Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

April 29, 2024236. Your Child Is About the Size of a Game Boy Advance
Lords:
Mark
Shirley
Topics:
Egypt sweater!
https://www.etsy.com/listing/233409089/amazing-1940s-egyptian-fair-isle-jumper
At the end of this film, are we supposed to want Indy to save Elsa? To go off happily together? (I say no.)
Kazim is the best character in Last Crusade
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/IP54S-ZZtyE
Portrait of my Brother as Indiana Jones
https://www.tupeloquarterly.com/poetry/portrait-of-my-brother-as-indiana-jones-by-amorak-huey/
Sallah: The hardest brownface to swallow
Are pits of snakes effective as circus attractions?
The visual of them closing themselves in a giant box while on the motorcycle
Microtopics:
A nerd of the second-highest caliber.
Working in tech on the internet.
Quality guests on a quality show.
Savage Oaf vs. Savage Oath.
Getting on Metal Archives and figuring out those bands are.
Swearing an Oaf.
Reading "Lord of the Rings" because you are pregnant.
Recommending pregnancy to someone who wants a child.
Wonder Weeks.
Your child is about the size of a mid-sized sedan.
A delightful looking creature about the size of a Micro Machine.
A sister who is a chimp and other wild shit from the 1970s.
A screwball comedy about lions living with Tippi Hedren and mauling the director of Speed.
A movie about an archaeologist who is beloved by all his students and one of them is wearing this sweater.
1940s Egyptian Fair Isle Jumper.
Getting unprofessionally close to the professor you have a crush on so he can notice your cool Egypt sweater.
Why Dial of Destiny didn't do that well.
An entirely tolerable movie according to Mark circa whenever that movie came out.
Deploying the tense night-time action music.
Going to Fiverr and paying someone the fair value of their labor.
Elsa's a Nazi and then we're mad at Elsa.
Emotionally elevated moments between Indy and Elsa.
Proposing to your girlfriend on the Golden Gate Bridge in a last-ditch attempt to save your relationship.
The payoff of Henry Jones Sr.'s character arc.
Elsa choosing the wrong grail on purpose.
The 50 grails on the other side of the room that Elsa didn't even look at.
Coffee cup movie magic.
The expeditious nature of film storytelling.
The Brotherhood of the Cruciform Sword.
Kazim falling off the dock.
Kazim showing up to beat the shit out of a kid who is spending too much time reading about the grail on Wikipedia.
The two-part episode of MacGyver where MacGyver looks for the Holy Grail.
Stealing artifacts because they belong in museums, not with the people who originated them.
Going on a series of heists to steal artifacts back from museums and returning them to their people.
Sometimes chased, sometimes chasing.
Amorak from Kalamazoo.
Love on her eyelids.
A certified Wocust.
Compensation for my brother-in-law's car.
The depiction of Sallah in Raiders vs. in Last Crusade.
Fisher Stevens in Short Circuit.
A movie you can give up.
John Rhys-Davies playing a dwarf even though he's not even from Middle Earth.
Middle Earth being flat for elves but round for humans.
A huge vat filled with undifferentiated snakes that is a circus attraction somehow.
The guy who lays down in the bed of snakes.
A 1920s-era circus putting on a performance of the play that Snakes on a Plane was based on.
Giving a garter snake to every kid who comes to the circus and if their parents don't like it they can just set the snake loose in the back yard because it's the midwest.
Not thinking to ask a question until 30 years after you've seen the movie.
Liking art that is flawed.
Dying from a recreational drug situation.
Safely ensconced in the box.
Being chased by Nazis and taking a moment to pry open a wooden crate just in case there is a motorcycle in it.
Batman scrolling reddit while hiding behind the curtain for the guy he's going to surprise coming back into the office.
Of course that's what they do, and of course it worked, because you just saw it happen and it worked.
The pitfalls of googling your own medical symptoms.
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1 hr 2 min
April 22, 2024235. Ennui Golf
Lords:
Jenni
Xalavier
Topics:
How do centaur internal organs work
What is the most unlikely horror franchise to adapt to games?
Do boomerangs work?
