Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

December 11, 2023216. I Forget What We Do but We're About To Do It
Lords:
Tyriq
Jay
Topics:
I recently moved and I think I understand Having Stuff more now.
Teaching my 3-year-old to use a mouse and keyboard. Kids learning software being a ghost of its former self.
Interface traps
Yelp! Review for God by Willow James Claire
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/ib998beS.jpg
Starting a YouTube Channel for kids and the lack of useful information on the topic.
Microtopics:
Ben and Jerry's Cookie Dough ice cream.
Washing the ice cream off of the cookie dough ice cream and baking cookies.
Snacking dough.
Living on your own and owning silverware for the first time.
Losing a fork that they don't make any more and having mismatched forks forever.
A hodgepodge of styles.
Different spaces each with their own internal consistency.
Going to your ex-roommate's Halloween party as a guest for the first time.
Parties that you can leave.
Finding out you were right about what you thought you'd like.
Moving house in an hour.
Your kid banging on the keyboard to write nonsense messages in discord but he forgets to hit enter to send so you have to do it for him.
Teaching kids to read by giving them a Kindle tablet.
Typing "stop" fifty times in notepad.
Dell Rugged.
What Mavis Beacon is up to nowadays.
Computers as the exciting future vs. computers as the boring shitty present.
Getting a laptop without a touch screen so your kid can learn to use the mouse.
Different ways to not understand folders.
Whether the problem is that Gen Z doesn't know what a folder is or whether it's that they sometimes still need to know what a folder is.
Apps that appear to be native apps but they're secretly running in a web browser.
Coming into possession of a child.
An overworld where you can walk in 8 directions and bump into NPCs.
Boots Quest.
Auto Shooting Survival.
Roguelike Turn-Based Auto Shooting Survival.
Mini Yoto.
Using the insert key on purpose.
The Jay's Wife of Scroll Lock.
The two Smush tracks on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack.
Why there are separate shift and caps lock keys but no separate toggle insert and hold to insert keys.
Sticky Keys.
Caps lock keys that physically toggle.
Toon Boom Harmony and other way too expensive subscription software.
Can't draw can't see pencil in toon boom reddit
Lock the taskbar, lock the taskbar.
The pros and cons of different start menu orientations.
Getting kissed in the vegetable aisle, so to speak.
Talking about dungeons and dragons and getting something slightly wrong about dungeons or dragons.
The laws of physics preventing you from kidding boys.
On the one hand growing up as a trans poet in Arizona. On the other, drinking a whole lot of strawberry kiwi kombucha.
Four out of five stars for inventing an extremely dry mouth.
A dry, scratchy, sandpaper cat tongue.
A song about a ghost eating toast.
Watching your kid watch things.
Where to put video content on the internet.
Ideas that are occluded by ideas that are better search-engine optimized.
Whether librarians are scarier in Germany.
Combining three people with social anxiety to make one really big person with social anxiety.
Fixing kids software for 100 people because it's too hard to fix it for the whole world.
X for Extreme.
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1 hr 14 min
December 04, 2023215. Taffy Arbitrage Tips
Lords:
Ben
JohnB
Topics:
Game & Watch Gallery
Halloween's never on the weekend, so I made Novemberween
Square mattresses
Eight Line Poem
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVqNJKQiPCA
https://genius.com/3143344
The most entertaining bit of the new Spider-Man 2 game has been sitting on a bench
Microtopics:
Fellow Traveler.
Citizen Sleeper: at least one person's game of the year.
State fair taffy.
Where to find seasonal taffy bargains.
Terrifying taffy flavors.
Single game LCD handhelds.
Gunplay Yokoi.
Withered technology.
The RC car that can only turn left because right was cut for scope.
Games where things are bouncing across the screen.
Tiger Electronics Double Dragon.
The earliest, most boring Game and Watch game.
A fun clock that's fun to watch.
Putting your face as the juggler in Ball for the Game Boy Camera.
What they did before d-pads.
A Print the Legend situation.
Mario Bros II for the Commodore 64.
Porting Game and Watch games to card stock.
Releasing a floppy disk reader for the Game Boy Advance in 2023.
Mario's Bombs Away, in Panorama Vision.
Moving slower the more gold you're carrying.
