Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

October 12364B. Meat on the Chat Bones (I Could Chew That)
This is the pre-show banter and topic negotiation for episode 364, ft. Maxx and Avery:
Microtopics:
Strumming a guitar on a Zoom call.
A topic that's just a story.
Cassowary Joe.
Something rotten in Denver.
Whether Carmen Sandiego is a pun on the city of San Diego.
How the Diablo game series sounds to people who are not from the Bay Area.
The mythical Kingdom of Bethesda, where you might go meet Liv Tyler.
Whether you're from San Diego. (It's complicated.)
In defense of the Murder Cassowary.
The tiger climbing up your friend and stalking you throughout the zoo.
Being the coolest kid in your apartment complex until somebody gets a Super Nintendo.
Cargo Cult Entertainment Green Light.
Offering a poem and immediately regretting it.
The RSS feeds for individual Lords.
The eight hour Avery-only episode.
Reminding you buddy not to say goodbye to the Alexandria that you're losing.
Pretty Wacky in Every Language.
Getting excited when you have something to contribute to the video game discussion.
Trying to turn your video game podcast into Topic Lords.
The Idle Thumbs Steering Direction.
Sharing a show on a radio station with your friend who only plays Ska and when they go to the bathroom you play Elliott Smith.
Timeless Topics that Will Never Grow Old.
Why is my computer automated?!
The shop in your local mall in San Jose where you can rent videos that people home-taped in Japan and mailed to the shop.
Gradually replacing all the water in your body with British game shows.
Support Topic Lords
20 min
October 12364. Boys Don't Know About Cassowary Man
Lords:
Maxx
Avery
Topics:
False brochures
https://legacy.drivethrurpg.com/product/513415/Green-Oaks
Owning the wrong game console
https://desertstormcards.com/
The middle 90% principle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
The God Abandons Antony, by C.P. Cavafy
https://www.onassis.org/initiatives/cavafy-archive/the-canon/the-god-abandons-antony
Microtopics:
A person, in Seattle and on the Internet.
Upcoming puppet shows.
Fussy Cloud Puppet Slam.
Portland Puppet People.
Giant puppets made from shards of cardboard hanging from the ceiling.
When people treat the puppet as real because the puppeteer did such a good job.
Various tasks that would be challenging got moths.
Girls go to university and boys go to cassowaryversity.
Social Media!
Spotify looking at your cover art and telling you "this would be better if it was AI-generated."
A Swedish pop duo originally consisting of two Swedish people.
A brochure that's slightly about your health.
A picture in which everyone is smiling even though one of them is undergoing a medical procedure.
Convincing elderly role-players to retire.
Volunteering to DM at your local retirement home.
Talking to your best friend, an emoji on a white orb.
The part of the retirement home brochure about making a scene where it's like "if you can't think of anything to yell at your nurse here's some ideas"
Growing old to become the dad from Frasier.
A high school student making a horror film hiring a bunch of 30 year olds to play the teenagers.
A brochure explaining what time is and different models of thinking about time.
Handing about brochures about yourself in lieu of business cards.
Marvel and DC comic book cards.
Topps Operation Enduring Freedom collectible cards.
The holographic Obama Bin Laden card.
Sitting in class and contemplating why George W. Bush is touching the side of someone's head.
Choosing to collect the Operation Desert Storm cards rather than the Operation Enduring Freedom series because it's more nostalgic.
Trading some Japanese Yu-Gi-Oh cards for a mint condition Condoleeza Rice.
Britain's Tony Blair: a Staunch Ally.
Why you have that tattoo of Bonk on your stomach.
Aphex Twin pressing play on his laptop and then just pacing back and forth on the stage looking angry as people dance.
The Asylum Pictures of the video game industry.
Kids in the neighborhood no longer coming over as soon as your neighbor gets a Super Nintendo.
Nintendo localizing all the onigiri out of NES games.
Kanye West's unfinished concept album about the Turbo Grafx 16.
Freezing your credit card in a block of ice, but for children.
A ten year old in the process of becoming a vegetarian.
