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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How many episodes does Topic Lords have?

The podcast currently has 331 episodes available.

Topic Lords episodes:

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
February 02, 2026328. Darth Icky
Lords:
Jesse
Alex
https://insertcredit.com/show/
https://discord.gg/dcofficial
Topics:
90s Gen X "Internet High Weirdness" culture: SubGenius, DiLingo, Steve Jackson, the Looneys, KoL
Writing a podcast about video games every week as someone who doesn’t really play many video games anymore
The mystery of BunnyROM
https://bunnyrom.neocities.org/
Junk by Richard Wilbur
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Al2MMuFX.png
https://github.com/jdonland/bookmarks
Autopsy, by Ross Sutherland: https://pastebin.com/raw/npCuYjLj
Disney saved Star Wars by buying it from Lucasfilm. This is what Saved Star Wars looks like.
Cycling's hour record
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Mens_hour_records_progression.svg/2560px-Mens_hour_records_progression.svg.png
Microtopics:
A gold star Canadian.
Cousin show Insert Credit.
One of the world's foremost experts on DC Comics.
Filling in the gaps with bonus episodes.
The lost episode of topic lords that might one day be produced.
Spreadsheet Secrets.
Detritus and ruins of the culture that came before yours. (Gen-X.)
Whether Steve Jackson is still doing the GURPS thing.
Where did Gen-X come from, and why did it disappear?
Your personal relationship with They Might Be Giants.
The weirdos who first colonized the Internet in search of the community they weren't finding in their lives.
Nerds riding high on military funding and founding new religions with varying degrees of mockery.
British comedy crossing the ocean and losing its cultural context, so a generation of American nerds grow up with a more absurdist sense of humor than the previous generations.
Sitting at your computer running IRC in 1996, staring at the screen waiting for someone to say something.
Classical Education as a shared cultural context so rich people can understand each other's jokes.
Halfway into the 2020s, still thinking about the Roaring Twenties whenever anyone names the decade.
Everybody forgetting how to group history by decade after a twenty years of not easily being able to talk about "the 00s" and "the 10s."
Playing video games from the ages of 5 to 20 and then stopping forever.
Asking some of the most thoughtful people you know questions about video games.
The exhaustion of trying to keep video games in your life.
Artists and critics with opinions that are wildly out of step with their audience.
Video game companies that have great logos.
People who are so good at telling interesting stories about the bad video games that they're playing that they convince you to buy the game and then you're like "where's the interesting game they talked about"
Talking to the same oldbies every week.
An 18 year old kid obsessed with the Atari Jaguar wandering into the middle-aged video game club and everyone is like "sickos face yes emoji"
Trying to track down the manufacturer of Digital Princess Friend.
Mysterious ROM images that nobody knows the origin of because nobody asked.
A Tamagotchi where your little guy can be a fighter plane or Sponge Bob.
Mysteriously good Tamagotchi software floating around.
The reason M&Ms come in different colors.
An egg that your umbrella with an eye can hatch from.
Why you can't ship a container full of cheap junk to the United States any more.
Middle English style poetry.
Sheer shards of shattered tumblers.
Modern English alliterative verse.
It's cool what people do with words.
Paying so much attention to the alliteration that you miss the meaning of the poem.
All the Babu Frik Funko Pops that will still be around long after all the stars go out.
Hephaestus' Hammer, all gunked up in microplastics.
Quoting other poems in the middle of your poem.
Publishing a book of all the poems we've read on Topic Lords and then being sued for copyright infringement.
A poem that originated on Jim's fridge.
Diminishing Mandalorian Returns.
The goddamned Ewoks shit.
The Droids cartoon.
The future of Star Wars: jokes about Star Wars??
The Day the Clown Cried of Star Wars.
The angriest you've ever been watching a movie.
The third good Star Wars movie.
Stealing good ideas from cool fiction.
One guy who got lucky a couple times and a thousand yes men enabling him for the next 40 years.
Planet Moriband.
Finally finding a guy you can call Mace Windu.
