Topic Lords

By Jim Stormdancer

Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week.... more

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The podcast currently has 340 episodes available.

Topic Lords episodes:

April 13, 2026338. Placebo Yourself into Having a Phenomenal Time
Lords:
Mark
Mark's top albums of 2025: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1InKh07sllCLF6cu9za0yhQvmGVC3ZHvM162XI1u1S9A
Shirley
Topics:
If you want to be at the front of the stage at a show, just go there, literally no one is stopping you - or - THE ONLY THING YOU LACK IS WILL
Elves and Using Religion to Protect Natural Spaces
It's illegal to mod your EV to have custom engine noises
Litany Against Fear
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Litany_Against_Fear
How to stop drinking coffee
Microtopics:
The Splintered Oar, by Weft.
An album about labor rights in Kentucky.
Reading aloud to your friends and family.
The siren song of sitting on the couch and watching TV.
Time as the crow flies.
Measuring time as the crow looks at the clock.
Wanting to be right in front of the stage and just going there.
Paying hundreds of dollars to stand in an extremely loud room.
Getting after it with an open heart.
Everyone standing at the same height as the musicians playing live music.
An active member of a live music community in a major US city.
Physically engaging with the music.
Letting go of your concern for the eyes upon you.
Standing in place for the entire four or five bands playing this show without ever leaving your spot to pee.
Working the merch booth.
Unloading a truckload of positive energy into the space in front of the stage.
Mosh pit comfort.
Bands graduating to the next level of popularity.
Fighting your way to the front of the stage so you can not look at the band.
Luxuriating in the freedom of a shared experience of joy.
Giving back to the artists you love by screaming at them while they play music.
Becoming part of a local scene.
People who believe in elves and people who pretend to believe in elves.
Looking forward to when your child might one day bring you boba.
Elf kayfabe.
Mall Santa breaking kayfabe.
Whether the mall Santa has to keep up the act even when he's alone in the shower.
Reindeer-powered Yaris.
Scandinavian elf lore.
Post 9/11 supporting of the troops.
Arguments to which there is no possible rebuttal, such as "you can't build a mini mall because the elves live here."
Picking a random Wikipedia article about Nordic folklore and finding out how many metal bands are named after it.
How few murders there are in the modern black metal scene.
A looping sample of Snoop Dogg saying "this Volt is in reverse."
Automotive engineers deliberately making the engine noise play a power chord.
Instead of banning whistle tips, legislators mandating that they play a 7th chord, and also that the driver must know enough music theory to explain why they chose that chord.
Being on the sideshow mailing list so you can attend every sideshow.
All the different motions you have to make to wash the entire surface of both hands.
A poem about not allowing fear to conquer you while you wash your hands.
A poem with a specific utility.
The lifelong pursuit of being okay with your own mortality.
Trying to learn to be happy with what you have.
How I fucked myself up.
How many waves coffee has.
Genetic sense of thirst.
Making up a magic number of ounces of water to drink.
Getting a water bottle and putting a cool sticker on it.
The lion's share of behavioral addiction.
Going downstairs into your morning environment.
The ritual pleasure of fidgeting with a cigarette.
Quitting smoking and having to find other rituals to fill the space smoking used to fill.
Your brain being like "remember cigarettes? That was cool" and you're like "that's a weird thing to bring up right now, brain."
Having a puff on a cigarette to find out if that's enough to get you addicted again.
What it would take to make smoking look uncool.
How much easier it is to quit smoking now that they have fidget spinners.
All the little adjustments you make to make your life more tolerable.
Embers of the Dawn by Bronze Hall.
Pumping your fist while you think about elves.
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1h 10min
April 06, 2026337. Mars, Technically
Lords:
Chris
Fabian
https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/
Topics:
Oops, my 3D printer became a hobby
GTA's AI is not trying to screw with you with its sudden lane changes and T-boning you at intersections, it's just oblivious. (Probably.)
Esper says: "I can confirm the traffic AI in Cyberpunk 2077 is still hilarious. I set my car to 'auto drive' and after maybe 30 seconds it took a hard right into the ocean. Maybe that’s lore accurate, who knows."