Toad walking across a bunch of seagulls.
Trying to get 16 player Faceball up and running.
The Burger King vs. Hungry Jack's era.
The Lost Lost Levels.
The most polite pumpkin head person you've ever met.
Inventing a new Halloween that happens the first weekend after Halloween so you can get candy at a discount.
Implicating the viewers in your terrible horror movie marathon.
Terrifying cakes with spooky words on them like "mortgage"
Tammy and the T-Rex.
A spooky guy in a helmet who races people in his car (and kills them)
Putting pieces of Stonehenge into circuitry to make children's faces turn into bugs.
A movie about a cat that vomits up another cat.
A very spooky four dollar pumpkin man.
Neglecting upkeep on your house for thirty years to celebrate Halloween.
Novemberween every Sunday.
How to celebrate Labor Day.
Rotating a square mattress 90 degrees.
Going into the mattress store and unrolling the amount of mattress you want from the spool and getting it cut to order.
Alternate reality How It's Made videos.
The Manchester Department.
Super Passive Aggressive Xenomorph Roommate Irritation Simulator.
Rolling the dice to determine which side of the cube mattress you're sleeping on tonight.
Rotating the tires on your racecar bed.
Asking the cat for poem opinions.
Sometimes the sun is just the sun. (Not this time though – it's David Bowie.)
Plugs within plugs.
All the different games named "Spider-Man 2"
Using your Spider Radar to track down the next objective.
A video game where you go on a holiday to Greece and stab a bunch of people.
The distressing absence of Mario Odyssey 2.
Finally, a Super Mario game you can finish without hating yourself.
A grown-up with adult things to do, like cooking bacon and receiving mail.
The Trophy Seller in Nier Automata.
Kosmology Hungry Jack.
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1 hr 4 min
November 27, 2023214. Oh Shit! That Guy's Got Horse Legs!
Lords
Daniel
https://www.cocoongame.com/
https://kbones.itch.io/dorks
Alexander
Topics:
Octopus dreams
Perception of memories. Why does actual recency and percieved recency often seem so at odds
Hike on 58
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45087/sonnet-18-shall-i-compare-thee-to-a-summers-day
World of Warcraft over the years / WoW Hardcore Mode
The highest honor you can receive in mathematics is to have your name uncapitalized.
Polywater
My brain is polluted by trochaic trimeter recognition
Microtopics:
Preventative care.
COVID lucky streaks.
Being able to go to the ER.
How to spell Cocoon.
Moth guys carrying orbs on their backs.
Boss battles that you wouldn't expect.
Wilford Brimley's agelessness.
Octopus nightmares.
The octopus equivalent of rapid eye movement.
Meeting sapient crows and asking them whether Y or Z should be up.
Which memories stick better.
Perception of time when you have a routine vs. when you don't.
Arranging your life to maximize perceived lifespan.
Different ways to have an adventure.
Shooby doooby doggie.
A sports rule that sounds like a 17776 plot point
Why the Bob Emergency is an emergency.
The best quarterbacks getting stuck in an endless hike and football ending forever.
The one person who hasn't played Frog Fractions but just listens to Topic Lords because they like topics so much.
Summer's lease.
Reading a poem aloud without knowing what "ow'st" means or how to pronounce it.
Words that used to rhyme but don't anymore.
Meter recognize meter.
Writing all your sonnets during COVID lockdown.
A poem about a dude that Shakespeare is not in love with.
Woe is me, etc.
Piss Jugman vs Piss Jugm'n.
Making phonetic reforms that don't take.
Smoothing off any rough edges or peculiarities.
Permadeath taking inspiration from real life.
A fun thing that you wouldn't have expected to see.
Enjoying spending time in the world.
Hold the W key and cruise through it.
The difference between wanting something vs. liking it.
Abelian.
The opposite of how you would think honor works.
Great honors: brands hate them!
Whether to capitalize "lynchian," "kafkaesque" or "quixotic"
Eternal abstract universal objects.
Teaching truck drivers where to put their piss jugs.
The highest honor Piss Jugman can receive.
The surname Piss.
What is the average Piss lifespan?
A real life Bobby Tables moment.
The Polywater Gap.
Water that scientists have sweated in.
Buying a can of Soviet Scientist Sweat in a Japanese vending machine.
