Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

July 08, 2024246. Send an Envelope of Guacamole for Analysis
Lords:
Jay
Alex
Topics:
Mexican food outside San Diego (Having lived in Colorado, Ohio, and now Melbourne)
Releasing my first commercial video game
The being an uncle of camping
Skyscrapers by Matt Haig
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/QM4hPodE.jpg
Attempting to preserve 40 years' worth of data
Microtopics:
A puzzle adventure game starring a ferret.
DROD-likes.
Sending an envelope full of guacamole to a food lab so they can tell you a list of ingredients.
Reaching in the window so you can finally drive a million dollar Porsche.
Letting the Ewok sit in the driver's seat but not actually letting it drive the car.
Whether Ewoks get old enough to drive.
Throw Rock.
Making a game by first making your own level editor, image editor, audio synthesizer and music composition tools.
Finding playtesters by letting them come to you.
An eyeball that charges a laser when you step in front of it.
Deliberately optimizing your game to take up as little disk space as possible.
A project that starts moving much faster when you figure out what kind of project it should be.
Writing a 3D modeler so that you can get your 2D game on Steam.
Working with a professional artist.
Rendering fur.
Games with turns that represent less than a second of in-game time.
The mind-feel of a turn length.
A game that was so good that the developers went back decades later to make it playable.
The Mud and the Slime.
How to play DROD without any roach timers.
Which DROD is the best one to start with.
Sokoban with swordplay.
The level in King Dugan's Dungeon that's nothing but roach queens.
Optimizing your sword movements well enough that you can move forward while fighting.
Puzzles that are just hard enough to engage your mind while you do something else.
Visiting someone who is camping and then going home to sleep in your own bed.
Building a fire and making s'mores in the bathroom.
Camping expenses.
Giving gifts to adults who can already buy whatever they want.
Deliberately choosing a vacation that is especially exhausting.
Spending two days each visiting seven different family friends.
Your grandparents taking you camping and they sleep in the RV while you have to sleep in the tent.
Buying an onion bloomer for $600 and insisting that your family eat a blooming onion every night to justify the purchase.
Skyscrapers made out of words
Training yourself to visualize words in the wrong orientation.
Puzzling out what the title of the poem would've been if the typesetter hadn't messed it up
Cross-sectional art.
Poems that are intended to be viewed rather than read aloud.
Anti-poem poems.
Every project you've ever worked on (on a computer)
Good usable archives.
The unique digital footprint of your life.
Getting the bits from a SCSI hard drive in an old Mac that doesn't boot up.
Apple Desktop Bus Connection.
The miraculous ubiquity and longevity of USB-A.
Figuring out how to hook up a digital video player that requires a Firewire connection.
The MacOS resource fork.
What the .sit and .hqx extensions meant.
Gamma Zee.
Using social media to actually do things.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
July 01, 2024245. It Was You, Old Man Molyneux!
Lords:
Ben
Nicholas
Topics:
Let me describe to you the Australian treats I sent my Canadian friend
The UX of live sport is terrible
Game jam idea!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_games_that_Buddha_would_not_play
I Continue to Dream, by Langston Hughes
https://mypoeticside.com/show-classic-poem-13632
Being overly patriotic and repping the national identity but only when around foreigners, is this something everyone does or just aussies?
Microtopics:
Projects that you can't talk about yet
Telling a joke for international joke day.
A very busy day for Australians.
Sending 3 kilos of lollies to your co-worker in Canada.
It's the way it shatters that matters.
Cherry Ripes.
The thinking man's candy.
Chicken Crimpy.
A biscuit inspired by Golden Gaytime.
"It's hard to have a Gaytime on your own."
Renaming chocolate jelly babies to be less racist.
A real enthusiasm for desiccated coconut.
Butter chicken parmigiana.
P burger candy.
Whether kangaroos are hunted or farmed.
Whether kangaroos are the same size as the kangaroo fruit.
The waiter in Japan staring at you until you eat the single slice of kiwi.
The official ranking of fruit prestige in Japan, with melon only being bested by keys and Galaga ships.
How many footballs they have in Australia. (At least three, maybe six.)
A sport where nobody can tell when somebody has scored so the whole audience is constantly on edge.
The theme song for the guy coming up to bat.
Booing when your team scores, because they didn't score more.
Whether Eurovision is better when you're not in Europe.
Correlating sports with Eurovision.
A little song and dance that's definitely not political.