Waiting for Jar-Jar.
Sometimes you just need drivel that you like.
Buying a tangerine and noticing that it's a Star Wars-branded tangerine.
Technology improving the way we interact with wind resistance.
1890 guy on his velocipede getting mad at all the new Space Bikes.
Instituting new rules stating that your bicycle has to look like a bicycle.
Ivory Tower Cycle Men.
Vampire Tactics.
The most prestigious world record in professional cycling.
Keeping track of the world record best dress at a fashion show.
What about Funny Cars? What's so funny about them?
Trying to break the Merckx record using Merckx's original bicycle and outfit.
Everyone tying the same world record forever.
Riding 270 miles a day for a year.
Walking to work 23 miles a day, both ways, because you love suffering and hate bicycles.
Detective Comics Comics.
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1h 20min
January 26, 2026327. Damn, That's a Good Kidney!
Lords:
Josette
https://www.josetteseitz.com/
https://www.instagram.com/jo_seitz/
Daniel
Topics:
The overlap between musicians and rhythm game players
Figure Skating and the upcoming Olympics
In this short Life that only lasts an hour by Emily Dickinson
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56456/in-this-short-life-that-only-lasts-an-hour-1292
The Reality of Hope
https://www.therealityofhope.co.uk
Is time travel media really that bad?
Microtopics:
3D art spaces and the Virtual Burning Man experience.
What were we talking about at lunch?
The new kind of Christmas light that's reminiscent of the old kind of Christmas light.
A nice soft blue.
The LED lights that hurt the most.
Mounting recessed lights in the eaves and lighting them up with the worst gamer RGB patterns.
Beige keyboards with three green LEDs on them that you can animate because they're memory-mapped.
Paradiddle.
Learning to play drums in VR.
Paradiddle for Snapchat Glasses.
Video game audio latency vs. digital synthesizer latency.
The Bemani guitar game that inspired Guitar Hero.
Guitar Freaks vs. Guitar Hero as a case study in how the same idea can be executed very differently getting very different results
How singing is scored in Rock Band.
Finding new music via the Rock Band games.
Beat Saber Library Managers.
Solid beams of light.
Ice Dancing.
Whether you can train rhythm.
Brother-sister ice skating couples.
Which animals can learn rhythm.
Representing your ice rink.
What to do after you've spent your life training but what you were training for didn't work out?
Ice skater unions.
Going to the Olympics with your mom to watch the figure skating.
Alysa Liu.
Meeting America's Princess and she's not a nice lady.
Finding the right coach at age 7.
Sports therapists.
The disposition to perform your best under pressure.
Exercising and practicing at the expense of nearly everything else you could be doing with your time.
What to do with your life now that you're no longer spending all your time training for the Olympics.
Missing your friend's 11th birthday party because you're busy training for the Olympics.
Giving seven year olds a test to see if they do well under pressure and if not, telling their parents not to try to get this one into the Olympics.
Grit.
What boot camp is for.
Training to be the best person in the world at field stripping a rifle.
Still living this life, which is great.
Still being responsible for other people's taxes.
Looking forward to the new year because it's tax time.
How your life might've been different if your parents insisted you go to college.
We've got learning at home but we don't have socialization at home.
Studying how to study without knowing how to study.
Passing the classes you were interested in at that moment and not doing so well in the test.
Two friends in the furry community.
Telling your friend about your medical condition in VR Chat.
A documentary about kidney transplants in the furry community.
Damn, That's a Good Kidney!
Filming a documentary in VR Chat.
What normal people think about time travel fiction.
Yes, you have to use your hands, and yes it's like a baby's toy.
Reading a piece of fiction because you're hoping to have a good time.
Which time-travel movies have reached the heights of popular culture.
Having this 360-degree camera just sitting around and trying to figure out what movie to make with it.