Serious KAAAND!
https://www.reddit.com/r/TopicLords/comments/1b3j3nu/serious_kaaand/
Most game mascots are the sexual avatars of their creators
The Ted Dabney Experience
Microtopics:
Rusty Lake.
An intriguing, terrifying morsel.
Whether it's okay to lie on this show.
Life Eater.
The horror fantasy kidnapping sim space.
Shippers shipping games.
How do we ship this game without destroying people?
All of the horse except for the head and neck.
Cosmetic centaur organs.
Introducing yourself to the inside of a centaur and it's extremely squishy in there.
A single multifunctional cube that births a centaur and that's the original Xbox startup video.
Speaking a language that doesn't exist and every time you finish a sentence you hear church bells.
Would a defective centaur wear a hat like this or like this?
Centaurs always standing at their standing desks.
A centaur wearing a horse mask.
Playing Wii Golf with someone who remains sitting the entire time.
Getting off the Power Pad to long jump.
Sitting golf.
My Dinner with Andre the Giant.
The monster mash vs. monster bash.
Adapting the Ghostbusters theme song to other media.
Playing as the car and running people over.
Jail for cars.
Jelly beans that taste bad on purpose.
80s films for children that are meant to turn them into weird bisexuals when they grow up.
Jeff Minter's Dune.
Barbarella the video game.
More things you can do with your Rock Band instruments.
Sticking even more games inside of Fortnite.
The lemur with the really big eyes.
Microorganisms that live in water and have the end of a comedy roast bone for a head.
Venomousness of hybrid mammals.
Grabbing your stress ball after learning that the duck billed platypus uses electroreception to track their prey, Xalavier Nelson, Jr.
Platypus patch notes.
Adding expansions to Classic World of Warcraft.
Gauging the temperature of the room when it comes to boomerangs.
Throwing a washing machine in a circle.
How you feel when the boomerang doesn't come back.
Objects that you see on TV.
Boomerangs that instant of being carved to return when you throw them, are carved to say "help, I'm trapped in a boomerang factory" in an Australian accent when the wind whistles through it.
A boomerang with a heart on it that you throw to find true love.
Boomerangs vs. Gen-Xerangs.
Getting lazy by the time you sharpen the 7th blade on your boomerang.
Disrupting marshmallows by making them kinda good.
Hiring a game studio to make a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy and then immediately suing them for fraud because making a satisfying sequel to Katamari Damacy is impossible.
Getting Australian concussions all weekend.
Naming your facial hair "are you ready for the next topics"
Hi guys call anyone knows how to buy guns and armor India?
Crossposting between r/TopicLords to r/IndianTeenagers.
Weeding out the cowards with Gregorian Chant.
Looking at Glover and immediately understanding his salient sexual verbs.
The distinction between mascot and main character.
Your Sonics, your Gexes and your Crashes Bandicoot.
Switching places with your therapist.
Non-saucy mascots.
Having to pick between being horny and being a sociopath because you can't be both.
Glover vs. Hamburger Helper vs. Thing.
Opening yourself to a deeper Freudian zeitgeist.
The mascot platformer you keep seeing roms of but have never downloaded.
Blinx 2: Masters of Time and Space.
Blinx dressing up as the lead singer of Power Man 5000.
Exactly the sort of podcast segment you want to commit to sight unseen.
Being willing to give up 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand to make a friend happy.
How much do you want that Golden Microphone?
The crucible of the soul you go through to record a podcast.
People in the future deciding what you would have made a podcast about if you were still alive and making that podcast.
The Xalavier Nelson, Jr. Experience.
The dream list of developers you ask to help finish your game in your will.
Locking Albert Einsten and Genghis Khan in a haunted house and they vote each other off the show back and forth forever.
A deeply safe field for job hunting.
The Ted Dabney Experience of finding out that Ted Dabney died twelve years ago.
Mrs. Columbo.
A movie named "This Movie Has Marky Mark In It."
A game called Beyonce Battle Royale that doesn't have Beyonce in it and it's not a battle royale. (It's a clicker.)
Beyonce: Oops All Mudkips.