Polywater intoxication.
Liquids with a lower freezing temperature than water.
The Polywater Doodle.
A metabolism described by Richard Feynman.
Brain Pollution.
The particular meter of the first line of Aqualung by Jethro Tull.
Singing "parallelipiped" to the tune of Aqualung.
Hearing random phrases in your life.
Spelling "yogurt" backwards.
Trying to understand the New York Times' effect on man.
A killer rap album based on alliteration rather than rhyming.
Poetry that rhymes on the second to last syllable rather than the last.
The baffling cosmology of Butter Dorks.
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1 hr 6 min
November 20, 2023213. Urine-Based Interactions With the Scientific Community
Lords:
Erica
Ryan
Topics:
Dog Bone Facts
We went to Cuba
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candidatus_Desulforudis_audaxviator
https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/avoid-the-noid/
Cancelling Texas: Praise the Sun
My sister has played video games her whole life and somehow doesn't know about [the thing everyone knows happens in Final Fantasy VII] and I need help shielding her from this knowledge.
Microtopics:
The COVID booster as a form of recreational drug use.
Puking, but not for the listeners at home.
The only way you can know if you're doing well.
WavHog.
Trying a lot of things that aren't working out.
A chat log that's organized poorly.
An ever-growing cacophony.
The million dollar web page.
Buying ad space on a web page that's entirely ads.
Gordy and the Monster Moon.
Little Buddy mode vs. Little Nemesis mode.
Making a noise whenever you wonder about something.
The sound of the aurora borealis.
The Northern Lights explaining to you how many bones are in a dog's body.
Peeing on your equipment to keep the foxes away.
Maintaining curiosity about things.
Burying a question and seeing if it comes back to you.
Recording a podcast even though you don't know anything.
An information strategy that is much more enchanting than looking things up.
Leaving through your journals.
Tannish white hair.
Burying a dog bone so that it grows into a dog bone tree.
Farms with no distinct edges.
Cholera vegetables.
Inventing your own COVID-19 vaccine.
Putting a whole country in a snow globe.
Tube ham.
Drinking a soda branded "your ass."
Knight Anoles.
Gerrymandering Florida to fix Cuba.
Lord Kensingtonitis.
A bacterium named after a Jules Verne quote.
The only known organism to exist in an ecosystem containing only itself.
A biome that's just a bunch of clones of you making a go of it together.
Slurping up radiation from the good good surrounding bedrock.
All the little guys out there being interesting.
The credentials you need to call yourself a scientist.
Which bacteria are most bothered by their Wikipedia pages.
Everyone's MRCA.
Meteorites throwing amino assets into space.
Extremely grabby carbon.
Moldy bathtubs all over the universe.
Little Buddy mode but for bacteria.
The works of Florence P. Wordsmith.
The origin myth of the Noid.
Whether the Noid is wearing a suit or if that's just his skin.
Yo! Noid and Yo! Noid 2: Enter the Void.
A layer of water that's waving up and down.
Empathizing with how the Noid sees the world.
Writing a poem about the Noid and, instead of hiding it in shame, putting it on the internet for all to see.
Getting a game over before you finish the first level but at least you killed a lot of seagulls with a yoyo.
The sun making a big X over Texas.
Drilling for oil in the Permian Basin.
The last total eclipse of the sun of our lifetimes.
Checkmate, scientists!
Solar noon.
Grab your glasses and get lookin'!
Meeting Topic Lords all summer.
Going sightseeing to find out where all your gasoline comes from.
Going to see the solar eclipse or just closing your eyes to get the same effect.
A big pile of polygonal Doritos killing another pile of polygonal Doritos.
Making sequels to the Final Fantasy 7 remake.
The porn web site named after a Final Fantasy 7 plot point.
aerisdies.com vs. aerithdies.com.
Retransliterations.
Husbands who are dead (asleep).
The option that makes you look like less of a douchebag.
Watching a Final Fantasy documentary before you watch it with your girlfriend to make sure it won't spoil a major character's death for her, and it shows the death onscreen but you missed it during the vetting process, but it's okay because she couldn't visually parse the Playstation-era graphics anyway.
Sending your sister to media literacy classes so that she can understand when Aeris dies.
