Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

October 02, 2023206. Waiting Around for Laundry To Be Invented
Lords:
JP
Styger
Topics:
Wouldn't mind hearing Jim's thoughts on the recent Super Mario Bros Wonder video
Souls departing / cartoon ghosts
You're supposed to use a "spacer" with inhalers now
Probably not a full topic but I finally ate that apple I was hyped for in my fist Topic Lords appearance
Questions for a more experienced musician about learning to play piano + songwriting
How do we teach our children to pirate?
Microtopics:
The flu shot.
Your TV patching itself.
Going wading in a bog until laundry is invented.
Dying of smoke inhalation until someone invents the chimney.
A topic for Jim.
Soliciting Mario opinions.
Murdering an 80s kid with Mario footage.
Squat anime Link.
Mario with a grappling hook.
Mario with asynchronous co-op partners.
The new Mario game bringing the real freak shit.
Developer quality of life.
The unfortunate mythology of the industry.
Getting to the moon more sustainably.
Mike Mika's Donkey Kong gender swap mod.
Big globs of ragu flying out of rotoscoped pixel men.
The evolutionary dynamic range of AAA games.
The boringness of violence.
Realistic present day modern warfare.
Making garbage that makes the world worse forever.
Wanting to see your medium grow.
A puzzle platformer using a first person shooter interface.
Reaching a little bit for a different thing.
Dealing a little bit of damage to a wall.
A door turning a corpse into a squished blood paste sprite.
Pikmin 3 as the most honest war game.
No Dead Pikmin Speed Run.
Getting more stuff back to your onion.
Revisiting game mechanics from throughout the series.
Outgrowing your childhood diseases.
A big plastic cylinder the size of a breath.
Audio iconography saying "look at this dickhead"
A bong for your inhaler.
All the surfaces between the air and your bronchial tubes.
A major change in inhaler technology.
Putting a bunch of programmer time into making conference calls sound good.
Respironix Optichamber Diamond.
Algorithms to cancel out the Mentos Jingle.
Finally trying the new apple varietal on your birthday.
Haphazard produce sections.
Heapsorting apples.
This apple is going to make you its bitch.
Bad mealy apples in the 80s.
Banana lore.
As Seen In Snopes: Verified Not Bullshit Fruit.
Getting the gist of a song and being able to do your own thing with it.
Making noises that sound like nice music.
Learning to play guitar while waiting for your maps to compile.
Edly's Music Theory for Practical People.
Learning to which suspicious-looking websites to trust.
The Golden Age of Scams.
oldversion.com
Spiffy new Windows NT computers.
Streaming services that you refuse to give money to.
Doers of Game Piracy.
Public opinion turning on piracy and copyright.
Information literacy.
The surviving websites where you don't mind being found.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 22 min
September 25, 2023205. It's Cool to Get a Letter
Lords:
Alex
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSjSkaBRD7k&list=PLBk6-z6v3pDKi3Q-9MeqUfupJswozircH&index=7
John
Topics:
That time I spent 4 days fasting in the woods
Twins! Coming soon! Ahhhhh!
The Zelda 1 second quest
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/806592-now-the-world-has-gone-to-bed-darkness-won-t-engulf
Microtopics:
Joyful communities.
Whether discord logs can be subpoenaed.
Encoding all your mail in ROT13 to keep them safe from the snoops at the NSA.
Finishing with your DSP design work so your employer sends you into the basement to make cardboard boxes.
Someone in the early 2000s with a high pitched voice.
Remembering your grandma's phone number from when you were six but not remembering any phone numbers since then.
Thinky Puzzle Games.
An Alan Hazelden thing.
Tom Brown's Tracker School.
Going into the woods and sitting in one spot for four days.
A good, productive, safe time.
Keeping control of your emotions.
How to know when to stop.
Doing a ritual at sunrise.
Having animal encounters.
Trees dripping water on you.
Doing the most boring thing for four days straight so you can never be bored again.
A really cool thing to do in your twenties.
Sonic showers screaming at you until you're clean.
Lacking the experience to understand what's coming for you.
Going through some shit and loving it.
