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

4.8

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How many episodes does Topic Lords have?

The podcast currently has 273 episodes available.

Topic Lords episodes:

January 06, 2025272. Beakknifed In Busch Gardens
Lords:
Ryan
Cort
Topics:
Is it possible to make a "meat flavored" potato chip that's not disgusting.
Meandering Pico-8 tracker jabbering
Do you think anyone has ever used the "Add or Remove Programs" interface to add a program?
Tommy C
https://genius.com/Dan-le-sac-vs-scroobius-pip-tommy-c-lyrics
Advent calendars are just tiny bulk-rate loot crates
Microtopics:
Ryan Ike Audio on Instagram.
How to make music and have balance in your life.
If there's nothing to fail at, what are you bad at?
Stand Elsewhere, an Oregon Trail-like.
Converting 50s pop songs to chunky four channel chip tunes.
The Pico-8 Splore database.
Asking a friend to make music for your PiCoSteveMo game, and having to explain what a PiCoSteveMo is, then Pico-8, trackers, music, sound, air, matter, and existence itself.
Potatoed Chips.
Romanian Beef Bolognese Flavored Potato Chips.
Abuela's All-Day Braised Carnitas potato chips.
Hate-buying a terrible flavor potato chips over and over so you can make everybody you know taste them.
Raw Hamburger flavored potato chips that moo when you eat them.
The Doritos Brain-hack.
Looking at the box of Frosted Mini-Wheats with a shrimp on the box and thinking "that's a little shrimpy"
Cool American Doritos.
Eat the cool. They knew the risks.
A bowl of M&Ms with a single Skittle in it.
Fresh Meat Potato Chips.
Walking into the Frito-Lay factory, dangling your jaw open and waiting for come what may.
All Night Nippon Shredded Abuela's Braised Carnitas.
The Taki's One-Chip Challenge.
Inviting all your friends over to try the new Strawberry Mochi Dill Pickle potato chips.
Explaining to your daughter's friends' parents that we're going to give your children tablets I got on the Internet and then we're going to eat lots of food and it's going to taste really weird. The FDA doesn't allow you to put this in food but I need you to dissolve this on your tongue.
Par-boiling your soft palate in lemon juice because it tastes so amazing.
Reprogramming your tongue to remix your palate.
What to do if you love both music and spreadsheets.
Art tools that make your tummy feel icky.
Mr. Lee by the Bobbettes.
What trackers are good at.
An extremely Bojangles tracker configuration.
Trying to do Math Rock in the Pico-8 tracker.
Triggering patterns 0 through 7 as instruments.
Whether the Add or Remove Programs interface can add a program.
Windows Sandbox.
Jacking your whole life up but your Windows desktop is pristine.
Getting a burner desktop for write-ins.
Inventing a guy named Dampiel and getting mad at him even years later.
Classic Dampy.
Renaming your game to doom.exe and suddenly Nvidia cards run it way better.
Putting a comment in your shader saying "Dear Nvidia, please make this shader look rad."
The Valve guy refusing to tell you how the math is wrong.
A selection of gags, hand movements and facial expressions.
Dying onstage while the audience applauds.
Feigning death so often as part of your comedy act so when you really die during your routine it'll be hilarious.
Death: just a bad deal all around.
Not my birth mom, but my robo-mom.
Having a death so weird that even as an extremely minor celebrity you end up on TMZ.
Doing extensive R&D so that you can somehow be murdered by a flamingo.
A bloodied flamingo wearing Ryan Ike's glasses.
Walking through the zoo looking for opportunities for environmental storytelling.
Accidentally doing an immaculate 360 Christ Air and then dying on impact.
Thinking of one funny scenario a month.
A treat that's busting the seams of the Advent Calendar door.
A sack of little handmade animal ornaments.
The Joy of Mastery.
Empty Advent Calendars.
Going shopping for used candy after Halloween.
Terrible Novelty Potato Chip of the Day.
One big Advent calendar the size of a barn door with 365 doors in it.
The Mayan Advent Calendar.
Automats.