A pile of snack chips fighting each other.
Showing Star Wars to kids who have never seen it but know every plot point in advance.
A priceless Ming vase that has never been perceived by human eyes and everyone thinks it's an idiot and Erica wants to save it by calling it up on the phone and smashing it.
A big red button you can push whenever you want.
The only time you've ever been accused of underthinking something.
Putting your first name and last name together to make a person.
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1 hr 24 min
November 13, 2023212. Back in My Day, Kids Actually Crossied the Road
Lords:
Mitch
https://janmisali.tumblr.com/
https://www.seximal.net/
Andrew
https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/
Topics:
Super Mario Bros. Wonder is the first mainline 2D Mario game since... (how many Super Mario games are there? update)
Original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XejJ6PzPtEw
New survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScsj0Yibs4rJjHWjIRVb3wwHsgVS64qYOAoUWqRwrXEfgVeag/viewform
Owning the domain emailfordogs.com for some reason
When I took my driver's test, a kid ran out onto the road in front of me, I braked, and the proctor made a check mark on his forms.
Love in the Age of Google by Brian Bilston
https://brianbilston.com/2018/08/
The Burrito Run (a form of physical exercise)
The WarioWare series has become increasingly story-driven in every game since WarioWare: Snapped! (DSi, 2008)
Microtopics:
Your names.
Jokes that have or have not been done.
The real Jim Stormdancer. (On my birth certificate.)
A game which has no sequels.
Pizza Panda dot Pizza.
Cultivating an audience who loves clicking links.
A polling feature that is great for polling people.
Why not use one thing? Just have one place where you post everything.
How to make your audience stop clicking links.
358 games that might or might not be Super Mario games.
A game called Super Mario Bros. Something.
All the different years there hasn't been a new Super Mario game since.
A controversy, but not one people care about.
New guy just dropped: guy who gets in arguments about whether New Super Mario Bros. 2 is a mainline Super Mario game.
Super Mario Bros. and Friends: When I Grow Up.
Super Mario and his friends discussing what career paths they might take.
Looking at all these MS-DOS colors.
Brian A. Rice, Inc.: it's just a guy!
Mario games for MS-DOS.
A Mario fan theory that has been disproven extremely recently.
Princess Peach and Princess Daisy having a conversation about something other than a man.
The description of Daisy in Smash Ultimate trying to come up with convincing reasons why Peach and Daisy are different people.
New Super Mario Bros. Mii.
Super Mariologists studying Super Mariology.
Super Mario Bros. Special.
A smeary snapshot of your mind.
A Mario game that was extremely expensive to make.
Working on a game until it's ready.
If you like Mario games, then it's one of them. If you don't then it's not.
Super Mario Bros. Tudor.
Super Mario Bros. Oneder.
Getting email for dogs at emailfordogs.com.
A hobby you used to be able to have.
Enough people making up fake emails for their dogs that some them send email to your fake dog email domain name.
Rip the old spacejam.com.
Space Jam: a New Legacy.
Reusing apacejam.com to capture all the people clicking on novelty domain names that redirect to spacejam.com.
A very small scale conspiracy, between one driver's test examiner and one child.
Being too flustered to deliberately fail your test.
A checkbox on the DMV test labeled "did not assassinate my arch rival, whom I now owe five dollars."
Back in my day kids actually Crossied the Road.
A smoke made with the fume of sighs.
A poem that scans as a poem.
A million monkeys using a million trackers.
One extremely busy monkey using a million trackers.
A new form of physical exercise.
Terraforming the hill to make your exercise routine more effective.
Copylefted exercise routines.
There are very few perfect things in life but this is the perfect exercise routine.
Dogs who are like dogs.
Dog theory.
What's more habitual than eating lunch?
Mathematical proof that all horses are the same color. (Except for the horse of a different color.)
Booger joke fart joke silly game.
A history of storytelling in the Wario Ware series.
Wario's hiring process.
A thing that happens after Wario puts a toilet on his head.
Why the latest Wario Ware game has microgames in it.
The Wario Ware employee who joined the company because he was such a big fan of previous games in the series.
Nintendo games that implicitly support unionization and fan-fiction.
The man who was too many Marios.
Hearing Wario speak in full sentences.
