Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

February 19, 2024226. Ilk-Action Lawsuit
Lords:
Ryan
Alexander
Topics:
Getting so agitated that you cook dinner
What's an acquired taste that's worth acquiring? What's one that's not worth the effort? What's the point of even "acquiring" a taste for anything when there are probably infinite options you don't have to teach yourself to enjoy?
Texturally enhanced alternative beverage
Bagme Bloma
https://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Bagme_Bloma
Microtopics:
How the science gets done.
Measuring the height of a flagpole by measuring its shadow.
Using calculus to find the surface area of a potato.
Measuring and re-measuring until you get the result you want.
Confronting your professor about their involvement in Frog Fractions 2.
Country and Western music fused with synth heavy prog rock.
Using the gun to parallel park.
That time Ryan died while recording Topic Lords.
Getting so agitated that you do some differential equations.
New guy just dropped: guy who whenever he thinks about death he has to make a sandwich.
The first step towards rejecting a task: assessing the task.
Today is a good day to fill your Prius with snakes.
The Raccoon Prius story.
Hilarious mothers.
The inside of a Prius: nothing but corners.
Officer, it's not what you think. No, not that either.
Putting the AC on so the python in the back seat gets sluggish.
Getting a fork and spoon and twirling up snakes like spaghetti.
A taste worth busting your ass for.
An oral history of tricking alcohol post your tongue.
An entire generation that has never had to work to enjoy things because there are so many things that are easy to enjoy.
Twelve year olds from Alabama calling you a cuck.
New ideas that you haven't been thinking of even without looking at your phone.
Hiking: it's just hard walking.
Getting so agitated that you developed a taste for hiking.
The guy in the Fred Meyer buying Reese's cups while wearing a tuxedo.
The Men's Wearhome.
The Men's Wearhouse employee who is not allowed to tell you that they don't have anything for fat people so he brings out less and less flattering outfits until you take the hint.
Orbitz. (The soft drink from 1996.)
A proto-boba.
Drinking a random test tube from a bioengineering lab.
What if everyone had a number floating above their heads that represented the number of times they had to drink Orbitz before they developed a taste for Orbitz and now that Orbitz is out of production everyone's number stays the same forever
Big Dick's Energy.
Flavor-blasted slushies.
The sense-horror of drinking an Orbitz.
Shelf-stable tapioca pearls.
A free-to-play game for your tongue.
Texturally subdued beverages.
Decaf Red Bull.
The hypothetical beverage enthusiast who wants a decaf Red Bull.
How to make Orbitz in your toilet.
How many Orbitz you have to drink to reach Nirvana.
eBay sellers insisting that you don't drink the thirty year old novelty beverage they're selling you.
Thinking a poem is a Middle Earth thing but it's actually a regular Earth thing.
Poetry that is alliterative rather than rhyming.
Making art by fucking around with a new medium.
Music in a foreign language.
What Simlish sounds like in different languages.
A quest to discover why they started dotting the letter Y.
Expecting scrolls in 3 to 5 days.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 9 min
February 12, 2024225. Showers: It's Wet in There
Lords:
CisHetKayfaber
BaseCase
Topics:
Raising third cultural kids as a second cultural individual
Figuring out how to do creative projects that take longer than a weekend when you aren't getting paid for them.
Someone sent me money on Venmo and now I need to sign up for Venmo if I want to have the money
Farmyard Song
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farmyard_Song
https://www.elyrics.net/read/a/aaron-copland-lyrics/i-bought-me-a-cat-lyrics.html
We've been subscribed to Universal Yums for over a year now, and the sweet snacks range from "unremarkable" to "unbelievably great" to "not my cup of tea but interesting", whereas the savory snacks are mostly bad. What's going on there?
Microtopics:
Not being permitted to plug anything.
A unique situation in which you are gendered a lot less.
Australian Treat Arnott's Mint Slice.
Crossover of snacks from Australia to Japan.
Gentleman's agreements among cookie manufacturers.
Patenting your cookie recipe.
Touring school administrators.
Being friends with a lot of Coca Cola people.
Really enjoying multiculturalism.
Producing a good person.
Taking credit for the time your daughter didn't play Mario for six months.
Focusing on the aspects of the situation that you find meaningful.