XFL camera operators running around on the field.
Improving sports broadcasts with drone cameras.
A comprehensive list of games that are causes for negligence.
Games on boards with 8 or 10 rows (or the same games played in the sky).
Avoiding the line to be avoided.
Making a mark on a wall and deciding if it looks like an elephant.
There's no throwing, Buddha! This is not a cause for negligence.
How the Buddha feels about the Mersenne Twister.
An abacus except it's a roller coaster track.
Tracing letters in the air or on a friend's back.
Even more games Buddha would not play.
The minigame from the beginning of Mario 64 where you stretch out his eyes.
What Shall it Be?
In this game you are the video game and you are the one being played.
A video game adaptation of the less half fun of Pictionary.
Kinect Charades.
Using the Kinect voice to say "it's goat!"
It turns out Molyneux was wearing the business all along.
Turning your dream into art. Like a video game! Or something more artistic.
Dubbing your podcast onto cassette tape and calling it an Audio Zine.
The Creative Labs Creative Zen.
Setting up your sound card and hearing digitized speech in Leisure Suit Larry.
Fond memories of listening to digital audio on your Creative Labs Sound Blaster.
Dr. Sbaitso and Dr. Sbaitso imitators.
What you do when your dad isn't around to help you boot up Red Alert.
An FMV adventure game set in Germany.
The Red Alert installation experience.
Tim Curry giving his all in the Red Alert FMV cutscenes.
An oral history of Tim Curry's escape into the one place uncorrupted by capitalism.
Enjoying the Aboriginal Sauce at Outback Steakhouse.
Australians explaining that America also started as a prison colony
Hamilton didn't talk about this!
The Simpsons writing room discovering the Coriolis effect and realizing that they need to tell the world so it's lucky that anything they write will be broadcast on national television and on streaming services for decades to come.
Everyone in your age bracket having the first ten seasons of the Simpsons memorized.
Finding Frinkiac, analogous to discovering a new Blender plug-in.
Lying on the couch and taking a photo of the TV.
Having a mobile game and sending the APK to anyone who asks nicely.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 14 min
June 24, 2024244. Get Gimbal Locked, Dean!
Lords:
Daniel
Andrew
Topics:
Hyperthymesia
Animal Well
Bad news for my google alerts: "Twinbeard" is the name of the Helldivers 2 community manager
Twinbeard reacts! https://twitter.com/TheTwinbeard/status/1805711034281349388
Dean asks "I know there are many seniors who are looking to start a business during retirement. For those who haven't settled on an idea yet, I'd love to suggest house flipping as a good way to earn income. May I write about this topic in a free article for your website -- specifically, how seniors can get into the house flipping business and become successful at it? I'll be sure to cover all the basics, including how to find the perfect property, how to finance the expenses, how to manage payroll for employees and contractors, etc. I'll also feature a link back to your website."
Should game developers "soak themselves" in games. Referring to this clip of Orson Welles: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg-qaeIcuyI
Microtopics:
Doom Guy: Life in First Person
A well full of animals.
A game that you keep hearing is great from people that you trust.
Remembering every detail of your life even though that's a terrible idea.
A cop asking you what you were doing on the night of November 3rd, 2021.
Fnords.
Eidetic memory vs. photographic memory vs. hyperthymesic memory.
Checking your memory of a time against your written records of that time.
Remembering that you're going to have a conversation about your day tonight so you had better do something interesting.
Data mining electronic records to figure out how you met somebody.
Playing a Sam Barlow game with your bank records.
Navier-Stokes fluid dynamics.
Spending a lot of time frowning.
Dark Forest.
A game providing you with a spoiler-free mechanism of conveying where you are in the game.
Shooting people vs. swording people.
The tools and verbs of just being a little guy.
Seeing a dog doing something you didn't expect to see a dog do.
Being unable to turn a crank because there's a blue ghost.
Choosing not to be a video game.
Setting up Google alerts for your game's working title.
Famous racehorse Secret Legend.
Liking some parts but not liking other parts.
How to construct a Google alert for t the video game Tunic.
Computer vision algorithms to increase yield and profitablity of insect farms.
How seniors can get into the house flipping business.
Collaborating with a spammer to write a poem about house flipping.
Exhorting a spammer to join the discord and post their dreams in the announcements channel.
A think tank dedicated to increasing house flipping around the world, measured by total rotation.
House flipping vs. house spinning.