A thing that is nothing to write home about but writing home about it anyways.
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1 hr 11 min
November 06, 2023211. Window-Peering Jim Checking Out Your Cats
Lords:
Cort
https://a.co/d/iRrEZcy
Elena
Topics:
My due date is literally tomorrow
Dogme 95 for web development
Visits from the neighborhood cats
Potato, by Jane Kenyon
https://poets.org/poem/potato-0
Cooperative board games are hard to design
Space themed coop trick-taking card game: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/284083/crew-quest-planet-nine
Building a conlang generator from the phonology up
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonority_hierarchy
Linear algebra cursed conlang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ze5i_e_ryTk
Microtopics:
The Be Real App.
Posting your mortifying skin condition for all the internet to see.
Being born.
The Dance Dance Revolution song "20,November," by Earth Wind and Fire.
PiCoSteveMo.
Tossing around hastily drawn concept art with your team.
Being born, again.
Having a kid for someone else.
Eating cigarettes off of the sidewalk.
A grab bag of thousands of possible pregnancy symptoms.
Literacy as a symptom of pregnancy.
A visceral reminder that you are part of a long chain of humans.
Which came first, humans or birth?
The comfort of the humans who are still around having individual experiences even after you die.
Tips n Tricks for dealing with fear of death.
Inviting dead people onto the show.
Asking for more pro-death art so you can feel better about death.
Pro-life, in the literal sense.
Flowers and mushrooms growing up through the bones.
Returning to the universe to nurture it.
Dumb Ways to Die.
Sum: 40 Tales from the Afterlives.
Thought experiments about something weird that could happen.
The Egg by Andy Weir.
Covering birth and death in the same topic.
Looking at photos of yourself from five years ago and thinking "oh shit!"
I am choosing to no longer have conscious experience, mom. You wouldn't understand, mom.
Swedish with a mouthful of potatoes.
Dogme 95.
Enpoopification.
A protocol for exchanging information on a computer.
Rewinding to a kinder, simpler web.
Avoiding all this gestures at the world
New rule: no web servers more powerful than a Raspberry Pi.
The cool thing that was on the web in the mid-90s.
Making art and putting it on the internet and getting a fan base.
The teenage gamer comic series making a comic about prostate exams.
Sharding the internet.
El Goonish Shive.
Anime hammers that you do when someone is being a pervert.
Coming to personal revelations regarding your neurodivergence or gender situation.
How to be a successful artist.
Not knowing if your favorite webcomic had ads because you use an adblocker.
Working at your parents animation studio as an inbetweener.
Merging your cats into one cat.
Neighborhood coyotes.
Cats beyond the reach of fear.
Window-peering Jim: he's just checking out your remodel.
Putting a GoPro on your neighbor's cat and livestreaming the inside of their house.
Cats with amazing life stories that they'll never tell you.
The consort of coffee grounds.
Making shepherd's pie for an entire hamlet.
A possibly accidental double line break.
A line break corresponding to a conceptual boundary.
The Story of Mel: a Real Programmer.
Adding left angle brackets to the start of every line until word wrap makes it a poem.
Blackout poetry.
Pumping gas as an element of Cottagecore.
A hamlet is just a city in New Jersey.
The fireworks on your forehead game.
A game where everyone stops talking.
The Yelling Game.
A dedicated period of yelling.
Space-themed trick taking games.
The Spaceteam card game.
Coming up with a set of place names that sound like they're from the same culture.
Assigning syllable groups to a morpheme.
Asking Claude.
Interpolating the obvious things.
The Sonority Hierarchy.
A gradient from less vowel-like to more vowel-like.
Cursed Conlangs.
Generating syllables and mushing them together.
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1 hr 5 min
October 30, 2023210. Good Ideas for Sam Barlow
Lords:
Andrew
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1658150/Moonstone_Island/
Kate
https://tunicgame.com/
Topics:
British food is good, actually
Really enjoying programming in MonoGame (and stop motion animation)
Lightswitch abstraction limit
Un petit d'un petit
The Old Timey Computer Show
Trying to get your friends to play a game that sucks to learn
Winston has discovered that the ending of a story is usually the most exciting part, so he doesn't want to watch whole movies any more, just the last twenty minutes of each
Microtopics:
Moonstone Island.