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1 hr 4 min
April 15, 2024234. Plunge Correctly for High Score
Lords:
JohnB
Kevin
JADES data: https://jades.idies.jhu.edu/public/
Topics:
Thoughts on approximately 5/12 of Don Quixote
The Time Life "Mysteries of the Unknown" Series (1987-1991) and its impact on a generation of young nerds
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mysteries_of_the_Unknown
https://www.reddit.com/r/IcebergCharts/comments/r487u4/distant_astronomical_objects_iceberg/
https://www.slideshare.net/DirkTheDaring11/timelife-mysteries-of-the-unknown-the-ufo-phenomenon
https://archive.org/details/DreamsAndDreaming_201809/page/n33/mode/2up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lal0aWAys0k
Thomas Edison didn't think telephones needed to ring. He figured the caller could just start yelling "hello" at you even before you answered the phone
Desiderata
https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html
https://www.readwritethink.org/sites/default/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson372/PoloniusExcerpt.pdf
Is pinball meant to be fun? Can you lose a quarter at an arcade faster in a game cabinet or in a pinball machine?
https://arcadeblogger.com/2018/07/06/arcade-holy-grail-the-pinball-circus/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zAtVBb8rOok
https://archive.org/details/TILTTheBattleToSavePinballDisc2Extras
Microtopics:
Dog ownership.
A living creature that just wanders around the house.
Picking up warm soft weird thing.
Cracking open a cold one.
Computers flush with science data.
The deepest images humans have ever taken.
Finding distances to individual galaxies.
Listicles you can peruse.
Picking a galaxy and naming it after yourself.
Bug Mars 2.
The Glass Universe.
Hiring women and calling them computers.
A guy with a lot of free time and a gold nose.
Some public domain books being more readable than others.
Pun localization.
North American otaku tilting at windmills with their katanas.
How people pronounce quixotic and how they ought to pronounce quixotic.
Whether we respect English majors on this show.
Naming a character something weird and hoping nobody argues about the pronunciation hundreds of years from now.
Butthead as Don Quixote and Beavis as Sancho Panza.
The Great Cornholio tilting at windmills.
The era of translations that don't realize Don Quixote is a parody.
Part II of Don Quixote responding to Don Quixote fan fiction.
Don Coyote.
Sending Mario Maker back to Miguel Cervantes to see what he would make.
The kinds of books your parents would have on their shelf, back when that was the only thing available to read.
The 80s resurgence of New Age thought.
Mystic Places.
The Shin Megami Tensei section in the library.
Where to find the books that teach you magic in the public library.
The canonical map of reported UFO sightings worldwide.
Books for the kind of person who thinks Aleister Crowley is cool.
The Spaceships of Ezekiel.
The JWST iceberg.
The Distant Astronomical Objects iceberg.
A tin can and a string with a battery attached.
Hello, fellow phone owner.
A phone call asking you to log into a web site and read a message.
Funny ways to answer the phone.
E.B. Games, where you can get F-Zero for Zero.
The size of fortune cookies in the 1920s.
Nice things to do and be.
Desiderata vs. Deteriorata.
Advice giving poems.
Skin cancer is mid.
Casey Kasem quitting Transformers after they wrote an episode featuring Abdul, king of Carbombya.
Avoiding loud and aggressive persons.
Pinball getting harder and more complex over the course of a century.
Baffleball.
Pinball features to make things easier for beginners.
The quickest way to lose money on an arcade game.
Tilt-sensing plum bobs.
A weird kinetic sculpture that exists just for your entertainment.
The Black Hole for Personal Reasons.
A boring and easy pinball cabinet that you can play for an hour when you want to get sick of pinball.
Tilt: The Battle to Save Pinball.
Multidisc!
Pinball tables by George Gomez.
Pinball: not actually fun, but they did their best.
Free play skee-ball.
Pacific Pinball Museum and Musee Mecanique.
Twitter forgiveness.
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1 hr 11 min
April 08, 2024233. A Huge Pile of Gold You Just Use To Shoot Porn On
Lords:
Jonah
AC
Topics:
When was the last time you listened to a song backwards?
Decentralized manufacturing
Are there other terms like "foodies," to describe those who are super into universal bodily functions?