Wheel of Fortune except you're assembling a wheel and not a phrase.
Spin the wheel, make a deal!
The first podcast of the rest of your life.
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1h 7min
December 30, 2024271. Ego Death Mario
Lords
Tyriq
Stevie
Avery
Topics:
What is Dr. Mario's specialty?
Boutique sardines
Street Sharks (and the lies about them)
PiCoSteveMo is over! (as of this recording)
Microtopics:
Throwing out an idea like a plate of spaghetti, or a grenade.
Odd Object.
Piggy-back dual plugs.
Now! That's What I Call Avery Burke, Vol. VII.
Jason Shiga.
Older kids who are into roughhousing and watching shark movies.
Audio Issues Because of Dog.
The only place on the Internet you can hear cardboard boxes rubbing against each other.
Two hours of an attractive woman scraping her thumbnail on a microphone.
Dr. Mario telling someone that they only have-a four months to live-a.
The weird forehead mirror that old-timey doctors wear.
The opinions of someone who's eaten cat food.
Grandma barging in while you're eating dog food.
Flintstones Cannibalism Vitamins.
Barney's PTSD after the Neanderthal Wars.
Wacky Races, the original MCU.
Dr. Mario's pill pusherside hustle causing the opioid crisis.
Ego Death Mario microdosing the germs in the pill bottle who transcend to the great pill bottle in the sky.
Coming up with the conceit that your band is enemies with sea mammals and making all future audiences hate you.
Three adorable sardines rowing a boat shaped like a dragon.
An octopus tentacle that looks like a serial port or a 2x6 spot light.
The animal that you're eating depicted in cartoon form as cheering you on.
An anthropomorphic ginger root eating a ginger candy.
Single-serving black characters.
Eating a fish and finding an entire spine.
The weirdest bone to find.
Free floating animals gathering into a colony and turning into a face.
The most popular fish sauce in ancient Rome.
Sealing a whale hand in a trash can with duct tape for two years until it starts leaking and your roommate has to help you dispose of it wearing a hazmat suit.
Tucking a whale bone under your trench coat and sneaking out of the museum.
Famous whale disposal techniqus.
Fishwife, fish life!
Not knowing about the preexisting work that your favorite cartoon is in conversation with because you're a kid and don't know anything.
Slammu, Ripster and Streex.
Michelangelo, Leonardo, DiCaprio, and Don Angelo.
Vin Diesel being very excited about the Street Sharks.
IP Homeopathy.
Sexy Mummy Costume.
Using mumnies as train fuel because they are so plentiful.
You can't get Mummy Brown any more because of Woke.
Who has and hasn't heard of Tommy Tallarico.
A toy that lets you shoot at the TV screen during the interactive parts of Captain Power.
Fresh off the PiCoSteveMo boat.
Graph going up emoji.
Lots of different skill levels going on in there.
Aardvarks and anteaters.
A three hour celebration of weird things that games can be.
Look Who's The Shining Two!
Why the Sokoban puzzle in Ocarina of Time sucks.
Puzzles vs. situations.
Tony and the Tony Mechanic.
The Thought Leader of the Thinky Games Community.
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1h 12min
December 23, 2024270. B-Roll Of The Big Bang
Lords:
Alexander
Hallie
Topics:
Making AI drunk
Alexander's name generator, rehosted: http://twinbeard.com/names/
How Star Wars being bought Disney is basically the same thing as the Roman Empire converting to Christianity
Electromagnetism
Super Bon Bon (according to Google search)
https://www.google.com/search?q=super+bon+bon+lyrics
Using flow theory and Kubler Ross grief to drive learning systems
Animals you want to pet, but cannot.
Microtopics:
A Game Called Anomaly.
A tarot-based GM-less storytelling game about a sinister organization investigating a supernatural The KGB (not that one)
Deliberately lo-fi neural nets.
Real to less-real name sliders.
What Jamden Ovenson is up to these days.
Cranking the tipsy slider all way up.
anomaly.
Things humans can do with new tools.
Setting desired and undesired objectives for your learning designers.
