Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

July 24, 2023196. Active Time Battle Internet Relay Chat
Lords:
John
JohnB
Topics:
The word "juxtapose" seemed hyperspecific and esoteric when I first learned it in school, but has proven incredibly common and useful
Farewell to Cheap Bots Done Quick and the tens of thousands benevolent Twitter bots it powered:
https://twitter.com/v21/status/1643932890105884673
Temple of Apshai's manual
https://fogknife.com/2023-05-31-the-book-of-apshai-a-personal-exegesis-.html
"Seen and Not Seen" by Talking Heads
https://genius.com/Talking-heads-seen-and-not-seen-lyrics
The new Zelda game several weeks in feels like the phase of a Civilization game where much, but not all, of the world has been revealed
Microtopics:
John and John as well.
A John of Many Names.
The Frog Fractions Soundtrack of the Decade Edition Vinyl.
Being sued for copying a song's vibes.
Aldi Barcodes.
Noise-cancelling the sound of eating crackers.
Just scan it. It's food.
A word full of high-scoring Scrabble tiles.
Juxtaposing a police station.
A history of "juxtapose" waiting in the wings like a Batman origin story.
Pre-35 words.
Biff going back in time to 17th century Prague to be thrown out a window but surviving because he landed in a pile of manure.
An upbeat song about tolerating people that you hate.
The invention of defenestration.
Farewell to Cheap Bots Done Quick.
Sharing a fun tweet.
Being technical enough to look at nested braces and know what that means.
Bots in Space.
Capcom vs. Everyone.
Temple of Apshai.
A text adventure except they couldn't fit any of the text on the floppy.
Action RPGs that demand you manage your stats and inventory on paper.
Solo D&D adventure books.
Dragon's on a Chip.
Video games that come with books that you need to read to play the game.
A thick boy, full of lore.
The philosophy of city planning.
What is an Earth for?
Tunic.
What StarTropics did with the letter.
Sentinel Worlds One: Future Magic.
[See paragraph 3.]
1980s computer game copy protection.
Bringing the Shenzhen I/O manual to work to study it on the job.
Why the main campaign in Shenzhen I/O is so much better than the bonus campaign.
Keeping an ideal facial structure fixed in your mind for years.
Musical mumbling.
Songs that are just a Shower Thoughts post.
The long-term discipline of adjusting your facial features over time.
Thinking about wider, thinner lips during the instrumental breakdown.
Trying to save SACD albums.
The Depths.
Sharing your location precisely.
There are four places: go to them.
The Ghost King Rauru.
The Calamity Ganon Calamity.
A dragon with really weird exaggerated eyelashes that you can run around on.
Giving up on horses.
Unique items of dubious usefulness.
Okay boomer, it's called a Purah Pad now.
Finding a tiny rock to jump off of to go into bullet time.
The two-fan hoverbike.
Skating around atop frozen gourmet meat.
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1 hr 12 min
July 17, 2023195. Persian Castle Day at The Climbing Gym
Lords:
Alexicographic
Kev
Topics:
Sports are good actually? Apparently?
Haunted articles of clothing
Burrito R&D
Casey at the Bat
https://discoverpoetry.com/poems/ernest-lawrence-thayer/casey-at-the-bat/
Becoming a vtuber after losing a bet
Getting a guided tour of a TV show
Microtopics:
Streaming daily.
The Tears of the Kingdom thread in the Topic Lords discord.
A rigid self-conception as someone who does not like sports.
Roller derby.
Whether skateboarding is a sport.
Going fast and shoving past people.
An athletic endeavor.
How much hockey fights feed back into the actual game.
Baseball nerds.
Chart Party.
Storytelling using data.
The Bob Emergency.
Seven Bobs left, and they're all aged.
Who was the top Bob?
East Bay Bike Party.
Floyd Rose Bridge Valves.
Figuring out how to make video games without involving Bay Area salaries.
Persian Castle Day at the climbing gym.
Taking the leather jacket that your drug dealer OD'd in.
Signing the bathroom guest book every time you poop at your grandma's house.
Schwarzenegger DNA on eBay.
The Clothes People Have Died In line at Value Village.
This Shirt Will Kill You.
A detailed cosmology of how hauntings work.
Ghosts of people who are still alive, following you around and asking for their hat back.
Taco Shop Guacamole.
A completely different foodstuff from what you were accustomed to.
Wet Burritos.
Airport Head.
A 3 oz container of guacamole that the TSA will allow on the plane.
Burrito night at the Stormdancer household.
Lulus and Cakes.
Spheroids.
Baseball Hagiography.
A Quora reply from three years ago.
