Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

September 16, 2024256. Donkey Kong Is a Tankie
Lords:
Mark
https://mythcarver.bandcamp.com/
https://writhenhilt.bandcamp.com/album/ancient-sword-cult
Dungeon Synth:
https://fief.bandcamp.com/
https://auramerlin.bandcamp.com/
https://shadowknell.bandcamp.com/
https://hillsfar.bandcamp.com/
https://erang.bandcamp.com/
Shirley
https://www.leuchtturm1917.us/some-lines-a-day.html
Topics:
Naming a human
Boomers say that you get more conservative as you get older, but I just keep getting more liberal.
I'm scared to start recording Mario Odyssey
The Orc
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/6TcTlXuz.png
Microtopics:
Writhen Hilt.
Writing a few sentences to achieve your goal.
Being extremely entertained by your drunken journal entries from a year ago.
Remembering the 140 years your son has been around.
Learningl from the dead.
How the archaeologists of the future are going to cope with social media, let alone the reams of LLM generated nonsense.
Detecting forged paintings via the radioactive isotopes that are only found in pigments manufactured after the detonation of the atomic bomb.
Low-background steel.
Scavenging steel from shipwrecks because you just can't make steel that good any more.
Pizza Pranks.
Packaging a USB stick as though it's a cassette tape.
Packaging your Dungeon Synth album on cassette in a Sega Genesis cartridge box.
Propsr Topics.
Calling your niece Billy Zane.
Naming your child Scooter. (Monotonously.)
Being unable to decide whether you're going to name your child Scooter or Squooter.
Some Wizard of Earrhsea ahit.
Holding power over your friends (magically, not legally)
Your name for a person carrying with it your relationship with that person.
Why they shipped a game called "Epic Mickey.*
Compaeing this year's top 50 baby names to the top 50 a century ago.
Mikse meeting Mikes.
The Bob Emergency.
One day there will be no more Bobs, and a door will close.
Continuing to refer to your nephew as a "little kid" even though he's 45 now.
Thinking you're getting more liberal but eventually realizing you're getting more apocalyptic.
Garbage-ass subreddits full of dis- and misinformation.
Battle Jackets vs. Jackets for Battle.
Pregnancy subreddits.
Checking out of gamer culture entirely.
Black metal communities dealing with white supremacists.
Can't we just have a place who love swords and wizards?
How to not run a Nazi bar.
Whether people get more liberal or more conservative as they age.
Stone cold hippies.
Explaining trans rights to your parents who are doing their best to understand.
Asking the AI-generated slush pile how to update your political beliefs.
Keeping younger people around who care about you enough to help you fix your shitty opinions.
Hungry for Jim topics.
Japanese cultural touchstones referenced in video games that just seem like nonsense to Americans.
Slavic folklore in the Witcher games.
Importing video games from more and more obscure countries because Japan is played out now.
Recognizing Greek heavy metal just from the riffs.
Vacuuming a couch and twenty one-dollar bills fly out of it.
Shagrat, you shag rats!
Rheumy weeping orbs that glare with hate.
Truly a poem of unknown provenance.
Shagrat doesn't deserve this!
We had some great topics today, y'all.
Mythcarver.
A discord for people who are due in the same month as you.
The Libras who won't let the dads in.
Circle time with other pregnant couples.
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1 hr 17 min
September 09, 2024255. We're Truly on the Bleeding Edge of Something
Lords:
Adam
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2769410/Ash__Adams_GOBSMACKED/
Linker
https://linker.itch.io/
Topics:
Ways you've changed in the last 20 years that have surprised you
Examples of x animal software running on y animal hardware (ie. fox being cat software on dog hardware)
This argument about whether erasure poetry is poetry
https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/753096096947011584
Favourite RPG (videogame or tabletop; open to interpretation)
Microtopics:
Launching a game in the deep past.
Indiepocalypse.
After Journey's End vol. 2.
The Monthly Tape Club.
Games that are big enough or marketable enough.
Getting excited about this month's PC Gamer demo disk.
Zine-like game distribution.
Making a small game to express a thought.
Making a living making weird shit.
The methods of marketing a small game.
Practices that have existed for thousands of years.
The boom and bust cycle and why you might or might not get in on the next boom.