The Bathroom Line, by Jesse Thurston
Playtesting legos
Microtopics:
Pet Rock Dot Site
Whether rhythm is a kind of sound.
A rhythm synthesizer that produces control voltages.
All the things you could hypothetically like about New York City.
Crowded speculative real estate.
Canada's role as a fire hazard.
The power company in charge of all the wildfires.
What happened to Smokey the Bear.
Stopping for lobsters crossing the highway.
Whether Smokey the Bear died in his sleep.
Putting the oven on self clean and it cleans your whole house.
Bringing back Satanic Panic to make backmasking cool again.
Constructing a cliff that echoes backwards.
Musique Concrete.
The kind of people who would make an album in Csound.
Admitting that your music is hilarious.
Conlon Nancarrow's works for player piano.
Black MIDI.
Knowing that you should be adding a constraint to your assertion but not knowing what it should be.
If Conlon Nancarrow had only entered cryosleep.
Loading up a song in Sound Forge.
Squid Salmple.
Bluetooth: it works every time!
Virtual modular synthesizers with cool cable physics.
The etymology of backmasking.
If Wiktionary is so good, why isn't there a Wiktionary 2?
Franchising your rhythm box.
Doing each other's administrative work.
Doing a labor swap to get fresh eyes on your project.
Ubering to the trail head.
Imagine: paying rent for an office.
Poopsocking it on this family show.
The Armory.
Going back in time and having $14 million.
Selling your forehead as advertising space.
Joseph Circuit City Smith.
This man needs your help to remove his porn logo forehead tattoos.
Aspirational snake eye contacts.
Your contacts contact.
Antique sword knife bookmark charm sword knife pendants knife charms for bookmarks.
Going to the breathing club and breathing really hard.
The Hearty-Starty.
Trying to joke about a thing that turns out to just be a real thing.
A Facebook group for people who love shitting.
Blinkos and all the nuances of the ways they love to blink.
A whole world just for smelling.
How your heart doesn't stop every time you sneeze.
Green text vs. other colors of text.
The r/bluetext subreddit that's all about links to other web sites.
Nutty Gum and Fruit Spleggings.
Finding the one while in line to poop.
Going to college for like a year and one of the best things about it was the bathroom graffiti.
A chalkboard in the physics department's bathroom stall.
Help I'm trapped in the bathroom grout.
Peeing while trying to think of a poem.
Peeing your pants in the bathroom.
Don't Backmask Me, Bro.
Finding someone in a bar who wants to playtest your experimental game for three hours.
The movie Yesterday except for inventing Legos.
Following instructions as a way to fidget.
Trying to solve a difficult programming puzzle when someone comes up and starts biting you in the ass.
All the ways someone can be onboarded onto an experience.
Free HTML5 Games Tagged Idle.
Top Three Clickers.
Roguathia.
Waiting until you have more SP to select upgrades.
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1 hr 13 min
April 01, 2024232. Where's the Poem, Zaborowske?
Lords:
Chris
Dev
https://devinbusha.artstation.com/
Topics:
Taking Improv classes has been life changing.
Practicing 3 keyboard layouts at the same time
I bought store brand salt. You wouldn't think this would be a big deal but it turns out to be
I Once Snorted an Eight Ball with Santa, by Richie Zaborowske
https://www.havehashad.com/hadposts/i-once-snorted-an-eight-ball-with-santa
Are all creative ideas very derivative, or is it just my ideas
Microtopics:
Pickleball.
Weird shapes the birdie flies in.
The sport that has level design.
Mindful breathing.
You are now breathing mindfully.
Looking forward to being at square one.
Getting the real data once you stop paying attention.
Thespians in High School.
Spinning a wheel to figure out what emotion to feel.
Whether the yes and rule only works for comedy.
Pancakes. Are. Starchy.
Being late to your job that's on fire because you were stuck behind the fire truck.
Celebrating your own failures.
How to play Lemmings in 2024.
Self-esteem.
Immediately vibing with a new sport.
Autotuning except it's completely manual.
A bunch of joysticks that you twiddle with your fingers to do letters.
Colemak vs. Colemak DH.
Keyboards that are laid out in columns.
Splitting up the typing test into QWERTY, Dvorak and Colemak.