A skateboard with the word "quaternion" written on it in a sick font.
Trying to flip a house but it gets gimbal locked and you lose everything.
Soaking in films. Just marinating in them.
Having virgin eyes in order to make great things.
Inventing video games from first principles.
The value of outsider art.
Shigeru Miyamoto inventing jumping.
Trying to remember the last time you jumped in real life.
Whether a historian has discovered the cave that inspired the Legend of Zelda.
What Stories Untold says about the Orson Welles quote about having virgin eyes.
Trying to prove yourself to a piece of software.
Trying to tell a story about a spaceship that doesn't involve combat.
50 Years of Text Games.
Having read a book back when it was a blog.
Whether we have time for another topic.
Mixing a Red Bull with a Caffeine Free Coca Cola.
Sunlight patterns that remind you of wandering in the forest as a child
The disco ball as an extrapolation of dappled sunlight in the forest.
Out of focus motes of light.
Figuring out how to make a desert beautiful.
Living that home assistant life.
Going to a thrift store to buy a lamp to fix the terrible lighting in your hotel room.
A motor that's constantly jiggling a pot of water.
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1 hr 9 min
June 17, 2024243. Welcome to the Elder Zone
Lords:
Andrew
Tyriq
Lords:
The Church of the SubGenius
Making FreeCell is kind of like playing FreeCell
How do we get to a place where our primary tool for productivity is not also our primary avenue of distraction?
"<3 Team Schiff", by Team Schiff
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/kNKMVgFF.png
Microtopics:
World Building Notes
An accent you cannot discern the origin of.
Fun worlds that I've thought of.
A world where hair is the source of all life.
A port of Freecell to the Playdate that might never be released.
J.R. Bob Dobbs, a salesman from the 1950s.
Whether Discord (the IRC client) is named after Discordianism.
Tyriq Reads Wikipedia.
Principia Discordia.
An extremely profitable troll.
Good and bad reasons to troll.
Making your weird fun art without worrying about people taking you way too seriously fifty years from now.
Whether submarines are named after the Church of the Subgenus.
Rewriting your entire game in C.
Playing Freecell Validly.
A latecomer to Freecell.
The one known impossible Freecell seed.
The Freecell Helleed vs. the Minesweeper Dream Board.
The looking at the cube phase and the turning the cube phase.
Typeshift speed run hacks.
Knowing a 38-letter word.
Undo trees.
The New York Times games package being sold separately from the newspaper.
The diction of the New York Times crossword puzzle.
Doing Greek letter flash cards to up your crossword game.
Words that come up a lot when you're mashing letters together.
A job where you don't use a computer? In this economy?
Sequencer-based techno.
Constraints that fit the UI extremely well.
An interface that makes a lot of sense for the Game Boy.
Printing out the entirety of Wikipedia so you can go offline for a while.
The compressed size of Wikipedia.
Here's a thing and the only thing it does is have information on it.
Hanging out in the library with people vs. with books.
The three best things in life.
Opening the tiny drawer and flipping through the tiny cards with your tiny hands and using your tiny eyes to read the tiny text.
Downloading information about a spider that links to another spider.
Using robots.txt to ward off all kinds of creatures, not just robots.
999: Extraterrestrial Worlds.
Abandoning the Dewey Decimal System after you discover that numbers go higher than 999.
Stopping to end.
This Cat Does Not Exist.
The perfect source of images that have never been used before.
An art project that invents politicians and texts people imploring them to donate to the campaign and that's how the art project gets funding.
What Socrates would have said about the Banksy that shredded itself.
Your legal name with a bunch of letters removed.
Picking an online handle that's very hard to pronounce to make sure people don't call you that in real life.
Giving everybody you meet a different name for yourself.
Having more friends than you've ever had.
Having hobbies that put you in a room with people.
Libraries as raucous hangouts.
Inviting tweens to play video games in the back rooms (but not in a shady way)
A citizen saying "hey, library, can I use a room?"
Your local library, featuring the Middle-Aged Zone.
Lego Security Theater.
An unordered list of links.
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1 hr 4 min
June 10, 2024242. Malware for Labyrinths
Lords:
Maxx
JP
Topics:
The different kinds of "changing your mind" in creative work
What texture did you think clouds were as a kid?
Infinity Island
Sleep, by Jorge Luis Borges
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=38645
Chippendale Mupps and the slowest nerves
Microtopics:
Knowing the names of zero outdoor cats in your neighborhood.