Making a shit-ton of money and continuing to pay your employees rather than laying them off.
Whether Gen Z is savvy to the MBA brain worms.
Whether Jim has a college degree.
New England Sarcastic.
Learning about having kids and wondering what it'd be like to have a purpose in life.
Being legally responsible for the survival of the worst roommate imaginable.
Other People's Dogs.
How is your life different from when you were 6 years old?
Becoming a permanent resident of Canada.
A local theater company producing your play.
Frog Fractions: it came from space.
A thing that expresses the maelstrom going on in my head (or soul)
The six 70s funk songs with a long enough stretch of isolated drums that they became the drums for every song ever.
How to make art as an expression of human needs.
Video games: they shouldn't exist.
Expressing a thought with the skills you enjoy flexing.
The virtues of having playtesters.
Bug software running on mammal hardware.
Tiny cats in the bodies of big cats.
Service dogs for cheetahs.
Remaining calm around humans because your dog buddy loves humans.
Erasure Poetry.
Oh Someone Oh God And Then Me.
Formalized rules for determining who gets credit for what when a bunch of people make a piece of art.
Legal precedents for copyright and reproduction rights.
Magnetic fridge poetry.
Inventing an art form that's even more constrained than pixel art somehow.
Unity of effect.
Looking at a blurry 16x16 tile and not being quite sure what it's supposed to be.
RPGs: what even are they?
What you can get away with within the aesthetics of a black and white Game Boy game.
Whether Breath of the Wild counts as an immersive sim and whether immersive sims count as RPGs
Getting into the topic weeds.
Chained Echoes.
Observing the sand running through the hourglass.
Social anxiety preventing you from enjoying tabletop RPGs.
Playing tabletop RPGs with a bunch of weird theater people.
Meeting your friend at a bar to catch up on the latest events in his tabletop RPG sessions.
How to use your name on social media.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr
September 02, 2024254. Help Me Get Over the Pervert Hump
Lords:
Ryan
https://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio/
Alicia
Topics:
How do I ask people what they're into without sounding like a pervert?
Arctic Expeditions and the stupid beauty of man's hubris
Asterix Park
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parc_Astérix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KK3Yr80lPOY
I Won't Call You Pretty, by L.E. Bowman
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/tghmy9KF.png
I sent this poem to my wife and she immediately responded by writing one addressed to me that was just as good, so, that's the person I married.
Microtopics:
How to work as a freelance creative without burning yourself out.
The me who comes up if you google me.
The black egg who knows all.
A huge egg with a second smaller egg in it.
The chickens who got no credit for inventing the Matrioshka doll.
Pluto: still a planet, because a dwarf planet is a kind of planet.
Team Moon.
Ancient Occult Magicks that you can check out from the library.
Giving up on the fairy smut everyone is recommending because it isn't smutty enough.
The air I just breathed.
One of my Top 5 Zeldas.
How many goes you get at being alive.
Luring Moongrum into the rolling boulder trap.
Bracing to hear about some online stuff.
Conference season in the game industry.
Meeting someone at a conference and asking them a question that Black Philip would ask.
How to Unfuck your Sales.
Content you Enjoyed.
Who are the coolest hangs in game dev?
Working with people you know and trust.
The Pervert's Mound.
Imagine if I was cool.
Wearing a sandwich board with the word "MONOGAMY" on it so the woman you're talking to knows you're not hitting on her.
Refusing to answer random innocuous questions so that it's not a tacit admission of guilt when you refuse to discuss an accusation.
Birthday bookshop tours.
Climbing as an act of disrespect to the mountain.
The HMS Terror and the HMS Erebus.
Peak British Colonialism.
Ignoring the locals' advice about what parts of animals to eat.
Sledging around your silverware.
Getting lead poisoning from the canned food you brought with you to find the Northwest Passage.
A cool pantsless mummy.
Paradoxical Undressing.
Having a hard time climbing Mount Everest because the path is choked with corpses of white people who blew it.
Oops, All Antarctic Ship Crashes.
Getting excited about bookshelves again.
Stepping forward into whatever the next grift is going to be.
Asterix the Gaul.
Localizing a book that is full of puns to dozens of different languages.
Not getting jokes in the English version of the Simpsons because the Swedish version of the Simpsons uses a completely different set of pop culture references.
