May 10, 2021

81. The Pianist-Oboist War

50 minutes

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

Lords:

Alexander

Amanda

Topics:

The disappointment of sci-fi stories that are just reskins of stuff that happens on Earth.

My bitcoin.

https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/543952090800734209

I can't decide whether I'm more annoyed that Wienerschnitzel doesn't serve schnitzel, or that they did for three months in 2017 as a gag.

Jesse asks "First encountering a song through parody."

Bad habits that adventure games teach you.

Microtopics:

Shrinking your pony until it's really small.

Pulling down the console and typing +mlook.

Skyrim modding as a more convincing representation of magic than the spell system in the game itself.

A very cryptic twitter account that just posts numbers.

What @math_ebooks did to be suspended.

Wanting to land on a planet and look for Bob but a different planet gets in your way first.

Sci-fi as a safe lens for exploring our culture without getting people's defenses up.

Reverse mystery stories.

Starfish people who communicate through music.

Watching Solaris because you're really into boring sci-fi.

An alien invasion movie without the invasion.

Final Jeopardy asking you to identify the Close Encounters of the Third Kind melody from the interval names.

The fires of Musical Jeopardy.

The correlation between how tightly strung your instrument is vs. how tightly strung you are.

The Star Trek episode where the Enterprise discovers a musician planet where there's a war between the pianists and the oboists.

Edmonton, the early Bitcoin hub.

SETI@home never finding anything interesting.

Losing your Bitcoin wallet.

Buying a $40,000 coffee with Bitcoin in 2013.

Giving your college hard drive to a friend to ask them to try to find your Bitcoin wallet without first scouring it for incriminating evidence.

Deciding you no longer need a memes folder on your hard drive because you can easily find as many memes as you need on the Internet.

Dressing up as the Murder She Wrote theme song for Meme Day.

Whether the Murder She Wrote theme song is a meme.

The barbecue joint that accepts Dogecoin.

Going to Remedy Chai in Edmonton and getting a butter chicken wrap and a $40,000 chai.

Liking both hot dogs and schnitzel but hating Wienerschnitzel.

A joke that most people won't get or notice, and the people who do will be annoyed by it.

My First Book of Space.

Hating potatoes until you discover that they are delicious and then hating them even more.

Your refusal to admit that actually you like potatoes as foreshadowing to every argument you ever have on the Internet.

The Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dog burrito skipping right from marketing's brain to consumer's mouths without ever being taste-tested by anyone.

The Brain to Mouth social movement.

The culinary dimensional space of meat product folded into bread product.

A hybrid chef/engineer who has an understanding of both fast food pipelines and how to prepare a tasty meal.

Hearing every Weird Al version of a song before you hear the originals.

Mathnet.

Bible versions of pop culture songs so you can sing along to the radio without being full of sin.

The guy at Bible Camp who rewrote the lyrics of pop music to be about God, who retired back when Christianity was groovy, so the most recent pop music you're allowed to sing is from the 1970s.

It's getting cold in here, so put on all your coats.

Sherlock Hemlock.

Vincent Twice Vincent Twice.

Monty Python's popularity among Americans who are completely oblivious to what it's satirizing, so a whole generation of American nerds grew up thinking inscrutable nonsense is the pinnacle of comedy. (Which it is.)

A combination of things you usually don't see tickling your neurons in a novel way.

The scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio show where Douglas Adams is making fun of disco.

The missing album that the Backstreet Boys only released in Canada so they could practice being famous.

Time traveling to past and future Space Quests.

Doing ridiculous adventure game shit to get a book of matches when you could just go to a store and buy a gosh darned book of matches.

An adventure game where you can do what makes sense.

How the Infocom hard boiled detective text adventures were structured differently from traditional text adventures.

Wanting Roberta Williams to adopt you and now you've blown it.

The Seattle of Mexico.

San Francisco, The Everbrown State.

Roberta Williams tracking you down and adopting you against your will.

Luring Roberta Williams to your house with promises of trained chickens jumping through hula hoops.

Support Topic Lords

...more

View all episodes

By Jim Stormdancer

4.8

1212 ratings