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1h 7min
January 19, 2026326. A Dead Quarterback Can Still Score
Lords:
Cort
Ben
Topics:
Oh man, remember the Geek Code?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geek_Code
I discovered a fun fact about my neighborhood
Every 5x6 Nonogram
https://puzzarium.com/every-5x6-nonogram
The Calf Path by Sam Foss
https://poets.org/poem/calf-path
Phillip Rivers
Microtopics:
Secret Playstation Things.
Transposing a matrix in SIMD.
Reclaiming your plug.
Trying and failing to use Libby.
Failing to check out library books from your toilet.
State-sanctioned piracy.
The restaurant where you had the dinner for your wedding.
The "my wife" voice.
Suddenly having nieces.
Hadad and Barney on Black Square Day.
The Talos Principal DLC.
The Geek Code Era.
VMS or OS/2 as a defining feature of your personality.
Dilbert, Perl, Doom, and X-Files: all equally culturally relevant to this day.
The Natural Bears Classification System for Gay Men.
The Human Code.
Your favorite grocery store's end-of-year recap.
The story of a Venezuelan woman between age 30 and 55, and her top 2000 interests.
Your favorite vowel in text messages you've sent this year.
What they call that AE vowel.
Speedrunning your entire email history in a weekend.
The Miracle Mile, where all the tar pits are.
Noted monster Sean "Diddy" Combs.
Two hip hop producers getting mad at each other.
Putting a plaque at your hotel explaining that Jim Morrison did not die at this hotel.
Being the plaque you want to see in the world.
Whether the Museum of Jurassic Technology has reopened after the fire.
A very earnest museum about a history that never was.
Wandering around dazed after every 5x5 nonogram is solved.
Doing your part to serve humanity by solving nonograms.
Do you remember where you were when Every 5x5 Nonogram Section 303 was finished?
Why a dippy bird can't keep you online.
Gesturing at the idea of collectively solving a problem.
Why we haven't heard from Peter Molyneux in a while.
What three digit numbers nonogram solvers think are interesting.
Sending 96 million solved nonograms into space as proof to alien life that humans are still capable of collective action.
Feeling bad about having installed an ad blocker and loading up a four hour block of ads from 80s TV.
Being prosecuted for use of ad blockers.
Look at that smirk. That's a man who knows he's preaching but getting away with it.
Getting a deck of flash cards to learn all of the pentameters.
Three iambs and a reverse iamb.
Your favorite good poems and your favorite shitpost poems.
Tony Gang Flame War.
Refusing to tackle the 40 year old quarterback after his wallet falls out on the field and the photos of his ten children unfold.
The median age of football players rising into retirement age as teenagers learn about the health risks and refuse to participate.
Using NBA 2K as a metaphor for the decline of civilization.
LA finally getting a football team again. (They have two now.)
Whether they're still playing Starcraft.
Broken 19 year olds who can't play Starcraft any more because their APMs are too low.
The experience of attending a live e-Sports event.
Whether they sell hot dogs and beer to the crowd at the live League of Legends event or if it's all GamerGrub and Feastables.
A Youtube shitpost made in Garry's Mod.
Channing Tatum playing the toilet in the Skibidi Toilet movie.
Al Gore: still alive?
Whether Wilford Brimley got plastic surgery to look that old.
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1h 4min
January 12, 2026325. Men, Explain Things to Me!
Lords:
Erica
Micah
https://www.reddit.com/r/micahwrites/
Topics:
Puerto Rico branded holiday jams
Chive drama on Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/KitchenConfidential/comments/1o0j6hq/cutting_a_cup_of_chives_everyday_until_the_reddit/
How to cure tinnitus (maybe)
The Ballad of Blasphemous Bill
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46647/the-ballad-of-blasphemous-bill
In defense of making movies sequels until they're good again
Microtopics:
Being finished with horrible shit.
Being in the middle of things forever.
The Minutes of the Intermittent Meetings of the Society of Apocryphal Gentlefolk, by Dark Art
Coming down from the high of PiCoSteveMo.
Explaining PiCoSteveMo to someone like it's their first time at Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Two things I'm willing to sacrifice to play PiCoSteveMo games.