Canny outdoor cats who are adapted to city life and don't need your plugs.
Obi like the belt or like the Star Wars guy?
Loosey goosey versions
Changing your mind while making a creative work.
Moving a door or a window in an existing wall.
Bigger creative decisions being composed of many smaller creative decisions.
Retaining maximum flexibility at every point in the process.
A workflow that reflects the spectrum of flexibility.
Flexibility Lost is Sturdiness Gained.
Tweaking the value of pi to suit your needs.
A system where a bunch of things depend on a bunch of other things.
Axes of flexibility that you don't end up using.
More specific categories of types of changing your mind.
Going down a deep dark hole and finding the glittering prize but not being sure whether it's worth anything.
A loop that spirals, oscillating, into the middle.
Putting a branch into a meditation labyrinth and changing its theological meaning.
Rewriting your novel in second person, present tense, just to see how it feels.
The Citation Needed guy doubting that mazes can be built with snow.
The ongoing Corn vs. Maize Wikipedia war.
The marine layer rolling in.
Looking at clouds and totally seeing the ice cream.
Buying aerogel samples on eBay.
What stuffed animals are stuffed with.
Going to the sky island and it's sort of rubbery.
Walkable clouds in the Mario series.
Cloudjacking.
Yanking Lakitu out onto the pavement and going on a joyride until the LoJack system kicks in.
Super Mario Bros. redubbed with Quake and Half-Life sounds.
Super Mario Bros. Next Gen AAA
What clouds taste like.
Fizzy Lifting Drinks.
The soda with the glass ball.
Ordering something red hoping for cherry, watermelon or strawberry flavor, but it's cinnamon flavored.
Eating Red Hots for the first time and realizing you've been Halloween poisoned.
Your first bitey cinnamon food.
A little poison, as a treat.
Filling your mouth with tree bark.
Games with saved progress feeling like you're participating in a responsible activity than games where you start over every time.
Deliberate mechanical whimsy.
Making a complicated game and failing to teach the player how to play it.
For a Change, by Dan Schmidt.
An infinite variety of forms of confusion.
Playing Frog Fractions all the way through and being like "what twist??"
Why Jorge Luis Borges gets annoyed when people wake him up.
Semi-routinely yelling in your sleep.
Being asleep is the inside time.
Citing Borges as a vibe.
A mid-pod plug.
The works of Ted Chiang.
Internalizing the idea that you need sleep to function.
Stepping stones of self-reflection.
Waking up feeling the vague sensations of having dreamt.
Sleeping with your eyes open.
Integration of your environment into your dreams.
Biting your tail before you go to sleep and not feeling it until you wake up.
Putting keys in your toast.
Repurposing the Chippendale Mupp's nervous system to make a vintage delay pedal.
Esports competitors putting the left mouse button between their teeth to improve reaction time, because it's closer to the brain.
Brains evolving to process whatever whenever and assembling the timeline later.
Kuratas Heavy Industries.
Smiling to fire the heavy machine guns.
Gripens.
Subway ads exhorting Maximum Lethality!
The airport nearest to all of the oil fields in the Permean Basin.
Billboards for enterprise services.
Wasting eyeballs.
A couple of active web presences.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min
June 03, 2024241. Brad Garrett Must Eat!
Lords:
Abby
https://www.hollywoodfringe.org/projects/10813
Pat
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hyperheartcom/gotchacards
Topics:
The pear scene
Capsule machines vs. claw games
Designing UIs for TV
This be the Verse, by Philip Larkin
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse
Microtopics:
My Brother the Car.
A card game that is not totally random.
Deciding to focus on something else in 2020.
Rock Paper Scissors vs. Rock Scissors Paper.
Which of the twins to take a kidney from
Committing to a bit that breaks the rhythm of what people expect you to say.
Making a game where people get crushed by debt but making it fun.
Everybody Loves Raymond.
Sitcoms that have plenty of opportunity to disappoint you.
A show that lives and dies in the performance.
Nine years to stop trying.
The most profitable sitcom of all time.
Adapting Raymond.
Ray Romano explaining the concept of having parents to a puzzled audience.
The kind of argument where both people make sense and are both trying to be nice.
Trying to be nice but failing.
'Til Death.
The demeanor of a revenant.
Whether Brad Garrett listens to this show.
Hitting 100 episodes and going into syndication.
Musicians needing a body that can strike.
Writing an increasingly ludicrous sitcom for an audience of nobody.