What would an Asterix theme park look like?
Riding in a big inner tube down the lazy river.
Elder Millenials learning about Skibidi Toilet.
Asterix Park is the world's 12th largest economy.
My brain beans are really getting steamed, here.
Building an empire on that mustache.
Watching POV rollercoaster videos with your five year old.
Refusing to get in the sea.
Going up to strangers and asking what percentage of the sea is fish piss.
Weekend at Bernie's-ing your friend's corpse to Asterix Park.
What style of underwear Zeus is wearing today.
Who makes Zeus's underwear?
Eating the boar sandwich at Asterix Park.
Tasting the terror sweat on the wild boar you just hunted down.
The little bald kid from the comics page has a theme park??
Pirates of the Carabiner.
Sailing through a diorama.
The theme park ride with the sudden drop into a pool of mercury.
The Haunted Garfield Theme Park.
DeFuncoland.
Jon trying to get with the veterinarian lady he's into and Garfield ruining it.
Let's-plays as a service.
You won't believe what happens when these Muppets swarm Treasure Island.
A movie recap that is 80% of the length of the movie.
Flirting tricks.
The violence of being struck by Cupid's arrow.
Complimenting someone on something they have no control over.
Good luck getting any continuity out of me!
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1 hr 6 min
August 26, 2024253. A Unified Theory of Hot Dog Preference
Lords:
Wacy
https://www.youtube.com/@WacyandChris
Chris
https://twitter.com/mrchrislhall
Topics:
Difficulties with long term traveling
Norway
Why don't they have novelty whipped cream
The Dirt Man Song, by Carter Vail
https://genius.com/Carter-vail-dirt-man-lyrics
Microtopics:
Specialty pour over filter coffee.
A very deep rabbit hole of discovery of flavors.
Drink the Machine: a Clean Metallic Flavor.
Wacy and Chris.
Chris or sounds like Chris.
Living near your friends and family and being able to see them any time you want.
Spot-it.
Explaining what "on air" means to someone who has never listened to the radio.
Why are flickering lights creepy?
Getting Winston ready for swim class.
The pressure to hyper-optimize.
Being in the place where you are all the time.
The world: it's really big and really full of stuff.
How to exist in a city where you don't speak the language.
Things you don't feel like maximizing.
Grocery store bagged salads.
Countries that are known for salads.
Eating nothing but pickled fish and salty licorice during your trip even though you hate both.
Being delighted by mediocre sushi.
How many times Topic Lords has been downloaded in Osaka.
Modern New-Age Scandinavian Food.
Gas station hot dogs in Norway.
Ordering a big slab of My Girlfriend is Not Hungry.
Ways Norway is familiar to Americans.
Walking around kicking the glaciers.
Bikepackers.
Giant highway ferries with six lanes of traffic.
Brown Cheese Waffles.
Daylight all night long.
Normal people going outside and walking their dogs at 1am.
The song that plays with the baby raccoon spinning in a circle.
A country that is extremely serious about tunnels.
Opening up your windows to let the cave air in.
Visiting the Arctic circle in the winter.
Good ideas, like Pesto Whipped Cream.
Orange Cream Whipped Cream.
The toothpaste tubes with the colored wedges.
Birthday Cake Coffee Creamer.
Guava-flavored beer foam.
Coffee creamer except for beer.
Chefs seeking out the worst food so they can understand exactly why it's bad.
The Friendly's Cone Head.
The Bad-Interesting Food Spectrum.
Sleep regression, or more generally how you don't always keep forward progress.
Why kids become picky eaters.
Replicating the texture of uncooked hot dog in a novelty whipped cream.
What whippets are for.
Original flavorless N2O tanks.
Using the word for amyl nitrite that signifies that you are a VCR owner and not a drug user.
How to not become dirt in the dirt lair.
The dirt man's tithe.
Lying to your kid about cosmology.
Pretending to believe the little lies as practice for believing big lies.
Reminding your mom to make a leprechaun trap.
Making fake boot prints to convince your kids that god is real.
Reindeer food. (It's just hay.)
All the years you didn't keep dirt under your pillow.
The dirt man's dirt man taking you even deeper down.
Lots of great places where the dirt man can be found.