Alberic Whale and the Enigma Layer
https://thespinoff.co.nz/the-best-of/31-12-2018/summer-reissue-the-mystery-of-zach-new-zealands-all-too-miraculous-medical-ai
https://thespinoff.co.nz/society/13-01-2020/rip-zach-probe-finds-serious-wrongdoing-over-miracle-medical-ai
Between What I See and What I Say…, by Octavio Paz
https://www.wisdomportal.com/PoetryAnthology/OctavioPaz-Anthology.html
Microtopics:
A coffee shop that exists here because of the port of Oakland.
Popping unroasted coffee beans into your mouth like peanuts.
The worst tasting and most caffeinated cup of coffee you've ever had.
Your local library.
Things that should not be businesses.
Three possible purposes of universities.
Finding a new hobby (derogatory)
3D printing a selection of action figures for your wedding.
That one person you know who's really into 3D printers.
Why having a broken 3D printer counts as a hobby where having a broken refrigerator is just a situation.
Yanking out some gunk with pliers in hopes that that'll fix it.
Your 3D printer breaking halfway through your wedding figurine project so you have to make the other other half out of milled aluminum.
IBM Selectric Typewriters shipping with a repair guy who lives in your spare bedroom in case it breaks.
Amazon sending an Amazon warrior to repair your 3D printer but since you only paid for the cheap extended warranty she's allowed to attack anybody including you.
Whether Balatro is trying to deliberately find weaknesses in your build.
Higher fidelity graphics coming with expectations of higher fidelity traffic modeling.
Car AI in open world games being as dumb as the developers can get away with, except for in Cyberpunk 2077, where they're dumber than the developers can get away with.
Whacking at it until it's good enough to ship.
Traffic tuning in GTA Vice City.
Playing games with really smart, effective AI, like Chessmaster 2000 and X-Com, and realizing that actually having really smart AI is no fun.
Skating around with rollerblades on your elbows and knees.
Everything's a tuna can.
Three car accidents in six weeks.
Conscientiously objecting to military service so they insist you get a driver's license instead.
Driving through a haunted house to train the braking reflex in response to being startled.
Whatever happened to ol' Alby Whale?
The AI assistant named Zack turning out to just be a dude named Zack.
Adorable tiny food delivery robots who turn out to just be remote controlled by a guy hiding around the corner.
Waymo cars blocking major thoroughfares for hours at a time.
Multitasking between all the most stressful, confusing driving situations.
Self-driving cars (allegedly) turning self-driving off half a second before impact so the impact is blamed on the human operator.
Several hundred tons of liquid nitrogen cooled supercomputer.
Blaming your spelling errors on The Enigma Layer.
Having seen more proof of your AI assistant than you have of god.
It's scammers and hucksters all the way down.
Whether DLSS is taking away game developer jobs.
What happens when you go from a three word Markov model to a five word markov model.
A giant prank with no particular end-game in sight.
Acts of speech.
Poetry as synesthesia.
Trying to explain in words why that cat is acting weird when the cat doesn't think in words at all.
My Psychosis, my Bicycle and I, by Fritz B. Simon.
Trying to figure out how football works when you can't see the players, only the referee.
Feeling some type of way.
Trying to take musical ideas and apply them outside of the realm of music.
Creating words that dance around concepts.
Getting stuck forever in your cringe phase.
Opportunities to write the same program over and over again.
A melancholy linked list implementation.
Passive-aggressive C code.
Java Enterprise Abstract Singleton Proxy Factory Bean.
Remember printed manuals?
The international obfuscated C code contest.
What made the 3D accelerated demo scene interesting again.
How much code you can fit in 64k if you don't link to anything.
Secret Topics.
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1h 22min
March 30, 2026336. The Four Colonoscopies
Lords:
Jason
https://bumpyskies.com/
Ben
https://www.zerofiftyone.net/
Topics:
Prepping for a colonsocopy, the jmac way!
https://fogknife.com/2023-12-31-my-colonoscopy-strategies.html
How to do things you're bad at
The Trustworthy Shirts Tournament
https://eldritch.cafe/@cassolotl/116156921111844432
Do not go gentle into that good night, by Dylan Thomas
https://poets.org/poem/do-not-go-gentle-good-night
Microtopics:
The Wordle Puzzmo and Dall-E shitposts channel.
Plugging your turbulence forecasting web site at both ends.
Kids picking a name for themselves at age 8 and then being stuck with it forever.
Going to court and the judge is named "velociraptor#1993" and that's just normal.