Putting your PICO-8 game in a CRT filter.
Lawnmower Man, based on the title by Stephen King.
Developing a field system in Puerto Rico.
Winston's face appearing to the extent that Zoom thinks it's part of my chest.
A deafening hospital siren playing while you're trying to have a good time at the beach.
Pirate-themed massage.
Stealing the windsurfing gear and going for a ride.
Walking past the site of a pirate massage and fatal accident holding a solo cup.
Getting pushed off the road by seven full-sized Coca Cola trucks led by a Santa Sleigh and followed by a party truck with a giant octagonal speaker spreading holiday cheer.
Charging more for a well-traveled Coca Cola.
Holiday-Branded Traffic Jams.
Shipping your worst wine to India and it turns out that the sea voyage turns it into your best wine.
Spanish Milk.
Visiting Puerto Rico during linear time.
The Puerto Rican version of Sleep No More in which Bad Bunny might pull you into a dark corner for a one-on-one and it's not clear whether he works for the event or if he's just another attendee.
Day 57 of chopping chives on Reddit.
Drawing airplanes crashing into the chives that are too long.
Working with (and living with) the Chive Lord.
Comparing Day 1 chives with day 55 chives.
Finding Yoshi in a pile of chopped chives.
A job that exists. (But not one you get paid for.)
Asking the robot to add heart shapes to your food processor chives.
These are the Days of our Chives.
Each Sale I Drink a Glass of Water.
Self-hosting memes and Turing-complete memes.
Phase canceling your tinnitus.
Not wanting to look it up because then you'd know.
Curing tinnitus with extremely specific grenades.
A party where everyone is constantly singing their personal tinnitus tones.
Why don't we get bass tinnitus?
Can you cure bass tinnitus with snail caviar?
The native word for white people who are doing poorly in Alaska.
The ice worms wriggling their purple heads through the crust of the pale blue snow.
Pine trees cracking like little guns in the silence of the wood.
Prankster Bill dying with his arms and legs outstretched so that he won't fit in his coffin.
Poems that demand to be performed with a banjo.
Whether they have banjos in Alaska.
Having fun with the way words sound.
I'm not gonna make it – but I can be an X shape.
The Cremation of Sam McGee.
Burning your house down to get the insurance money to buy a telescope.
Making bad art until it becomes good.
Tremors 3: Back to Perfection.
A giant worm monster drilling up out of the ground in order to slice chives.
Really dwelling on how much you don't have in common with other people.
Six topics (and Shrieker Island)
A dollmaker on the run after making farcical plays about Hitler.
The Saved by the Bell themed music video featuring the same actors as the Final Destination movie it's promoting.
Would you take 90 minutes off of your life to have not seen Final Destination 4?
The replacement for the 1 to 10 pain scale where you decide which Final Destination movie you'd be willing to watch to take the pain away.
Low pain awareness.
Chess boxing win/loss ratios.
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1h 7min
January 05, 2026324. You Don't Love Staggering?
Lords:
Andrew
Kate
Topics:
The strange and alienating experience of learning to drive at 40
The mottos of the livery companies of London
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mottos_and_halls_of_the_livery_companies
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mottos
Independent They Stand!
https://archive.org/details/computer-games-magazine-issue-115-june-2000/page/n83/mode/2up?view=theater
Leda and the Swan, by William Butler Yeats
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43292/leda-and-the-swan
Predecimalization currency in the UK
DIY TTRPG mapping software, the ridiculous way
Microtopics:
Streaming making maps of video games on the Internet.
The people who are willing to watch someone map out every corner of this sprawling and convoluted game.
Writing about video games and writing video games.
Dicey territory. (Which is only appropriate.)
King Stephen, which will have been great.
Fun jokes and oblique references.
Forty and a half years old.
Building your life around not being able to drive a car.
Pockets of civilization separated by vast stretches of asphalt.
The car unsteering itself unless you hold the steering wheel in place.
Someone yelling at you with their little beep beep horn.
Learning a skill and forgetting how you learn it.