Running out of existential concerns before you turn ten and never developing any more.
Japanese kids accepting Transformers at face value, like "of course this gun would turn into a guy" whereas American kids needed a Saturday morning cartoon to explain that it's because they're made of transformium and eat energon.
Slightly malproportioned villain with a Shakespeare collar and a claw hand
Going out to run errands in jeans, a t-shirt and a Shakespeare collar.
How many pieces of s suit it is if you're just wearing sock garters that nobody can see.
Custom colors for your Turbo Grafx?!
Extremely serious Bombermans.
The 90% parking principle.
Calculating the approximate maximum height of a human based on having no information about humans.
Mathematicians and philosophers yelling at their Windows Phones about this podcast.
Trying a cup of coffee and saying "it needs more beans."
Suddenly realizing that you might live to be 940.
A poem who only writes about ancient Rome.
Waking up to hear an invisible parade leaving Alexandria.
Feeling the portents of the moment.
A classic of Art Terrorism.
Replacement-level mid-90s R&B.
A 22 minute song including everything everyone likes best in a song.
Every commercially-released Beatles song playing at once.
A particular teacher who always enters the classroom in the same way.
Every Topic Lords guest needing the same brand of squeaky rubber chicken
A nickname that a radio DJ gave you when you were 15.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 6 min
October 05363. Cockroaches Who Won't Turn the Volume Down
Lords:
Avery
https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/album/six-songs-for-lisa
Chall
https://www.youtube.com/@bonk-zoo/shorts
Topics:
Playing real games on my phone
https://www.reddit.com/r/nostalgia/comments/1900nip/mario_kart_64_taco_bell_toy_1997/
Jim, you're a video gamer nerd. Did I hallucinate that the second player in Atari's Bruce Lee game is a Minotaur?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtBF7lBZWGw
Semi-perfect pitch
Bay Area Rapid Tankas by Bulian Jauer
https://bart.short-edition.com/story/bay-area-rapid-tankas?ctlg=4386
Microtopics:
Finally getting it wrong after seven years.
Becoming a dad in two weeks.
Biodegradable 3D printer filament.
Printing your tax documents on your 3D printer.
Printing a replica of a gun and also what you look like shooting it.
Turning your body into tiny little wiggly plastic skeletons after you die.
Whether Epic has ruined Bandcamp yet.
The impossibility of finding good video games in phone app stores.
Hypnospace Outlaw's phone port.
Optimizing your phone controller clip for your BART commute.
Cutting your phone in half hamburger-wise or hot dog-wise.
ABXY-Lutely!
Running an HTTP server on your phone.
Asking the robot to do the settings.
A Galaga the size of a credit card.
Galaga-oriented phone solutions.
The thing where you get a mattress in a tiny box and you open the box and the mattress inflates over 20 minutes, except it's a Galaga arcade cabinet on your BART commute.
BART Anime Festival.
A Taco Bell kids meal toy that's one of those plastic marble mazes except it's Mario Kart themed and has a replica of the middle fork of the N64 controller sticking out the bottom.
The Tiger Electronics Marble Madness game, with the shitty d-pad styled to look like a trackball.
The VR headset that played the same games as the regular Tiger hadhelds except you had to keep one eye closed or you get a headache.
Boolean Jower.
The first time you saw more than one computer in one place.
Your best friend in grade school whose dad kept bringing home unfinished Atari 800 games.
The blue minotaur in the Bruce Lee game for the Atari 800 whose special move was to moo.
The two player mode that every single-player secretly has where the first player tries to play the game while the second player keeps poking them in the ribs and making mooing noises.
The purple hugging guy in Kung Fu.
The guy in the purple suit who kept trying to hug Bruce Lee.
Hugging-adjacent martial arts.
Nolan Bushnell founding Chuck E. Cheese.
Living next to a Chuck E. Cheese and eating pizza every night.
The COVID Chuck E. Cheese that only offers takeout.
Reframing arcade games as being for children rather than just teen hooligans.
The haunted animatronics movie where Nicholas Cage doesn't have any lines.
Mockbuster versions of movies that can afford a real movie star but not enough for them to talk.
