Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

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.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
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.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 11 min
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.
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1 hr 8 min
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.
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1 hr 10 min
October 28, 2024262. Real Meal, Fictional Man
Lords:
CisHetKayFaber
Maxx
Topics:
Food-focused Japanese TV
If "fish don't exist," then how do pescetarians?
PicoSteveMo is back!
https://wikipoem.org/
Verisimilitude in play (My daughter plays GTA and Roblox) (The shifting nature of what is appropriate for children)
Microtopics:
Emotionally connecting with a dying web site and meeting up with other users in Seattle.
What the Cohost diaspora is doing to do.
Drive-by bad opinions.
Where people live in Australia, on average.
CSS Crimes.
Using external image hosts to continue blogging on Cohost after it is in read-only mode.
URL shortening services reusing old links.
Meeting up with people you have a loose association with and having a good time together.
The Bowling League Mafia taking up every lane every day with tournaments so nobody else can bowl.
A TV drama where a traveling salesman keeps being hungry at different train stations.
Seeing a meal that looks delicious but you're full and can't eat a whole nother meal.
Whether food becomes fictional as soon as you eat it.
Watching satellite TV on your flip phone.
OneSeg.
Your email address being owned by your phone carrier.
A phone that closes and has great battery life.
The golden age of food-focused broadcast TV.
A celebrity who's interested in food goes and eats at a restaurant.
This Burger Weighs 30 Pounds!
Midnight Diner.
The Karate Kid but with ramen.
Watching a Youtube of the video gamers.
Ordinary People, Extraordinary Food.
Whether pescetarians exist.
The researchers in the shark lab you used to work at calling dolphins fish.
Fish eyes: nature's boba.
A block of gouda floating in the ocean.
Fish that stop being fish when you think about it too hard.
Disagreeing with beavers about what tree to cut down, but you're conflict avoidant so the beaver always wins.
Haven't we all argued with beavers?
Crows stealing the naan out of your naan and curry.
Jungle Crows who sound like an adult man doing an impression of crows.
Crows who are really good at Japanese T9.
The nets you put over your garbage that can't possibly keep the crows out.
Picking Steves from a continuity standpoint.
Finding any excuse to make a Stephen King Sokoban.
Deliberately awkward control schemes.
A thousand prototyping girls in space.
A poem without any line breaks in it.
The zine era of web design, when people would just type HTML and it would become a web page.
Phrases that make sense locally but not globally.
A comedian who is in lots of things.
The kind of poem you'd get if you put a poem on a wiki.
The kind of thing that would probably be read on this show.
The kind of web site that you'd run into when you're doing an ARG.
Installing Roblox on the PS5 to teach your daughter to read English better.
Playing a game with purple vomiting everywhere.
The ways a 7 year old interacts with a Grand Theft Auto.
Teaching yourself how to drive in Grand Theft Auto and obeying all the traffic laws.
Not shielding your kid from media but talking to them about it instead.
Academy Award winner Fisher Stevens.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 11 min
October 21, 2024261. Chat Hurt Chatself in Chat's Confusion
Lords:
Alex
https://www.youtube.com/@adiener
https://discord.com/invite/ZkV2zdb
Mitch
https://hbmmaster.tumblr.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@HBMmaster
https://www.patreon.com/hbmmaster
Topics:
The Wikipedia article about football
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Football
Classic Macintosh computers
The entomologist nerds get like two minutes of screen time in Silence of the Lambs, but I'm pretty sure they directly inspired the whole genre of forensic investigation TV.
With Apologies to Dr. Seuss, by Supper Mario Broth
https://fxtwitter.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1807077109661114636
Archipelago
https://archipelago.gg/
That "chat is a fourth person pronoun" thing is impressively wrong
Microtopics:
Off-the-cuff something.
Putting on the best talent show Cohost has ever seen.
Www.www.www
How to deal with multiple things that are called the same thing.
A list of things called Georgia.
A very opinionated move that you would not expect from a source as neutral as Wikipedia.
Sometimes your can carry the ball; sometimes you can't carry the ball.
What an IP address has to say about women in sports.
Sports: there's a place where you play it.
Watching Mexican TV and seeing an ad for "¡futbol americano!"
Repairing an old Mac that you found in an e-waste place.