Learning a skill before you find out that learning is hard.
The false sense of immortality that allows people to get into a car.
During your driving test, pushing the drift button but the driving instructor is like "I don't see any blue sparks"
Learning to drive when you're six years old.
Getting your Lego Land driving license.
Awarding the worst student in your driving class the "most spirited" driver's license.
Explaining what livery companies are by reading the Wikipedia page also.
The Worshipful Company of Communicators.
Everything's so good, bread especially.
A great motto for clockmakers.
Does anyone know any cool Latin mottos?
When are all these servants having time to go out and have mottos??
The Soggiest God you can Muster.
The Worshipful Company of Information Technologists finding a Latin word that is also a snack food for their motto.
Painting, staining, and compelling obedience.
Sticking with Hope Classic.
Shoemakers making jokes about supporting their customers.
Getting the salt/wit pun in there for people who know Latin.
Africa: always producing some novelty.
The 2000 IGF.
How to read a magazine together on a podcast.
John Carmack's Finger Server.
Doom Guy.
John Romero's specific type of memory.
How they invented mouse look.
Turning with the arrow keys and aiming a reticle around the screen with the mouse.
Dragging the mouse to the top of your cool dinosaur mouse pad.
Why doesn't Microsoft Excel keep the mouse cursor in the center of the screen?
The FPS phone interface where you swipe on the touchscreen until the button you want to press is in the center of the screen, then pull the trigger on the back of the phone and a shotgun sound plays.
Fold-away interface panels.
Thousand Hells, by the developer of King of Dragon Pass.
All the video games named "Rift" or "The Rift"
How can those terrified vague pink fingers push the feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
Zeus disguised as a swan.
Whether Marylin Monroe will would've loved Hades.
Going to Wikipedia's list of mottos because you need some more mottos.
How many ha'ppenies to a thruppence?
The half crown, worth 2/6.
Several hundred quarterfarthings.
Decimal Day, 1971.
Extremely forgeable coins.
Dividing the day into two sets of twelve.
Decimalization. (Based on 10 fingers.)
Tuppence and Thruppence.
IBM calling it "hexadecimal" because they refuse to say "sexadecimal" out loud.
Theater of the Mind storytelling.
Importing an occlusion map.
Tinting what the players can see green and tinting what the DM can see red or blue.
Swapping the lenses in anaglyph glasses so one person can only see red and the other can only see blue.
Hanging a projector from the ceiling and projecting the D&D map on the table.
A projector of uncertain parentage.
Harebrained vs. cockamamie.
A fun puzzle you can run off and waste a bunch of time solving.
A stochastic cinema where you never know if it's going to be comedy or horror and everything seems totally real to you and is about your personal failings.
Focusing on wibbly dream state.
How to exhale with your nose plugged.
Losing your Apple Watch on Mt. Everest and going back up to look for it and it turns out you dropped it in the shower.
Topics going into the bucket that nobody ever sees.
Writing a secret on a piece of paper and burying it on a hill with a single tree on it on a moonlit night.
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1h 18min
December 29, 2025323. The Astigmaprism
Lords:
Ryan
CisHetKayfaber
Topics:
My vocal stims are getting out of control now that I don't have pets.
Training to become a Tetris Grandmaster
https://www.youtube.com/@cishetkayfaber/videos
Switching to not-bifocals
Eagle Eye Cherry - Save Tonight
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nntd2fgMUYw
Microtopics:
Introducing yourself or plugging something.
Going to Cape Town for Playtopia.
Enemies to enemies to lovers.
A game conference with a name that sounds way too much like Fruitopia.
What you would do for an Orbitz right now.
An apple juice with basil seeds ensconced in it, like an Orbitz.
I'm not mean, I'm just trying to manifest bullying.
Semisolid Kind of Life.
A dog following you into the kitchen and acting like a Ghostbusters trap except for all your bullshit rather than ectoplasm.
The movie about the prep school kids who poop on the floor at their magic school.
Making yourself laugh by doing a Gollum voice while you make a sandwich.