Searching for cake and Google asking you to prove that you're not a robot.
Bethlehem slang from 1888.
Vtuber tooling.
Picking a punishment for yourself that you already want to do.
Animated fish backgrounds.
A more compatible CUDA API.
Mixtapes of TV episodes and video game levels.
Someone's top ten list of Star Trek episodes.
What the kids call Cliff's Notes.
The skill of understanding someone else's taste.
These are the songs that I love, perhaps you will also love them and if so we could fall in love.
Exchanging Spotify playlists because that's what we have now instead of mixtapes.
Trying to get into Homestuck via Problem Sleuth.
An 11 year old with the patience to wait a year to read Harry Potter book 2.
Phish Food.
Recording Topic Lords before lunch and getting a well-deserved burrito afterwards.
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53 min
July 10, 2023194. How Good It Was, To Have a Toe
Lords:
Danny
Danny
Topics:
Most Song Lyrics are redundant
Perfect fourths and fifths are named wrong
It's almost summer and that means it's time for Mark Salud's "Forever in Summer"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ip_K5DHZlfg
Who wants to do a smutty poem?? We haven't done one of those
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47339/upon-julias-clothes
Oh yes
Celebrity Deaths are getting out of control
ZZT has achievements now
Microtopics:
Which Danny should go first.
The Noclip Archive.
Night Brunch.
Plugging before demonstrating your plugworthiness.
Whatever happened to MySpace.
The gnarliest weirdest thing you can get away with.
Stop making weird things!
Feeling passionately about individual words without considering their actual message.
Writing lyrics by stringing together abstract vowel sounds and then filling in the rest of the word later.
The native language of rock and roll.
Prisencolinensinainciusol.
Irish rap.
All the ways music is redundant.
A very inefficient way to communicate factual information.
The Mentos jingle.
Spoonman: a famous guy who played the spoons.
Music's ability to convey ideas that shouldn't be conveyed.
Teaching kids to love it.
What's perfect about a perfect fifth.
Music theory homework that calls it a "perfect unison."
Lydian to Locrian.
An extremely popular nostalgic songwriting device.
Trying to bring up topics out in the wild.
Even majorer then major.
What it means to be far from A.
A thing that happened on Public Access TV in San Diego.
Keyjazzing.
Weirdos making weirdo outsider art.
The tradition of using an Amiga 500 as a musical instrument.
Watching a musical performance by looking at the back of the performer's head.
Something to watch.
Economy of movement.
Playing drums so as to take up the most possible space.
The kind of singing that the Rock Band scoring system encourages.
Pre-singing the note so you're getting points as soon as the note starts.
Smutty poetry.
Whether singer songwriters have parentheses.
The Diamond Fleece.
Whether liquefaction is a Bay Area word.
Brave Vibrations.
What people thought was sexy in the 1600s.
Talking about a topic because people can hear you.
The 80s-90s thing of saying "as if"
America's Whitest City.
A phrase that Zoomers use to mean that they don't believe what they just said.
Investigating the Cool S for ten years.
Finding the Cool S in ancient Sumeria.
People in Latvia who don't know who Marilyn Manson is but they know he had a rib surgically removed.
The first celebrity.
Increasing numbers of celebrities.
Industrialized celebrity.
Adopting a future grief machine.
Practicing grief.
Several generations of digital fish.
Trugoy the Dove.
Disembodied consciousnesses living on a Dyson Sphere simulating Tina Turner's music.
Downsides of everyone living forever.
This is a mistake. (Here I go.)
Pre-dead.
Questions that will not be answered on this show because they are not topics.
Fish swimming in the background of someone's Zoom call.
What a time to not want to be alive!
Doing squats so you can get out of a chair.
Maximizing broken limbs while minimizing brain trauma.
Renaming Potomac Computer Systems to Epic Megagames.
ZZT: an Epic Game Store exclusive.
Caverns of Kroz.
An Amiga platformer sponsored by Chupa-Chups.
Retro Achievements.
Modding emulators to add achievements to old games.
Adding achievements to the Fairchild Channel F.
Achievements as a ludological device.
Assigning a point value to all the things your lizard brain needs an extra incentive for.
Citizen Game.
A game design trope that can be deployed with taste or not.
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1 hr 20 min
July 03, 2023193. Pull Down Your Murphy Toilet
Lords:
Elena
Quil
Topics:
Human Pudding, and why popular media can't depict bad art, only bad taste
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SfHmctamVEA
https://www.notinhalloffame.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
I got a van!
Corporate art: From industrial musicals of the 50s-70s to this Staples logo unveiling
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWUhqoAGsfk
https://philolexian.blogspot.com/2006/11/kilmer-2005.html
Microtopics:
A very good New York Times crossword.