Trying to pick a baby name and suggesting the name of your great grandmother whom you never met, velociraptor1993.
People still being named Baker even though nobody bakes any more.
Ripped off vs. stolen.
Colonoscopy Strategies.
Poorly understood advice from well meaning friends.
Drinking squid ink the day before your colonoscopy.
A power-blasted clean empty warehouse of a colon.
Why are you still listening to these colonoscopy stories? Skip to the end of the episode where I ask you to give money to the patreon.
The tattoo on the inside of your colon of an arrow indicating "this polyp right here"
Staying up until 3 AM drinking an entire jerry can of mineral wax.
Referring to the COVID pandemic as "the pandy"
The colonoscopy robot's tattoo gun.
Knowing all the names of parts of the intestines because of the difficult boss fight inside an intestine at the end of Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty.
Hideo Kojima setting out to design a game to force people to write strategy guides about traversing the human rectum.
What Google searches Hideo Kojima was trying to inspire when he designed Snatcher.
Writing a strategy guide for drinking a five gallon can of lemon-flavored gym socks.
Slightly chewy boiled sweets.
Whether Jim should already have had a colonoscopy by now.
Getting your colon cancer screening kit in the mail and it swishes when you shake the box.
The tattoo scissor robot: it's out there waiting for you.
Getting an image of someone else's intestines tattooed on the inside of your intestines.
Getting "how's my driving" or "if you can read this you're too close" or "we bought this before we realized Elon was a fascist" tattooed on the inside of your intestines.
Striving to be more comfortable with being bad at skills.
All the ways you can fail at throwing pottery.
Learning to enjoy being bad at the piano.
The doodle that Bach drew on the cover of Well Tempered Clavier.
Flanderizing yourself because nobody else will.
Art forms where you accumulate physical evidence of your skill progression.
Recording three audio books and observing yourself getting better at recording audio books.
Audible's gig economy thing.
Never studying piano because you get too much done when you procrastinate studying piano.
Converted telephone microphones.
Trying to learn to play piano with a broken digital piano and really getting into electronics repair.
Playing live music and being completely at the mercy of time passing.
The Moogseum in Asheville, North Carolina.
The aspect of human existence that you're most missing out on.
Sitting there watching people play music and wishing you could also play music.
Learning to play the Final Countdown riff or the Axel F riff and being set for life.
Following a tutorial to create a convincing cover of Satisfaction by Benny Benassi.
Rip it Up, by Orange Juice.
Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat.
The Lesser Trolley Problems.
Whether viewers of The Good Place are more likely to value moral philosophy.
M*A*S*H vs. Moomins.
Who would go around wearing a M*A*S*H shirt in 2026?
Deciding how much to trust a Moomins aficionado without knowing how old they are.
Identifying Moomins on sight.
Owl House vs. Owl City.
People who go around wearing Owl House shirts without thinking about all the passers by assuming that they mean the Fireflies band.
What the characters in Interstellar think of Dylan Thomas.
The last wave by soaking in the green bay.
Whether you should get mad before you die.
Breathing life and fire into those who yet live.
Showing people an argument for losing so that they get mad and win instead.
Charitable Reads Book Club, LLC.
Production values that are way too high for this bit.
Soupertasters 15, with guest star Michael Caine.
Corn poems vs. carrot poems.
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1h 8min
March 23, 2026335. Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll: Pick Any Two
Lords:
Andrew
https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/
Aubrianne
Topics:
Reading every Hugo-award-winning novel
I accidentally made Frog Fractions 2.5 before knowing what a frog fractions was
https://www.lexaloffle.com/bbs/?pid=40777
I've discovered the perfect video game genre
https://mastodon.social/@mogwai_poet/116072652112241644
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer, by Walt Whitman
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45479/when-i-heard-the-learnd-astronomer
Software Toolworks Multimedia Encyclopedia CD from 1992
https://archive.org/details/the-software-toolworks-multimedia-encyclopedia-1.5-1992-12-english-cd
I fixed my slow computer with time travel
https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
Microtopics:
Plugging moving.
Apps that don't do things or have functionality.
Wearing one of those blood pressure cuffs all day.
The treadmill hacking into your heart rate monitor.
Getting your heart rate up by being aggravated at terrible exercise apps.
Video games that only work with first party controllers because they patch the controller firmware.