A floppy disk: it's a kind of cartridge.
Putting a spinning magnetic disk inside of an N64 cartridge casing.
Fitting a minidisk player into an N64 cartridge so Tony Hawk's Pro Skater can finally have the CD-quality soundtrack.
Mechanically-produced drum loops.
What to call people who have absolute pitch except it's only accurate to within three or four semitones.
The course of perfect pitch.
Copium theories.
The one person with perfect pitch in the a capella group trying to drag everyone else into tune.
The sound of an orchestra tuning.
Believing yourself to be a gifted musician and having the data to back it up.
Hearing the tone that only teenagers are supposed to hear.
All the teenagers that Japan is trying to scare away.
The only person in the coffee shop who can hear the high pitched whine of the induction hot plate. (The owner.)
A poem about the noises BART makes.
Reading poems on bart.gov
August Content.
George Lucas probably getting the tie fighter sound from riding BART.
That part of my life is over. (Two hours ago.)
A recipe for not be being able to hear the teen-repellent noise.
Why would anyone want to keep teenagers away from the mall?
Whether malls are for teenagers any more.
Why is the tofu always last to know when the mall closes?
Hot Topic ghosts chasing you down as you desperately try to find the Manic Panic.
A screensaver with a winner and a loser.
Having a Turbo Grafx 16 while everyone else has a Super Nintendo.
Your life's work in mp3 format.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min
September 28362. It's Me, Your Own Guy
Lords:
Esper
https://ourbroadcastday.com/
Mitch
https://topiclords.com/tags/mitch
Topics:
Making a daily show
https://www.youtube.com/@MagicEveryDaywEQ
https://www.youtube.com/@Twinbeard_
Beatspell (Rhythm Heaven Groove)
The Topic Lords IMDB page
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30527870/episodes/
Dad are you at bus stop riding on a bus at work
https://beige.party/@maxleibman/116884326841775088
Oops! 45% of tumblr users don't read the plaintext above a poll before participating in the poll
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1mDCGI0uSScqGUNiSM82C3d6KK0Orkijj98qabIE8FTE/edit?gid=1797283451#gid=1797283451
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSccEEQQsI_5El_rWwru7czngN34fgx3Gb9CVzUjyhtP7GXfWg/viewanalytics
Microtopics:
Plugging purposes.
Magic Every Day with Esper Quinn.
August 3rd until the end of linear time.
If you like moving pixels entering your eyeballs, you'll love this Youtube series.
Dulcet apple pie.
The Super Mario Wiki Mario Awards.
Everyone's second-least favorite Mario thing.
Calling a thing mediocre when you don't want to admit that it's good
Using a botnet to convince everyone that "dogshit" is a laudatory word.
Words more laudatory than "perfect."
Stealing an idea from someone who also stole it.
Playing exactly one Mario level a day.
Youtube banning a certain kind of video because it's too cool.
Personally knowing everyone who watches your Youtube channel.
How hard it is to get Youtube to show you channels with less than 20 views a day.
Rhythm Heavens: there are five of them now!
A rhythm roguelike where you fight enemies by dancing at them.
How to play Rhythm Heaven if you don't have a Switch.
The Rhythm Heaven Groove developers apologizing about latency issues and then doing nothing to fix them.
Rhythm games with excellent lag calibration facilities.
The screen reader robot getting morose and depressed when you turn it off.
Blind people playing Rhythm Heaven Groove.
Blind-accessible video games.
Lesbian Beatspell lore.
Dodging the time warp and ending up in the future.
Making the show more lovable so listeners spontaneously do thankless rote data entry tasks.
Explaining to grandma what a podcast is every time you see her.
Shoutcast stations.
Going to bat for vods.
Incidental line breaks.
A poem that's a poem in the same way that an open-faced sandwich is a sandwich.
Come on, thankless Topic Subject!
The 55% of Tumblr users that read a poll before answering it.
Being on your way to go to a building.
Explaining important context in tiny text.
Maintaining a list of alternative titles of Mario games.
Survey techniques that come off as condescending.