Whether programming has changed since 1985.
Running an Electron app on a Mac Classic.
Switcher allowing you to run four 128k programs at a time on a 512k Mac.
How the 1991 Borland C++ debugger compares to the 2024 Visual Studio debugger.
Blah Blob, a Celeste-inspired platformer implemented as a Hypercard stack.
Sitting at the blender all day blending everything within arm's reach.
Steve Jobs' relationship with fans.
Wrapping your Xbox 360 in a towel to reflow the cracked solder.
Adding an extra lane to a highway to make the traffic worse.
Two awkwardly charming guys who help with an FBI investigation.
CSIvania.
The public domain jingle that precedes the poem.
Supper Mario Broth.
Wario's Shit Bone.
A Rare Gooper Bloober Goop Gooble Event.
Rhyming portend with event.
A textuovisual post.
Dr. Soup.
Whether the folks writing the Prima guide to Mario Sunshine get to personally ask Miyamoto what the weird goop enemies are called.
Bowser's Fury: the final Mario game.
F Boy: the F stands for fireball.
Trying to use a social media service when you don't know anyone on it.
In My Tumbl Opinion.
Weird Mario Enemies.
F Boy (Again)
Wanting a cool nickname like F Boy.
Explaining randomizers to someone who has never heard of video games.
Multi-game multiplayer randomizers.
A non-randomized randomizer.
Getting rupee donations left and right when all you need is a sword.
Unofficial archipelago support.
The hypothetical dad behind the fourth wall.
The hypothetical eighth month of the year.
Subtumbling.
How to tell the difference between a noun and a pronoun.
Old-fashioned home grown misinformation.
Getting from fourth wall to fourth person.
Fourth person perspective as an alternative term for first person plural.
Whether "dad" is a pronoun.
Chat hurt chatself in chat's confusion.
Rebageling images from 2014.
Agreeing with yourself from 10 years ago about which images are interesting.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
October 14, 2024260. This Sentient Life Could've Been an Email
Lords:
Jenni
Chris
Topics:
Are corporate mascots in US culture age-locked to a generation? I have done no research about this
The continuation of our species depends on balls being able to taste soy sauce
BB-8 changed my tire
The Woodchuck, by Sam Pink
https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/wg09x5/poem_the_woodchuck_by_sam_pink/
Microtopics:
Too much dick content for one show.
What kind of fetus dong shot engagement you're looking for.
When they smear the goo on your belly.
Throwing a gender reveal party and the uncle nobody wants around is like "I don't believe you" and you get to whip out the photo of the kid's dick.
Shipping a person in Q4.
Automating the Omelas kid.
The Disney suffering animatronic child asking passers by to walk away from Omelas.
Gen Z no longer needing to read The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas because they live in modern society.
Gardening in one of the hardest places in the world to garden.
What's the grass for?
An office park spending millions of gallons of water to maintain a lawn nobody ever walks on or looks at.
What if the Omelas kid is a dick? What if they're treating him really well and he just has impossibly high standards and hates everything.
An electrical problem that's very pronounced when Jenni turns on the blender.
The Golden Age of Corporate Mascots.
Undead Corporate Mascots.
Trying to find a picture of the Toucan Sam redesign and ending up on Deviant Art.
Howard and Nester.
Whether American kids will tolerate anime.
President of the Nintendo No Fun Club.
Spending $200 on the Nintendo hint line trying to solve the last screen in Solstice.
An adventure game that's also a platformer where if your toe touches a candle flame it's an instant game over.
Inventing terrible camera angles in a 2D game.
It's 3D, but on your Speccy!
Trusting a YouTube documentary more the longer the video is.
Are Domo Kun and Hello Kitty free agents?
Cap'n Crunch guest starring in the Star Wars Holiday Special.
A Roma who was once helpful.
Eating a sandwich and getting the sandwich tattooed on your bicep because.
A baby name that Boomer moms love.
Remington Steel On At 7PM After Matlock Jones.
Getting into a thing with people on Metafilter.
POV: when your girlfriend gets you Swedish meatballs at Ikea.
Whether Frosthaven is important to the testicles tasting umami story.
Vanilloid receptors.
Why you can shock your tongue with a 9 volt battery but you can't shock your forearm even if it's wet.