Hanging up a happy face on the fridge and writing "mirror" on top of it to convince yourself that you're okay.
An action figure that absorbs all the dark energy aimed at you.
Giving advice to someone that you really have no basis for.
The dog who loved your terrible celebrity impressions and the dog who gives you a look like "I expected more of you"
Your online source for news about what water parks Jim and his family went to.
The kind of Tetris that you become s grandmaster in.
Tetris but the pieces don't fall, they just instantly appear at the bottom of the well.
How the Tetris company wants you to play Tetris.
Delayed Auto-Shift.
Doing a hadouken move to place the zigzag piece in the correct column.
Stack faster, stack better.
A skill you can practice and get better at.
Training for three or four hours a day on a hacked PlayStation Vita to become a Tetris Grandmaster.
How the Tetris the Grandmaster community feels about leverless controls.
Going several years between occasions to say hello to your wife.
Going for a walk around the block so you have an excuse to say hello to your wife when you get back.
Seeing a person and immediately infodumping at them.
What they have now instead of bifocals.
Training your eyes to look through the part of the lens that does the thing.
Going to the optometrist and saying "just fuck me up"
Why they don't make bifocals for text at the distance of a computer monitor.
There's still time, and there's dignity.
Watching the VOD of your own death because you missed the livestream.
Getting used to your vision swimming in a new way when you get new glasses.
Getting an eye exam and saying "I'd rather not say" when they ask you what letters you see.
Freeballing your corneas.
A fellow glasses enjoyer.
A cursed gem that gives you astigmatism.
Doing the Magic Eye thing in order to learn to read.
Being born a trust fund kid, except it's your eyeballs.
The return of the quarter speed music video.
Even slower slow motion.
Why can't Eagle-Eye Cherry crawl?
Wondering why you haven't leaped yet.
Singing to the camera while being robbed.
Watching music videos at 1.5x speed as practice for watching them at .25x speed.
Suddenly the dog takes its mask off and it was Eagle-Eye Cherry the whole time!
Promising to eat your glasses frames on camera.
Forgetting how cool your whole premise is and just stopping doing it.
Literal music videos.
A houseplant can't save shit. A houseplant doesn't know what time it is.
People running around New York and looking sad at the camera.
Buck Cherry. (Named after Chuck Berry.)
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1h 14min
December 22, 2025322. Tony Hawk's Skateboarding Without Dying
Lords:
Maxx
Michael
Topics:
Reinventing pants
Plortonomics (the economy in the game Slime Rancher)
The Leaning American
Maggie and Milly and Molly and May, by E. E. Cummings
https://poets.org/poem/maggie-and-milly-and-molly-and-may
Microtopics:
Rabbits and writing.
Buying the lede (but thankfully the rabbits dug it up)
Lord Veterans
Ancillary Justice, or The Imperial Radch.
Rabbits who want nothing more than to chew louder than you talk.
Leaving space for the elephant in the room
Inventing a new kind of pants inspired by taiko drumming.
After years, finally trying out your new idea for how to sew pants, and realizing that the waist of the pants only reaches the crotch.
Pants that are only made of rectangles.
The slow process of realizing what pants are.
Rapidly becoming pants.
The universe doesn't end with a bang, but with a zip. (Of the pants.)
Inventing a new kind of pants and looking them up online and realizing that they already exist and the name is extremely offensive.
Pants that are just a square of cloth that you fold around your leg.
A new kind of pants where the crotch is higher than the waist.
Disassembling the kimono to hang it up to dry.
Looking up the etymology of "pants" and it comes from an ancient word that means "the thing you can't just fold around your legs, you have to find a pattern on ravelry and sew it"
Back when "pants" were just two leg tubes that you tied to your shirt.
Clothespins: they turn tubes into clothes.
How pants are different for fat people.
Clean room pants reverse engineering.
Asking a tailor who's never seen pants to make you pants based on a verbal description of a Taiko drummer you saw once.
Making plorts after eating.
Vacuuming up the plorts.