Learning to speak as many languages as possible so that Godzilla does not rise from the briny deep.
Refusing to let the AI drive the bus.
A very big json dump.
The Mac Mini in your closet that runs your witch's familiars.
Things that are obvious to you but not to anyone else.
Cool apocryphal acts, bro.
Getting into Christ before it was cool.
Decanonizing anything that doesn't serve your power interests.
Bible/Star Wars crossover fan fiction.
Once you eat the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden, forever will it dominate your destiny.
Metals that can be turned into a magnet.
Where to even start with spin?
Whether protons are physical objects.
The language of perceiving the world.
Reading a poem about quantum physics.
Finally understanding the mathematics of love so you can ditch the love poetry and find the best lovers in the math department.
Which types of quark are super effective against other types of quark.
Why they call it electromagnetism.
But what about the Bullet Galaxies?
Weakly-interactive massive particles, or WIMPs.
Another particle that we thought up.
Microphones not picking up your tinnitus.
Extremely slow and old neutrinos.
Cosmic Microwave Background Average Frame of Reference.
The Soul Coughing cadence.
A poem, but it's performed in a certain rhythm. Some white guy should invent that and take credit for it.
Song Meanings Blog Dot Com.
Helping drive exploration of new ideas.
Making a name generator so bad that nobody uses it more than once.
Patterns and responses that characterize human behavior.
Grief as a mechanism to address overfitting in the human learning model.
The Parable of the Spandrel.
Possibilities that are more probable than Godzilla having eaten your house.
Depression as a way to just sit there.
Automatons with anxiety.
Entering random Game Genie codes into your neural net.
Wanting to pet a service dog because he's the best boy.
Service dogs having their own service dogs, recursively all the way down.
A chicken named Regular Expressions, or Reggie for short.
Digging in anything that looks diggable.
Being desperately confused by objects that you can see through but not walk through.
Ways to not get tricked by yourself or others.
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1h 9min
December 16, 2024269. Wet-Ass Planetoid
Lords:
Tyriq
Alex
Topics:
Trying to superficially familiarize myself with every country
The log burner fan
https://ae01.alicdn.com/kf/S68d58689db54401f9a434456881cbdfcf/4-Blade-Heat-Powered-Stove-Fan-Log-Wood-Burner-Eco-Friendly-Quiet-Fireplace-Fan-WinterWarm.jpg
Drilling this chair for ancient water
Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams, by Kenneth Koch
https://allpoetry.com/Variations-On-A-Theme-By-William-Carlos-Williams
Boichik bagels
Boxfish skeletons are wilder than seahorse skeletons
Microtopics:
Saya Gray.
Least-favorite UFO 50 games.
Treating the city you live in as if you're a tourist.
Going to obscure corners of parking lots.
A way to have an adventure in real life.
The tiny squishy seal that's no longer in your back pocket.
Web sites that are nothing but quizzes.
Trying to name every country.
This Sporcle quiz's opinion about which disputed territories count as countries.
Feeling more worldly after you memorize the names of every country.
Learning katakana and then being annoyed when signs do katakana wrong.
The curse of perfect-pitch.
Corrupted Pitch.
Tuning your whole band to the same out of tune guitar.
Hearing sounds in your head but only the sounds you're also hearing with your ears.
State.gov hosting PDF reports of the US government's opinion of every country.
Dear diary, today I did a cool fishing trade with Norway.
The Four Guineas.
The Place Across the Woods.
A giant CPU heat sink in gunmetal black sitting on top of your wood burning stove.
Devices powered by ambient temperature differentials.
The spinning thing on the roof that looks like a macaroon.
Putting googly eyes on your turbine roof vents.
Whether Stirling Engines are useful for anything other than a demonstration of the principles of the Stirling Engine.
Fluids moving through spaces of different sizes.
Injection molded hollow chunky boys.
Extremely mundane time capsules.
A Chair for Scientists.
A giant plastic-encased garbage ravioli.
Entire ecosystems that have existed without light for thousands of years.
Your FEMA-approved disaster preparedness chair.