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1 hr 4 min
August 19, 2024252. A Properly Functioning Bag Nose
Lords:
JohnB
Kory
Topics:
I have become a vinyl record enjoyer
Teaching myself C++, or "I learned C++ when I should've learned C, AMA"
Forgetting things as a way of getting other things done
I Sat Belonely by John Lennon
https://silverbirchpress.wordpress.com/2013/05/14/i-sat-belonely-poem-by-john-lennon/
The vestigial organs of video games
Microtopics:
Kbones' Wire Tripper, on display at Wonderville.
Easter eggs for fans of Gordy and the Monster Moon.
Ebirah, Horror of the Deep.
Watching Shin Godzilla immediately after Evangelion.
Dan Ryckert's nonsense over at Giant Bomb.
Listening to a Mario Party game on the radio.
Supplementing all your collecting hobbies with a creative hobby.
Grabbing the record player before the garbage collector does.
An auto-sustaining supply of sound bars entering and leaving the trash.
The Digital Jim Gift Shop.
The Frog Fractions OST Vinyl in Bug Mars Orange.
Auditioning for college radio by DJing a show to tape that won't be aired, just rated by a panel of experts.
The vinyl soundtrack to a Net Yaroze game.
Albums that have an odd number of sides.
Holographic tie fighters that spin around when you shine a light on them.
The Funkopopization of Vinyl.
Hobbies that are better if you have friends.
Using wood glue to clean an LP, then using an inverse record player to play music off the glue's negative grooves.
The glue's glue.
Station to Station, by David Bowie.
The experience of listening to an album all the way through.
Content-producing reasons.
An excuse to listen to an album with friends under the auspices of being productive.
Seeing the music by looking how wide the groove is.
Smooth jazz appreciation.
The Madden NFL of the record shop.
How to justify going to GDC when you're not a game developer.
How to ship a Love2D game.
Drag your file onto a Love Executable.
Putting together your first Arkanoid-like in Game Boy Assembly.
To create Red Dead Redemption, first add two binary digits.
Super FML.
Objectless games.
The data flow required to change screens in a Zelda-like game.
What happened to various aspects of the Adobe Flash ecosystem.
Why console games had such sluggish menus.
A bug where if you do it right you don't have to press A.
How to do a bureaucracy thing.
Keeping an important task in mind so you can accomplish all your less important tasks.
Trying to forget all but one thing you need to do because if you remember two things you'll just sit there being anxious.
Forgetting information that you do have vs. faking information that you don't have.
Foveated vision.
Yesterday's List.
How many Frog Fractions had to die because the most dangerous task was attempted first?
A little tiny little pig.
Balonely.
A Spaniard in the Works.
Reading your own book in your fictionalized biopic.
Whimsical Elisions.
Fun whimsical vs. dark whimsical.
Coming back from India and writing a hundred one minute songs that don't mean anything.
Music that you've listened to so much that it's like listening to breathing air.
Don't Pass Me By and Octopus' Garden.
Game mechanics that still exist because nobody's thought about them in a while.
Moon phases in Shin Megami Tensei.
Demon Fusion.
What Super Mario Wonder does with a combo since it doesn't have points.
A potentially dangerous vestigial organ in video games.
How to make pinball beginner friendly.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
August 12, 2024251. Organs Experiencing Red Shift
Lords:
Erica
Casey
Topics:
Isn't it great to have a coelom?
Solving problems by waiting for another bigger problem to occur and override the previous problem
Mammals learning to eat cephalopods
https://crookedtimber.org/2024/03/16/occasional-paper-when-armor-met-lips/
A Narrow Fellow in the Grass, by Emily Dickinson
https://www.poetryoutloud.org/poem/a-narrow-fellow-in-the-grass-1096/
Personal project retrospectives
Microtopics:
That thing you just heard.
Assigning your new hire an office.
Plugging over a million leaking gas and oil wells in West Texas.
The Topic Lords Promise.
A bag that your organs sit in.
Undifferentiated tissues.
How dissecting an earthworm is different from dissecting a gummy worm.
Inflating your coelom in order to take out your spleen.
Organisms with high diseectability.
The anti-coelom lobby.
Undifferentiated tubes of goo that get depression.
The gummy worm future we're all looking forward to.