What if it all works out?
The experience of knowing twins.
Taking advantage of the Groupon for college tuition.
Hanging your fears on milestones.
Taking your parental leave consecutively.
Daycare as a microcosm of communal living.
Showing people what you're working on.
Making a living putting your kids on social media until your kids get old enough to express that they don't like it.
Wearing a shirt saying "I do not consent to be photographed."
A conversation with a five year old about scrub jays.
Sharing media with an allowlist.
Setting permissions on who can see your photos.
Sharing photos with your family by handing out USB drives.
A visual novel that is extremely interested in your personal financial information.
A pen connected to a matrix of hundreds of other pens so you can sign your name hundreds of times at once.
The Zelda one-second quest.
Naming yourself Zelda as a shortcut for understanding this topic.
Naming your character Zelda without understanding the consequences.
Red bubbles that take your sword away.
An obvious door that you can walk through.
Iwata Asks.
Accidentally using only half the space available.
Zelda randomizers.
SMZ3.
How to make Super Mario World a metroidvania.
Marvin putting in work.
Capturing a particular level of snark.
Reading books in high school that you won't understand until you're 30.
The California Raisins as the sequel to the Grapes of Wrath.
The kind of person who works really hard in high school.
Xanthan gum.
Trochaic something or other.
I had a theory about music and then I made all these friends!
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1 hr 9 min
September 18, 2023204. Defrag My Colon
Lords:
JohnB
CisHetKayFaber
Topics:
The human body is more similar than I'd like to shitty software (humans have chitinase in our DNA, immune system works like an antivirus)
The origin of hiccups
https://derinthescarletpescatarian.tumblr.com/post/723161770948231168/okay-so-the-thing-about-hiccups-is-that-you-have
Twenty years ago there were like three real books about videogames that weren't strategy guides and now there are hundreds.
"untitled" by Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz
https://allpoetry.com/poem/13310612-Prostetnic-Vogon-Jeltz-by-Bollox
TV shows that have inspired original mathematics - yes, it has happened more than once
Microtopics:
Whether it's okay to catch up.
Air conditioning on hot days.
A steel mill catching fire and the whole east bay smells like the back of a cathode ray tube.
Shaking yellow sand out of your laundry.
Importing brushfire smoke from Canada.
Using bad metaphors to explain RAM.
Stochastic immunology.
Alphabetizing all your gut bacteria.
Whitman's Anal Sampling Mechanism.
The Bonzi Buddy of the human body.
Your inkjet printer waking up at 5am to cycle some ink.
The optimal humidity to reflow your ink cartridges.
Norton Commander.
Selecting files with the arrow keys and viewing them with F3.
How Thunking ruined Jim's Norton Commander clone.
Your fish nervous system trying to be a fish again.
Reciting the anti-hiccup poem to cure your hiccups.
Fish reminding each other to not take ten small sips of water or they'll stop breathing.
Scaly swimmers.
Working in a shark lab.
Whether a fish sandwich is a fish or a sandwich.
Offering people a "tuna roll" and when they say yes guessing whether they think you mean the sushi or tuna salad on a bready roll.
Meditating on the concept of hiccups.
Congratulations, you won the game!
How to Beat the Atari Home Video Games.
Where a library would shelve those books of type-in BASIC programs.
Dave (2018) and Dave Demo (2018)
Which Boss Fight Books are good.
Starting your kid on Mario Maker.
Game Engine Black Book: Doom and Game Engine Black Book: Wolfenstein 3D.
Mario Galaxy's camera-oriented level design.
Your body telling you when it's time to drink water.
Using Final Fantasy 4 as a bridge to talk about localization.
Developing a light gun game to install in all the bowling alleys now that the bowling fad has faded.
The Countdown to Irrelevance.
Books that used to be blogs.
Inventing criteria for how you beat Galaga.
Learning what micturations are twenty years after reading that Vogon poem and wondering which seeming nonsense words you'll learn in the next twenty years.
The BBC TV Hitchhiker's Guide series.
The second-worst poetry in the galaxy.
Red Dwarf airing on Dave.
A better way to think about it. (If you are a math person.)