What does and doesn't count as a childhood development milestone.
Being good at the work people are expecting you to do.
Doing worksheets outside.
What children report back from their experience at school.
Attempting to pirate the Montessori curriculum.
A really fun month.
Projects you can accomplish in a weekend.
Why you don't have more to show for all your free time.
Refusing to call someone stupid or lazy and having to figure out why they're actually failing.
Coping strategies to get things done.
Advice that is not helpful for neurodivergent people.
Breaking a task into subtasks and putting them on a schedule.
The first time you encountered the concept of a to-do list.
Brain tech.
Hammock time. (Or shower time.)
Showers: It's Wet In There.
Exultation of showers.
Watching someone start a hobby and immediately excel at it.
Finding a good community to learn how to do a thing.
Joining a discord with experts in many things.
Learning how to program and realizing that this makes you good at everything because programming is the hardest thing humans do.
Sending money to a phone number vs. sending money to an email address.
Canadians wishing each other money.
Nice things to do when you don't want to defraud people.
Opening a whole raft of phishing opportunities.
Visa getting a cut of every transaction that happens ever.
Whether every person in the world could live in Canada.
The Cocaine Mayor.
A traditional that is credited to Aaron Copeland.
Cats saying "fiddle-eye-fee."
Not being a raging misogynist but engaging in raging misogyny anyway.
The era when the onomatopoeia for a dog barking was "bow wow."
Onomatopoeia that is literal like "bang" vs. onomatopoeia that is more of a stretch like "shimmy shack shimmy shack."
Riffing on Aaron Copeland's sexuality.
Trying to shit enough to keep up with your toilet paper subscription.
A product built for people who have kids but do not have kids.
The mechanism by which the "Launch Frog Fractions 2" button launched Frog Fractions 2.
The great Loot Box crash of 2019.
Snacks that come with an instruction manual.
Ketchup flavored potato chips.
What you reach for when you're feeling snacky.
A potato chip palate that is just far too sophisticated.
Smoked ham potato chips.
Harry Potter jelly beans ruining snacks forever.
Only liking eating things that taste good.
This is bad, but is it bad in a new, interesting way?
The worst kind of bad.
Observing a terrible sprawling work and thinking "wow, you really did a thing here."
The recontextualization of earlier elements based on later knowledge.
Discord Lords.
Listening to ads because you have gloves on.
How to join the Topic Lords discord.
A recently minted lord who edits the show.
Lords Eat Free.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 20 min
February 05, 2024224. Following a Garden Hose Around in the Dark
Lords:
Jason
https://jmac.org/
https://masto.nyc/@jmac
Nathan
Mommy's Best Games Everywhere
Topics:
When I paint my nails I don't paint my thumbnails. This is because I see my thumbnails all day long but I don't see my other fingernails nearly as often, and so every time I do I'm like "Whoa!!!!"
Jukebox griefing
Nintendo farmed out the development of Donkey Kong to an outside dev team, because they didn't have an in-house video game team yet. Donkey Kong was that team's first game. Their second game was Zaxxon.
Hypothetical explanations for the paradox
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bZmUoKct.png
Thinking about RGB color programming for games, then wondering about how the color actually happens on monitors.
Bach drew a loopy doodle at the top of the cover of his original manuscript of "The Well Tempered Clavier". It looks like he was just warming up his pen-hand, but scholars have been arguing for years that it contains secret codes about how to well-temper a clavier
Microtopics:
Interactive Fiction Land.
Panoptikum Budapest.
Bumpy Grumpy's emotional arc.
Frantic Frank.
Men and male-presenting persons with painted nails.
Painting just one fingernail dark green and wondering whether that's a hankie code thing.
What's going on with my thumbs?
Your non-thumb fingernails.
Painting your nails and repeatedly rediscovering them.
Looking like an android. (But in a cool way.)
Forehead loaves.
Starting to pay attention to where your fingers are.
Why not to wear a magnetic nose stud.
Being old enough to remember when you had to walk up to the jukebox to queue up Beat It by Michael Jackson ten times in a row.
Getting into a jukebox griefing war with someone you've never met.
Walking up to the jukebox and typing in the binary code of the WAV file you want to play.
Binary data played back at audio rates.