A tiny fox in a big world.
Cherry blues.
Something within your culture that is awful and bad.
Whatever can grow in the wet and dark. (Potatoes.)
Cool Whip based salads.
Yorkshire pudding. (The fluffy one.)
The non-spicy gravies.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt's roast potato recipe.
Lamb going with mint and pork going with applesauce.
How to eat Vegemite or Marmite.
A man at the end of the table whose entire job is to carve meat for you.
A place to take your picky grandma to eat.
Bodega cats and bodega kids.
Doing stop motion animation as a goof.
The fun part of Dunning Krueger.
Doing a magic trick without knowing how the trick works and amazing yourself.
Leaning into the good times.
Accidentally getting good at an employable skill.
Flailing at the wall until the light switches are in the right position.
Off: just a different kind of on.
Doing your first pull request.
The fountain pen of the version control ecology.
Getting a bunch of little plant men to turn the lights on and off for me.
Poetry written in nonsensical French that is homophonic with English nursery rhymes.
An entire book for a very specific kind of nerd to have a sensible chuckle.
Allowing yourself one E, as a mistake.
A joke written back when people knew what am omnibus was.
Vintages footage from 1980s computer shows.
Dousing CD-Rs.
The Free Cake and Donuts Half-Hour.
Getting as many 35+ computer dorks as you can under a box before you pull the string.
Making two children fight each other on the British equivalent of Crash Bandicoot.
A policeman on a unicycle.
The imagined experience of programming the ZX Spectrum.
The other Cambridge.
Mac PCs.
The Oliver Twins.
Turning on all the shaders to make your programmer art look good.
Finding three extra Dizzy games in the attic.
Trying to tell your friends about a family tradition and while you're telling them you realize how messed up it is.
A pile of 500 cards that should really be a computer game instead.
A rule where every time you play a card you have to sigh a little bit.
A game where you torture your friends.
A food with the letter E in it.
Trying to have fun despite your friend who is making you play the game.
Have you guys heard about conclusions?
A bunch of stuff happening and then there's a riddle.
The Go Left Problem.
When games have secrets.
Pushing at the edges of a game and the game pops up a dialog saying "I noticed you pushing at my edges."
A password named "Susan."
A DVD where every interface to start the movie starts it at chapter 2 and chapter 1 is a secret.
Reading just the last word of a book.
Watching the first episode and the last episode of a sitcom and trying to guess which actors missing from the last episode died and which went to prison.
How to find your Mastodon name.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 14 min
October 23, 2023209. Do Caterpillars Anticipate?
Lords:
Will
Chris
Topics:
Canoes
Blowing soap bubbles with your hands, making cricket noises, "party tricks"
nissan.com
Nothing Is Too Small Not To Be Wondered About, by Mary Oliver
https://thevalueofsparrows.wordpress.com/2017/05/20/poetry-nothing-is-too-small-not-to-be-wondered-about-by-mary-oliver/
Would zombies try to hide the fact that they were zombies?
Magic
Microtopics:
Soda Drinker Pro for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Finding someone to port your game to NES via LinkedIn.
The Vivian Clark Experience.
Making certain contortions slightly easier.
Rock climbing. (Not a topic.)
The Phantom Lapboard.
The Only Viable Product. (OVP.)
What if you could mouse and keyboard on the couch?
Growing up in a canoe family.
Paddling vs. rowing.
Carbon fiber paddles for canoe racing.
Waterwalker by Bill Mason.
Your favorite memories of a kayak.
Waking up in your kayak to see a snapping turtle staring at you.
Floating up and wiggling all over the place.
Kayaking to lunch from your office.
Living in a ski cabin and your office is at the bottom of the mountain.
Living at a Lagrange point and your office is at the bottom of the zipline.
Boston Unity Knights.
Doing a game jam every month for four years.
Knowing enough people in your field that you no longer need to network.
Five really worthy zero-hour games.
Making a therapeutic horror game.
Going to a terrifying party in an abandoned train tunnel and finding a burned-out police car.
Questionable poisonous air filled with unknown tunnel organisms.
Doing mouth stuff in VR.
Making the soda line up with your mouth.
The Ferris Bueller water drop noise.
The thing where you play a blade of grass like a reed instrument.