Fluid things going on in the organism.
A car that has a huge dent in it and it doesn't matter because the car still gets around no problem.
Good car ideas.
A bad thing happening but it's not your fault.
Buying your house in a point and clock adventure online.
Rediscovering all the things you have stored at your parent's house.
Multi-episode Topic Lords story arcs.
Which colored stripes are on Wikipedia's Non-Notable Flag.
The Topic Lords explainer episode where everyone finds out what this show is about.
Serial Podcast Monogamy.
Podcast guilt.
Discussing all the same topics as the last episode with no self-awareness.
Non-Stop Coelom Celebration.
My own very special walking bag of guts.
Evolving cheek muscles to suck meat out of a spiral shell.
Losing your baby lips.
What it's like to eat a planarian.
Cephalopods that have evolved to eat mammals.
The giant squid that have never been seen alive.
The colossal squid vs. the giant squid.
Finding a mobius strip solution so borh your flag and your neighbor'a flag can be biggest.
Our flag that represents limpness will be your downfall.
Non-stop sensationalized documentaries about North Korea.
Opening the border to North Korea so we can finally interview the people about the colossal squid.
Emily Dickinson slipping into Yoda Speak.
Being too busy reading to understand what you're reading.
Whether the Emily Dickinson poem about the snake is actually about a snake or about a dick or both.
It's coming at your feet! It likes a boggy acre!
A polysexual attitude towards nature.
Emily Dickinson making thousands of attempts to fix the Gilligan's Island theme.
Herman Melville describing Moby Dick as "the Ebon Whale" because he didn't have Wikipedia.
Moby Dick annotated by biologists who explain why all the whale facts are wrong.
Game Developers doing a "post-mortem" of projects that are ongoing.
Befunge.
Clojure and other Lisps.
Watching your own programming livestreams to learn how to learn better.
A huge block of text off to the side that tells you how to play the game.
Fine-grained tactical mistakes.
Why people keep telling game developers to learn to ship a game.
The most significant barrier between you and putting a work of art out in the world.
Inventing metrics for success for game engines that never ship.
Rewriting your game engine to have cooler tech but be way harder to make levels for.
Modern Jim-Style Content.
Artists trash talking their own work while they're showing it to you.
A sign on your forehead reading "ask me about my severely negative feedback."
The George W. Bush childhood home.
A community built on everyone's shared desire to leave.
The ethic of owning a shotgun.
The last of the Midland Odessa complaining.
Big Bend and Carlsbad Caverns.
An airport full of ads for oil wells and oil well accessories.
The Chris Kyle American Sniper Memorial.
A plaque on a sculpture explaining whether the flag represents a penis.
Everything's a dick if you squint hard enough.
An assassin of federal judges.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 12 min
August 05, 2024250. Almost Pickles: It's Just Cucumbers!
Lords:
Jenni
Tyriq
Topics:
That mayochup and kranch
Barry Topping
Magic Shell
Hot Sauce by Just James
https://www.poetrysoup.com/poem/hot_sauce_889972
Video games where you put toppings on things
The temptation of bad ice cream toppings
Microtopics:
The game where you go into your uncle's nipple and find a tiny heart.
Isles of Sea and Sky.
A block pushy game.
Toppings that are just recombinations of existing toppings.
Switching sriracha brands for labor relations reasons.
Combining all the soda flavors because you're an iconoclast and suffering because the flavor is worse but it's worth it.
Getting a squeeze bottle so you can drizzle sauces like on TV.
Getting pre-ruined peanut butters so you don't need to worry about ruining it any further.
Buying peanut butter because you no longer live with someone who is allergic to nuts.
Intrusive and non-intrusive seeds.
Condiment combinations sticking in your head for decades.
Ketchup and something that's kind of like a thing you might know but might not.
Almost Pickles: It's Just Cucumbers.
Harmless Coconut Water.
Cranch: ranch dressing that that comes out of the can in a wobbly cylinder like cranberry sauce.
Barry Hilary Valentine Topping.
Paradise Killer.
Walking into court sipping your Starbucks latte.
Hopping around a beach and looking at a vaporwave pyramid.
Collecting skate tapes, just like Mario does.
Bails hurt scores, Mario!
Street Uni X.