Super Mario DVD menu games.
Hiring people to localize your gimmick Mario survey into EFIGS.
Mario the blunt object.
The Paper Mario Sticker Star inflection point.
Whether the Japanese Super Mario Portal would classify Fire Emblem as an RPG.
Coming up with examples of things that aren't video games but also aren't funny to call a video game.
The Choose Your Own Adventure Interactive DVD.
Whether Black Mirror Bandersnatch is a video game.
Whether mayonnaise is a video game.
Quest for the Rings for the Odyssey 2.
Asking someone to make you a sandwich without specifying what kind of sandwich.
Deciding that you like video games and therefore video games that you don't like aren't actually video games.
Smashing binaries.
A film is something that has Freddie Krueger in it.
Gamers vs. Moviegoers.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 16 min
September 21361. Making the Math Do Pretty Things
Lords:
Farbs
https://farbs.org/
Hallie
https://moveslow.info/
Topics:
The only way to truly beat Dark Souls is to achieve enlightenment
Writing is a serialization problem
Grand Theft Auto producer Leslie Benzies was lead programmer on Space Station Silicon Valley for the Nintendo 64.
Ode on a Grecian Urn, by John Keats
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn
Learning by copying
Meandering thread of execution: https://mastodon.social/@Farbs/112679557654266096
Microtopics:
Systems where people make meaning out of joy and suffering.
Weighing in on whether video games will still exist a month from now.
Linking the fire or not linking the fire.
Video games that were popular when saving games was expensive.
Who invented corpse runs?
Finishing your whole life believing you're the hero.
Whether the narrator of the Dark Souls trailer is a character in the game.
Doing the thing you've already proven you can do.
The three stages of grief: betrayal, anger, sense of victory.
Secondhand lore.
Seeking paleblood to transcend the hunt.
Lounging Carl: he's just chillin'.
Getting all the platinum trophies to achieve enlightenment.
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. It's worth 50 souls every time!
A meter going up and a bell ringing and you're a better person now!
Daoism Dives.
Force Witches.
Tedious and annoying programming problems.
Taking a nebulous interconnected cloud of data and turning it into a stream of bytes, and vice versa.
Metaphorical Kevin Bacon Game.
Developing your serialization scheme iteratively.
Sorting your evidence by persuasiveness.
Working with data in different ways.
Turning a video game into a sequence of experiences.
Looking at the world as a set of events rather than as a set of objects.
A video game series where you steal cars.
Having just one good work in you and being proud that you made that one good work.
Shipping a game that's not in the Grand Theft Auto series for the first time in decades.
Clicking on the blog button and it just says "nope" and then clicking on the games button and there's a PHP error.
Void Bastards printing sound effects on the doorways, just like Hunt the Wumpus.
Making the math do pretty things.
Plugging functions into each other.
Doing all your level design by writing stacked modifiers in C code.
Stacking up a bunch of quality of life features and that's it, that's your content authoring system.
Forever panting and forever young.
A sad sack with consumption, bullied by Lord Byron.
Isn't it nice to not be subject to the passage of time?
This urn is never going to catch its breath.
Following your feelings and always being right.
Poetry as form of lossy compression.
Roger Ebert claiming that poetry can never be art.
Rebuilding Zelda 1 in Voxatron.
Pausing the whole game while a single important thing happens.
Making games inside-out.
How they made games before we killed GOTO.
Trying to explain setjmp/longjmp to a non-programmer.
Committing to the bit and refusing to work with anyone who isn't committed to the bit.
Legitimate Peripheral Participation.
Explaining to Tim how Jamestown could've had online multiplayer.
Rowdy in Different Ways.
Talking to every doctor in order to become a doctor.
Finding a tutorial and deliberately following it wrong.
Acquiring facility in translating between two domains.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 14 min
September 14360. The Screen Disapproves
Lords:
CisHetKayfaber
Charles
https://nohomework.website/
Topics:
When your therapist introduces their own problems that you don't have
Color as a separate sensory axis (deprioritized for some, assumption of color in black and white things, dreaming in black and white)
One-handed triangle
Many, Many Tekel Upharsin by Jacob Bacharach
https://bsky.app/profile/jacobbacharach.bsky.social/post/3mruuexkb4k2c
Screen time is a classist plot
Microtopics:
Ironic usernames.