The only team that was permitted to alter the microcode on the Nintendo 64's GPU.
Reading every Hugo award winning novel.
Sci-fi authors in the 50s being obsessed with advancements in psychiatry.
What if there was an empire that spanned a continent.
Drinking a potion every morning to address your ADHD.
Dissolving your gummy vitamin in liquid nitrogen and/or
Looking forward to the next time you get sick so you can take NyQuil again.
The Snow Queen by Joan D. Vinge.
Why they let women write books now.
Advantages of AuDHD.
The Hugo award, invented by the protagonist of Hugo's House of Horrors.
Knock-off Sierra games.
Feed the Ducks.
The one with the Spider-Bat.
Stealth plugging a classic Pico-8 game.
Independently inventing Frog Fractions.
Not-Vector Art.
Making games that don't have a secret thing in them.
Making Pizza Panda without ever telling anyone what you're working on.
Picking up a mouse with hats.
Just make a dumb thing that's silly and you can make fun gifs of it.
Splore 'em if you got 'em.
XAMWWSKH, or "Exam Whiskey"
Curses, or ncurses.
Walking around this maze and running into this guy and suddenly you're playing a minigame.
Whether weird shit keeps happening in Pac-Man, or happens only once.
Why wait at all? Just wake up each day and be surprised.
Aren't we all just building mazes for ourselves?
Why sports games still exist.
Why do people play sports video games when they could play sports in real life?
Snapping your fingers in order to better internalize the poem.
What have you over-intellectualized in your life?
Your particular brainotype.
Learning about muscles, joints and physiology.
A bicycle reflector they put on the moon so they could shoot lasers at it.
Measuring diagrams during your lecture.
The astronomer who lost his nose.
Revealing that you've drawn a moustache on Orion's Belt.
Learning to read words by looking at a spectrogram.
Who knows what the Danes are up to?
Things that are not widely known but can be described.
Looking at really old computer stuff because that's fun.
Beautiful art that nobody made on purpose.
Getting actors together in a room to read a scene together before discovering that that's exactly the wrong way to do video game voice acting.
Aphantasia but for audiation.
Inability to audiate at different volumes or on the stereo spectrum.
Focusing really hard to fall asleep.
Kick-starting your hypnagogic hallucination dream state.
Rolling that sleep boulder up the hill every day.
Retheming your 2026 Linux computer to look like Windows 95.
Downloading 20 years of email history.
Playing Hunt the Wumpus on your dad's SIM-1.
What game developers say now that "AI" means something else.
What "drone" used to mean, and also what it meant before that.
OpenRCT2 and FreeCiv.
Making your customers less nauseous before they sit on a bench.
Not having any restaurants at your theme park so that nobody throws up on your roller coaster.
Being unable to A/B test your brain because you only have one brain.
Having a variety of weirdos on Jorts dot horse.
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1h 12min
March 16, 2026334. A Pivotal Event in the Evolution of the Society of Quebec
Lords:
SJ
https://neutralzonehotel.com/
Benjamin
Topics:
TD Place Arena in Ottawa is really weird in an interesting way
Learning to ice skate when you're 40
Is this keyboard layout more sensible than QWERTY?
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/VfpwY7be.jpg
She Walks in Beauty, by Lord Byron
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43844/she-walks-in-beauty
Microtopics:
Neutral Zone Hotel.
Heated Rivalry.
What a loon sounds like.
Going to Canada but never going outside.
A real dickhead in the history of hockey.
Needing a new hockey arena and a new football stadium and putting one on top of the other.
Backwards ice.
Canadian Tire Center.
The Ottawa '67s.
Realizing that your two arenas on top of one another will collapse instantly if you ever hold two events at once.
Asbestos sprinkles falling from the ceiling and delighting the crowd.
Ice skaters falling over because the ice is too cold.
What's up with fighting in hockey?
When ice hockey goaltenders got masks.
Regulating sports violence with additional violence.
Spontaneous vs. pre-arranged hockey fights.
The Gordie Howe Hat Trick.
A triple double, except instead of impacting the outcome of the game, it impacts your soul.
The Punch-up In Piestany and other bench-clearing brawls.
Hockey's Post-Headshot Era.
Learning new skills as an adult.
The Kraken Community Iceplex.
Complaining about swizzles for months.
Pumping your legs to propel yourself forward.
Swizzles vs. backwards swizzles.