The Tony Hawk soundtrack except slightly more a Lilith Fair.
Enjoying a bad N64 camera enough for the two of us.
The thing you squirt onto your ice cream.
Making your own counterfeit Kranch at home in a bottle with Kranch written on it in crayon.
The Cheese Remains Saucy.
Getting a boba tea for $17 outside of LA.
Taking the very worst bite out of your mother in law's ice cream cone.
Working out your jaw muscles until you can eat the entire ice cream cone in one bite.
Eating 16 pints of ice cream in six minutes.
Screaming at ice cream until it teleports into your belly.
Admonishing your readers that hot sauce would not make a good wife.
Stealing the pelt of a selkie but she always wants to go back to the ocean.
Selkie for a wife vs. ice cream for a wife.
ASMRtistry.
Spices of life.
Using a food metaphor to describe the metaphorical nature to food.
Three pop songs that compare women to food.
A topic that is floating around in the the collective unconscious.
Sriracha sorbet.
A flight of tea-flavored ice creams.
Sentient hot sauce putting itself on things you don't usually put hot sauce on.
Salamander County Public Television.
A Wario Ware that's a little bit QWOP.
The Pancake/Burger/Bacon trilogy.
An interactive thing where you put food into space.
The American Portion Gun.
Put things on things.
Video games with hamburger building elements.
A fast food simulator where you solve all the horror game problems that you're in.
Whether board games count as video games since you can see them.
Vidus Gamus.
Livin' la Video Game Loca.
Learning how to recover from mistakes.
Putting an entire Snickers bar in your cup of Sriracha and the clerk just shakes his head.
Asking the froyo guy to arrange the gummy worms "artfully. Like how I would if I could reach in there nyself. In fact why do I need to order, just give me the froyo that I want!"
All the Mistake Blizzards you can eat.
Nerds Butterfinger Mistake Blizzard.
Putting barbecue sauce on vanilla ice cream because you're out or chocolate sauce.
What's your favorite cheese to put on Pop-Tarts?
The Ambies for Excellence in Audio.
How to make more of the red liquid they found in the black sarcophagus.
Support Topic Lords
58 min
July 29, 2024249. Singles Night at Whole Foods
Lords:
Ian
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2tEaI_bi-i8
Shannon
https://www.oddityroadshow.com/
https://www.youtube.com/c/struccimovies
Topics:
Official and unofficial remakes of Yojimbo
Danny McBride shows, and how to balance character likability with dark comedy- examples of this done well vs poorly?
I can't fix bad movie dialog mixing for everyone, but I can fix it in my own house
The Chinese Checker Players by Richard Brautigan
http://kempwash.blogspot.com/2011/05/chinese-checker-players-by-richard.html
Microtopics:
Songs that signify that this scene or moment is sophisticated.
How to pronounce Debussy.
Southern gothic dark comedy body horror.
A weirdo from Twitter who can't email your employer because he doesn't know who you work for.
The Glass Key's remake family tree.
A drifter samurai coming to a town.
A dude who shows up in town and decides to play all the criminal factions against each other.
The scene where the protagonist sets the bed on fire and jumps out the window.
Escaping from rum runners by convincing them that you've already escaped.
Propping your gun on a cross and using Jesus to pull the trigger.
A sorceress who spends the whole movie topless because it's one of those movies.
Omega Doom starring Rutger Hauer.
A robot who gets stabbed in a bar because the stabber needs to download his memories.
Using a mook as a human shield.
The supporting actor getting a better offer and quitting in between takes.
Where you put the interesting part in your movie.
A hobo who runs two crime syndicates.
The story of two rival vice principals.
Jim's theory for why cringe comedy shouldn't exist.
Where cringe comedy has gone since Seinfeld.
How to make an unlikable protagonist that people don't admire.
Characters who aren't good at anything.
The schlub.
A montage of dad destroying model airplanes with a sledge hammer.
Liking some things about someone while not liking other things.
A monster who is very fun to hang out with.
The character in the show who ends up in Florida.
Marathoning Breaking Bad and Better Call Sail and ending up 40 years old no matter how old you were when you started
Why you might not throw away a sound bar.
Entering the Konami code to enable compression.
What the Clear Voice feature actually does.
Getting really agitated and putting the subtitles on.