Cheek-flapping noises.
Magic tricks vs. Party Tricks.
Inhaler magic.
Twenty levels of spinning pens.
A different horrible knife game.
A game about chopping off fingers named "Chop the Finger."
Shooting arrows in the air while your friend run away.
The keyboard shortcut for finding someone to port your game to NES.
A web site where you endorse people as thought leaders.
Entering the LinkedIn cheat code on Xbox 360.
Porting your video game to a robotic arm.
Making it move when you think about it.
Uzi Nissan v. Nissan Motors.
It can happen to you or someone you know!
Picturing conceptual rabbit holes in your head.
Sylvester Stallone's Mom's web site.
Sylvester Stallone's mom doing palm readings of your ass.
All our favorite apps, such as buffalo wings and boneless spare ribs.
Thinking about a cricket's interiority.
Putting some nature in your poem.
Using cricket noises to tell what temperature it is.
Having the same number of wings you've always had.
Do any bugs make a plan.
Leaving "I gave up" pheromones
Leaving a map of a physical space in the space.
Sizable ants.
Fewer scorpions than you'd expect.
Putting a bug into your awareness.
Pseudoscorpions hanging out on old stuff.
Little guys in random places very occasionally.
Zombies going to Whole Foods.
Going quiescent until a dude walks by with a tasty-looking scalp.
Painting a brain on your helmet to fool the zombies.
A short-hair wig taped to your grandfather's basketball.
Dropping your scalp like a lizard tail and the zombie shakes your scalp back and forth in its teeth.
An analyst commissioned by a think tank to write a book explicating how to deal with the zombie apocalypse.
Sound Reading Trainer.
Having a bunch of magic props that you never show anyone how to use.
The casino OJ got arrested at.
Tommy Wonder.
Reviewing a product on YouTube without ever showing it or saying what it does.
How stage hypnosis works.
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1 hr 21 min
October 16, 2023208. E.T. Shot First
Lords:
Hallie
Tyriq
Topics:
People really like potatoes and I don't get it
I wear shorts now.
Why are these ants on my desk?
The go-getters of predawn gym
Non feathered dinosaurs in the public imagination
Esper says: Magic: the Gathering does have feathered dinosaurs as part of its mesoamerican-inspired setting, which look cool as hell. Not all of them are completely covered or anything, but Gishath is a good example of how to make a dinosaur look really intimidating and powerful while still having feathers. https://scryfall.com/card/xln/222/gishath-suns-avatar
McPop
Microtopics:
Not counting the Zelda game you made.
Mashing up the hummus beans.
Tahini texture.
Garbanzo merengue.
Cutting-edge vegan technology.
Making video games until you learn better.
The freezer popsicle that's just a tube of flavored water.
Potato struggle sessions.
Curly fries versus seasoned curly fries.
A waste of a hearty food that should last longer.
Century potatoes.
Burying a potato in the ground and setting a peat bog on fire.
Taro chips.
The bag in the grocery store that says "veggie sticks" and there's a picture of fresh vegetables on the bag but inside it's just potato slurry fried into stick form.
Anti-shorts positions.
A tattoo in a conspicuous place.
Showing up to a game jam in a Voldo harness.
A tattoo that makes it look like you've been scratching a rash.
Getting a cool tattoo and starting going to the gym because you want to be worthy of the tattoo.
A slovenly dude in a fedora getting a sick tattoo of a slovenly dude in a fedora.
Yakuza style tattoos except it's all video game shit.
Leaving an olive under your desk.
What the ants are into lately.
House Ants.
Storehouses of finger dust.
Letting the ants have the olive.
Mice with an exoskeleton.
Sitting on a toilet made of ants and instantly becoming one with the ants.
A bottle of Ginger Ants.
Extremely tangy abyss.
What is in my mouth? What is in my bed?
Rolling a ball of goo over your keyboard.
Finding some good goo and keeping it to yourself.
The validity of shipping yourself with things.
Merging your cats.
Motivated brothers.
Waking up at 5:30 to go to the gym.
Go-gettitude.
Chronotypes.
Expressing all the aspirational aspects of yourself.
The only person flexing in the mirrors.
Why is this young teen here so early?
Pretty ripped. (For a child.)