Sorting all the water molecules on earth from newest to oldest.
Artists' depictions of the Hadean Earth.
The biggest wettest comet in the universe.
Don Quixote, the sopping wet comet.
Free sharps, only used once!
Writing a piece for prepared guitar after your kid fills the guitar with crayons.
Unprepared Pianos.
Juicy cold March wind.
A fair-use parody.
AI analysis of poetry that completely misses the point.
Editing Wikipedia to say that Lil Jon went to Harvard.
List of Rivers in Togo.
What a Specific Guy!
Registering an account to vandalize Wikipedia every few months for years.
Supermarket bagels.
Boiling round bread in water with crustaceans from the Bronx.
Making your own water to make coffee with.
Where to get food-grade lye.
Pastrami lox.
Seahorse skeletons.
Every Platonic Solid Has a Fish.
Where babies breathe from.
Fish without ribcages.
Caltrops arranged into a fish.
Using a pufferfish skeleton as a fidget toy.
The pufferfish at the center of our solar system.
The kind of decoration you see in a lobster joint.
Tropes of the open ocean.
The guy preventing you from being able to find search results for the Atari game Toobin'.
The loudest drinks in the world.
The Toobin' zone in LEGO Dimensions.
Chucking whole unopened cans of beer from your inner tube.
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1h 1min
December 09, 2024268. Puzzles For Puzzle Enjoyers
Lords:
James
https://pounced-on.me/@Triplefox
Kev
https://kevzettler.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@MikeMotion83
Topics:
Copyparty
Egg punk vs. chain punk
Going geocaching three times
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ugJWqQdP.jpg
Septic Tanks
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/q0tW8KtD.jpg
Certain kinds of trash you don't see any more
Mosquito bites
Microtopics:
Multiple recurring lords.
Going back to an earlier episode to listen to the plugs.
Agreeing to a copy party without knowing what it is.
Multi-part RARs.
Putting together educational material for your hypothetical younger self.
Manually extracting files over a physical USB connection.
Org-mode.
A collection of ogg vorbis music.
Your personal learning mind-map for learning how to draw.
The bottom end of expertise.
Two contrasting branches of the punk community.
Nerdy; dancey; influenced by Devo.
Musical genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get.
genres refusing to converge no matter how close they get.
How old you have to be to know about My Bloody Valentine.
Finally getting your act together and installing the right app and logging into the right web site.
Finding excuses to be more engaged with nature.
Having conversations, like you do with friends in a park.
Finding an Altoids tin where you would expect to find a bunch of spider webs.
Walking through half-nature in near-complete darkness.
Climbing down a rocky embankment in near-complete darkness with your phone in one hand.
Caches getting muggled.
Null Island.
Realizing that you're about to go on the bad kind of adventure.
A passing wizard complimenting you on your ironic orc-detecting sword.
A stuffed BB-8 that you use for photo opportunities.
Leaving one line of your toilet poem blank in case you think of a good rhyme for "too."
The kind of poem you put in your bathroom.
A pithy way to say what to put in the toilet.
Telling the restaurant's poet laureate that he really nailed that septic tank poem.
Using a black marker to redact the line about cigarette butts from your poem.
A book that reads like browsing Reddit.
Taking your mind off of your butt for five minutes.
Whether Law and Order was ever an accurate depiction of police procedure.
How they convicted or didn't convict the latest perp.
Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.
TV Guides lying on the street.
The genre of children's craft made from newspaper.
Archaeologists finding a thousand year old USB drive and finding a bunch of PDFs and videos about how to learn to draw.
FAT16 vs. FAT32.
Multi-volume ARJ files.
Putting together dual-purpose CDs for punk banks.
CD-ROMs shaped like a business card.
Inserting mini-CDs into a slot loading CD drive.
What it takes to make an indie Gamecube game.
Side-factoids about Luigi's Mansion.
Luigi's Mansion counting the volume of dust you've vacuumed through the whole playthrough.
The new Duck Tales game modeling the physics of every treasure you can collect so you can swim in them.
Mosquito activity in the midwest.