Palm Pilot Graffiti.
The Lord's Prayer in Gregg.
Shorthand. (Originally called Briefhand.)
Good ciphers for room escape puzzles.
Are QR codes based on the mazes in Zelda 2?
Flaky sea salt vs. coarse sea salt.
Adding a biting experience to make your food more heterogeneous.
Edible chemistry.
The last time you pinched salt.
Audially-rewarding salt grinders.
Science Youtuber Hank Green.
Warning pregnant women to not eat too much salty licorice.
Supertaster-outing Tic Tacs that regular people love but supertasters immediately vomit.
We've got a level six kaiju supertaster on our hands!
The guy who gets paid too much to taste ice cream.
The kind of person who doesn't salt their food but instead repeatedly licks a salt lick throughout the meal.
Heads swirling around like snow globes.
A poem that doesn't do anything with line breaks but does do something interesting with sentence lengths.
A poem that you might read on a bathroom stall.
Wearing the little hat and pulling on the cord that makes the horn toot.
The ecology that grows around the dumpster.
The crane swinging porta potties around.
An extremely expensive way to have fun
Heading towards the era of having kids.
Asking for payment for software that is not being maintained.
Minesweeper but X.
An idea that is worth doing but not obviously worth doing.
How to make Missile Command fun in a new and interesting way.
A boxing essay with questionable authenticity.
Strategies for enjoying Frog Fractions.
Rangers and the new way they handle animals.
Yes-anding whatever ideas come to you.
Ancient primals that were interlocked in battle.
Someone thinking of an idea.
Constantly listening for cues.
What do inanimate objects do?
Buying a giant bag of googly eyes and putting them on everything.
Not posting on Twitter.
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1 hr 13 min
March 25, 2024231. Game: the Game and Music Experience
Lords:
Jeff
http://dopeassvideogames.com/
Tyriq
https://fourbitfriday.itch.io/
Topics:
The shame of not remembering any good jokes for kids and having to write jokes on the spot for impatient children
What's your favorite genre to consume that you have no interest in making (or think you'd suck at?)
High Sidin'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5INAxH1HD7s
Poetry
https://poets.org/poem/poetry
Every mammal has a fish
Microtopics:
Line of sight for the fog of war.
Plugging unplugging.
How to keep looking at TikTok when your phone is destroyed.
Telling your kid that Youtube broke.
Youtube videos that teach your child how to give a thumbs up.
Having more kids because it pays for itself.
Why did the princess have no dresses?
Explaining to a four year old about the $20 Sack Pyramid.
Weaning yourself off of saying /s by saying "wocka wocka" instead.
Teaching your kids better standards for comedy.
Snow White did this and then Belle was there and Ariel was there with her human legs.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen but for making pie.
Looking up knock knock jokes online.
Your kid finding your secret hoard of popsicle sticks and realizing you didn't just make all those jokes up from your head.
Things you want to have made but don't want to make
Trying to surprise yourself with your own level design.
Wallowing in the stuckness.
Whether game developers know when they're making a bad game.
Playtesting the shit out of a game because you enjoy playtesting so much.
Questionable hip hop.
Thrashy hyperpop.
Full-time access to a green screen and what it does to your head.
Comedy FMV games.
Making a career out of making bad art except it's funny and having to live with yourself.
Approachable game projects.
Pivoting from making an action RPG to making a Vampire Survivors clone in the space of a weekend.
Making a bunch of efforts and they're all terrible.
Whispering into a distortion pedal.
Putting your vocals through a bunch of effects pedals because your lyrics are terrible.
Enjoying an art creation process until you get too self conscious and ruin it.
Wallowing in the stuckness.
Making art and never showing it to anybody.
A twin stick shooter that's just for me.
Game Heads.
Onlookers getting hyphy.
"Side Show" by 415.
Back when Oakland was in the 415 area code.
Turning tight ones.
Turning brodies in an intersection while commuters look at your 15-inch subwoofers.
Rogue car events.
Game: the Games and Music Experience.
A lowrider with the entirely wrong number of switches.
Whether Boots Riley and Too Short still live in Oakland.
Aspirational trailer music choices.