The point at which ice skating classes branch out into hockey classes and figure skating classes.
Beer League teams.
Born knowing how to skate.
Jusse Saros erasure.
Hockey players getting concussed by swimming while drunk.
Circle to confirm and X to back out.
A keyboard with all the calculator buttons on it.
Interviewing the animator who designed the weird keyboard in Bubblegum Crisis.
An argument for Colemak over Dvorak.
The Z, X, C and V keys staying right where they are.
Switching keyboard layouts to keep your college roommates from screwing with you.
Why boredom is a good thing.
Desperately trying to fill today's 16 waking hours with something, anything.
Making content for the Internet.
Cloudless climes and starry skies.
Whether Lord Byron got his title by being on the show.
Trying to rhyme brow and glow.
Whether they had non-rhyming poetry 200 years ago.
Only remembering your anxiety dreams.
The recurring dream where you explore stone stairs leading down from a decrepit old fishing house, going deeper and deeper each time you have the dream until you finally get to the bottom of the stairs and find out what your whole life has been leading to.
Tiny hockey community discords.
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50min
March 09, 2026333. Bring Your Daughter to Monastery Day
Lords:
AP
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2364580/Titanium_Court/
Alexander
Topics:
The 5th Ramsey number
Why Mr. Satan (from Dragonball) is one of my favorite characters in all of literature
The Odyssey 2's ROM sprites
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Evl0wxIY.png
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/gNkdwtoA.jpg
Search Lizard Vagina And You Shall Find by Patricia Lockwood
Why do drugs have two names? What's up with that?
Microtopics:
Recording the fakest possible sounding laughter in case someone makes a joke that doesn't work.
Going on a nice short walk.
The PNW, where the frogs are a-croaking.
Going out to see the dog pee.
Lying down and pretending to sleep
Explaining to the doctor that you didn't sleep at all and he's like "that's not what your brain waves said!"
Dreaming that you've been awake for 48 hours.
Path of totality vs. regular shitty boring eclipse.
Consume Me.
Attempting to become hot in high school.
Whether unwishlisting and rewishlisting a game helps.
Very large prime numbers that are only two apart.
Prolific math speed freaks.
Whether the aliens know the fifth Ramsey Number and are just quizzing us.
Aliens visiting and sharing the ultimate secret to doing laundry.
Sentient arithmetic getting angry.
How do kangaroos clean their pouches?
Topics that don't cause listenership to drop precipitously.
Thinking about Mr. Satan in the bath.
Localizing Mr. Satan for the American audience.
A cartoon of two muscly guys screaming at each other, getting louder and higher pitched over the course of five minutes, to the point that you start worrying about the health of the voice actors.
An episode of TV that's just 22 pure minutes of building tension.
Goku's hair turning blond so that the manga artist doesn't have to laboriously color his hair black al on every panel.
Everyone in the story growing strong enough to blow up the planet on a whim.
Everyone on Earth showing up to cheer on Mr. Satan.
When wrestlers stopped maintaining kayfabe outside of the live show.
King Lear asking the audience if they can see the corpse breathing.
Giving annoying characters a moment of sincerity and/or heroism.
Enthusiastically chanting for Satan.
Witnessing the total horror of the universe and then being like "I didn't just see that"
Mr. Satan convincing the evil alien not to destroy the Earth by showing him a cool puppy.
How is Goku going to prevent spam bots from registering accounts?
A weird lens on this strange universe.
Sincerity punchlines.
Behold, an anime horse!
Top 37 Classiest Satans.
Death losing every game against Bill and Ted.
Coloring the up arrow green to represent a tree in your skiing game.
The division symbol you learned in grade school and never used again.
When you want to shoot a golf course, a plane or a tiny flat cake.
Collecting your favorite medieval manuscript scans.
The medieval scribe deciding on a whim to write the next passage in Greek.
The guy plucking penises off of the penis bush and putting them in a basket.
My brain, and the bad sunning lizard inside it.
Here is some pornography, if it will help you.
Great job, Canada.
Poems that foresee themselves being uploaded to the Internet.
One of the early "isn't it weird that this literary person is on Twitter writing shitposts?"
My Least Favorite Antibiotic.
Wrapping your antibiotic in a tortilla.
I love an antibiotic with a nickname.
Magic acts you can only do once. (Because they kill you.)