Hanging out around mosquito predators.
Mosquitos waking up for the gloaming and then going back to bed.
Finding the one high-altitude spot in the Panhandle to avoid the mosquitos.
Feeling bad about killng mosquitos after playing Hollow Knight.
Your favorite mind control force.
Golfers hitting that ball to make the number go down when they could just play less and it'd stay at 0 forever.
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1h
December 02, 2024267. Unburying The Duck
Lords:
John
Erica
Topics:
Golden owl pre-post-mortem
https://goldenowlhunt.com/
Twin update: one year later
Notepad has support for alternative line endings now
Goodnight Moon (And/or Goodnight Dune?)
https://www.firstcry.com/intelli/articles/goodnight-moon-nursery-rhyme/
Microtopics:
The waiting list to get into the Topic Lords discord.
What goes on the lords-only channel.
The first rule of being a lord.
It's the end of the show somewhere in the world.
Frog Fractions Royalty.
Topic Lords Con East.
Choosing pairs of lords.
What lords have been on the show least recently.
Mystery with a B.
Responsibility to the lords.
ARG goings-on.
Maze of Games.
Rubber hose ARG solving
Digging up the golden owl and replacing it with a duck.
The minimum number of golden owls you are allowed to cast in France.
The History of the Owl Stuff.
Commemorating your love of the Golden Owl by purchasing this commemorative Golden Owl.
The Mystery of the Golden Owl that nobody wanted solved.
It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World.
Going and burying a duck
Unburying the Duck and putting the Owl back.
Looking through the Heart of France.
Another cursed treasure hunt in the can.
Ancient alternatives to zip files.
Re-scoping your puzzle hunt on the fly.
Telling twins apart using phrenology.
Twin identification strategies.
Let me see your flecks!
Checking your placental mammals for belly buttons.
Platypodes.
Jock twin/nerd twin.
Having children as a way to practice solving problems together.
Who forgot to take a nap today? (Everyone on the show.)
Flailing limbs kicking your bedmate all night.
Rocking your kid to sleep and then depositing them in the crib like Indy swapping out the golden idol.
How to teach babies to sleep.
Wearing children until the children no longer tolerate it.
A good selection of kid-friendly music.
A guy with a soothing British voice saying interesting things for ten minutes.
How much coffee to give a six year old right before bed.
Waiting for your kid to realize that when it's 1am he doesn't have to ask you if he can watch TV.
Just show me the byte order marker!
Adding tabs to Notepad.
Everyone agreeing to go back to WordStar.
What software developers do once a program is finished and perfect.
Loading CSV files into R.
Accidentally updating Excel.
The kind of person who is passionate about the latest cutting edge version of all software, who works in tech and is in charge of all update systems.
Adobe Premiere updates that ruin your team's entire workflow.
Why JWZ is no longer rich.
Seeing all the trailing spaces at the end of the line.
Jobs that require you to be able to distinguish between a tab character and the equivalent number of spaces.
How Unity handles upgrades and versioning.
The 75th anniversary of Goodnight Moon.
Why the New York Times's list of most borrowed children's library books of all time doesn't contain Goodnight Moon.
When Goodnight Moon says "Goodnight Nobody" and you immediately assume that the old lady died.
The calming effect of going over an inventory of really nice soothing things.
The Margaret Wise Brown ouevre.
Goodnight Dune.
Good night, shai-hulud bursting out of the dune.
Good night, Bene Gesserit witch whispering "they tried and died."
Too much of every character giving their internal monologue in italics.
Virginia Facebook's extremely cheap antiques.
Floating in the No-Room.
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1h 14min
November 25, 2024266. Voronoi Cookies
Lords:
Ben
Andrew
Topics:
Baking: precise science of measurement or do it all by feel? (People have very different philosophies of muffins)
I've gotten into making crosswords this year and recently had the idea to start putting them on postcards and leaving them in public places for people to find. Am I becoming the Riddler? Is this fine?