The chef with the tiny spoon in your testicles making sure to get the exact right MSG level in your semen.
Peppers hacking mammal biology.
Seeds who enjoy being digested by birds.
The cardioprotective benefit of spicy food.
The Ones Who Bring it Back to Omelas.
Broccoli evolving into crabs.
This is canon: BB-8 drives a 2016 Corolla.
Pretending that you are talking to a Youtube audience while you make s sandwich.
Just a li'l guy who rolls around on a ball.
R2D2: a mean mean man.
The floor falling out of the Pinto while you're driving it.
A rubber pad with friction stripes on it.
Turning it until it feels like you broke it, but you didn't and you have to keep going.
After the cake comes out of the oven the recipe stops having steps.
How to get help from Linux users.
The entire wheel snapping off the axle as you're parking at Camerica Bank.
Different car, same maintenance strategy.
Driving a car until it can no longer be ontologically be classified as a car.
Churchill's Irregulars.
Waiting for Peter Jackson to mansplain to you the sound a car makes when the wheel snaps off.
Delving too deeply into the Cars cinematic universe.
A Mastodon setting that hides all of Jim's BB-8 toots.
How to find people to follow on Nectarine.
The dying MUD you joined in 1997.
Radioactive names such as Hitler and Sheldon.
Joining a social media service and it tells you there are no posts.
Sam Pink strikes again.
The emotional arc of putting a tiny hat on a woodchuck.
A woodchuck you would definitely do a murder to.
Ampersand at the beginning of the line.
The Furniture That Rolled Away From Omelas.
Why the computer is mad in I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream.
Looking for sentient life in the universe when you have dolphins at home.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 16 min
October 07, 2024259. All Bag, No Pipes
Lords:
Elena
Esper says: "I will join both guests in also recommending Dropout, especially Game Changer. They are on to something really special with the shows they're making, very little makes me laugh as hard as the stuff on there."
Tyriq
https://50games.fun/
Topics:
Being witty and social is my favorite power fantasy to realize
Popular music: sometimes popular because it's good?
Where do we go after Cohost
Ballad of the Veliger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Garstang?useskin=vector#The_Ballad_of_the_Veliger
Microtopics:
Japanese cold medicine.
Promising the guy at the drug store you haven't taken this drug on the last week.
Lulu Attack X.
What the College Humor folks went on to do after graduating.
50 games for a fictional console.
UFO 500.
Super Mario Bros but it scrolls wrong.
Google docs autocorrecting your Steam keys.
Some weird shit that you're going to maybe discover.
Why he's named Gordy.
Being sharp and on it all the time in a conversational manner.
The safety of a fantasy that is unrealistic to fulfill in real life.
Picking a joke and connecting it to the prompt.
Making a speech check and the DM thinks of a clever thing for you to say.
Coming across as socially competent in a conversation and feeling great for the rest of the day.
Looking at an extremely charismatic, competent character in a film and thinking "that's me! That's me in there!"
People talking to you about Chappell Roan.
Japanese translated cover of Good Luck Babe.
Hearing a lot about an artist and thinking "this artist has a lot of attention and they don't need mine"
The combination of a man, a woman, and bunch of instruments.
Where people who like pop music hear new music.
Pop music: not as popular as it used to be.
The pros and cons of people enjoying a wider variety of pop culture.
Fingerprints in the Clay.
Having to make synthesizer music in prison because they won't let you have guitars.
Not paying attention to the political context of the unintelligible screaming in your favorite album.
Ancestors of the guitar that sound a little bit different from the guitar.
People being unable to tell what amateurish synthesizer work sounds like.
Instruments producing incidental noises that come alongside the sounds you intend to make, just by their nature as a physical object.
Pink Pony Club, a song about dancing at a club.
Authenticity vs. perceived authenticity.
Trying to stay on top of fashion trends.
Making noises because you feel compelled to.
Finding one way or another to pay off the Capitalism demons.
Having the genetic disposition to practice a lot.
Seeking out things that are easy for you personally to become good at.
Drawing because you are holding a pencil all the time and need to fidget, and stopping drawing forever when you are no longer in that life situation.
Singing to yourself on the bus.
An instrument that's just the screechy tube part of the bagpipes.