Car Stealth: drive around a corner and hide.
Missing Rock Band but not missing it enough to install Fortnite.
Initiating taunts in Fortnite by strumming the guitar controller.
The immovable critic twinkling his skin.
Imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
Poetry with a diss track vibe to it.
Good going, dumbass, you got into poetry.
Whether poetry should rhyme.
Discriminating against business documents.
Putting a poem on genius.com and adding a "wocka wocka" annotation after every joke.
Spending an hour searching for animal names followed by "fish"
Which fish have the thickest bones?
Buffalo Fish Wings.
A fish that is way too big and shaped like the letter D.
Is Beyonce a Nicki Minaj friends??
Grandma's big bowl of worsties.
Energy drinks that make you want to disassemble a clock radio.
Drinking C4.
The guy you know who always has at least three Red Bulls on him at all times.
Bringing home a one-of-a-kind Monet even though you know your roommate is a Monet fiend and will eat it immediately.
The Master P of devouring Kit Kats.
The Queen of Bites and Sips.
Your duty to eat snacks before they go bad.
Eating one marshmallow right now.
The shitposty garbage that made Twitter fun.
Here's some pants pooping jokes, wocka wocka.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 12 min
March 18, 2024230. What's God Even Made of Anymore?
Lords:
Mike
Jake
Topics:
Cameras are peaking -- what's next?
Is the mysterious disappearing, or just mystery?
Preschool security practices
At the Feast in the Great Hall, by Ursula Leguin
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/1-EFinaN.png
It's not boring to talk about dreams
Microtopics:
The great state of Maine.
A project you've been working on for a long time.
Inventing a game developer community in Michigan.
Meaningful distinguishers on normal camera use.
A lukewarm decisionmaking process.
Computational photography.
Samsung's fake moon.
A camera that just guesses what you want to see so you don't even need to take the photo.
A massive endless feed of the same photo with different people in it.
Why people use cameras.
Whether photos exist.
Late stages of the product category.
People who need Photoshop to do their job.
Photo mode in real life.
A photo you can take later.
Adding a filter to make the guy in the background less likable.
Meals for the Ages
How to get from here to perfect ubiquitous service surveillance.
Theatrically pretending to be hit by a stationary car.
Going to the Gallagher movie and getting sprayed with watermelon.
There's just the one Bigfoot, it's the same Bigfoot every time.
Tomato sauces that are still delicious even if you learned the recipe from the Internet and not from a grandma.
Mysterious things backing into the shadows so they can remain mysterious.
Protecting mystery wherever you find it.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology.
Stepping inside someone else's very strange brain.
Dawn Wall.
An intensely detailed exploration of the surface of a cliff.
I wonder what it's like on the fucking moon?
Who painted the iconic cover of the Wrinkle in Time paperback.
The shoot-em-up cabinet you saw in the canteen at the US Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia before the first Liberian civil war and have never been able to find since.
A reaction to the lack of organic mystery in our lives.
The Case of the Missing Hit and Searching for Sugarman.
Wash over me, True Story.
Which phone checked the kid out of preschool.
Being on the list of services the insurance companies consider to have checked various boxes.
We got pins. We can do that.
The three bad four-digit pins.
Streamlining the process of rapidly accounting for all the children.
Developing a system that would deterministically move the needle in a useful way.
Blundering in the brightness.
Telling two events from the same perspective.
Ugly crying at your desk in a public workspace.
Spending way more time not alive than alive.
Something that we can experience on either side of our lives.
A Fire Take from Jake.
Waiter stress dreams.
A skill that you can hone.
One of the more fun channels in the discord.
Holding an increasingly large bag of stuff.
Waking up laughing until you realize your dream was not funny.
The consciousness wall between you and visualization.
Training yourself to let your mental imagery be visible.
Seeing clumps of color and interpreting them.
Doing an editing pass on your dreams before relating it to your friends.
Jay-Z's favorite bleu cheese Milkshakes.
Screwball horror.
A splash of furry content.
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1 hr 14 min
March 11, 2024229. This Show Now Available on Cockroach DNA
Lords:
Megan
Lexi
Topics:
Erik Satie's performance indications
https://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=60&threadid=4497
Instant food from other cultures (why isn't everyone eating maggi noodles??)