The math describing Mario's jump arc.
Making the first racing video game and thinking "well that's racing games sorted."
Satoru Iwata's understanding of Mario's last name.
Mario: a weird little dude.
Drill Dozer.
How to run a video game business when games are sold on cassette tape for six pounds which is way too heavy for a video game.
Platformers where you go off the edge of the screen and end up on another screen and each screen has a name.
Inflation hypothesis and the youngness argument.
Earth is purposefully isolated. (Planetarium hypothesis.)
They are here undetected vs. they are here unacknowledged.
Arguing about a sexy robot.
Ironically Sexy Robots
The Fudd Paradox, by Ray Bradbury.
People who just want to toss salad and don't want to know about your weird slang.
Gender-expansive anthropomorphic rabbits.
Blank verse vs. free verse.
Burning Monkey Solitaire.
What your cat sees when he's swatting at Kratos.
How blue is blue?
Watching old episodes of Bob Ross and you can't follow along any more because they don't make Mummy Brown anymore.
The Opaque See-Through TV.
Seeing a see-through TV at CES and asking the guy at the booth what use case is of a see-through TV and he's like "to look cool at CES."
Ribbed monitors.
The secret textures of the Nintendo 3DS.
All kinds of words that you don't know how to pronounce.
The Moogseum.
Bach's looping doodle.
The structure of the J.S. Bach speedrunning community.
A community obsessing over minutia and never worrying about whether it's true or important because it's just some bullshit you made up and agreed to care about.
Hungry music theorists who need human connection.
Sponsoring AGDQ with your clavier etudes.
Black MIDI.
Using up all the claviers in the world during your clavier speedrunning event.
The Fetaverse.
Making an arcade cabinet.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 11 min
January 29, 2024223. Three Hats to Scoop up a Mouse
Lords:
Andrew
https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/
Aubrianne
Topics:
Knitting patterns are open source clothing
This one weird trick will make your videogame feel original
Esper says: "JRPGs are just menu games. Everything that's happening is an option in a menu doing some math, there's almost never timing involved. Why do they have to be 'battles?' I've always wanted to make a JRPG set in 1990 where instead of getting in battles, you're just a band from Detroit on tour. There's probably enough going on that you could make interesting JRPG 'battles' and story and characters out of that. 'Audience response' as an HP meter that goes up instead of down, I guess."
I noticed myself using insert. It turns out I use insert.
https://genius.com/Shel-silverstein-the-garden-annotated
Esper says: "The best summation of Black Mirror I ever heard was: 'Can I have an apple?' 'No, there are only Cyber Apples.' 'Can I have a Cyber Apple?' 'No.'"
Aphantasia but for audiation. Is that a thing?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW3LE8scke8
Microtopics:
Wool socks.
The thing Jim heard about wool.
Making a rope out of human hair.
Whether there are multiple Columbos or just one.
Which one of you is the programmer and which one is the rubber duck?
A human 3D printer.
Keeping your hands busy.
Stim vs. fidget.
How to end a conversation that is not during a D&D session.
Discovering that your entire personality is a coping mechanism.
YarnTube.
The fine line between dressing like a grandma and dressing like a really slutty grandma.
It's a tube. Figure it out.
Doing it badly until you figure out how to do it better.
Making a game that is fun even if it doesn't have health bars.
Instead of doing the easy and obvious things, do something really hard instead.
Why video games have conflict.
Disaccord between you and everyone else in the video game.
Definitely arguably.
Kids learning from people who are not their parents.
Smashing a bunch of things together until fun emerges.
It's not a game where you jump over pits and it's not a game where you hit people with swords so what even is it??
Dating anime ladies by clicking through text.
A caveat among recommenders.
Video game dialog that makes you feel conflicted about shooting Nazis.
Remembering people's tweets.
The Rule of Thirds of video game dialog.
Executing a bad idea very well.
No One Weird Trick for learning to play cello.
The insert key as part of your typing repertoire.
Whether pause/break still works.
A keyboard without the LinkedIn key.
Getting your grandma online.
Pushing the pizza key on the keyboard and the CD-ROM drive opens and there it is.
Rifled plumbing that allows sewage to flow in a clockwise spiral while clean water flows in a counterclockwise spiral and they never touch.