Feats of crossword construction that just make the experience of solving it worse.
Cottage cheese and jam.
Fruit on the bottom cottage cheese cups.
Whether cottage cheese comes pre-curdled.
An opportunity to make money by making the richest people in the world happier.
A jams and jellies bandolier.
Going to the arcade wearing a token dispenser but also your "I don't work here" shirt.
A band that only exists so that John Stamos can be annoyed by it.
Whether the average person would misspell a word on a grocery list.
Flashy rock and roll in which the lyricss are goofy and the goofy lyrics heightens the perceived quality of the music and the music heightens the perceived goofiness of the lyrics.
Various anime in which the kids are forming a band.
The Fictitious Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
The East coast DIY music scene.
Eyeball Skeleton.
Smoosh nee Smush.
My Pal God Records.
The Most Wanted Song and The Most Unwanted Song.
Ramadan jingles.
Putting all the things people hate the most in the same song.
Single Ladies.
The Rescue Rangers dimension where the Rescue Rangers theme song is still modulating upwards to this day.
Releasing an album on vinyl that ends in a locked groove with a shepard tone.
Sprinter Vans.
Diesel vans racking up a million miles.
Van life.
Vans with indoor plumbing.
How people react when someone is sleeping in a vehicle in their neighborhood.
How to recognize a van that somebody lives in.
Living in a Wal-Mart parking lot.
Campy camping.
Living the hash tag no car life.
Bimodal distribution of van dwellers.
The Minimum Viable Van.
Living six people to a bedroom and not liking it.
A landlady who cooks for everybody in the 1800s.
Outlawing boarding houses because there are too many single men being rowdy.
The Florida Project.
Moving into the hotel across the street for a day so that you don't live in one place long enough to become a tenant.
Guessing how squatting laws work.
Staples presenting a trailer for their new logo at E3.
The history of Industrial Musicals.
Hiring video artists and composers to create massive lavish displays of brand awareness.
The documentary that Kevin Smith made about Prince just for Prince to watch and never release.
Making a funny video for mystery people to watch for mystery purposes.
The KFC VR training app.
Living close to Hamburger University.
Rerecording Prince's "1999" for every year up to 2999.
The circus ad that Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite was based on.
O Deathy Death.
Most Foul Vowel.
The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest.
The headspace you get into as an artist when you try to make bad art.
A good example of a bad poem.
Birdemic's environmental message.
A clown photobombing your movie soundtrack.
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59 min
June 26, 2023192. The Prime Number Shitting Bear
Lords
CisHetKayfaber
Charlie
Topics:
Umbrellas, siphons, and other physical things that seem like hacky bullshit but actually work
Articulating the shape of your internal cause-and-effect network and applying it as a learning superpower (futurevision)
I'm not sure what archipelago.gg is but if I read this paragraph aloud maybe we can figure it out together
https://archipelago.gg/
A copypasta from this page:
https://www.followchain.org/best-copypastas/#3
Why is a skill less valued the more we love it? Shouldn't it be the opposite? Is this arguable?
Microtopics:
Supporting someone's video game dream in Denmark.
Escaping from idle games.
Video games drawing the screen as often as they can.
The pauses getting longer and longer whenever the bear needs to shit a new prime number.
The prime number shitting bear getting constipated.
How to calculate prime numbers faster.
Math stuff.
A choo choo train of thought.
Meditation apps that play ads while you're in the middle of meditating.
The thing where you put your mouth on the tube and then have to spit out the gas or you get neurological damage.
Creating a low pressure system by sucking on a tube.
Whether umbrellas make sense.
Umbrella side-drip.
How bicycles stay upright.
Does a bicycle on a treadmill stay upright?
Pattern recognition.
Seeing a situation you recognize and understanding what's going to happen.
Predicting where someone's sentence is going to end up.
Putting your water glass in a zone where it's going to get knocked over.
The shape of your mind's cause and effect network.
Seeing scenes from the future, like in Law and Order.
Predicting the future so that you can be a more efficient organism.
Mashing air molecules at you.
Speaking a language that your coworkers don't.
Applying FutureVision to your creative process.
Nonlinear creative processes.
One unique large musical story where nothing repeats.
A physical task you are doing inside your head.
The pet that is closest to having a kid.
Importing a portal gun into Tears of the Kingdom.
Finding the hookshot in Metroid and your friend then bring able to use it in Link to the Past.
How to know what your friends want.
All the bad ways an idea could be implemented
Surprise boomerangs.
Archipelago's Release System.
The era of couch co-op games.