Extremely ineffective insider trading.
The kind of crime you only get caught at if people hate you.
Gathering data on when people didn't file a malpractice suit.
Doctor Parsley diagnosing you with sleep apnea based on the width of your neck.
Suing a little mouse for malpractice because his tiny thimbleful of chamomile tea didn't cure your hepatitis A.
Wholesome farming games where you go back to nature and practice aggressive capitalism.
Throwing your slimes into the sea. (Which is maybe made of slimes.)
The fantasy of running at high speed down a hill.
The fantasy of skateboarding without dying.
Incentivizing the player to discover new plorts.
The fantasy of being on friendly terms with your neighbors.
Comparing your favorite Animal Crossing villagers with your favorite Love Island cast members.
The two competing Britain's Favorite Gardener.
A reality show where you check in three times on people doing a project.
What the rest of the world does instead of leaving.
Learning how to stand – normally a thing only babies do.
Leaning on an inclined surface made for a butt.
Leaning less when you're visiting Japan.
Crab Doctor.
Reading a poem before it's too late.
Narcissists soaking French.
Tag yourself, I'm the horrible thing racing sideways while blowing bubbles.
As small as a world and as large as alone.
Wikipedia Dad.
Gauging how long an answer to give a child asking a philosophical question.
The Final Plug of Maxx Yamasaki.
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58min
December 15, 2025321. Mist Is Just Wet Dust
Lords:
Linker
Alexa
Topics:
Variations in vampire stories: types of powers, origins of vampires, lack of consent lol
Anthropomorphism/Connection in media
Get a free burger when you join my rewards
Meditation at Lagunitas by Robert Hass
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47553/meditation-at-lagunitas
What letter of the alphabet would win in a Royal Rumble
Anti-Lesbian Vampire Propaganda of the 1970s as shown in The Vampire Lovers (1970)
https://crossingsjournal.ca/index.php/crossings/article/view/283
Microtopics:
Being American and then being Canadian-American.
Elephantasy and Elephantasy Flipside.
Crazy Aaron's Thinking Putty.
3D-printed worms.
A plastic casing attached to your keychain that used to have a clicky button on it.
What we did to fidget after the industrialization of textiles.
How office workers goofed off before the Internet.
Bella's lead skull that prevents Edward from mind-controlling her.
Making up a power to be your favorite vampire power.
What happens when you inhale a vampire in mist form.
Using a picture of Cat's Cradle to illustrate the concept of telekinesis.
Putting the vampire coffin in steerage and the familiar has to sit in coach and then pull the coffin off of the luggage conveyor belt.
Would it be fun to turn into mist and be collected in a cup and then drunk?
Miss Frizzle, vampire expert.
Getting frustrated at a stealth video game and giving up being a pacifist as a metaphor for being an old vampire.
New Money vs. Old Money vampires.
Vampires going on Fetlife to find ethically sourced food.
One mysterious vampire at Goth night at the nightclub quietly asking to drink your blood, vs. twenty vampires going around begging and everyone's like jeez, this again?
Nobody expecting you to embezzle the blood.
Talking to a computer like it's a person you have absolutely no respect for, in a way you'd never talk to a real person because you assign a baseline respect for just being a real person, and people overhearing you are like "holy shit they're really mad" but you're not mad, you're just talking to a computer.
Apologizing to the table you just ran into.
It Takes Two.
Following the instructions of the book of love.
Creation of personality in moments of friction.
Interacting with video games in similar ways as you would a person, expect without the social anxiety.
Why would you ruin this perfectly good complex system with social anxiety?
We've got teamwork at home.
Sentient burgers enslaving other sentient burgers.
Being rewarded with a free burger but then turning into a burger and being given away as a reward.
Chicken stars! They're like chicken nuggets but they're shaped like stars!
Where were you when you were drafted into the Rewards Wars?
Naming your rewards program "My Rewards" so when the mascot refers to it it sounds like the rewards belong to the mascot.
Demanding to see the terms and conditions before you eat this hamburger.
