Comment by musesum | Hacker News Reader

Comment by musesum | Hacker News Reader

Will Wright taught me about "turtleducks"

Met him at the Computer History Museum, maybe around 2007. He had a branching storyboard-style presentation with 100's of slides. In the middle of the talk, he asked the audience about which direction they wanted to explore. Based on a show of hands, he proceeded to branch off into a few dozen more slides. Pretty epic.

Anyway, Turtleducks: we met later and I demoed a visual music synth. Was wondering if it would fit somehow into Sim-City. He said: "Well, what I have is a turtle and what you have is a duck. You can't just put a duck on a turtle and get a turtleduck." [Am paraphrasing.]

Ironically, a year later, he introduce Spore -- thus, solving the turtleduck problem. At least, in the turtle/duck domain.

> You can't just put a duck on a turtle and get a turtleduck.

The creators of Avatar: The Last Airbender clearly disagreed there:

https://avatar.fandom.com/wiki/Turtle_duck

Whaaa???!! I guess if you can think of it, it will probably exist at some point.

The Avatar series aired in 2005, so who knows, maybe Will Wright got the idea from watching it with his kids (assuming he has children)

My go-to name for this is 'Nuts & Gum' from the Simpsons.

In the show, Homer pulls down a can from the cupboard and the camera zooms in so we can read the product label: Nuts & Gum! Together at last!

These two products would obviously be horrible together; a crumbly thing, and a thing you can't swallow. But on their own they're just fine.

You've never done the trick, apparently. When you're chewing gum, try adding a "real food", like a peanut. The gum changes texture dramatically.

It has to do with saliva enzymes, i'm told.

This just triggered a memory synapse that probably has been unused for literal decades about how when I was a kid we only could buy really bad chewing gum in our village, the type that quickly lost flavor and ended up really tough to chew, and how we would experiment with eating something else like licorice or a cookie to re-introduce flavor or soften it up. Even thinking about the texture of chewing gum mixed with brittle cookies now grosses me out, but childhood me had different tastes I guess.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com