A son who is always on the wacky tobacky.
A sitcom husband who notices that his wife has been recast and realizes he's on a sitcom.
Continuing to give Brad Garrett chances to star in sitcoms because he's so tall.
A sitcom that made you feel seen.
The workplace sitcom vs. the domestic sitcom.
Aimlessness in a post-Seinfeld era.
Abed Ghaith's striptease.
Is that Abed Ghaith's penis in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?
Claw game skill issues.
A billionaire trying to figure out how best to do good in the world and who decides to operate several generous claw machines.
Decorating a desk space with a pocket full of miniature delights.
Mona Lisa Breakdancing.
The rice cooker that King Piccolo was trapped in.
Rubik's Cube but all the faces are Mahjong tiles.
The coolest and most popular racial atrocity.
Ramen Man vs. Kikko Man.
A bowl of ramen in the shape of a tube.
Homer Simpson: visual ripoff of Kinnikuman.
Seeing an aquarium fish that looks just slightly too human.
Reading a book about bugs and itching like mad.
Worrying that you are ruining eyes for yourself.
Famous JAV title "Reincarnated as a Spider"
Conveying the idea of receiving a DM on social media to a television audience.
My face in a tube dot com.
Saying "youshmoob" really fast and hoping nobody notices.
Wanting to put a Russian Roulette scene in your TV show but being unable to negotiate the rights to Russian Roulette from ELORG so you need to hire Alexey Pajitnov to design a replacement game.
A joke that is very funny when you explain it but impossible to convey in any known medium.
The flag that says "bang!"
The Joker not being confident enough in his jokes so he has to use laughing gas.
Silent Comedy Joker has to work a bit harder.
Naming a difficulty level after a pop culture allusion to babies.
The ending of a Clockwork Orange in the UK depicting the protagonist as deciding to renounce violence and become a better person, but in the US they omitted that chapter because it's unrealistic.
The UK edition of A Clockwork Orange depicting the protagonist renouncing violence and becoming a better person so he joins the police force, whereas in the US edition the protagonist decides to remain brutal and violent so he joins the police force.
Where's the bridge, Larkin?
This be the verse you grave for me.
Poets being jerks to all different kinds of people.
Kefka creating a tower of garbage in Final Fantasy while everyone tries to convince him it's worthwhile to have a family.
Which kids inspired Lord of the Flies.
Suggesting that your mom read Chainsaw Man Part 1 so that you can talk to her about grief.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr
May 27, 2024240. Who Was Emily Dickinson Owning?
Lords:
JP
Shepard
Topics:
Damn it, Microsoft added something worthwhile to Office.
Favorite DOS game soundtracks?
The Balatro Discourse
Faith is a Fine Invention, by Emily Dickinson
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/faith-is-a-fine-invention/
Microtopics:
Artist Alley.
Scrolling down a web page and seeing a bunch of cool stuff.
Seeing a list and wondering "how did this list happen"?
Steam Farming Fest.
Trying to figure out what you want to do when you grow up.
Eating eggs and rice when you have tummy troubles.
The file you all edit to make the deposit slip.
Taking data from multiple columns and putting them all in a single list.
Becoming the spreadsheet wizard.
Installation wizards.
Why nobody calls a software feature a "wizard" any more
A window into the dialectic of wizards.
The LLM hype tornado.
Renting video software from Blockbuster.
Back when any media was a "tape"
Enumerating the kinds of MS-DOS audio hardware.
Emitting a blast of data.
Enjoying a video game in 4, 16 or 256 colors.
How Doom sounded on the internal PC speaker.
Playing multiplayer Doom on a four computer LAN where two of the computers don't have sound cards.
The Doom source port family tree.
Whether Linux supported the internal PC speaker.
Playing each MIDI note with the off-the-track square wave.
Holding on to a joke for several minutes.
Doing sound effects via the Roland MT-32.
FM synth guitars sounding more evil than real guitars.
Synthesizers that are fancier than other synthesizers and are therefore better.
The ambient music on the Doom soundtrack.
The Lost Vikings soundtrack.
Games with tracker soundtracks.
The tracker music era.
A roguelike deck builder kind of a thing.
A huge hit within your social horizon.
Beginners hoping to project intelligence and competence.
The kind of mixing of data and code that Lua makes easy to do.
How to deploy a Love2D game to consoles.
A cool game idea that's just a bunch of cards doing stuff.