A surprise poem where none of your fruit is food.
How to make a poem fit on Pinterest.
No combat in my poems.
Doing your best to make a good thing but never thinking your own work is good even after you experience great success.
A grocery list with a Black Mirror twist ending.
Having money in Venmo but you need to sign up for Venmo to get it.
Listening to a thing if you want to know what it sounds like.
Anauralia: the silent mind.
It takes your whole brain to be you, it doesn't have time to be other people too.
Not watching Black Mirror so that you can believe everyone when they tell you lies about Black Mirror.
It was Emma Thompson all along.
The difficulty of remembering Maggie Gyllenhaal.
Getting ripped while sitting motionless at your desk.
That fat jiggling machine from the 50s.
A weighted hula hoop to massage your guts.
Jorts Horse.
A bunch of millennials shitposting.
Trying to distribute your games locally by stapling a floppy disk to a telephone pole
Microtransaction pump games.
Sneaking into an arcade with a new arcade game in your back pocket and furtively shoving your new game between two existing arcade games.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 13 min
January 22, 2024222. Barkley in Retrograde
Lords:
Chris
Esper
Topics:
Geocaching
The Miyoo Mini and other handheld emulation consoles
I still think I could've made it as a highly paid Super Mario Bros. 35 coach. I should've gone for it.
There's Not a Person Alive by David Donihue
https://medium.com/@daviddonihue/theres-not-a-person-alive-poem-by-david-n-donihue-a1fcd714cc99
The strange semiparasocial relationship between a podcast editor and the people on the podcast
Struggling to relearn high school Spanish
Microtopics:
The editor of a podcast.
The #1 podcast for topic fans.
Chopping at some audio until it becomes a podcast.
Editing a recording into a podcast that's nothing but ums, mouth smacking noises and uncomfortable silence.
Zoom dynamically sensing when you're saying something dumb or boring and muting you.
Saying yes with the Sonic ring noise and no with the Sonic taking damage noise.
A cozy pleasant show full of fun facts.
Prepping for a paradigm.
How to put audio on film.
Going on a web forum and receiving a quest to find a magnetic box stuck underneath a metal staircase.
Geocaching on the Moon.
Geocaching vs. Geohashing.
A French pun for your board game night that nobody can remember because it's in French.
c:geo.
Finding a geocache by climbing a tree and pulling a paperclip attached to a fake piece of bark.
What to do if you're the one who picks up a travel bug.
Fake bolts where the center unscrews and it's hollow inside.
Developing a sense for when a geocache is nearby and always being wrong.
Miyoo Mini Plus.
Custom firmware that fixes your terrible handheld game system.
The Dream of the Playdate.
The Anbernic R something something letters numbers.
C-ctrl.
Going back to the Tekken 3 well.
A video game bar in Japan that only has Americans in it.
A very reasonable number of video games to flip through.
Emulators with daily runs.
Multi Bowl.
A game that legally can not exist.
Johann Sebastian Joust and its meta.
Getting one point in Rampage.
Advice that can literally no longer be helpful for anybody.
How to be an effective Goomba.
Looking at Jim's win/loss ratio and being inspired.
As Garfield said, "nothing good can stay."
A stainless soul lying inspired.
Bad experiences shared by every human.
A very smooth-brained day
Rampant poetry plagiarism on TikTok.
A food ASMR video where someone is repeatedly stabbing chicken with a fork.
Videos of hamsters running in wheels while listening to Dragula by Rob Zombie.
Whether the fish enjoys playing Pokemon.
A sweet 16 bracket of Best Kinds of Shark.
Rerecording the Topic Lords jingle with a swarm of bees.
The qualifications required for the person who designs electric car backing up noises.
Which apps to use to help you remember Spanish.
Speedrunning High School Spanish.
Learning Japanese from anime.
A 24/7 Livestream of digital cats lying around the house.
Hallucinating new languages around the house.
52 Pickup with Gita Jackson and Alex Jaffee, about the most important comic book series of this century.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 14 min
January 15, 2024221. Fisher-Price My First Right Click Menu
Lords:
Chris
Alex
Topics:
Living without software updates
I like Cyberpunk 2077
I had a friend who would argue with the people collecting signatures in support of a proposed law. Not about the proposal itself, but the methodology behind it.