Drive-by Mathematics.
Nesting your watch orders.
Watching every episode in every possible order to get the maximum possible amount of context for every scene.
Marylin vos Savant.
The Monty Hall Problem.
A game design that presumes the player does not want a goat.
Whether you want to switch to the other goat.
Opening 98 doors, revealing goats behind each one.
Pushing limits and talking about calculus.
Learning Japanese because you want to read the smutty manga.
X: The Everything App.
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1 hr 11 min
September 11, 2023203. Only Girls Get Duck Combs for Christmas
Lords:
CisHetKayFaber
Phone
Topics:
Correction regarding a previous topic where I stated that Metal Gear Solid 2 was the most important game of 2023
https://twitter.com/othatsraspberry
Children cannot be trusted to enjoy things, and maybe that's fine
This list of extremely specific danger signs
https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/720069329613357056
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Tkr719yF.jpg
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/9unswnr6.jpg
"Bank Account" by Louis Cole
https://genius.com/Louis-cole-bank-account-lyrics
Technical beliefs you have which may be regarded as superstition, but are true to your experience (I'm convinced my new microphone is worse)
Microtopics:
The part where Jim talks.
Splitting your mutuals.
The kind of person who goes to Bluesky vs. who goes to Mastodon.
A relationship with an editor. (Like Emacs.) (Or Vim)
Wanting to see what Shaq posts.
The human zoo of bad takes.
Who sent Shaq a Bluesky invite??
O' That's Raspberry
Metal Gear Apologies.
Sending Konami money to fund the port of Metal Gear Solid 4.
Optimizing for extremely specific hardware and getting entrenched.
Shaders languishing on PS3.
PT's final resting place.
Konami diversifying into video games in the 80s when it's lucrative and dediversifying when it stops being as lucrative in the 2010s
A lot of weird business practices involving Slurpees and banking
All the places the Vita port of Metal Gear Solid 2 went on to.
The Worlds of Power novelization of Metal Gear.
A Narpas Sword scenario.
Cutscene inflation.
What happened to cutscene lengths after voice acting became cheap.
Encoding movies on a disc for free.
Time to Crate vs. Time to When Your Input Matters.
Ramen waterslides.
Annoying things that little kids do that adults also do.
Playing video games and parenting at the same time.
Whether it's still abuse if it's happening in the Netherlands.
Expectations people place on their children for Christmas vs. for Halloween.
Distorted beer.
Getting a bunch of stuff you don't want for Christmas.
A sweater with Mario or a cool dinosaur on it.
Swapping the Barbie and GI Joe voice boxes and whether that's a plot point of the Barbie movie.
Chewbacca dancing on top of the twin towers as they collapse.
Taking wire cutters to the electrical substation and getting some free copper.
I don't feel 130 kilovolts; I'm a perfect sphere.
Creating a situation where people are safe even if they're not paying attention.
Flying around in a tornado googling "what do you do when you're flying around in a tornado"
Is it .webm or .webnn?
All the three letter acronyms that ought to be on the internet rug you can't get.
The giant System 7 floppy disk blanket.
A blanket with the Mac startup sound on it.
Missing out on some drum solos.
A poem based on a true story.
Being afraid to look at your tax returns.
Getting single taxed and double social security benefits.
Replacing your old snowball with a new snowball.
Your thing as a person trained in audio engineering.
Getting a very insensitive microphone so that it only picks up the sounds you want it to.
Jim's advice for recording your voice.
A Shure SM-57B with the Cloudlifter.
Technical knowledge for smart people.
Solid state drives failing without warning.
A high pitched whine imparting a natural warmth to your voice.
Recording your voice with a $15 boom arm.
Using shittier tools as you get more experienced.
A cover of a Weezer song that's rendered unlistenable hematite l because of the string squeak.
The inability to process and retain information about LinkedIn's purpose.
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1 hr 9 min
September 04, 2023202. Tim Was My Jim
Lords:
Mark
Shirley
Topics
Lawn Angst: Why does the city get to decide what is a weed vs an acceptable plant?
