hole or ten later, Meg and Ned discuss microtonal music, instruments, bands, synthesizers, Dan Deacon, mushroo...

Ned and Meg kick off their convo with a discussion of how to piss off men, technofeudalism, sports!!, and the Hum. We talk about the AOMC faltering, how much Ned appreciates espresso over other forms of coffee, and whether or not one might stave off the inevitable loss of coffee through private cultivation. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick!

Ned and Meg talk about microgenres in art. We also discuss a new turn of phrase, aesthetic erosion, which Meg learned today. We follow the history of microgenres from the 1970s through to the contemporary digital world of art. We talk about all sorts of weird stuff in the process, including unfilmable books, online journaling, Yacht Rock, jewel theft, and whether we should apply color palettes to...

Ned introduces Meg to the mini-genre of music and visual art called Vaporwave. If you grew up in the 1980s and 90s, you will immediately get the aesthetic, because it's digitally repackaged nostalgia for things from our youth, before they failed to deliver on their promises. Thanks for listening, listen to vaporwave, wash your hands, don't be a dick.

Ned and Meg discuss the long history of the concept of hedonism and how it gets sort of a bad rap. For four thousand years, give or take, people have been arguing, sometimes strenuously, over the concept of pleasure and how to measure, maximize, and promote it. We talk about the philosophy of hedonism as well as the neurology and biological basis for it. Are you a doomer who thinks you can only ex...

Ned and Meg generally don't find reaction videos entertaining, until the personal strife of the reactors becomes apparent, in which case Meg thinks they're riveting. We talk about consuming other people's misery, getting rated for inland water sailing, and the dangers of ingesting household chemicals. This one's a shorty! Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick.

In today's episode, two pseudoscientists tell you how to live, and it all starts with woke butter and homeschooling. We talk about alternatives to dairy milk and how non-diary stuff has gotten so much better than what was available only a few years ago. We consider whether milk leaches calcium from your bones and whether you ought to eat fruit before noon. We discuss kitchen gadgetry, ice cream vs...

Have you heard the Good News? Ned and Meg are starting a cult! Which cult will it be? That is still up for debate. We haven't really settled into anything yet. Gravity, books, and white noise are all in the running for the focus of our hypothetical cult. What cult will you start and what are we gonna do with all the cash? As always, thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick.

Meg and Ned decide to design a cult, but first we need some background. You would think years of Catholic 'education' would prepare Meg for this but whatever they said in CCD classes never stuck and Ned was raised without religion, so we need to do some research. We also forgot to get into the shit with Janja Lalich but more on that in #2. For now, join us on our preliminary endeavor into designin...

Poison! Poi-poi-poison! In a serendipitous moment of uncertainty, a fascinating email arrived in Meg's inbox and graced us all with the topic of today's episode: intentional food poisonings. When we were little, this included urban legends around sabotaged Halloween candy meant to force children to behave (ok, boomers), but in real life there have been many, many intentional and very real food poi...

Ned and Meg chat about the Simming Problem, which is a concept from Iain Banks, a sci-fi writer, about the ethics of simulating entities or individuals or whatever. The *whatever* bit is because how we define all these things gets real dicey and yet makes all the difference. What is an agent, or an intelligence, or a substrate or authenticity and is consciousness an emergent property of sufficient...

Ned and Meg admire the magnificent Dieter Rams, who pointed and shrugged his way into our hearts, and we discuss his legendary ten principles of good design.

Ned and Meg celebrate the near-anniversary of the Titan Sub Failure with a couple updates about the ongoing situation, lawsuits, obituaries, and so on. We also learn a couple things about the Gay Agenda, no relation to the Titan Sub Failure. Thanks for listening to our schadenfreude. Wash your hands, don’t be a dick!

Ned and Meg recorded this so long ago that they don't even remember what it's about! It's like looking for a pine needle in a haystack, or some other bad analogy. We are apt to surprise and delight (maybe) everyone, even us (probably). I mean delighting ourselves is basically the whole point of this thing. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick!

Meg and Ned talk about an awful book in the category of self-help writing that Meg had to read for school. It's about how our culture in America shames women and it totally sucks not because it's true, which it is, but because it fails in its aims, except for one tiny excerpt near the very end and that part is about a man. It's the only part of the book that is any good. That's an opinion. If this...

Ned and Meg explore examples of familial triangulation involving people who grew up before answering machines and modern smartphone technologies. This leads to a chat about doubling down. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick.

Meg forces Ned to explain Net Neutrality on the spot, and then after that we talk about how US courts just overturned it, which is bad. In addition to the bad idea of ending net neutrality, we also talk about flat earth. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don't be a dick!

Ned and Meg talk about #fff8e7, the hexadecimal index of the color Cosmic Latte. And what is a cosmic latte? Why, it's the average color of all the light emitted in the universe, or close to it! We chat about how this color came to be known in 2002 and the guys who discovered it. We also talk about physics jokes, free will and the double slit experiment, deterministic universes, and coffee. Becaus...

Ned and Meg get off topic super quick because we were in the same room again. Joy! Hello to everyone we met in San Diego, you're all wonderful! Ned and Meg talk about people who hang themselves with their own ropes, also idiomatically known as being hoisted by one's own petard, thank you Shakespeare. We talk about whales and linguistics and dogs with vocabulary buttons and the meaning of the phras...

Ned and Meg talk about the latest hype at the intersection of the art world and block chain, NFTs. We dish on digital assets, block chain public ledgers, the black market, intellectual property rights, and all the major problems with NFTs. This whole topic is both as crazy and not as crazy as you may already think. Watch out! This one’s a trip. Wash your hands, wear a mask, get yer shots, don’t be...

Ned and Meg have some thoughts about content, content creation, and what the fuck is going on. Also this one is as the name says, so we sorta forget what happens after that. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, don’t be a dick.

Ned and Meg give their thoughts about Derry Girls, a cute and adorable television show set in Ireland in the 1990s with The Troubles and a Catholic school setting as hilarious and relatable backdrops to the lives of teenage friends. We get sidetracked by pizza and fish that share a name, how everything costs $300 now, endless road trips, and a list of Neds. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, d...

Ned and Meg give their thoughts about Derry Girls, a cute and adorable television show set in Ireland in the 1990s with The Troubles and a Catholic school setting as hilarious and relatable backdrops to the lives of teenage friends. We get sidetracked by pizza and fish that share a name, how everything costs $300 now, endless road trips, and a list of Neds. Thanks for listening, wash your hands, d...