Sean Barrett's STB libraries.
The ability to change your mind without having to throw away a bunch of work.
Ambient complexity vs. intrinsic complexity.
Hot takes escaping containment.
The Celeste character controller.
Software security practices that do not apply to a single player indie game.
Looking at code and seeing all the things that it used to be.
Looking at code solving a problem in a domain you are unfamiliar with.
An Emily Dickinson poem that reads like a response to an argument she had at dinner.
Situations where you can directly observe what's happening.
All the filters preventing you from bursting out into song.
Esprit de escalier.
Who was Emily Dickinson owning?
A contempt for faith and a sense that microscopes are good.
Knowing that nobody reads your blog, but taking satisfaction in the knowledge that someone hypothetically could.
Excavating spiritual truth from apocryphal ramblings.
The app that holds all the texts you don't send for ransom.
Digging through people's trash but with fewer steps.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 1 min
May 20, 2024239. Public Universal Snoopy
Lords:
Abi
https://shielddoespixels.itch.io/
Eva
https://eslee.bandcamp.com/
https://eslee.itch.io/
https://eslee.dev/portfolio/
Topics:
Will 2024 be the year of Snoopy girls?
https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/will-2024-be-the-year-of-snoopy-girls
https://www.deviantart.com/shenki/art/Human-Snoopy-393886831
Are living fossils inherently better creatures or just really lucky?
Helious
https://www.mobygames.com/game/12740/helious/
https://toot.cat/@smp
Certain Women
https://www.hazeljaneplante.com/songbook
Emulators are finally available for iOS, which is exciting until you realize you have to play Mario 64 with a touchscreen
Miko asks: "Public Universal Friend"
Microtopics:
Working through mental struggles in the form of Zelda dungeons.
Donating to Red Cross for Snoopy Merch.
Snoopy's place in the cultural zeitgeist.
Transcending Peanuts.
Who doesn't want a fun bird friend?
Crocheting and knitting making a major comeback.
Every year is the year of Linux on the Desktop.
Influencers wearing a Snoopy merch.
NASA sending Snoopy to the Moon.
Giving your merch to NASA for free but charging the shit out of movie makers trying to make documentaries or authentic space movies.
Animals that are already so good they didn't need to keep evolving.
Leaving bacteria off your list because you couldn't even see them.
A little blobby thing.
Scientists trying to write for the general public.
Naming an organism after the concept of having three eyes when it only has two eyes.
Having two good eyes but evolving a third shitty eye just to annoy people.
Running executables of completely unknown provenance.
A game that was plausibly created by aliens if you haven't played very many interesting games.
Making up an incredible back story for your game to explain why you have no idea why colors work.
Good Wild Combo vs. Unused Insurance Bonus.
Looking up the artist of a work you loved in the 90s and they're still out there tooting.
Wizened game developers posting on social media about their farm animals.
Designing interfaces for the phone.
Finding out that a person made a work you loved and preferring to have imagined it came from space.
Striving to be a cozy follow.
Retweeting a thing that does not make people angry.
Putting the poise in poison.
Inherently terrifying bodies of water.
A big fish that's touching you now.
A level of repetition that is bordering on too much.
Songs of Love, Death and Pleasure.
Deliberately blurring the line between poems and songs.
The Emulators-on-iOS era.
Kirby Canvas Curse.
Playing Super Mario Land on a TI-84 calculator.
What old Nintendo games work well on an iPhone.
The EU repeatedly forcing Apple to get its shit together.
One- and two-thumbed smartphones.
The Society of Universal Friends.
The thought process that led to the creation of Human Snoopy.
The Cat Snoopy phenomenon.
Snoopy as a Psychonauts character.
Snoopy enjoying a pile of human femurs.
The Notorious PUF.
Someone who was interesting enough to enter the historical record.
An attempt to seize the Friend and carry them off in an oxcart.
The distinction between abstinence and celibacy, and whether it exists now or in the 19th century.
The Mouth of the Lord.
Naming yourself after a branch of the government.
DMing people on Discord.