Learning to code is like a cheat code for life, or at least work
Poop epidemiology
https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/720886587343454208
Insomnolence by Charles Rafferty
https://poets.org/poem/insomnolence
Ville asks: "buying mysterious items that aren't labeled in a language you speak from the Asian supermarket because the picture on the front looks good, then choosing whether to roll the dice by putting them in your dinner or keep them in the back of the cupboard until you move house and throw them away"
Microtopics:
Chamber Mage.
Touring on the strength of your one song.
Heartstopper, by Alice Oseman.
The city issuing a ticket because you have a weed on your lawn.
Declaring certain plants weeds when they're all good plants, Bront.
All the different signs you could put on your lawn to tell off your neighbors.
How tall a CB tower you're allowed to build without a permit.
The youngest homeowners on the block.
A natural space that isn't so manufactured.
A society that loves some plants and hates others.
How to grow flowers on the moon.
Making 660 folders based on an excel spreadsheet.
The stick-to-it-iveness required to fight a bunch of bugs.
What LLMs are good at and bad at.
A Dragonborn Paladin with aphasia.
Generating humans with too many fingers.
Where to post your Wordle results and Dall-E shitposts.
A cryptic lineage of COVID in Columbus, Ohio.
Gross but amazing.
Some seriously bad-ass science.
Expecting more diligence after you start paying your volunteers.
The Paxlovid Rebound.
Gin Gin Ginger Chews
Genetically altering your tongue to taste the most possible bitter flavor all the time.
Placing a ginger chew on your tongue and allowing it to dissolve over the course of an hour.
Paxlovid Mouth.
How to sleep with a cough.
Numbing your coughing agents.
Stashing the lozenge on your gums.
Waking with a hard candy stuck to your teeth.
Scarring your vocal folds by coughing as much as you can.
Poets: good at writing in a poetic way.
Poetry that's just prose if you think about it.
Turning a poet in to the authorities for writing prose.
At night, in the woods.
Standing here a thousand years ago and feeling the exact same thing.
Not being able to upgrade our armor any more because bokoblins are extinct.
Finding and giving up on a new ingredient every week.
RIP Bean Paste.
H-Mart.
Gooey Duck.
Buying a bunch of dumplings without any idea what's in them and having a tasting party.
A tiny freezer with only durian in it.
A smoothie that tastes like drinking a gas leak.
Jackfruit as a crab or pulled meat alternative vs. jackfruit as a tasty treat.
Getting foodstuffs stuck behind your soft palate.
Asafoetida risks.
Golden Mountain Sauce.
Brown Umami Boosters.
Fish sauce tastings.
Three Crabs vs. Flying Lion.
How to say "Serving Suggestion" in all the different Asian languages.
Loving all your listeners, even the problematic ones.
Throne of Iron.
Heavy metal music about D&D.
Finding yourself on the internet.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 16 min
August 28, 2023201. Don't Be Distressed, It's Just Australia
Lords:
Alex
Shannon
Topics:
Tree law
https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/721716818422677504
https://www.tumblr.com/whistletown/723346723280453632
Tax Heaven 3000
When I was a kid I read about a magic trick where if you touch your index fingers together and cross your eyes, a disembodied third finger appears between them.This is the kind of thing we had for entertainment in the 80s.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/156405/outbreaks
Best food byproducts
Microtopics:
Exhausting topics before the show even starts.
Should we give bee educators guns?
Lords with lord awards.
Megalords lording over huge swaths of topics.
Getting your partner a very smooth engagement ring so it hurts less when they punch you in the face.
Trimming a tree in the middle of summer.
Tree law consequences.
The Hitman games, you know, with the bald guy
Whether Hit People are hired to kill likable or dislikable people.
Games with missions designed to make you feel bad about what you're doing but also to give you no choice but to do it.
Injured while sl searching for bodies in Lake Mead? Demand compensation!
A cute anime girl who really wants to help you prepare your taxes.
MSCHF.
Calling the Key 4 All hotline for real time data on the car's location and speed.
Playing Geoguessr to determine where the car is.
Reverse engineering the smell of WD-40.
Using the car for purposes of a car.
The legal standing of Public Universal Car.