Bilingual global information security IT legal compliance.
Knowing each other through the replies.
Patrick Cosmos, L Ron Mexico and Senator Lemon Gogurt.
Taking on a challenge to guest on more than one podcast per week.
The legal comedy podcast ouevre.
Riffing with your therapist.
Your therapist getting really upset about political events and you have to calm them down and then they bill you for the hour.
Finding your zen when things make you shouty.
Your psychiatrist telling you you can't have a mental disorder because you've published papers.
Staying with a therapist longer than is therapeutically useful.
Doing your best to not worry about things you can't fix.
Why everyone is to choosing to affront you, the protagonist of the universe.
Surviving the chaos that being a parent introduces into your world.
Therapy access in Japan.
The development stage in which kids are unreasonable.
Recalled image pastiche.
Inability to perceive sunburn.
How to tell if a light switch is working in a dream.
People who can analyze that they like about music.
Deprioritizing color information in the same way a color blind person would.
Coming to reality with different axes of perception.
Spending time around people who notice eye color.
Self-describing phenomena.
Converting to Catholicism so you can become white.
A triangle that's not shaped like a triangle but it sounds like a triangle.
Playing a triangle like a shaker.
Touching the exposed bars so that it sounds like you're eating with chopsticks.
The Triangle Tessitura.
A one-man band on the boardwalk clapping cymbals with his knees.
Not hating a thing because your emotional range just doesn't reach that far.
Stomp Clap Hey Band.
DannyB Fanfic.
Trying to live forever via various peptides and also your son's blood.
Using Jewish artifacts in a drunken reverie.
Doing your own hair transplants at home.
Hey buddy, can you get these peptides in Japan?
The Ozymandias level of hubris that demands its own poem.
Becoming a meme of yourself.
Different kinds of screen time.
Growing up with unlimited screen time and almost getting a PhD.
Hyperpalatability.
The attention economy.
Not knowing about an Internet phenomenon.
Developing agriculture and then it all goes to hell.
Figuring out everything you have to do and then doing the easiest thing on the list.
The Screen Disapproves.
Taking the coping strategies that you can get.
The best parenting strategy you can hope for without having infinite free time.
Babe Ruth walking with choppy legs on his home run trot.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
September 07359. I Believe That Like I Believe a Hole in My Head
Lords:
Erica
Alex
https://ludobloom.com/
Topics:
Making friends with animals
The 20 point platform of Count Binface
The song NASA banned from space
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKzLopYRauI
You Are a Dragonfly & I Am Also a Dragonfly
https://www.tumblr.com/apoemaday/722022939295367168/you-are-a-dragonfly-i-am-also-a-dragonfly
Using text to organize thoughts
A Tale About Digging a Hole
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4210530/A_Tale_About_Digging_a_Hole__The_Official_Story_Novel/
Microtopics:
Eating a bunch of chocolate.
Carob vs. chocolate?
Caffeinated soap.
Why there's so much cherry juice in everything.
What the Cranberries have to say about the Ocean Spray collective.
Topic Lords is a Sometimes Food.
Emergency Cat Wrangling.
Identifying and naming individual squirrels.
The kind of friendship you have to cultivate over 20,000 years.
The skunk that keeps hanging out and taunting Roy.
Licensed squirrels.
What moral obligations possibly having a pet squirrel confers upon you.
Texas skunks with fake IDs.
Squirrely chipmunks.
California's Argentine ant super colony.
New hypotheses in immunity ecology.
Tracking the ant colony outside your house and keeping a database of when each individual ant dies.
The more we learn about the squirrels, the more they know about us.
The weirdo who's always hanging around on the other side of the mirror.
Failing the marshmallow test because you only wanted one marshmallow anyway.
Trying to bat squirrels away from your sandwich on your first date with the squirrel lady.