Settling Space. (And why we shouldn't do it.)
Establishing legal precedent for selling moon rocks.
Can God get a thorn stuck in his paw?
There's No P in Thomson. Let's try to keep it that way.
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1h 9min
March 02, 2026332. Boston: It's Not a Year
Lords:
Jin
https://awesomedonut.github.io/
Brad
https://rainwarrior.ca/
Topics:
The shareware games business model
Thoughts on how to define femininity?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bqloPw5wp48
The Great Molasses Flood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrnRNfXm_k4
Entrance by Rainer Maria Rilke
https://poemsintranslation.blogspot.com/2010/10/rilke-entrance-from-german.html
Combining magic and science in science fantasy.
Microtopics:
Lizard for the NES.
Retrofuturism in ancient China.
Silkpunk Origins.
Ultima-inspired indie RPGs from 1994.
Passing around public domain games on floppy disks.
Registering shareware to get rid of the nag screen.
Adventure game hint books as a second channel of income.
Asking your mom to get a money order to register the shareware version of Impulse Tracker so you can get the Stereo Wav Writer.
Front loading all the good levels in the shareware episode and selling the crap in the registered episodes.
The Ur-Quan Masters.
Printing to PDF.
Uploading your music to mp3.com.
Cracking shareware using a known plaintext attack.
Drawing an image with so much entropy that the Save Robot dances for longer than usual and then plays a sad sound.
A three hour deep dive on the very popular vampire novel Twilight.
Going online and googling masculine and/or feminine traits.
The Four Pillars of Femininity.
Pants: they're for barbarians.
Whether Stephanie Meyer was trying to write a treatise on idealized gender roles or whether she was just writing what she thought was cool and fun.
Popular depictions of women who are masculine in behavior but feminine in appearance.
Why can't your girlfriend both look like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and eat hamburgers like Buffy the Vampire Slayer?
Why women work so well as horror protagonists.
Do people cry less in Marvel movies?
Someone crying so hard in a movie that you start to worry about the actor's social life.
Tolkien adding a second female character to Lord of the Rings just so he can make the "I am no man" linguistic joke.
Boston: it's not a year.
Painting your giant molasses tank brown so it's harder to notice that it's leaking.
All the children in town walking up and licking the giant leaking molasses tank whenever they feel like a snack.
Waking up in a pile of dead bodies with your mouth full of molasses.
Big Enough to be Horrible.
Getting your architectural plans approved by a government body.
Gilding the lily when the lily is already extremely memetic.
Fame: look what it does to people.
Building a giant tank of anything in the middle of a city.
Where do you put your 50 million gallons of molasses?
What happens if you poke the Demon Core with a screwdriver?
Scientists getting too excited to keep being careful.
A black and slender tree.
A word kept in the mouth to grow.
Eveningfall.
Putting a tree in the sky while you're creating the world.
The game you're making giving you ideas about the game you're making.
Navigating the scientific method in a fantastical universe.
Lit RPG.
Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Using a quarter of the words in your novel to explain the rules of the world like a board game manual.
Jedi using their powers to boil water for tea.
Enslaving Jedi to run your steam engine with their mind powers.
Jedi Inflation.
Two words that sound good together and now it's your name.
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1h 3min
February 23, 2026331. Earbuds Are a Type of Sandwich
Lords:
Kory
https://kbones.fun/
Andy
https://highcadence.online/
Topics:
The Gametank
https://gametank.zone/
https://www.crowdsupply.com/clydeware/gametank
I swear to God, I'm going to talk about auctions and auctions in games, it's super interesting and I don't want to get preempted a third time.
Esper says: "There’s actually a game coming out in a week where you break into museums to heist real-life African artifacts with the goal of returning them to their rightful homes! It’s called Relooted and looks pretty cool." https://store.steampowered.com/app/3255890/Relooted/
Winston figured out how to watch TV at 2AM
Dragonfly Catcher, by Chiyo-ni
https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@gingerbeardman/115933940306986226
I just lost a snapshot of my life in mp3 format.
Microtopics:
Multi-time lords.
K-Bones dot fun.
CachyOS.
Scrubbing topics against the corrugated metal washboard of discussion.
Leaning into the microphone and saying "topics."
Helping Andy quit his day job tonight.
What MAGfest used to stand for.
Playing with SGI hardware in the Old-Ass Computer Room.