A monotonic screech machine.
Joining your church choir and knowing you're better than everybody else there.
Doing a really good job and being relieved that nobody noticed.
What does 12 year old Jim know? Certainly not where he's been for the past six months.
Making a space for humans on the internet.
Tumblr wins by doing absolutely nothing.
The kind of person who is like "follow me onto this social media site I've just heard of right now"
Artist Alley.
The moral difference between "liking" and "reposting."
The "reposting something without liking it" vs. "liking it without reposting it" truth table.
A British citizen from the 19th century with a name that looks German.
How the gastropod got its twist.
Horny Foot Without.
A poem that is just literally what it says on the tin.
A little baby sea guy.
A sonnet about the anatomy of the eyeball.
What marine biology nerds got up to in 1928.
Larval Forms and Other Zoological Verses.
Red Seas Under Red Skies.
Lamarckian evolution.
Snails are great. (Except for the cone snail.)
I'm on a sea slug diet.
The class of pet that you never touch or interact with in any way.
How to interact with fish.
Whether koi care that you're petting them.
Interacting with fish by having them clean your teeth.
Enticing your pet octopus to do the dishes by covering them with fish paste.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 9 min
September 30, 2024258. Only The Head of the Deer Sparks Joy
Lords:
Cort
Mark
Topics:
The best and worst thing you’ve ever found in the trash.
Traveling with children & associated challenges/solutions
Adventures with BB-8
Survey of Forms - Burma-Shave Sign, by Andrew Plotkin
https://eblong.com/zarf/thod/58.html
The useless superpowers game
Does Mega Man ever suffer ennui?
Microtopics:
Dependable sources of guava.
Staring at the raccoons as they go by at night.
Room temperature ice cream full of bullets.
Vietnamese guava vs. central american guava.
Gnawing through a leathery rock to impress your in-laws.
Cudgel Hero Faction.
A life-sized deer sticking out of your neighbor's trash can.
What to do with three quarters of a deer.
Swimming around in a treasure factory and finding spices.
Explaining to your mom where this salt and pepper came from.
Dodging a delicious treat bullet.
Bringing home a NeXT machine from the dumpsters behind Carnegie Mellon.
Throwing away 30 year old legal books and a time traveling lawyer compares you to Hitler.
Won't somebody think of the LA hipsters?
Figuring out how to be okay not having exactly what you want all the time.
Getting heatstroke in Japan.
Mr. Puddles Pineapple having the time of his life.
Getting a photo of your stuffed penguin at a Hamlet castle holding a skull.
Is it really fake if you're telling the truth in a fake way?
Housekeeping having a good time with your stuffed animals.
The perfect companion to explore the Star Wars Galaxy by your side.
Arranging yourself external motivators.
A skill separate from cooking that is still relevant to the dining experience.
Butterfly Pee Tea.
Interwoven bread dough.
These are Zelda meatballs!
Trying out the recipe for Dubious Food in the Zelda cookbook.
Sonic the Hedgehog chili that takes five hours to make.
Rouge the Bat's favorite dish.
Very round droid. Rounder than most.
The make-your-own-lightsaber course class project room experience.
Going to Disneyland and asking someone in costume for directions to the speakeasy.
A game that exists to make children sad.
Everyone working together to blow the shit out of Bowser, Jr.
Losing the boss battle with Bowser Jr. at Super Nintendo World and the attendant hands you the dongle so your kids can listen to Princess Peach crying in despair the entire drive home.
Explaining to the Super Nintendo World staff that you shouldn't need all the keys to get to the final boss because that's not how Mario games are typically structured.
The guy trying to backwards long jump the stairs to the final boss in Super Nintendo World.
A series of billboards that turn out to be a poem.
Which came first, the Pizza Hut or the building shaped like a hut that you make pizza in?
A racially insensitive fireworks store.
Dropping a CRT monitor off of a tall building vs. dropping an LCD display.
Raccoons witnessing crimes.
Shaking exactly two aspirin out of the bottle every single time.
An extremely opaque Pepper's Ghost.
Mega Man defeating Ennui Man and acquiring his powers.
Mega Man can't defeat Dr. Wily because of Asimov's Three Laws.