Don't rotate the donut, you gave to rotate the pie
Legal MSCHF.
Taking the SATs for money.
Writing a list of demands in a child's scrawl and sending it to your senator.
Seeing the Vienna sausage with knuckles.
Getting a book of Magic Eyes in the 90s and staring at it until you see the dolphin and having a splitting headache for the next day and a half.
A jump scare in Magic Eye form.
Why we all need glasses.
Listening to your dad listening to a podcast.
Disappearing your own nose.
The purpose of feeling boredom.
The impossibility of being bored when libraries exist.
Paleolithic man enjoying memes.
Why campfire smoke always blows into your eyes.
Building a prehistoric highway system and using one of those printers that prints on the road so paleolithic man can enjoy dank memes.
What kids get in their stockings today now that iTunes gift cards are obsolete.
Why keep any DVDs?
A common metaphor for a problem that can be overcome by relaxing.
The most racist shrimp.
It's not a firearm, it's just an explosive knife.
Begging your mom to buy you the Krazy Krabs.
Putting on a brine shrimp show for your family members.
A spring loaded rigid whip.
Kitchen Somebody.
Searching for comfort and the eels come.
The neon 24 hour fried chicken sign gleaming behind the pines.
Finding god in a cluster of eels beneath your palms.
Have you given god a pizza?
A different eel pizza meme.
All the Breaking Bad fans coming to your neighborhood and throwing pizza on top of the Pizza Eels for a photo opportunity and the eels are getting extremely fat.
Feeding the sharks by stuffing a dive suit full of chum.
A cooking process that creates a byproduct that you can use to cook something else.
Calling bean juice "aqua fava" and styling.
Browning the whey to create a delicious paste loaf.
The two-in-one, in which they put two taquitos into a burrito.
Glorpamole.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 6 min
August 21, 2023200. My Banana Has Bones
Lords:
Jenni
Tyriq
Topics:
King Leonardo and His Short Subjects
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/WesternAnimation/KingLeonardoAndHisShortSubjects
Nervous Subject
https://sims.fandom.com/wiki/Nervous_Subject
Subject Zero
https://masseffect.fandom.com/wiki/Jack
On the Subject of Poetry By W. S. Merwin
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=26014
Royal subjects
Subject 13
https://www.mobygames.com/game/84773/subject-13/
Microtopics:
The only place on the internet you can hear subjects discussed.
Subject Lords.
Finding video games in places that don't exist.
Renaming the spreadsheet to the Subject Bucket.
A hand me down Rocky and Bullwinkle bedsheet set.
Rocky and Bullwinkle indoctrination.
How many seasons the Flintstones ran for.
The Classic Wikipedia Was.
Wacky Racers.
Whether Winston has ever tried Circus Peanuts.
Enjoying one Circus Peanut every three years.
How to buy just one Circus Peanut.
Sawing a nickel in half before money became pre-scored.
Whether jokes were funny in the past.
Two troublemaking nephews named Duke and Earl.
Mr. Mad's plan to trap the king.
One actor playing more than one character all in one take.
Somebody the Explainer.
A Nancy strip where the joke revolves around knowing that people used to take their shoes off in movie theaters.
Show Swap day at the movie theater.
Waiting in the closet for the grim reaper to show up and then jumping out and being really seductive.
Closet-pilled.
Multiple people dying in the same yoga class and the grim reaper just sticks around instead of leaving and coming back.
Yogaing while old. (YWO.)
First name nervous, last name subject.
Born pregnant by aliens.
Nervous Subject vs. Nervous Object.
Pressing X to wisecrack.
Getting quests from Lord British and killing some monsters.
The Vic Viper and the Road British.
A pop culture character who hits the center of the Venn diagram.
Writing Mass Effect fanfiction for Glittermitten Grove
10,000 Boolean variables that can be triggered by your narrative choices.
Narratively justifying how getting a donut leads to your death.
Generating alive/dead states for everybody.
The tortured but boring space marine guy with a tragic soldier past that isn't very interesting.
The girl who is just a cloud of gas under her hazard suit.