A word that is elegy to what it signifies.
Moments when the body is as numinous as words.
Taking some LSD and learning about non-symbolic states.
Ignoring poetry in the same way that you ignore ads.
Vampire jokes!
Transylvanian Hounds.
Serif H being much more combat-ready than sans serif H.
The most bouba letters.
Capital O rolling around crushing the other letters of the alphabet like in Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Distraction the ref so you can stab.
Which letter of the alphabet could do the best backflip.
Whether the ampersand counts as a letter.
Letters that are good at stabbing vs. letters with broad sturdy bases.
The nuclear family emerging in response to the financial boom following World War II.
Anti-lesbian propaganda films that are far too sexy to be effective.
Heteronormative fiances.
Carmella the lesbian vampire stealing your wife.
The vampire lesbians receiving their comeuppance and the heteronormative couple living happily every after.
Be gay do crimes. (Murder.)
Buying Linker's games so he doesn't die.
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1h 8min
December 08, 2025320. Wri Your WriMo, Gen Your GenMo
Lords:
Hallie
Peter
https://www.paschaefer.com/
Topics:
Do you know where all your things are?
How education doesn't melt
Bebop Bytes Back
Augustus Gloop by Roald Dahl
https://allpoetry.com/-Augustus-Gloop...-
Microtopics:
The Directrix of Cybernetic Security.
Unity licensing from Unity as Unity.
Fantasy Book of the Month. (FBOM)
Part zombie, part ghost.
Accidentally GenMoing your WriMo.
A house with a bunch of your things in it, and they're everywhere.
Knowing someone who knows how to find things and knowing someone who knows where things are.
Knowing where to put something because it's where you first thought to look for it.
A person who itches when they see somebody not using a switch statement.
Having been gradually removing yourself from social media since back when Twitter was Twitter.
Back when you could get out of a chair without grunting.
Getting the whooping cough and coughing your disc out. (And you're in your twenties.)
Whether your dad named you after the murderous robot in 2001.
Seeing your students cheating poorly and teaching them how to do it well.
Scaffolding it pedagogically.
Big boat: hard turn.
How do we get education to exhibit swarm behavior?
A brand new exciting way to be bummed.
Education by Panopticon.
LLMs exposing how much of people's jobs and education are bullshit busywork.
When does the salt jump?
Putting together the 50s and then putting together the tens and then putting together the fours.
The simplest shallowest version of active listening that exists.
Doritos hacking the learning loop.
Continually finding new opiates of the masses.
Typing hex opcodes into the Beboputer.
An effective educational tool that has never been less appealing to the youth it's targeted at.
Steve Jobs coming out of his grave and slitting your throat if you install a programming tool on your iPhone.
Making the sun wink and realizing that this is the rest of your life.
Deescalating your LLM partner when it has an anxiety attack.
Your Socratic Oxford Don persona.
The Life Cycle of Software Objects.
There is a mistake, and it is being overcome.
Steps you can take to avoid Godzilla coming back and nature reclaiming the earth.
A poem written by a beloved children's author who absolutely loathes fat people.
Whether the terrible children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory are all based on people that Roald Dahl knew.
SwitchBitch, Roald Dahl's famous Typescript library.
Making sure your weirdness is a kindness.
Roald Dahl: boy did he do the stuff.
Penning The Twits in an effort to "do something against beards."
Why Stephen King?
The Dollar Babies.
Whether Stephen King is still on MySpace.
Walking down the road and hearing Stephen King yelling at cloud.
The Dave Barry game jam.
Going into the sewer and solving puzzle platformer problems.
Group hug vs. forming a blob.
Tube Hippo is back!
The game engine sorting hat.
Coming out of character to talk about Inform 7.
The year that you fucked around with interactive fiction but never shipped anything.
Presuming that interactive fiction has continued to be great even after you stopped playing.
Choosing Twine over Inform 7 because of your absolutely enormous forelimbs.
LLMs as an extremely fancy Tarot deck.
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1h 16min

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