PIECE A SHIT, possibly by Sam Pink
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Kl_AeoXl.jpg
Microtopics:
Lords of Topics.
Asking your mom if this Thanksgiving turkey is Frog Fractions 3.
Haiku Hero.
How to talk to the press.
An email from the guy who sent me the quirky thing from before.
The Last Biceps.
Filling your house with electronics that continuously ask you to do things.
How to interact with the Internet on an old un-updated computer.
Snap craft something or other.
Turning off Windows updates for over a year and nothing bad happens because security best practices are bullshit.
Visiting twinbeard.com to find out about the beads in Jim's ears.
Searching Google for the little balls in your ears.
Your phone popping up a window saying "you're a year and a half out of date, would you like to update?" and hitting the back button as fast as you can.
Windows updates adding AI functionality to MS Paint.
Making uneducated guesses about how someone else's code works.
Searching for a program on your computer and Windows gives you Bing results for that program's name.
A sneaky hacker man doing non lethal takedowns.
Making a complicated video game and then patching it into a completely different complicated video game after the guides have all been written.
Trying to explain to someone why the story of Half-Life is cool and realizing halfway through your explanation that it's not that cool actually.
Cool things that build immersion.
A guy saying "have a seat" and a contextual actionicon appearing over a chair.
Voluminous closets full of costumes for virtual dress-up.
Delivering exposition in cars.
All the weird things people will put on their body in the cyber future.
A fictional city halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Recovering a stolen painting by showing a satellite.
A city with lots of neat stuff to do.
Querulous Friend's Advocate.
The Everyone Gets a Pony Initiative of 2023.
Filibustering people collecting signatures in front of the grocery store.
How much do you believe in the political causes you're promoting?
Watching your friend play games in a little window on your second monitor.
Mr. Feeny recording car AI voices.
Getting into World of Warcraft because you are stressed about starting a new job.
Level 1 Superman killing rats to collect 10 rat pelts.
Fun ways to fight crowds of mooks.
The things you see on your limbs when you see your limbs.
Replacing all the mirrors with cyber mirrors.
The doctor pulling out your cyber eyes and putting them in a drawer and all you can see is the inside of the drawer.
Lost games dev techniques such as palette swaps.
A screenshot of a book.
A poem painting a picture of a time and place.
Maybe Sam Pink.
Writing a bunch of messages to someone and making their phone vibrate every five seconds for a full minute.
Notification throttling.
Fanciful technological panaceas.
Ultra poetry where each line has animation and timing.
Making a word wiggle in a sine wave to indicate that it's a spooky ghost noise.
Poem Lords.
Seven poems on the itinerary. (But we'll only have time for three of them.)
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 13 min
January 08, 2024220. An Oral History of Men Riding Cats
Lords:
Abby
https://abbydenton.podbean.com/
Michael
https://www.tinybarbarian.com/
https://dawnoftimecomics.com/
Topics:
That moment when the podcast ads don't play
Lobsang Rampa
I had a dream where I needed to recolor my teeth. Why don't video game character creators support this?
"I've Been Writing You A Poem," by Abby Denton
Cats you can ride, pre-He Man
Microtopics:
Cyber Cafe.
Tiny Barbarian DX.
An exciting new way to give me money.
The gamut of barbarian sizes.
Learning the power of chat from Alan Partridge.
A podcast deciding that you're not worth advertising to.
Launching into the jokes and the fiending.
99% Inaudible.
Elvira's lawful good rival.
Sugarhill Oiljack.
Roundtree's fruit pastilles.
A more colorful playful treat time.
The comic book guy sizing you up and stapling appropriate ads into the comic you're buying.
Finding out a lot of very interesting information about Texas Railroad Commissioner and forgetting it all immediately.
Page after page of ads and then a back cover.
A hardcore Bush-era ad explaining that Klonoa's gonna kill your mom.
Two Dollar Groos.
Writing a fan letter to the guy who letters Groo the Wanderer.
Groo ASMR on GrooTube.
A man in the 50s. (And the 60s.)
A plumber from London who found success writing books about Tibetan mysticism.
What English sounds like to an Italian speaker.
Prisencolinescionalciusol.