Game consoles that output square video.
Getting pixels into the framebuffer of the Fairchild Channel F.
Seeing a fun puzzle to solve but not solving it because you already have way too many projects.
Through-hole soldering.
Replacing volatile memory with F-RAM.
Preparing to have fun.
Reaching the point in your life where you don't want to bother with the war game, you just want to paint the miniatures.
What do you call it when you pair up with three people?
Throupling up for the next 45 minutes.
Who has time to both solder things and play video games?
Why Robotron 2084 was more difficult in emulation than in the arcade.
How to pronounce SNES.
Shmups slowing down when there are more objects on the screen, and game designers incorporating that into the game design.
The ZX Spectrum Next and the Mega 65.
A game console that only 150 people own and they get super excited whenever a new game comes out for it.
Game development like a caveman would do it.
Whether more than one person can take the under.
The rules of Monopoly as written vs. the folk rules.
eBay auctions as an extremely boring game.
First price vs. second price auctions.
Visiting the real money auction house in Diablo and finding out just how little your time and effort is worth.
The Gold Standard of the Hat Meta.
An evolutionary branch of PVP that's distinct from Yomi.
What to do when you want to play Avalon Hill's Dune.
Fence Lara Croft's Stolen Treasures.
Lara Croft's Stolen Antiquities Simulator.
Winning a bunch of Saltybucks on Saltybet.
Age-appropriate behavior.
Speedrun watching TV at 2 AM.
Live and Don't Learn.
Explaining jet lag to a two year old.
Watching MTV's Liquid Television block until 2:30 AM.
Finally sitting your son down to have the Aeon Flux talk.
Haiku that end "that's it, that's the haiku" even though that's too many syllables.
Hiking in the wilderness and encountering or not encountering a dragonfly.
People at risk of owning a Game Tank.
Broadly appealing messages sent out to farm likes.
The psychological cost of having 20,000 people following you.
Choosing your Mastodon instance based on what domain name William Gibson thought was funny.
The Mazzy Star song that's on the Batman Forever soundtrack.
iPod shuffles always insisting you're not pregnant no matter how much you pee on them.
Ephemeral preservation of a time in your life.
A biological weapon that removes your ability to perceive music as music.
You die young, or you live long enough to see Nine Inch Nails become dad rock.
Music Inspired by the Soundtrack.
Putting your MP3 collection on striped RAID arrays for the benefit of future archaeologists.
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1h 13min
February 16, 2026330. Tip Extra To See the Nuns
Lords:
Alex
Shannon
Topics:
Japan in summer is too hot, but there's lots of cool festivals
Why can't I have marzipan made by nuns in California?
Podcast playlist problems
Considering the Snail, by Thom Gunn
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52887/considering-the-snail
Microtopics:
Traveling.
If you need a lot of stuff, or if that stuff needs you.
Real Topic Aficionados.
Last Life and other lives.
Watching a TV series you like and then going back and watching the same episodes again from a different character's perspective.
Napping all day and seeing street festivals at night.
Walking around with a tower of flaming candles on your head that keep getting tangled in power lines.
Why aren't the modern World's Fairs as exciting as the ones from 150 years ago?
Making a couple weeks vanish in lieu of a millennium and a half of leap days.
Naming your baby Person Who Packs For Themselves.
Naming your baby "Supplanter"
The littlest bean that's currently born.
Growing up enough to realize that everybody is named Luke now.
How Bob used to be the funny fake name but now it's Jeremy.
The Bob Emergency.
The guy you call Baker because he's a baker.
The canonical order of ore value in video games.
Hacking your save file at home, just like in the good old days.
Selling marzipan in a dark room with a turntable and a bell.
Things you can eat in some parts of the world that you can't eat in others.
San Diego's Best Seattle Burrito.
The essence of fine Mexican foods.
Australians telling candy companies "stop trying to make Halloween happen"
That friend who has digestive issues eating salmon, but only in specific countries.
The politics of buying Girl Scout cookies.
The best place to sell a Girl Scout cookies on UCSD campus.
Boy Scouts trying to sell popcorn, with seemingly no awareness that popcorn is not remotely as good as Girl Scout Cookies.
Kobey's Swap Meet.
Getting an old timey surgical mannequin at a swap meet so you can practice your surgery.
Kids today trying to figure out how to operate a VCR like they're playing Myst.