Reaming out the president of Belgium because you hate waffles.
Count Binface of the Gremloids.
Replacing Lord Buckethead when he retires, like the Dread Pirate Roberts.
How dare you? I'm from outer space!
A t-shirt of Margaret Thatcher worrying about Lord Buckethead.
Arcade grabber games to be made fairer.
How regulated are claw machines in Clacton?
A narrow genre to appreciate if you like screaming.
Mission control deciding the music that the astronauts wake up to.
A committee of 30 people who decide what music to play at what volume to wake you up at 6:45am.
Mission control shutting down Pink Pony Club right before all the astronauts are about to join in on the chorus.
The American teenager who wrote most of Scots Wikipedia.
Slurred yelps of the song's title.
Whether a 2010 blog post is more plausible than a modern Facebook post.
Interviewing 90-year-old Jack Lousma about Paralyzed, by the Legendary Stardust Cowboy.
What if someone answers the phone at the fake pizza hotline?
Roy vs. Fake Roy.
Ducking out of reading the poem every time you can.
Ducking out vs. weaseling out.
Cutting the green air open with our sharp blue bodies simply by being there.
Dragonflies that are effortlessly in the moment.
A few sentences about what a dragonfly might experience.
The implications of seeing a pond for the first time.
Looking at the ocean and experiencing awe. (Not the same thing as enjoying it.)
The realization that any time, the Pacific Ocean could decide to kill you no matter where you are.
How Jim is going to mentally process the concept of ponds.
The set of things that would have to be true for you to be able to solve this puzzle.
Particularization.
Inventing a puzzle solving process to play video games more efficiently and then using the same process to drive cold fusion.
The fantasy of producing something meaningful.
Art as a product vs. art as a process.
Gathering ore and selling the ore for upgrades.
PDF DLC.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 3 min
August 31358. Maximum Permitted Whims
Lords:
Kory
https://kbones.fun/
Jeremy
https://gamemaking.social/@SpindleyQ
Topics:
Forgetting that the old internet also kind of sucked, or, the Tar Pit From Hell Theory
Starting over in C after a hiatus from non-pico8 game development
Burning the Candle at Both Ends, by Andy Wallace
https://taper.badquar.to/15/burning_the_candle.html
Speedrunning figuring out how to romhack The Legend of Zelda because of a toot
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLhKtbablIXrfIJf-icFkrXv94KCgEser8
https://youtube.com/watch?v=ACuk2TXoNhc
Microtopics:
Coming in hot.
Switching to paperbacks.
Cascading interpretations of a kernel of an idea.
The yips for reading sci-fi.
Dealing with a succession of bureaucrats as you try to get the most interesting version of your book published.
Kids: they've gotten too rowdy in Korean high schools.
Sending in Jason Bourne to discipline rowdy high school kids.
The Fringe Game History podcast.
Meowio.
Forums: they were also terrible.
Placing your web site on a big slab of plexiglass that floats around on the tar pit from hell.
Naturally occurring toxic engagement vs. actively farming the stuff.
The switch that flipped that suddenly made everyone stop caring what No Mutants Allowed thought.
The naked animosity between the PalmOS community and the Pocket PC community.
The Gamers Quarter.
Making stuff and talking about the stuff you're making.
Interesting things spawning out of stews.
Cockamamie theories that survive mostly because their names are fun to say.
Meeting friends on the Internet and having the ability to meet them in person.
Every game eventually becomes a Zelda-like if you're not careful.
Instantiating the particle system.
Inventing the easing function.
Inventing a thing that already exists.
Applying a bunch of easing functions to make it look like you're climbing a tower.
Whim-based game development.
Walking around a maze and picking up pages that have spells on them.
Whim-Based Development Problems.
The most whims you can fit on a Pico-8 cartridge.
Getting a guy moving on the screen and then making the rest of the video game.
Downloading Turbo C and being like "I'm gonna program the EGA!"
Running out of engine programming tasks and being forced to start on game design.
Neu][ower.
All the game projects that improved your life even though they never shipped.
Making the game that's easy for you to make.