Thinking of something interesting to say and then forgetting it.
Which one's the son and which one's the dad?
Ripley vs. Ripley's Believe it or Not.
Lobbying for more mean old lesbians in theatrical productions.
Playing Chinese Checkers with a woman who outlived her husband by 70 years.
Where you were when you realized that it's possible to outlive your spouse by 70 years.
Bowling Alone.
A place to meet people that isn't the play you go to drink or the place where you go to pray.
All your friends who went sober in the last year.
Liquor stores that only sells non-alcoholic products.
Mocktail bars.
Name tags that have different foods on them.
Inappropriate attention in nerd spaces.
Figuring out where you can go with all your sober friends.
Who listens past the first five minutes of a podcast?
AI-driven smell-o-vision.
Searching automated transcripts to find things that people didn't say.
The subtitler writing "knockos" whenever people in The Wire say "narcos" in a Baltimore accent.
Streaming services cutting corners wherever possible in a desperate attempt to become profitable.
Snitching on bootlegers of racist Disney movies.
How to get banned from TikTok.
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1 hr 3 min
July 22, 2024248. The Ephemeral Nature of Digital Fish Food
Lords:
Elena
https://www.gouletpens.com/blogs/fountain-pen-blog/sailor-shikiori-tokiwa-matsu-ink-review
Nathalie
https://alienmelon.itch.io/ [cw:flashing lights]
Topics:
Fish-based screensavers
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQpCcQhNfxM
https://www.montereybayaquarium.org/animals/live-cams
Fire safety
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheThingThatGoesDoink
https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/8/644/files/2017/08/Chiang-Lifecycle-of-Software-Objects-q3tsuw.pdf
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Qxqmhqj1A
The Aquarium and the Glass Harmonica
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOx7zmO5ppw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FAc3HmfoSY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSzTPGlNa5U
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hA3sA3ncX44&start=103
I Am Running Into A New Year by Lucille Clifton
https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/738271770264600576
I went to Japan
https://nerdparadise.com/mspaint/stereogram
https://twitter.com/mischiefanimals/status/1704934776421913018
Microtopics:
Shikiori Ink.
The Computer Museum in Berlin.
Back when you saw fish-based screen savers everywhere.
The Roku app fish screen saver.
A rock in the aquarium that says "Roku"
11 hours of fish content.
Fish nerds sitting in a small box at the bottom of the ocean getting hype over seeing a small worm.
An animated gif of fish nerds getting hype.
A live jellyfish web cam that is just in principle.
A web cam of the thing that goes donk and everyone cheers when it goes donk.
The fish screen saver where you need to keep buying floppy disks with fish food on it or the fish die.
Don't copy that fish food!
The startup selling digital rabbit food going out of business so all the digital rabbits go into hibernation.
The Life Cycle of Software Objects.
Being unable to open your front door because the smart lock ran out of batteries.
Everybody congratulating you on the infuriating guy you made up to get mad at.
Fire safety anecdotes.
Glass top electric stoves that look just like induction stoves, as a prank.
How fire extinguishers taste.
Looking at fire extinguisher dust and thinking "let's get the blood brain barrier involved."
Leaving the stove on.
Broiling a sandwich and the whole sandwich catches fire.
A five year old doing science experiments with a lit candle.
The UX design of grease fires.
The William Shatner song about the dangers of deep frying a turkey.
Relating to the teens coming into fashion for like a week and then the next week the teens are like "You're still trying to relate? That's cheugy AF."
Self-moistening fingertips.
Soaking your fingertips in water for eight minutes to get them pruny.
The Canon of harmonica virtuoso music.
Ethereal floating tones that fade in and out of existence.
The Flat Bells.
The Mellotron as a slightly more physical sampler.
Clara Rockmore playing "The Swan" on Theremin.
Bit-doers playing "The Swan" on Otamatone.
Letting go of what you said to yourself about yourself when you were 16, 26, even 36.
The assumption that you need to be forgiven for something.
The sun coming up on this episode of Topic Lords.
Working up the courage to climb the mountain you see every day from your back yard.
Really tall hills you can walk up.
What it's like to not hear cars constantly.
Designing a building to sound good – even if it isn't a concert hall.
Car-free cities.
Biking in a bike-centric environment.