What happens if you put a VHS tape in backwards?
Netflix's "continue watching" category, for movies you didn't like enough to finish.
We don't want to hear your bra podcasts!
The Stanford professor you're gardening for asking you what podcast you're listening to and now you have to explain your weird hobby to your employer.
How to listen to podcasts without your boss sneaking up on you.
The first time you've been to the dentist without headphones this millennium.
Introvert Dentists.
Tooth care advice that you forget immediately.
Extremely symmetrical knots in a power cable.
Climbing, sailing and caving knots.
What is a snail's fury? Why is this snail so mad?
A turtle that's decided it's go time.
Getting really excited about the turtle races at the Renaissance Fair.
Watching a carnival game where four people throw five spears each at targets attached to a wall of hay, and none of them manage to hit the wall.
Axe throwing bars, where you have a beer and throw axes.
Taking up axe throwing as a hobby because whenever someone gets killed with an axe, the police will be sad if they don't have any suspects.
Axe throwing failure modes.
Dominant javelin throwing strategies.
Throwing a javelin further by spinning around like a discus thrower.
Bullets: they go where they want.
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1h 1min
February 09, 2026329. Who Made Tigers?
Lords:
Tyriq
Watson
Topics:
My sleep experience over the holiday
Esper says: "Cannabis can definitely help one get into a sleep state, but actually degrades the quality of sleep quite a bit. From personal experience my guess is this has to do with how it affects dreams, often precluding them from happening to begin with."
Conlanging taught me how to judge good art
Tate mode
The Tyger, by William Blake
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger
Microtopics:
Scrubbin' Trubble
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Leguin.
Changing history by dreaming about it and having a hypnotherapist that's trying to change your dreams.
Telling artists that you like them vs. telling them that you like your work.
Learning how to take compliments.
Three people who could have opinions.
Spoilers for early January.
Trying to sleep on an airplane and training yourself to be unable to sleep at all.
A highly suboptimal experience.
Untraining the fear of falling asleep on planes from your body.
How to wear a neck pillow, maybe.
Sleeping sitting up and your head nodding forward as you fall asleep.
Neck pillow instructions dot PDF.
How to transport a neck pillow.
Hyperfixation on sleep and the consequences of not getting it.
Mythbusters Mode.
If you can't sleep, how helpful is it to pretend to be asleep?
Being woken up by the sensation of all your senses shutting down as you fall asleep.
Skipping your consciousness off of the surface of sleep.
Getting super stoked when you're about to fall asleep and waking yourself up because you're so excited.
Problems solved with more coffee vs. problems solved with more coffee tables.
Lingthusiasm.
Cursing yourself to hate a beloved movie series by watching it on a plane.
Psychosomatic self-curses.
Linguistics and conlangs.
The guy everyone hires to con a lang for a movie.
Judging things based on whether you like it vs. judging things based on whether it achieved the creator's goals.
Learning a new framing and applying it to everything.
Being aware of your frame and communicating your frame to the listener.
Lojban.
Lojban as a wholly unnatural way to speak in the same way that ballet is a wholly unnatural way to move.
Decent and not unaesthetic.
Trying to draw a picture without knowing how to hold a pencil.
Birds with extra vocal tracts.
Birdlangs.
What if parrots evolved to be sentient, except in a fantasy world, because reasons.
Ascertaining the borders of your caring.
Brandon Sanderson doing Brandon Sanderson things.
The IPA of sounds a human can perform live on a modular synthesizer.
To create Hatsune Miku, you must first invent the universe.
Horizontal vs. vertical scanlines.
Designing a CRT that can scan either horizontally or vertically.
Delta gun tubes with a triad of phosphor dots.
Having a vertical monitor to display tall things.
Page-shaped-pages.
Games that ship as a rectangle on a web site.
Black frame insertion.
Do modern LCD displays have ghosting?
A very intimidating challenge.
A very fun nexus of art and programming.
Tate Mode vs. Tate Modern.
Tate your owl for science.
Whether this poem predates the Great Vowel Shift.
Mixing ands and ampersands.
Capital Ampersand.
Seeing an animal and realizing that this is it, this is the one that's meant to eat me.
A glowing golden perfect human that everyone instantly hates and wants to eat.
Whether you can invent a tiger in Dwarf Fortress.
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1h 9min

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