Starting a project that requires a bunch of writing even though you get anxiety about writing.
That 30% cut is coming right out of the microtopics.
Inaction: it carries its own risk.
CP-437 block and line drawing characters.
Things to do if you value shipping a game.
Emoji moving around with a CRT filter over it.
Valuing the wrong paths you take for the lessons you learned from them.
Jump-scaring yourself the first time you type "malloc."
There's no segfaulting on a 286; the bits just fall out the back.
Zelda cave merchants appearing in a puff of smoke.
Wild speculation about 6502 assembly.
Using FCEUX to develop a ROM hack for The Legend of Zelda.
Nerdsniping.
Killing the enemy in object slot #1.
Why edit RAM when you could edit the ROM?
Doing very untoward things to The Legend of Zelda.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
August 24357. Let's Be Each Other's Encrypted Off-Site Backup
Lords:
Rebecca
Martin
Topics:
Running a home server: Easier than you might think and very useful to do
The best place to find poetry is on vacation
Winston reading every sign in Target
Zampiceni's Marketplace, by Margaret Szumonski
https://toots.ravenoak.dev/@rebecca/116899616527167036
Hot dog research thursdays and bad dracula nights
Microtopics:
Tomato season: the tomatoes look pretty good.
Mozart in the Park.
Actors: they're not fussy like cellists.
Ancient Greek plays where they stab each other.
10 hours of Star Trek engine noises.
An illicit hacker breaking into your Jellyfin server and watching your Star Trek.
Listen to Data putter around.
A recurring thing with a database that you have to keep debugging.
Building a normal computer out of normal parts.
Everybody being each other's encrypted off-site backup.
Opening books and closing them, then opening them again and closing them again.
The one about the horny grocery store.
Having a difficult time finding delicious food in Massachusetts.
The kind of food they feed you on a weaving retreat.
Sitting in a Starbucks, staring at the internet and rotting.
Walking into an indie music store and perusing the local music section.
Getting mad on vacation because you miss your cats.
Nothing Beats Doing Nothing.
Buying grape juice from vineyards and making wine at home.
All the little guys that help you make wine and cheese.
Wrapping your wine fermentation vats in blankets so all the bacteria are more comfortable.
Folks who assume you know about wine because you're from California.
An advertisement exhorting you to go where you already are.
Abag & Iclei?? What does that mean?
Puzzling out the vanity plates.
Growing up watching only PBS and then falling for every ad as an adult because you have no ad literacy.
Seeing a targeted ad and feeling like you failed as a person because you want to buy the thing.
How Instagram ruined hash tags.
Getting off-topic but it's okay because it's a different topic.
Prose poems and deconstructed sandwiches.
Absolutely! No parking! For Buca di Beppo!
Having notes on this sign.
Seeing a sign and thinking "hmm, someone must've parked for Buca di Beppo here."
Your tight five on East Coast Fallouts ruined the Fallout TV series.
The grocer cutting open the pomegranates so you can touch them.
Muscles building like coconuts, lifting whole regimes of bananas.
Why are husbands so wrong about Zampiceni's Marketplace?
Moammar Gaddafi's obsession with Condoleezza Rice.
Getting curious what Danny Devito was doing in the 1970s.
The invention of No-Fault Divorce.
Be sure to marry someone you can go to the grocery store with. (Especially the sexy grocery store.)
Saving the horny onions for your next appearance.
What to do with all the write-in topics now that we don't have a write-in segment.
Who to turn to for pizza research now that the Pizza Research Institute has shut down.
A pizza that's more like a heaping roasted salad.
Inventing the peanut butter and pickle hot dog once a week.
Putting peanut butter on noodles.
Food wizards.
As much star anise as you could possibly ever use.
Learning to cook in a no-onion environment.
Fermenty Black Beans.
Medium to high-effort hot dogs.
Dracula just trying to be a good dad.
Quitting Bad Dracula Day for good.
Lucy pulling the football away. (The football is good Dracula movies.)
A movie where karate guys do kick-ass moves while children are being trafficked.
Michelle Yeoh as Cop Lady.