Seasonal decorations
Delhi Metro
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17k75ftxEn2xR-tJkLSV4H8st5BFAxPNxE3BNCXDI6Go/edit
Becoming Immortal by being predictable
Living in different climates (e.g. my experiences with the harsh winters of Chicago vs sweltering Austin TX summers)
Microtopics:
Music implementation for The Lamplighters League.
Watching a streamer play games and asking them for a turn at the controls.
How to pronounce "Erik Satie."
How to pronounce "Gymnopedies."
Finding 100 umbrellas in your dead friend's apartment.
A list of Satie's performance indications.
Grandly forgetting the present.
With your bones dry and distant.
Playing music with your forehead.
Doing something to a piano.
Your boss sending a memo asking you to work with a shy piety.
Pizzicato vs. Bartok pizzicato.
Adding the hamburger so it's not just Helper.
What instant foods are missing from your food vocabulary.
Adding heavy cream to ramen broth.
Getting an apron so you can have a little costume when you cook.
Realizing that when you wear the apron you don't get food on your shirt.
A big bib for Big Jim.
Normalizing scoop bibs.
Kraft Dinner.
Halal certified instant stir fry noodles.
Ramen in a cup or ramen where you provide your own container.
Insurance Mac.
Canned cheeseburgers.
A boring house with nothing on it.
Movable feasts.
Keeping those 12-foot skeletons in your yard and decorating it seasonally.
The beetles that clean bones for you.
Recreational Explosives Day.
A Zachtronics programming puzzle for every holiday.
A movable feast where you don't eat.
Decorating your house to celebrate Toyotathon.
Falling for strangers and their blue hair.
A poem that is long if you read it but short if you recite it.
Taking public transit as an act of defiance.
A gift that is impossible to give yourself on purpose.
Inventing a shower proof phone so nobody ever has shower thoughts again.
Putting your phone in a Ziploc bag and watching movies underwater.
Sitting down at your computer and getting stuck.
Hacking your executive function by adding friction in the right places.
Whether Wellbutrin gives everyone tinnitus or just you.
Death hacks for staying mentally connected to your dead relatives.
A service that puts your podcast on vinyl.
Using CRISPR to infect the cockroach population with 229 episodes of Topic Lords.
Moving to a land where your snot doesn't freeze.
Not trusting your own weather opinions.
Surprising yourself by enjoying seasons.
Driving in icy conditions.
Standing under the heated lamps like a lizard.
Waiting for the bus in the dark.
Learning to drive after you move to a city with public transit.
Not driving with kids.
Getting rid of all the bots.
Sgt. Pepper Bot.
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55 min
March 04, 2024228. Detecting Myself as Spam
Lords:
Fif
Mitch
Topics:
The Ace Attorney series' English localization's naming conventions
The kissing mechanic in Bully represents both what is genius and terrible about the game
Podcast Prep Sheet Trending Guests and Topics
The Tay Bridge Disaster
https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/tay-bridge-disaster/
No but seriously what the hell is up with the user interface in Bully. I assume it's just a Rockstar thing? I'm only into Bully so it is a mystery
Comments that say "why did the algorithm recommend this to me"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1LhdhQEKtg
Microtopics:
Two handfuls of times.
Something very fivey about hands.
Dependability and a detail-oriented nature.
Putting your resume in the show notes.
Naming your kid a list of two things.
A story taking place in a Los Angeles that is a satire of near future Japan.
Naming games after verbs.
Mario Push Button.
The Haiku-detecting tumblr bot.
Imagining an opinion and searching for someone who has it so you can yell at them.
All the time we have for Topic Lords.
Kissing a kissable person. (They have kissability.)
A dress-up fashion thing.
Wearing a reindeer patterned jumper to reduce your kissability.
Applying triple-A polish to a boarding school setting.
Dorms in a castle.
Hey, nice face.
Demographics based on what classes you have to take to kiss members of the demographic.
Dressing in real life like you do in a Grand Theft Auto game.
The one character in the entire GTA series that cares about the clothes you wear.