The man who slouches listening to the wheel revolving in the stream, yet there is no wheel there to revolve.
The reason the wheel turns – though there is no wheel.
Sitting at the end of March.
Deckard Bane.
Hortatoriness.
How do we feel about monarchies?
Tropical fruit tree drama.
The Miami Fruit Organization.
Ordering a moonbeam in a jar from Instacart.
Where in the fruit the seed wants to be.
The banana that evolved for the seed to pop out and hit you in the face as soon as you start peeling it and that's how they invented firearms.
Figuring out how to hold an avocado like a gun.
Fruit with Velcro-style hook and loop.
Fruit you should avoid if you have a mucous membrane.
Subscribing to durians for $199 per week.
Turning the pineapple upside down.
The pineapple as a symbol of hospitality.
A video game with many of the components a video game would have.
The taking robots from the System Shock series.
A pre-rendered background Final Fantasy 7 type deal.
Cinematic platformers starring spheres.
Conflating two games made by Francophones.
Namable group chats.
Getting a Bluesky invite just so you can park your domain.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
August 14, 2023199. The Hum of the Universe Sounded Like a Bug Zapper
Lords:
April
Ryan
Topics:
John asks "Puzzles/puzzle games and challenges you find pleasant and brain-expanding vs. the ones that you just cannot get your head around."
Which foods would be the most fun or the least fun to eat if you rotated them at a 90 degree angle first.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/184633478236
The Shaggs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XR9d4ESlpHY
Instructions for Traveling West, by Joy Sullivan
https://joysullivan.substack.com/p/how-to-leave-a-life
Songs that we completely ignore how weird they are because they're famous already
Microtopics:
Unions
Plug guilt.
Mentoring young composers.
Saying smart stuff about things you know about.
Taking the W.
A high pitched ding whenever someone succeeds at something.
A Good Snowman is Hard to Build.
Into the Breach.
Pushing the Vek to a different square.
Making something in your environment more satisfying.
A squid with your kid.
Colors that have frequencies vs. compound colors.
Indigo: a fake color.
The banger heavy duty colors.
A range of frequencies that is culturally mediated.
Paint mixing vs. light mixing.
Exploding ancient dinosaur juice constantly.
The electricity magic vs. the valve magic.
What does it mean to explode?
How to tell the difference between things you know because it's common knowledge vs. things you know because it's what you obsessed about when you were 15.
Having a responsibility to the taxpayers to not be wasteful.
The science of what sounds good.
The most confusing music you've ever heard.
Food rotation.
Imagining you have a banana coming at you. (It's not scary.)
Biting it the way we bite it.
Burrowing through your hamburger top to bottom.
Living with the mayonnaise for 30 seconds.
What happens when you turn a taco 90 degrees.
Ike's Paradox.
Eating a rib straight up and down.
Pizza sandwiches.
Explaining to your dentist that your bottom jaw is a ruinous cavern because you eat ribs top to bottom.
Adding a thickening agent to soup so you can turn the bowl sideways and just shove your face in there.
Buying the Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like Batman Crying just to flip it.
A li'l cute ghostie with ears.
Affection for bands that are bad.
A rock album recorded by three kids who have no interest in or aptitude for writing and performing music.
Art that lives at the very tips of the horseshoe ends.
High fashion and weird looks that aren't meant to be for everyday.
Music that sounds bad in a way that you don't recognize.
Music that is boring and propulsive at the same time.
Music that is not for listening to.
Threatening your wife with a conversation about Beatles chord progressions.
Making art that is boring in unexpected, interesting ways.
Inventing a new boring version of interesting that still isn't interesting but is boring in interesting ways, which should make it interesting but doesn't.
Finding a desert and falling in.
Watching a purple meadow quiver and drinking whiskey beside a 100 year old cactus.
Whether Joy is a trick.
Blowing up your life and other people's lives as well.
The other entendre.
Yet another example of this fucking show.
Cooking for the rest of your life without ever washing dishes.
Joy that can't not be real.
Poetry that's just really well-constructed prose.
A poem that doesn't have any line breaks because then it wouldn't fit on Instagram.
A true poet who accounts for swiping.