I just found out that there aren't exactly 52 weeks in a year
The Rules, Leila Chatti
https://poets.org/poem/rules
Building fidgeting into a Zoom lecture
Things of Science. (Subscription science toy service that I got when I was a kid)
Microtopics:
Posting pictures of pottery to social media.
The Hopefully Year of Layoffs.
Teaching game development as a hobby.
The interactive comic books of Jason Shiga.
Lies and truth and sea monsters.
Waiting for half an hour to find out if you fucked it up.
Baking intuitively.
Skimming a recipe and thinking "hmm yes, I've made food before"
Voronoi cookies.
Keeping separate baking notebooks for each season.
Having units that are divisible by two.
Putting it in a Gas 4 Oven.
How to pronounce "tare."
Sneaking into Grandma's kitchen and weighing all the ingredients.
Cruciverbalism.
Where to post the crosswords you've constructed.
A Lord's Puzzle.
Giving people a little bit of joy and avoiding hearing any feedback about it.
Living in the puzzle capital of the world.
Constructing a crossword puzzle for every party you attend.
The MIT Mystery Hunt.
Making art for a really small group of people.
Crosswordese.
Designing themed vs. themeless crossword puzzles.
How many weeks are in a leap year.
Yet another ratio that doesn't work out.
Calendrical systems you could use.
Things that you know that are wrong.
What's your favorite thing you don't know that you don't know?
Finding a drawer full of narwhal tusks in a bone shop and thinking "hm, sixty unicorns died here"
NASA's antigravity room.
Why doesn't the Mars habitat work out?
Multiple digressions on horse urine.
Refining horse urine into progesterone on Mars.
Suddenly realizing that you've been dead all along.
Cicadas doing whatever they do in the trees.
Acknowledging the expectations of what a poem is.
Why you always turn out to have been dead at the end.
Who is out there still making games about guns?
Adding line breaks to make your essay look like a poem.
Innominateness.
Garden path level design.
Reading aloud etudes.
Mavis Beacon Teaches Elocution.
Replacing your Zoom background with a video of yourself.
Brain massaging video of cutting sand.
The calming effect of amphetamines.
Fidgeting incessantly during Zoom calls.
Fidgeting for people so they don't have to.
Bubbling noises and space harps.
Remote testing protocols.
Plagiarism detector snake oil.
Doing homework to get used to the idea of doing homework.
Mass-production of adults.
Paperwork as a method of crowd control.
Homework as a barrier to family time vs. homework that facilitates family time.
Mailing people little bits of science.
Aerogel vs. Superslurper.
Growing mold in your oobleck.
Sending 1940s children asbestos in the mail.
Using every sense to explore the world.
A dog sniffing your hand and walking away.
Throwing away all the business cards that just have your Twitter handle on them.
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1h 8min
November 18, 2024265. We're Here To Make This Slide Floppy
Lords:
Tim
Chris
Topics:
Noodles?
Everything and More (by DFW), the "impoverishment of the question",and free will
Choosing an integrator
https://gafferongames.com/post/integration_basics/
Lucky Jim (old song)
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/U7zR1RCa.png
Collaborative music as a game design problem (see: skill gap, handicaps, engagement, peripheral participation)
Microtopics:
Celtic Music and Corgis.
Tim, a figure shrouded in mystery.
Topic Monologues.
Gluten-free noodle straws.
Bucatini: imagine a Red Vine but made of pasta.
Replacing food service workers with clockwork automata made of noodles that have been hardened into gears and springs.
Giant fusilli as playground equipment.
Noodleness and pastitude.
Whether gnocchi is a pasta. What about cauliflower gnocchi?
Unleavened Carrot Cake.
Indomie: the number one selling noodle on Earth.
Good spices: they can work in a broth.
Soupertaster: Jim eats soup alone while talking to a volleyball with a bloody handprint on it.
Learning math by starting with incredibly abstract unmotivated ideas.
Some Bottomless Pits are Deeper than Others.
Approaching a question by interpreting it as a question that if answerable.
The significant of the perception of free will.
How a closed system can produce multiple different outcomes.
What happens when we decide we don't have free will.
A completely deterministic system that has a sensation of free will.