Lobsang Rampa getting an extra bump from people misspelling Danganronpa.
Painting your teeth mother of pearl.
The Xbox 360s mii knockoffs.
Breath of the Wild's NPC faces.
Mr. Potato Head Plug and Play Mouth.
Mainly a tooth-oriented game.
Dentists wearing a back sack over their head.
How dentures happen.
Insulin price caps.
Explaining to the nice lady who works at the grocery store that the company she works for is monstrous.
Trashy people in all walks of life.
Why shouldn't I be able to give Bayonetta missing teeth?
Post-hoc nightmares where they only upset you after you wake up.
The bladder comes to me, I don't go to the bladder.
Changing the scansion on the fly.
Writing a poem for a relative who won't appreciate it.
Whether children only like 3D animation now.
Whether it's cheaper to do 3D or 2D animation.
Wanting to play with the person you see even though they can't step out of the phone.
People who love being perceived.
This poem's threen.
Vamping about an ambiguous number because of diabetes.
Feeling shaky even though you are not shaking.
Fat cats in Washington and what they're sitting on.
Two people in the universe with perfectly incompatible needs.
The only member of your family who didn't go into the hard sciences.
The giant cats in Tom and Jerry going their weird shifting their muscles walk.
A mockery of a crown.
There he is; the poopy man.
Thinking of a man riding on a cat.
The Lure of the Basilisk.
The Gandalara Cycle.
Teleport vs. New Body.
A big cat-riding opportunity.
Riding around on a cat made of pure vinyl.
How did Cringer get like that, Prince Adam?
Little jokes you do with your partner.
Wingor, Trunkor and Unkor.
She-Ra taking it back from the boys.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
January 01, 2024219. Jeff Bezos's Butthole Guy
Lords:
Jay
Jenni
https://youtube.com/@kiwami-japan?si=z03WRlRnur883JkN
Topics:
The dying art of learning a skill on a message board, such as pixel art or having long hair
The Baldur's Gate 3 butthole chart
https://www.reddit.com/r/BaldursGate3/comments/16dlml1/behold_the_chart_ever_made/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VGhcSupkNs8
Is giving people ideas helpful?
https://itch.io/jam/picostevemo
James asks "Why is configuring the thing more enjoyable than using the thing?"
I read one time that the way you know if you live urbanly or rurally is if you live in the city you know a place and if you live in the country you have a guy
Microtopics:
Three people with social anxiety.
Your left ear not working at the post office.
80 people in a post office screaming at each other.
Keeping your broken item and just buying another because you don't want to go to the post office.
Naming your band after a way to transmit audio.
I'm good that they're exist.
Getting your New Year's Resolution off of the Mastodon Tooter.
Finding a kid at Applebee's to sit next to.
Forming a seal on your face when there's hair.
A hip burger or hot dog joint hanging a sign saying "Take it to Squirts-Town" over their condiment counter.
An app to track how much emotional load you've dumped on each friend recently.
Preparing to hold space for your feelings.
Going outside and banging on pots and pans at midnight.
Getting really into Casey Kasem's Rockin' New Year.
Getting twelve grapes and trying to eat a grape on every bong of the clock.
How far apart are the bongs?
Whack it for a huge dong!
The second message board you signed up for. (After The Sims.)
Entirely abandoning the idea of drawing with your hands.
The Three Tile Rule.
New Year, New Wife!
Being approached in a Trader Joe's by a guy who runs a message board for men with long hair.
How to find people to follow on Cohost.
Searching for a technical issue on the internet and finding a post on a message board asking your question and the answer is to "google it."
Message boards about tying knots.
A ghost giving you a hug.
Shadebobs and searching on Youtube for shadebobs.
Shadebob Squarepixels.
Turn-based speed runs.
Oxygenarian runs.
Starting with meat. Ending with meat.
Whether it's okay to do a Butthole Chart for people who are still alive.
The Shade of the Butthole.
Special people with hairy buttholes.
When God asks you to bring him 50 buttholes, what body parts he'll accept as the butthole.
Butthole purism.
Personality traits that correspond with butthole traits in popular culture.
What to do if you don't like the shade or the smell of your butthole.
Going on T because you want a hairier butthole.
Whether billionaires are real people.
The Butthole of Dorian Gray.