An expression of a huge evocative idea built out of tiny ideas.
How to be happy even when you are not actively chasing your dreams.
A song that is famous in some way.
That fuckin' Pina Colada song.
Marrying the same person three or four times.
Bouncing along and going on a fun road trip while the world is ending.
Mystifying number one hits.
Robot Mr. Feeny in your car and you go around solving mysteries together.
Getting your wife a Groucho Marx nose for christmas.
Robust dependable noses.
Think On Thine Sins, Gumshoes.
Giving the Latin Grammar Police the L.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 18 min
August 07, 2023198. I’m Not Leaving Until Someone Sequences This Cup of Spit
Lords:
Maxx
Avery
Topics:
Change Ringing
The differences between American and Japanese robotics teams
This rug
https://www.rugstudio.com/funrugsfuntimeshapecomfts-163multi.aspx
A few days after I ordered it they emailed me canceling the order. I'm pretty sure this rug doesn't exist.
Look what we found in the park in the dark
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/KmODxwhW.jpg
Grandma giving you a world's best grandma mug
Microtopics:
Topics. Disgust.
A video game experience that you will find relatable if you've ever moved.
Making prototype furniture out of huge Tetris blocks and then forcing your friends to carry them around every time you move onto a new house.
The kind of friend who believes the world should be a certain way and then acts like it is.
Just frogs. Toads too. Mostly turtles.
Frog-themed 8th birthday parties.
Running a frog rescue out of your van.
Frog Fractions 2: Revenge of the Fallen.
Writing Bonfire of the Vanities but never reading it.
Sport meets art: spart.
Method ringing with two cycle sine waves.
Installing a huge church organ in your home because they were giving it away for free but when you play a note the whole building catches on fire.
Free Pianos On Line!
Babysitting someone's upright piano while they go on the lam.
The mattress story but with a piano.
Where the warehouse came from.
When the landlord comes by and you have to put a microphone over your bed to convince him that this is a recording studio, not a bedroom.
Getting a pipe organ so you can play it while holding your brain in a jar and cackling.
Sliding down the whale rib.
Donating your brain to art so that they can slide it down the whale rib and try to hit a target.
Experiencing change ringing in a regal square.
Memorial ringing
Bell ringing machines.
Robots competing in team sports.
Microsumo.
Sumo printers smashing into each other.
Making a fighting toaster for the fighting toaster league.
Battle Bots vs. Robot Jox.
Department stores with an entire floor for stationery.
Buying Gundam models and never putting them together and just having a bunch of robot heads lying around.
Major innovations in robot mouse maze navigation.
A mouse with an inverted helicopter to keep it on the ground.
A 3D maze with a robot mouse that can walk on walls and ceilings.
Fun rugs fun time shapes to impress your teens with a trendy sense of style when you bring it into their room.
A rug covered with keywords from the 90s internet.
$87 for not that big of a rug.
Bonding with your child over ISP servers.
A visitor trying to bond with you about your ironic decor and you have to explain that sorry, no, it's supposed to be ironic.
The illuminated manuscript version of an the ironic internet rug.
A fantastic place to buy nuts and other bulk items.
A limit of 1 kilogram of tapioca pearls per customer.
Bringing the tapioca balls to life in the rice cooker.
Inventing a new way to dispose of tapioca pearls every single day.
Tiktok schticks that are connected to a minimum wage jobs so even if your tiktok starts making a bunch of money you still can't quit your shitty job.
Having anxiety dreams about the coffee shop you worked at years ago.
Non-mammalian milk enthusiasm.
Being someone's non-mammalian milk guy.
A bipedal walrus with jaundiced eyes in a jar the size of a walrus and it knows you're here.
Leaving a turtle in the park and it's a 50/50 tossup whether it immediately dies or has a litter of a thousand baby turtles that devour the entire ecosystem.
Companies that are named after the business that used to be in the building.
A 1950s sign with a bowling pin on it that says "Safeway."
Walking into the DNA lounge and demanding that they sequence some DNA.
Military challenge coins.
Meeting the world's best grandma and she hands you a "world's greatest grandma" mug to prove it.