Taking as much time as it takes to read a book.
Shooting the Moon (in real life)
Taking all the bad cards and winning.
Becoming disciplined about time
What a modern feature phone can do.
Dividing your day into blocks and spending them.
The period in your life when you lived in Burlingame.
Getting an incredibe amount of work done during your hour and a half commute.
Topic Lords or Plug Lords?
Something you'll be glad you did tomorrow.
Integration Basics.
Explicit Euler vs. Semi-Implicit Euler.
The pros and cons of RK4.
The physics system behind Drawn to Life.
What it takes to be an old song.
Hadestown and The Instigator.
The Hadestown Tiny Desk Concert.
How to play music with other people in a way that accounts for skill gaps.
Going to the Starry Plough to play the penny whistle.
Musicians sitting in a circle and talking until someone starts playing something and everyone else joins in.
Joining in on a song you've never heard before.
Playing Mary Had a Little Lamb at 40 BPM.
Making a slow song more interesting by adding ornamentation.
Star of the County Down.
Different ideas that come out when you play music at half speed.
Lark Camp.
The person who hands out the cheat sheet with all the popular tunes and their chord progressions.
Sorting tunes by frequnecy.
The bad things about Irish sessions, from a game design perspective.
Learning a song by reading the notation vs. learning it by playing it for 30 years.
Star Above the Garter.
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1h 11min
November 11, 2024264. Pickpocketed So Hard You Die
Lords:
Andrew
https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/
Aubrianne
Topics:
I will never get good at video games and that's okay
Does charging (or even allowing donations) for something change its perception as a piece of art?
Messy game design
To Be of Use, Marge Piercy
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57673/to-be-of-use
Films Noir
Complementary Hobby Power Couples
Microtopics:
Just shakin' it a little bit.
The royal it.
Putting Homestar Runner on shuffle while you do homework.
Making Pico-8 games under an Internet name.
Your child petting a dog but when you try to pet the dog as well the dog is like "no, not you!"
A beard or long braid as a fidget tool.
Spectrum Cheater Reveals.
Games where you have to plan ahead.
A very easy social slot to fit into.
How many extra organs does Master Chief have?
Watching your mom fail the same jump in Animal Well for twenty minutes.
Picking a garbage can in Fallout 3 where you keep all your stuff which works great until they patch garbage collection into the game.
A game that requires two skills and the two skills exist in two different people.
What happened to cheat codes?
Paying the pickpocket trainer to train you and then pickpocketing your money back.
Pickpocketing someone's vital organs.
Homestar Runner as the ultimate counter example.
What quilts are worth if you charged a fair wage for your time.
Spending half an hour convincing your nephew that this scarf really is worth $300.
The only two millennials who haven't professionalized their hobbies.
Constructing your game design like a mathematical proof.
The promise of the text parser.
All the weird bespoke deaths you could find in a Sierra game.
Games intended for people who have more free time than you.
How to make it completely viable to make small games.
A clever hack to market your video game (spend a bunch of money)
The promise of the 50 in one pirate kart.
Trying to get the house gifts in every game in UFO 50.
Collecting the umbrella and the pin an least a dozen times.
A Guided Tour of Barbuta.
The black sleek heads of seals bouncing like half submerged balls.
Doing what has to be done, again and again.
A form of idleness that produces an incredibly amount of textiles.
Peruvian people spinning while they wait for the bus.
Why nobody gives a shit about rope and string.
Appreciating the lasagna that's right in front of you.
Making a loaf of bread for your family that mostly eats peanut butter sandwiches.
Making a little frowny face at "amphoras."
Meeting a girl and wooing her with good semicolon usage.
Dressing up as Elaine and Guybrush for Halloween.
Whoppers Jr. and Games Boys Advance.
Classic Film Noir such as Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
That time Rita Hayworth made you realize you were gay.
Getting no movies from America for years and then getting a ton of movies from America all at once.
Pulpy low-budget melodramas.
The Hays Code.
The five minute monologue where Quint describes the graphic sex scene between Jaws and the Hoth Ice Wampa
Neo Noir. (Meaning from the 70a.)