Hiring a person to take care of your butthole situation.
Making eye contact with the guy who cleans Jeff Bezos's butthole but you can't stop and help, you have to catch your train.
PiCoSteveMo outcomes.
Self-driving taxis paving the entire planet.
Suggesting ideas as a way to make sure nobody will implement those ideas.
Receiving a new CD for Christmas in the post-Napster era.
What we can still use as stocking stuffers now that CDs and DVDs don't make sense any more.
Your life partner going through a Brandon Sanderson phase and giving you a huge Brandon Sanderson book to read.
What you call the plug that goes into a plug.
Getting paid to learn to solder.
Deliberately introducing mpeg artifacts into a video stream.
How to troubleshoot a motherboard now that they don't beep any more.
How many Intels they're up to now.
A memory of fun that you can't go back to.
Awful Fantasy.
Putting a foul-mouthed rom hack on your SNES Classic and then forgetting that happened when you give it away to your friends' kids.
Imagining how great a product is going to be while you're buying the product.
Asking for a toy for Christmas even though you know you'll never make time for it.
Going to a friend's house and seeing a bajillion guitar pedals that you can't afford.
Giving your guitar pedals away to someone who'll actually use them rather than just reselling them.
Hanging out with the kind of person who's playing Rock Band in 2023.
The only generation that learned how to use computers.
Worrying that the five year old computer geniuses are going to hack your foot so you can't walk.
Living in New Holstein Wisconsin and needing psychic healing.
Living in the city and having a place you go to for hot dogs vs. living in the country and having a guy you call for hot dogs and he comes to your house with a suitcase full of hot dogs and a USB-C grill.
Moving to the country so you can hang out of the hot dog guy.
A place that's not even really a place because you can't catch Pokemon there.
Two Guys and a Place.
Bringing independent gas stations their coffee.
Yacht Man Cologne.
Stuff You're Not Allowed To Eat dot com.
Arguing with GPT-4 until it agrees that your Garfield dating sim idea is ethical.
Putting on your face shoes.
This Is Cake Bread!
Tholen vs. Tholen.
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1 hr 16 min
December 25, 2023218. Darmok and Jalad Go to White Castle
Lords:
Stevie
Avery
Topics:
A tour of silly medieval musical instruments
The House of David, the baseball cult who all looked like oldtimey barbers.
Arguing with Winston about how needing to pee works
Avery's Non Mammalian Milk Corner
Ode on the Mammoth Cheese Weighing over 7,000 Pounds
https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/ode-mammoth-cheese-weighing-over-7000-pounds
Microtopics:
Why the show works like that.
Asking people if they understand what's going on.
Spy software.
Exactly the kind of game you don't want to explain.
Someone who has a sense of humor and thinks something is funny.
A hat you can put on your frog.
Why frogs are so damn popular.
The game with the magnifying glass.
Whether the recorder is a real instrument or a crappy toy for babies.
Just how thicc this bass recorder is
The supercomputer that's also a couch.
Talking to your mom on the phone for 45 minutes because she can't stop listing medieval instruments.
Recorders that are double recorders.
Michael Fassbender teaching his clone how to play the flute.
Eating a pair of garden shears.
An umbrella handle that was given growth hormones that sounds kind of like a stylophone.
An instrument that is curved so that you can play it on horseback without bonking the horse.
The sackbut.
A selfie stick but for a trombone.
Sausage bassoons.
Unholy Rackett.
How long how many strings look it up?
Insufflation tubes and dudelsacks..
Versatile, like the Pogues.
Bears riding unicycles but not very well.
Overblowing.
Jim the Overblower.
Bringing up bugles to someone who works hospice.
How many songs you can play on a bugle.
Not wanting to play Beatles Rock Band because you with at BevMo.
A photo of an early 20th century cult/baseball team that looks like a modern-day metal band.
Not being able to make it to the majors so you settle for House of Dave.
Someone who's never played Blaseball trying to explain Blaseball.
Amusement parks started by cults.
A pretty good way to end a baseball league.
Additional amusement.
Preserving tiny railways built by a baseball cult.
A busy man who has no time to pee.
Peristalsis.
Persons currently experiencing hubris.
What happens to your knowledge when you're not actively thinking about it.