Throwing your body into traffic and hoping drivers care about the legal liability of running someone over.
The intersection where you always see the skid marks from kids doing donuts.
Doing watercolors but with ink.
Buying a bunch of art supplies and never using them because you're afraid to waste them.
How do you get your paintbrush to do what you want?
How watercolors behave depending on how wet the painting is and how wet the paintbrush is.
Scraping your knife on the painting and it just looks like a shed.
Is it a bunch of cats or is it the word "gay"?
Images that look like stereograms but aren't.
The blank canvas stereogram.
Crowds staring at the enormous stereograms hanging up in the Mall of America.
Stereogram artists accounting for pupillary distance.
Making a stereogram in MS Paint.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
July 15, 2024247. Fish That Scrutinize; Fish That Rubberneck
Lords:
Alex
Shannon
Topics:
The less you spend on food, the better it tastes
The jizz of a bird
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jizz_(birding)
The Cosmic Call
https://blog.plover.com/2024/04/15/
Line Fishing by Daniel Kahaulelio
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/rWuOwlpV.png
How to order coffee in Malaysia
https://kopi.guide/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6mv7VY8YLA
Dice, and physically rolling them
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.com.tann.dice
Microtopics:
Paleo animators.
Malaysia as a vacation destination.
Restaurants that are just in s guy's house.
The best whole fried catfish you've ever had.
Eating mixed whole livers.
Striving to get a B rating from the food safety inspectors because the A rating is too bougie.
Starch and grease.
The shape of the price to deliciousness correlation graph.
If you're here to buy cake, ring the doorbell.
You can talk to the cops or you can have cake. You can't have both.
Whether Americans can drink the water in Malaysia.
Being so desperate for fresh vegetables that you wash them with tap water.
Butterfly Pee Flour.
Jizz (birding)
The practice of just getting the vibe of a bird.
I don't know, it had the jizz of a bird.
Zooniverse.
Going through the still images on a nature webcam and trying to identify local animals.
Trying to tell the difference between a wood rat and a deer mouse.
Reclassifying all the animals in the world based not on their actual genetics or but based on what people think they are by looking at them.
Small, Brown and On the Ground.
Submitting a picture of a pair of brown wood owls to a bird study app and two hours later an angry ecologist is knocking on your tent to ask if you meant a spotted wood owl.
An extremely high-stress app.
Asking an albatross which of the twelve species is albatross it is.
Walking around in the woods until you spot a kiwi.
Major gaffes in interstellar communication that future aliens will be very confused about.
Massively synesthetic dog brains.
Receiving a sequence of bits and deciding to arrange them in a grid.
The other book with the spiders.
Humans interacting with a spider-based society.
Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky.
Expecting monkeys to become the dominant intelligent species on a terraformed planet seeded with Earth animals.
Adventuring into a dungeon built by the ancients and admiring the signage.
Opening an oil drum full of concrete and tubes and being like "where's the treasure that's supposed to be in here!"
Writing a song about how being near glowing cats is very dangerous.
Public serving meme songs.
Engineering earworms for the public good.
The Museum of Hawaiian Culture in Oahu.
Fish that watch. Fish that look.
Get those fish hungry.
It's just a lookin' fish.
Sleeping the lobes of your brain in shifts.
The lobes of your brain playing pranks on each other.
How can fish get some shuteye if they don't have eyelids??
How can fish rubberneck if they don't even have necks??
The Star Trek replicator except instead of materializing your food it prints a piece of paper with the words that you need to say to the tired-looking guy who then goes to cook your meal.
Ais krim.
What languages are hardest to spell in.
Are there four silent letters at the end, and if so which ones?
Cofftea.
Rolling all them bones.
Owning more sets of dice than you have played actual D&D sessions.
A big pile of dice rattling around in your phone.
Rolling the dice off of the table every single time.
A switch that goes ka-chonk.
Actively seeking out hobbies where you touch things.
Ways that continuous deployment sucks.
Text classifiers flagging your sexuality as photographic.
Image classifiers flagging your medical photos as pornographic.
Which photos encapsulate what you're trying to remember and discuss.
How to get your life off of a corporation's hard drive.
Unsearchable Tumblrs.
Get out there and jizz a bird!
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 16 min