Modern art. (Meaning from the early 20th century.)
Neo Noir films such as the Bourne Identity and Batman Begins
Bugs Bunny inventing the smoky noir saxophone.
A taxonomy of complementary hobby pairs.
Getting 20 musicians in a room and it's a total disaster.
Sheep growing so much extraneous wool that they fall on their backs and explode.
Youtube recommending a video on how to flip a sheep over.
Sheep Tips: How to Flip a Sheep.
A video of a guy getting out of a car and hopping a fence and running over to help a sheep who is stuck on its back like "what do I even do now?"
Fellow Jorts Horsians.
Deep lore of server outages.
Support Topic Lords
...more
1h 8min
November 04, 2024263. Drafted Into The Applebee's Wars
Lords:
Xalavier
Brianne
Topics:
Why do movies about contract killers skip over the good part of negotiating in excruciating detail the contract and clauses present?
Are fictional characters greater role models than real people?
The new Zelda game talks too much and I'm okay with that
Think of Others by Mahmoud Darwish
https://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/2014/11/mahmoud-darwish-think-of-others.html
Should every person be forcibly drafted into a customer service job, like the military.
The horrible things I would do in the Criterion Closet, if given an opportunity.
Jim's evidence for why The Pest is memorable: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cAB8dNMoXZ0
Microtopics:
I Am Your Beast.
Making 50 games in 7 years.
A co-op Kaiju horror cooking game
The Name of the Rose meets Godzilla meets Lethal Company.
Power couples in games.
Moviegoers who want to know about contract law.
Search and replacing "murder" with "unalive" so that a contact killer can safely sue the client for breach of contact.
Pedantic legal contact killer law every week.
Lowering the bar so that we can all raise it later.
Doctor Odyssey.
Disheveled Detective.
The Autistic Coded Detective.
A ahow about autistic people written by neurotypical people.
Making a weekly podcast and scoffing at the TV shows that can only manage 24 episodes a year.
Asking google for the "podcast with the fewest episodes" and google just assuming you meant the podcast with the shortest running time.
Sending children to the sharps dump. (Because the kid asked for it and the parent signed a waiver.)
Desperately knocking on Google's door and beginning them to tell you where the furthest Denny's is.
The Waluigi-owned Denny's in the Andromeda Galaxy.
Role Models happening accidentally.
Donald Duck becoming a sex pest after edgier writers take over.
A form of self to aspire to.
300 Rorschach Guys in a discord server.
An epic story that FromSoft will continue to plunder of its biggest plot elements for the next 30 years.
A character that you relate to and then you realize that's bad.
What do you do after you get what you want?
Leading a horde of ninja at the dictates of an Eldritch god.
Getting what you've been looking for and realizing that you're no longer the person who wanted that thing.
Role-playing a princess who has to talk to a litany of insufferable people.
Swinging your sword through grass to reveal rupees.
Zelda's Got an Onus.
Who you're thinking about as you pay your water bills.
Those who are nursed by clouds.
Shakespeare beeves.
GettingTikTok Mad.
The Death of Arthur.
Impacting media literacy for generations because you want to make a sassy pun.
Slipping into Belgian because you don't have enough mana to speak French.
The red phone in every publicly traded franchise restaurant that connects the customer directly to a random shareholder.
Working a Black Friday at a retail job and being awarded a purple heart.
Working a Best Buy Geek Squad tour of service to earn your citizenship.
The Criterion Closet.
The level of stardom you need to attain in order to remove movies from the Criterion Collection.
Supermarket Sweep.
Asking someone who took one year of high school French what you call someone who owns a closet.
I would not be normal and they would not be safe.
Landed noblemen who are super into Amontillado.
Where to lock the insufferable friend who went to film school.
How many Miami Vice episodes ended up in the Criterion Collection.
The movie that you remember the least.
Forgiving the insufferable film school attendees in your life because you can't think of a good punishment for them.
Support Topic Lords
...more
1h 10min

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The podcast currently has 273 episodes available.

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