Giving up on waking up before dawn and becoming the kind of go-getter who gets later things.
Reconstructing dinosaurs based on what people think they should look like.
Semi-mythical creatures. (That actually existed.)
Microraptors that are slightly melty.
65, with Adam Driver.
An interesting concept, executed poorly.
The Pepsisaur.
Adam Driver running away from horny dudes crawling around in mocap suits and the test audiences hate it so they CGI in some horny humanoid dinosaurs.
Having kids and patching ET so the government agents don't have guns and then after your kids grow up, patching ET so they have extra guns.
Twelve gauge flashlights.
Lemmings but with babies.
One of each type of eye.
Eyes that are so human looking that it kind of fucks you up.
A reverse The Fly situation.
McPopHouse.
The Junta of Tralfaz.
Picking up a new key and trying it on every locked door you've ever seen.
Pressing insert to empty your sexual tension meter.
Back before Microsoft Word owned the .doc extension.
A hoary pld PD Turbo 3.0 include file circa 1985.
Sentences from shareware documentation that have been in your head for 30 years.
BBS Doors.
Legend of the Red Dragon.
Reprising your role as Olmec.
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1 hr 2 min
October 09, 2023207. Muppet Bird Generation Ship
Lords:
Lesley
Nathan
Topics:
Thinking of survival shows like Alone, is "wilderness survival" a sport?
Regional differences in the tone and caliber of NextDoor posts
Pastry arbitrage
The Light That Shines When Things End
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/bOfIPmqs.png
Wild takahē (TAH-kah-hay) have been reintroduced into the mountains of New Zealand
How are we feeling about the Boston Robotics advancements? Welcome our new robot overlords or not?
Microtopics:
Hyper Light Breaker.
Bumpy Grumpy.
Recording a podcast from inside a toilet.
Fishtank bubbling noises.
Assigning a point value to eating reindeer lichen.
Eating your belt because someone famous ate their belt once in the 19th century.
Starving contests.
Calling in an air drop for your favorite outdoor survivalists.
The reality show where a guy is living alone in an apartment scouring thousands of magazines for offers of free stuff.
The "it's a living" joke.
Pez Guy.
Trying to redeem Pepsi tokens for a fighter jet.
A boiler room full of people tilting soda bottles.
Weary cereal mascots.
Hippies living in a canyon until Topanga emerges.
Making a Nextdoor post about a guy peering in your window and the replies are like "it's cool it's just Window Peering Jim checking out your remodel."
Making a Nextdoor post about finding a baby goat and what do I do and a reply saying "you need to call the Goat Goddess" and another reply saying "I'm the Goat Goddess and I can help you."
Encouraging microcultures.
Surfacing positive comments to the top of Youtube videos.
Using technology to steer people away from being terrible.
Writing a story about a guy with a sword.
Writing a parody of bad fanfiction and building Minecraft worlds to support your world building.
Whether jokes are funnier now or if old jokes are just out of fashion.
Trying to relate to the kids by saying "I can has cheeseburger?"
How art used to happen before copyright law fucked everything up.
The dudes at the farmers market selling tomatoes that are obviously from the grocery store.
The farm with a sign that says "come pick pumpkins at our pumpkin patch" but the pumpkins are just sitting on the ground and by pick they just meant "select."
The Quasi-Authentic Experience.
A pumpkin velcroed to a vine.
A large hill. (Not a mountain.)
Making the light a liar, at least until your mid-thirties.
Ruining an otherwise amazing moment.
A Minority Report precog murder kind of situation.
Whether the light has a bell too.
A poem that's just a shower thought if you think about it.
Taking the eggs to an incubation center.
Muppet Bird flavor.
Cutting open a cookie monster to reveal the cookie layers inside.
Seeing the Cookie Monster's leg in the window of the butcher shop.
The roast chicken saying "It's a living!" as you slice it up.
Robots that sound like bees.
Slipping on the ice and hearing the bees.
Whether fun robots are even scarier than serious robots.
Moxie the child companion robot.
A dog named Spot and his SDK.
Too loud, too scary, too many bees.
People who can pollinate.
If it's empty, fill it with bees.
Memes that the kids don't think are old because they have fallen out of the cultural memory entirely.
Still being on Twitter because you have games to sell.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 12 min