Support Topic Lords
51 min
May 13, 2024238. Talk to Me Like a Doctor Who Gives a Shit
Lords:
CisHetKayFaber
Jenni
Topics:
Interesting/weird foley sounds in games
Finding out about pop culture when it shows up in ASMR videos
CisHetKayFaber, correcting small breast mammography takes: "Mammograms seem to suck for everyone, and my initial take of, 'they just keep going' is correct while later discussion where I used it as an example where 'best effort,' in the healthcare system feels like lack of care wasn't appropriate even if that broader point is generally true."
https://www.healthimages.com/how-are-mammograms-done-on-small-breasts/
Going to see the eclipse
https://archive.org/details/canonofeclipsesc0000oppo
He peels off my clothes like a starving man would peel an orange, by Sharon Cherski
https://www.mscl.com/characters/sharon_cherski.html
Generational punctuation differences
https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-millennial-captcha
Microtopics:
Plugging the enormous void in your soul by playing Balatro.
A card game with really good balance and numbering.
Seeing the light at the end of the tunnel on the Rusty Lake series.
Giving everybody grace except for yourself.
Corpse looting foley.
Looking through a sound library for the sound of a spider dying.
Buying a chair from an estate sale because you love the sound it makes.
The Looney Tunes cartoon where some foley artist invented everyone's conception of what a pneumatic tube sounds like.
Running around outside and deciding to drop a soup can into the pool.
A school project where you rerecord all the audio for five minutes of television.
Showing your project to someone and you did such a good job that they don't even notice your project.
All the clothes that you're wearing making all the clothes noises.
Watching a porn clip overdubbed with Minecraft noises at just the right time in your life.
Does two tails mean two assholes?
Putting an acronym on the Tails experience.
If you've got a cloaca, it's gotta go in the acronym.
Only getting horny when an earth, somewhere in the multiverse, is being hit by a comet.
Two-Tails has two assholes, and I'm one of them.
Forming the Megazord.
Lance from all the various things that have Lances in them.
Who is Lance in love with Voltron?
Google giving you sports results to make incognito mode more plausible.
Ironic ASMR.
Doin' it for the tingles.
When Dora the Explorer asks you what your favorite part of the show was and she says "I liked that too" except it's a video of a doctor asking you about your health.
The doctor explaining that this is just what your life is like now.
Hot dogging it on the blood pressure cuff.
Changing your blood pressure just to fuck with your doctor.
Deliberately choosing a femme-presenting chubby doctor.
Needing to lose about 40 pounds so you get a leg amputated.
Checking a box on your insurance form saying "do not give me lifestyle advice."
Carrying around your patient in a folder.
Doing the Barium test every time.
I'm in a Barium rotisserie, I need you to work with me.
Checking the quality of your stomach lining.
Trying to banter with the person giving you the mammogram and deeply offending them.
Getting small mouth shame at the dentist.
Rude Doctor ASMR.
ASMR videos where the dentist tells you your mouth is big enough.
Assuming Hugh Laurie is not on Cameo for the purposes of the bit.
Sourcing an entire podcast through Cameo.
The most stony-faced magical realism twin assassins.
Topics episode topics.
How to personalize a stair.
Hiring Mike Ehrmantraut to tell you how you're gonna do your taxes.
Mike Ehrmantraut administering the mammogram.
Visiting friends who live near the totality.
A stump that is freshly cut so it's exuding sap non-stop and is covered with bees and flies 24/7.
Whalefall but on land.
Chekov's oozing stump coming back in the third act.
Going to the astronomical society web site to be sure that the eclipse glasses you get are not the counterfeit eclipse glasses.
Looking at where the sun used to be.
Looking at something that could only be a visual effect except it's right there in the sky.
A thousand year old elf working through her emotions about how her human friends keep dying.
The day you had to be inside during recess.
Standing up and throwing your potato salad and mint julep on the ground.
Writing an angry email to Peter Molyneux for designing eclipses badly.
The cold cement basement of love.
Media from 1992.
Borrowing the DVD boxed set of My So-Called Life from your manager at the pizza place.
Writing poems for your benefactors.
Poetry written from the point of view of a fake person.
Poetry that could plausibly have been written by a teenager.
Do you believe the German mathematician in the 19th century, or do you believe Google?
A soda can that plays the Amen Break when you open it.
Texts from your mom asking how is your "boyfriend," is there anything I can do to "help"?
What it means when someone puts two spaces after a period.
Growing up meaningfully on the internet.
Composing some shit very quickly and making sure it is very needs-suiting.
Taking all day to come up with 350 words because you did not grow up on IRC or forums.
All the kids discordin' like for real for real fam.
A much wider variety of emoji than anything you can do with colons and parentheses.
Sending the semicolon-based winky face to your wife because you cannot be bothered to pull open the emoticon window and find the right icon.