Secrets Behind the Suite: Unveiling the Hidden World behind Luxury Hotels.
Eco-friendly or Eco-fail?
Law and Disorder: how TV crime shows get it wrong.
Sending an email to yourself and it gets detected as spam.
The friend who has a lot of opinions about Homestuck.
Making your hearts for to quail.
Poems including civil engineering advice.
Good vs. bad nonsense poems.
A fun poem to read.
Paying money to engage with content.
Deliberately slipping on a banana peel.
What it says about hitting in the Banana Rules.
School administrators publishing statistics on how many banana peels you've slipped on.
Skyrim spoiling the presence of robots on the stats screen.
Watching what players do and rewarding every action they take.
A good video game is a game that has three good stats screens and no bad stats screens.
Having a question in your head and not knowing who to ask so you ask the person in front of you.
Youtube koans.
Showing content to someone who will be not that jazzed about it.
Youtube recommending a let's-play from a year ago with 10 views.
A PMV of the character you are obsessed with.
The only person who takes a the Youtube Creator Surveys.
Constantly deleting the shorts.
Posting a tweet to youtube.com.
Posting a link to your own videos on Youtube.
Community captions and what happened to them.
Doing annotations dirty.
Nekoneko.
Comments popping up and scrolling across the screen constantly.
Listening to a cassette tape you dug up in the desert.
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1 hr 11 min
February 26, 2024227. Maximal Overlap With the Dork
Lords:
Erica
Kory
https://kbones.itch.io/
Topics:
Mystery Hunt 2024
Developing my first video game
Wearing glasses prevents COVID
English Ending Song, by Ryoji Yoshitomi
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/AxA-XP8E.png
How to make satisfying non-violent gameplay
@[email protected]
Microtopics:
Letting go of concepts of yourself that you believe.
Losing a concept of yourself as a person and just becoming free-floating thoughts.
47 year old house painters.
Growing up to be a pluripotent human being.
Finding cool and positive Internet spaces to hang out in.
Excavating old Bubsy memorabilia.
Checking the maps on your telephone.
Defining yourself as someone who doesn't eat free cheese samples.
Scientists researching how to be cool and cringe at the same time.
2023 Game of the Year Gordy and the Monster Moon.
Protocols and processes that presume that if you are good at solving puzzles then you must also be good at designing puzzles.
The humble beginnings of the MIT Mystery Hunt.
Puzzle Inflation.
Instant stooging.
People who are obligated to prevent their children from dying.
Server migration problems.
Accidentally writing the same puzzle as someone else.
Premium content for listeners who want to subscribe.
Putting sprites on the screen and accepting controller input.
Game design by proxy.
Your local Barcade with a Pico-8 cabinet.
Buttoning up a game to make it a shippable product.
Whether the knife is detecting a dork.
Butter golems.
Bugs that make games more fun.
Building a high end gaming PC and only running Pico-8 on it
I can't believe they buttered Jorts!
Meeting the guy who runs the Indie Arcade at Magfest.
Waiting 40 years for opportunities to fall in your lap.
Think Buick.
A cat that is not on the show.
Of all the exposed mucus membranes on your face, the eyes are two of them.
Projectile transmission.
Did this COVID infection rate study control for popularity?
Hitting 40 and embracing the cringe.
Wearing chemistry goggles in public.
Myopic basketball players.
Things you can put on your face to look like a superhero in disguise.
The Wario Land 4 soundtrack.
Making ogg vorbis rips of the Wario Land 4 soundtrack to put on Napster.
A gem of a poem to be hidden in a Wario game.
Playing back vocals with single-syllable samples.
Our collective dream diary.
Your dreams melting into your pillow with all the dust mites.
Everything is impermanent, especially video games.
A shocking removal of an important human from your life.
Making your peace with the time you have forgotten.
The natural high you get from blowing things up.
Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up.
Cooking games.
Matching happy looking fruits of different sizes.
Watching carefully as two peaches slide together.
Designing video games for 5-year olds on T.
Dropping things that merge in a two dimensional space with gravity.
The boy has two dads.
What can I do that is nonviolent and crunchy and interesting and solvable?
Looking for inspiration outside of video games.
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1 hr 14 min