Seek god coin??
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
July 31, 2023197. It's No Moist Shit, But I'll Eat It
Lords:
Mikel
https://www.lasertimepodcast.com/category/videogame-apocalypse/
Diana
https://www.lasertimepodcast.com/category/thirty-twenty-ten/
Topics:
Banishment is still legal as a punishment in Georgia (the state)
From an evolutionary standpoint, why is it so hard to admit you're wrong?
Minesweeper speed running
http://www.minesweeper.info/wiki/Dreamboard
Sometime During Eternity, by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42860/sometime-during-eternity-
Marsupials: Have they got it figured out?
Venture Bros. rewatch - things gleaned from a binge rewatch 20 years after it debuted, ahead of the finale
Esper says: "Also I second the Venture Bros. recommendation, and double-triple the content warning. The first season is rough not only in terms of political correctness, but some of the episode setups are just 'let's watch the characters be racist for a while and assume that's funny.' They work their way out of it mostly after the first season, and those episodes aren't even great, but are completely necessary for laying groundwork going forward. And it's really worth it to get through them! Everything after season 1 is excellent, and everything from seasons 3 to 7 is truly some of the best television writing of all time."
The origin of dungeons
https://cohost.org/mogwai-poet/post/1771576-if-you-look-up-dung
Esper says: "The 'big B' is, according to my high school German knowledge, called an 'esset,' and can be replaced by 'ss' in just about any word using it. It's just a double S sound."
Microtopics:
Vidjagame Apocalypse.
30 20 10.
The day when new games used to come out.
Why podcasts come out at certain times.
Banishing someone from 158 counties.
Taking drugs to regulate your brain chemistry.
Figuring out some way you were right every time you're wrong.
Signaling and countersignaling.
Being so high status that you don't even need to pretend to be right.
Coming back two days later to prove that Steven Spielberg directed Star Wars.
Minesweeper board generation.
The Dreamboard.
16 vs 32-bit PRNGs.
Speed running a game regardless of whether it's fun to speed run.
Watching speed run attempts live.
Using up one of your Life Stalks.
The shame of confusing Minesweeper and Minecraft.
The origins of Minesweeper.
Minesweeper the Game the Movie.
Harrison Ford on a boat fighting aliens.
Rihanna on a boat fighting aliens.
Manning an aircraft carrier with four guys, two of whom are over 90.
Back when they were still making movie video games.
An Advance Wars clone made as a tie-in to the movie Battleship.
Some scroll-type parchments that some henchmen left lying around the Dead Sea.
Jesus sitting in on your jazz combo.
Sitting there looking dead.
Going all in on Beatnik Jargon.
Asking centenarian beat legend Lawrence Ferlinghetti what he thinks about Minesweeper.
Flies holding their noses to eat durians.
If humans had elephant-length gestation periods and the kids came out walking and talking.
Giving birth to peanut-sized babies and expecting the babies to climb into your pouch on their own.
Having half a dozen kids because you need help emailing PDFs.
Adorable tiny possums that look like weasels all over South America.
Marsupials transplanting babies between pouches.
Some K-Type shit.
Munching on opiates your entire life.
What if Jonny Quest grew up to become a fail son?
The slowest rollout of a TV show in the history of television.
Gee willikers, I can't wait to solve this mystery!
Making a sequel that reflects the fact that you've grown since you made the original.
Adventure cartoon archetypes.
David Bowie showing up and yelling at you.
The deadly sting of the monarch butterfly.
One of the things that you put up against your throat and it vibrates.
A little straw that you put in your mouth to make it sound like you're talking through a didgeridoo.
What a regular person thinks of when they hear "dungeon" vs. what a nerd thinks of.
What was this place before it was a monster-infested dungeon?
A labyrinth full of guys.
Fill it with a few wonders and you got yourself a dungeon.
The Tomb of the Qin Emperor.
Why they only made some of the pharaoh's tomb a trap, rather than the whole thing.
Letters we used to have.
The German letter that looks like a big B.
Mewterhead.
La Fiesta de Quince Anos.
Support Topic Lords
59 min