Fast forward 200 years and it's 1972 and there's a funk soundtrack.
Hosting your own patreon, and other ideas that will definitely work.
Being on the Fediverse to post and on Bluesky to cry.
What Gene Siskel thinks of the Blacula sequel.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min
August 17356. ICANN has Cheezburger?
Lords:
Felicia
Andrew
https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/
Topics:
My dad's indestructible mailbox
Ares doesn't emulate the timing of the Reality Display Processor
Moo box vs. Groan tube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GQ126DUsyQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tOsucpdD7Y
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QyvFNZZ1fs
Front mission 2's window color configuration menu
https://bsky.app/profile/guilewinquote.bsky.social/post/3mozyqq2ibk2g
Trying to get The Incredible Machine 3 running in Wine only to realize 2 is exactly the same and runs in DOSBox and finally solves a dialogue sfx mystery
Microtopics:
The cheezburger TLD.
A show that has a big reputation to live up to because the name sounds similar to Totoro.
Prehensile rainbow hair.
Sensible anime naming logic.
A little guy running around like in a video game, except in real life.
Matter Senators, the only place on the Internet you can hear matters discussed.
Issue Ombudspeople, the only place on the Internet you can hear issues discussed.
Agnes Tachyon. (Agnes is his surname.)
Mailbox Baseball.
Making a new mailbox post out of a 1 foot diameter oil drilling pipe.
The floral anatomy of a mailbox.
The neighborhood in Albuquerque that has the least destructible mailboxes.
An iron iceberg embedded in the sidewalk tearing a gash in your RV.
Wikipedia redirecting your search for Mailbox Baseball to the page for Property Crime.
Calling your daughter to let her know you've just sent her an email.
Overengineering your mailbox by an order of magnitude in every respect.
A Vault-Tec vault but for mail.
Low level Nintendo 64 emulation.
Sending a display list to the Reality Signal Processor.
Trying to do N64 development when the development hardware is in a different building from your computer.
Working on web apps and wishing you could be working on folding space time.
Shoveling pixels from one memory location to another.
Losing track of the state of Nintendo 64 emulation because you have to remodel your house.
Predicting a console's success by whether it uses bespoke off-the-shelf parts.
Putting a value in the zero index in a Lua array.
An Youtube video that is old enough to vote.
Bidirectional groan tubes.
Shaking the groan tube.
Making a mace by attaching a Moo Box to the end of the Groan Tube.
10 hours of silence occasionally broken by groan tube.
Ranking the best groan tube moments.
Attaching 100 groan tubes to my wife's car's exhaust pipe.
Alfred E. Groantube.
Wikipedia articles with videos.
The UPS guy carrying around a huge box of Moo Boxes.
A Muffled Cacophony of Christmas Crap.
A big box fancy liquor store.
A building in the vicinity of a cheeseburger office.
Muzak World HQ.
The Cure doing a faithful cover of the Front Mission 2 Window Color Configuration Menu.
My eyes are grayscale but your hair is more purply grayscale.
A game that was criticized for its long loading times.
A poem about long Playstation loading times.
Lords Get In Free.
The death of Youtube videos just showing the UI of video games.
Get Medieval (1998)
The hardest era of PC gaming to run a game from.
The sort of thing someone might post in the Topic Lords discord.
Refusing to read the Mothman's Ass bumper sticker because you might do it as a poem someday.
Solving puzzles inspired by Rube Goldberg machines.
Porting a game to Windows Forms.
Finally finding out why Tim pronounced the title that way.
Consulting Wikipedia before making life decisions.
Going back in time to tell your past self that The Incredible Machine 2 is the same game and way easier to emulate.
MT-32 if you're lucky, Adlib if you're unlucky, PC speaker if you're even less lucky.
Asking Claude for the recipe for napalm from the Anarchist's Cookbook and it's just as accurate as you remember.
Downloading text files from textfiles.com
Files that you should not follow.
A 40 column text file on how to make a dust bomb.
Learning how to download porn from Usenet.
Undocumented features of TRS-80 BASIC.
How to get a free account on Compuserve.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min