December 06, 2021

111. Put It In A Vice And Squish It

1 hour 6 minutes

Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!

Lords:

Erica

Abby

Topics:

Scale modeling hacks for broke hobbyists

Nobody should live here redux: nobody should live here either

Anal Sampling Mechanism

Wallace Stevens - The Emperor of Ice Cream

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45234/the-emperor-of-ice-cream

Andrei Tarkovsky, game designer

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyzFSsNQYoXBo4zjmTmncoA

https://www.youtube.com/c/SulMatul

Microtopics:

Photoshopping your co-guest's face onto a platypus or maybe it's a beaver.

Wanting to depict someone as having a really excellent body without knowing what that means to them, so you photoshop a swimming trophy into their hands.

The claw beavers use to comb oil into their fur.

An after-dinner lemon.

Memorably embarrassing yourself as a mnemonic aid.

Playing along with someone's schemes to get them to leave you alone.

A cool hacker whose anti-establishment principles drive her to pirate every episode of Digimon.

Differentiating between the real world and the cyberpunk dystopian future by the number of Digimon available.

Painting the peg of a loose action figure joint with clear nail polish so the peg gets a little thicker.

The downtown Los Angeles Gundam shop.

Not being permitted, socially, to carry around clear nail polish, so you get a flask and write "man juice" on it and pour the nail polish in.

Man Juice, For Men Only.

Finding a vice big enough to squish an entire city block.

Desperately searching for how to do something and finding a single forum post from fifteen years ago, with a single reply from the same poster saying "never mind, figured it out."

Appealing to 60 year old men who need something to put in their basement.

When tour wife and kids leave you and your turkey sandwich is dry and lonely.

Ancient web forums that aren't getting any more radicalized because nobody is posting there any more.

The scum of mold you get on top of your pickling brine.

How Koreans deal with moldy kimchi.

Transcending all human notions of gender by both using blush to make your Gundam model look muddy and using a soldering iron to make it look like it has bullet holes.

The ways The T-1000 is female-coded, actually, e.g. taking on a child care role, but the filmmakers clothe the robot in a masculine skin for some reason.

A beaver with a swimming trophy who doesn't want to go in the lake because it's too cold.

Eating your lemons and sitting in the dark of the lodge, as the winter will soon be over.

Whether beavers get pruny.

Why and how to get pruny.

Animals that have hands.

Otter brains: too bigs for their skulls.

Finding out what animals have in store for us.

Living in a town built over a big bubble of petroleum and your neighbor's yard having the cutest little oil derrick.

Rinsing off with distilled water after you shower so you don't get a rash.

Living in a town that has no social scene so on Saturday night you and your friends go downtown and try to track down where that shrimp smell is coming from.

Gas fields flaring all around the city.

A combined oil derrick/Bitcoin mining rig that you can plug right into the ground and forget about.

The ability to voluntarily control defecation.

The sixth sense that's just in our butts.

Taking care of you butt consciousness.

Shitting your pants once and upending all of science.

Whether anyone poops in Rain World.

A cat who is also a slug who is also trapped on the Wheel of Samsara.

Reading a poem and refusing to click on the poem guide that explains what the heck it means.

Approaching poems as inscrutable puzzle boxes where you have to crack the code to even figure out what the hell they're talking about.

Approaching making art as aN opportunity to bore the shit out of your friends and family.

Pulling the theme of a story like a string and the entire story falls open like a sack of grain.

Demanding more delicious curds and dawdling wenches at your funeral.

Needing a weird cow to anchor your painting of a grassy field.

Whether the crowd-pleasers actually have something there. Something other than all the money, I mean.

Making a funny reference to a contemporary TV commercial in your poem about a funeral.

The King of Carrot Flowers.

Busy wrists make for busy minds.

Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" as the basis for every video game except for Rain World.

Stalker and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

The mysteries of The Zone and why it exists.

The Emperor of Ice Cream of Tarkovsky movies.

Experiencing what is like to live in a non-functional economy.

Being in the company of a doctor piloting someone through a pandemic-ridden city.

Stand-Up Tragedy.

The cheapest way to fame.

Renaming your PhD thesis "Anal Sampling Mechanism" so your advisor will finally look at it.

Support Topic Lords

...more

View all episodes

By Jim Stormdancer

4.8

1212 ratings