Dr. Light deleting Mega Man's special abilities between games because he needs the hard drive space for porn.
Mega Man choosing to forget Crash Man's memories because he's tired of remembering that awkward first date.
Dr. Wily hacking everyone's iPhone to have the latest U2 album.
Searching for lords and finding a random raccoon.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
September 23, 2024257. Stinky Judo
Lords:
Nathan
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2976260/ChainStaff/
Tom
Topics:
During the summer olympics, France introduced breakdancing as an event, which was invented in America. They stole it from us! What new event should we steal from another country when the Olympics comes to LA in 2028?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzy_(mascot)
Getting to an age where media is good: the writers are your contemporaries so their work doesn't feel stodgy anymore.
How are you saying goodbye to trigraphs?
Rain by Raymond Carver
https://readalittlepoetry.com/2012/12/13/rain-by-raymond-carver/
Jumping levels of abstraction while explaining computery things, how to pronounce angle brackets and command-line flags
3rd tetris playtest developed ("rolling"), ponder an entirely new approach to a game (or medium, or problem) that comes nearly 40 years later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV5DIZyqsaw
Microtopics:
Whether the chain staff is also the grappling hook.
How all games ought to be made.
Using an ancient alien artifact as an immersion blender.
Getting the steamer arm upgrade before you can steam the milk.
Space Opera by Catherynne Valente.
Books where you read a couple paragraphs and you're done for the day.
A sport where if you reach just a little bit further maybe you can touch your opponent's face with your foot.
Stealing cheese rolling from France at the 2028 Olympics.
Hosting the Olympics: a huge money-loser.
Shouldering the terrible burden of hosting the 2028 Olympics.
Aging up the 1996 Olympics mascot so they'll be the right age for the 2028 Olympics.
The Chinese Olympics mascot Jim keeps confusing for Tingle.
Olympic announcers just assuming everyone knows what a "B-Boy" is.
This right here is a horse.
Arranging a competition as bracket of 1v1 matches when it could just as easily be individually scored performances.
Gymnasts all over the world chalking their hands because humans are more alike than they are different.
Running fast at the Olympics.
Hiring Topic Lords as Olympic announcers.
Synchronized swimming except you need to synchronize with all your competitors.
Getting out the shotgun mics to televise basketball players trash talking each other.
Liking television alongside people who share your generational values.
Enjoying being part of a target demographic until you get too old.
Making an effort to appreciate new art more.
The inexhaustible supply of old movies you haven't seen.
What is lost and what is gained now that we're not all watching exactly the same TV shows every night.
Realizing your social values match the media you're consuming because you didn't roll your eyes at the Very Special Episode.
All the video games where you build a bionic arm for an NPC.
Two guys in a missile silo arguing to keep trigraphs in the C standard.
Boring programming situations where memory leaks are impossible.
A guy drinking a beer looking over your shoulder while you program who says "yep" whenever you do something he approves of.
Compiling C++ to a web site.
Writing a web assembly program by typing opcodes into a Javascript string.
What website people are into.
Music that plays while you're waiting for a game to load.
Loading the loading screen.
Some things are being destroyed and other things rebuilt.
Waking up and it's raining.
Saying you have no regrets when of course you have regrets – everyone has regrets, fool!
What cities were destroyed in December 2012?
Scraping information so you can stick it in a file system.
Complete List of Destroyed Cities.
How grumpy Raymond Carver was as a six year old.
How to communicate about what you want someone to type.
What they call curly braces in other countries.
Smooth brackets.
How Mandarin speakers write C code.
Drawing weird shit with Unicode glyphs, making it your URL, printing it on the side of a bus and making people figure out how to type it.
Mathematicians giving all their variables single letter names.
Embarrassing yourself by begging the compiler to not reformat your code.
Choosing to do the easy part of your job right now.
How to play Tetris faster.
Strumming arcade buttons to press them faster.
Weird ways of holding the NES controller to move Tetris pieces faster.
A new way to interact with this piece of plastic.
Turning the back of the controller into a giant button.
What high jump competitors thought the first time they saw the Fosbury Flop.
Learning to do close-up magic and getting frustrated because you can't literally make the card vanish.
Funding a weird game and finding out later if it ever ships.
Whether the folks who made ZPF considered any better names.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 15 min