When you can truly say you know the capital of the United States.
Waking up needing to pee and trying to fall back to sleep so that you forget you need to pee.
Having a dream about urinals overflowing.
Cutting nature at its joints.
Preparing for Topicking.
Whether the Jejune Institute made money.
When Sacky Meets Butty.
Signing a contract in someone else's blood.
Yet another non-mammalian milk.
Jacked, yoked, ripped and swole spiders.
Imagery that's only unsettling because you don't regularly drink spider milk.
Vestigial web butts.
Sympathy for the young.
Putting on a spider silk dress and never being able to take it off.
A communal spider butthole web.
Blinded by the milk, wrapped up in a douche.
The first boutique New York restaurant to serve spider milk pancakes.
Cutting out all the parts where people say something dumb.
Drum Pants. (It turns your pants into a drum set.)
We have seen the a Queen of Cheese.
The worst rhyme scheme.
A poem that screams 5th grade.
Why does this web site have line numbers?
Are you a bad enough dude to save the president's cheese?
A poetic technique that can be really cool (but not in this poem)
Confusing this mammoth cheese with another mammoth cheese.
The most mammalian of all mammals.
My Mother Milked a Million Mostly Male Mammoths.
A huge ice cream tub carried by four ponies.
35 tons of milk
Extremely fake beards.
A thing people once said to sell chicken.
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1 hr 4 min
December 18, 2023217. Rotate Your Plate Breakage
Lords:
Maxx
Nick
Topics:
Puzzmo
I'm worried about my tableware rotation strategy
Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennigaldi-Nanna's_museum
It Was A Coffin That Sang, by Olena Davis
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/xBLG36yN.png
Microtopics:
Instead of giving someone a business card, stamping your information on them so they have to call you before they take a shower.
Where's George?
George isn't here. George was never here.
Canadians looking forward to when they can walk around with King Charles' face in their pocket.
Giving the barista a coupla chucks for a cup of coffee.
Money with RadarSat on it.
inaturalist dot org.
Taking a photo of a weird plant with a weird seed pod.
The fantasy of collecting information.
The game where you try to name every street in San Francisco.
Running all the streets in your city over the course of a decade.
Games Genie.
Lexicographic Ordering and Time Travel.
A sanctioned topic. (It's on the list.)
Wario Ware presenting you with a full sized crossword and giving you six seconds to solve it.
A fun little histogram.
Finally implementing the letter T.
Doing the crossword on paper and making your daughter enter your answers into the app.
Will Shortz coming out of his orb to carry out a hit on a competing puzzle.
Fugue Orbs.
Comparing the interface design of Connections and Red Herring.
Things Relating to Wonder Woman.
Extremely well SEO'd pestilences.
Arranging your dinner plates in a stack vs. in a queue.
Using all your plates evenly so they all break at the same time.
Rotating the Stock.
The dangers of Low-Sodium Perpetual Stew.
Default plates from the food service factory.
Airplane boarding algorithms and how to convince everyone in the terminal to follow yours.
Plates that are made for using.
A whole Jefferson, in your Republic dollars.
The urge to queue.
Lanesplitting your backpack.
History: it's a lot older than we think
Ancient cash registers.
Pranksters organizing the topic bucket.
How many museums deep are we?
The human wife.
Efficient.. Successful. Human.
Top five lists of your life.
How small a flavoring agent has to be to be considered a spice.
A twelve foot tall statue of either Zeus or Poseidon.
Myth- and Nationhood- Making.
A museum where you can feel wood cut with various tools.
Hearing about a cool metalworking museum but fixating on how the bathroom works.
Cool Bathroom Ghost.
The toilet commenting on your performance.
Piping bookshop noises into your bathroom.
Robert Stack's Solved Mysteries.
Being sad and trying to have a good sadness.
Michael Brough talking about his design process.
Fun exercise vs. shitty boring exercise.
What to do about the world ending.
Driving in circles around the McDonald's drive-thru ordering more and more coffee until they catch on.
Telling a joke on Twitter and an archaeologist getting it 1000 years from now.
The world's oldest joke.
A fart joke from 1900 BCE.
Reconstructive historical linguistics.
The linguistics of swearing and taboo.
Eater of bees.
Top five stanzas.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min