Asking your dad "what do you think LMAO means"
Aunts saying "LOL" in funeral announcements.
Entire generations who have terrible reading comprehension because they didn't grow up texting their friends as their primary mode of communication.
Missing entire regions of UI because they are vaguely shaped like ads.
Using a bigger computer to make your bigger purchases.
Millenial CAPTCHAs.
Straight for pay.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 11 min
May 06, 2024237. Through the Pooping Glass
Lords:
Avery
Chris
Topics:
Cross-Country Skiing
Putting art where advertising usually goes
Running Pico-8 on a Raspberry Pi
The Day I Fell Down the Toilet by Steve Turner
https://ramblinglisasbookreviews.com/2016/09/20/poem-the-day-i-fell-down-the-toilet-by-steve-turner/
I thought "snow" was one thing but it is about a million different things
Microtopics:
Looking for a job as a programmer but finding one as a bard.
A Transformers the Movie style power ballad.
Stopping having a job on purpose.
All the fun things you can do on mountains.
Carrying around a VR helmet so you can take photos of a mountain.
Snowy mountains on one side and lava fields on the other.
Towns named after regular guys.
Yelling at your barista that you live in Frisco.
The tier list of San Francisco's rarest nicknames.
The wrong kind of skiing.
A kind of hiking that is faster and also you can slide down the hill.
Cross-country snowboarding.
Repeatedly popping out of your ski boots and landing in the snow barefoot.
The most winter you've experienced in your entire life.
Taking snow home from the mountains and putting it in a cup in your freezer.
Breaking your toe while stage jumping.
Best ways to not save a hypothermic toe.
Devoting a portion of your massive intellect to making your friend's life interesting.
Back before the Internet was threatening.
The Avery ARG (or AARG).
Writing a short story about your friend in the form of a dating personals ad and posting hundreds of copies all over town.
Miranda July.
An app that crowdsources uncomfortable personal interactions.
A KFC billboard that has been defaced to unrecognizability but the life-sized statue of Colonel Sanders right next to it remains untouched.
Partnering with Safeway to distribute your zine on the back of Safeway receipts.
Mixing up your ammo with your pharmaceuticals so your mugger no longer feels iron deficient.
Whether it's morally okay to appreciate a well-made advertisement.
The advertisement where the guy is now on a horse.
Spray tan parties happening in your area.
Going to the buying place with your earth money.
Your favorite deodorant being discontinued and buying the very last crate and rationing them even though you go to the gym every day.
Handling Smellium with your bare hands.
Smelling what happened to the scientists who discovered Smellium.
Asking for a fun tool for Christmas even though you know you'll never have time to use it because maybe the idea of fun is enough.
The screen saver only paying attention to mouse and keyboard input so when you're playing games you need to jiggle the mouse every few minutes or the screen saver kicks in
Looking at headlines first thing in the morning to make yourself angry enough to get out of bed.
Seeing a headline saying "10,000 people join Mastodon" and thinking it's talking about the metal band.
A touring photographer whose job is is to photograph EDM acts staring at their laptops.
Software developers figure out a more effective way to make money than making their users happy.
Nonconsensual updates.
Writing demos, like in the 90s, back when computers were fun.
The optimism of feeling like computers were going to make people's lives better.
Finding cool programs to download onto your computer.
Getting a job writing Picotron BBSes in Lua.
Waiting until Chat GPT learns how to use Picotron.
Clippy but it's self-aware and hates itself.
Asking Clippy for stories about Bill Gates.
Desktop Pets.
Bonzi Buddy pointedly reminding you that he has your credit card number.
Writing a poem to get your dad to stop asking you if you're off the toilet.
The scene from Trainspotting where the protagonist dives into the toilet.
In twenty years when Winston is hosting Topic Lords and making Frog Fractions sequels.
downpour.games
Look at this, look what I did!
Seeing snowflakes for the second time in your life.
Snow: it's beautiful, unless it's in Avery's freezer.
A frozen lake that you can just run around on and dogs love it.
Snowboarding with a kite.
Cross country snowboarding while holding a Swiffer.
Contagious ice.
28 different shapes for the waters to be in.
A metastable high pressure form of ice.
The sci-fi lore of obscure ice.
Virtually all the ice in the biosphere.
Pauly Shore's lifetime achievement Oscar.
Why climb a mountain when you could administer a Mastodon server?
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 14 min