A multiplayer season where everybody picks a different game.
Doing the oration.
Who the colored lights in your keyboard are for.
Polygonal dudes with long hair head banging in the background.
Weirdly modern music.
Fifteen years of everything else.
Rhythm games vs. music games.
Living in a society.
Devaluing the skills you love.
Listening to a song and really appreciating its use of rests.
How note lengths and rests work in tracker music.
Stopping a note without starting a new one.
Running experiments to determine exactly when a note should stop.
The micro decisions of things that people don't think about or care about.
A bird named Mabel.
A bird figuring out how to enjoy music.
A tepid delicate series of notes.
Attractivision.
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1 hr 7 min
June 19, 2023191. Carbonated Cream of Mushroom Latte
Lords:
Chris
Wacy
Topics:
Crafting little guys
Negotiating how to play Zelda together
Cream of mushroom latte
ChatGPT wrote a poem about zelda
Climbing real rocks
Microtopics:
The Marble Hornets/Slender Man oeuvre.
Copying and pasting a video.
Sharing a movie you liked with a friend over IM by copying and pasting the title.
The turnip in Breath of the Wild.
Attempting and failing to enjoy wood carving.
Stabbing the Korok until it is less fuzzy.
A Snapchat filter that makes it look like you're made of felt.
Losing your needle-felted Lorax and getting upset.
Kirby eating Halo.
Hobbies that double as fidget toys.
Carving a stick into a squirrel.
Finding polymer clay out in the woods.
Naturally-occurring fission reactors.
Nature with really good graphic design.
Sharing a Zelda save with your life partner and learning a lot about each other.
Finding every turnip.
Learning spoilers at an interesting space.
The huge thing.
Target's 30-day return policy.
What Switch games support local wireless multiplayer.
Playing halfway through a video game before you figure out the most of the systems.
Stirring until the lumps go away.
Kombucha milk.
An incredibly cheap gas.
The Sus Engineering DIY carbonation guide.
Cream of Cow Latte.
Target getting out the UV light to detect traces of cream of mushroom soup on the espresso machine you're trying to return.
Frothy oily coffees.
Inventing a culinary taxonomy in which mushrooms and cheese are both fruit.
Sweet cheese and savory fruit.
Sweet cheesus!
Making a yes or no answer incredibly long.
Rewriting each paragraph until it ends with a word on a line by itself.
Rapping about Zelda in 1980s.
Finding plot holes in this poem about the Legend of Zelda.
Using video games to ignore that you're on a plane for six hours.
Horror poems.
"A Crow Looked at Me" by Mt. Eerie.
Knowing why someone wrote an album but not why people listen to it.
Bad Two-Sentence Horror.
Whether Poe's The Raven counts as horror.
Businesses named after the thing that the building they're in used to be used for.
Berkeley Bowl's produce section.
Climbing a boulder that is not labeled with its difficulty level.
Difficulty inflation at the climbing gym.
How rocks are shaped.
A lump that you pinch with your whole hand.
Reading about a weird thing in Harry Potter and not knowing if it's weird because it's a magical kingdom or if that's how England does things.
What camping is like in England.
Taking a four year old to a parkour gym.
Being a kid and looking forward to finally growing tall enough to skate on the power lines.
A table full of rock obstacle courses.
The standards body that certifies what playground equipment is safe to install.
Old Enough.
Achieving the Milk Task.
Not teaching children cursive.
Having a name because your mom liked it.
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1 hr 4 min
June 12, 2023190. The Linguistic Eggplant-Dick Collapse
Lords:
Tyriq
Hallie
Topics:
The world needs more clues for secrets nearby
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUXow3d3-b0
How kids on tv used to hate leftovers
Smartphone sales declined 11% in 2022 while sales of flip phones doubled
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44272/the-road-not-taken
What will emoji look like in 100 years?
I have invented a conspiracy regarding the shape of hand-held supermarket baskets
Microtopics:
Lumps.
Lumpy Space Princess.
The best Space Princesses.
A completely different two Ls.
A good first vertically scrolling shooter.
Electric vehicle backing up noises.
Collecting Tesla license plates whenever you hear the Tesla collectible item noise.
The most sound-designed thing you interact with on a regular basis.
What kind of noises electric motorcycles make.
The laser you can point at any window to turn it into a speaker.
Bubb Rubb's reaction to whistle tips.
An urban legend about a haunted car driving down the freeway.
Advertisers beaming holograms directly into your AR goggles.
The city where instead of taxes they have ads and you're not allowed into the city without wearing the AR goggles at all times, even in the shower.
Wandering into the woods to escape the ubiquitous advertising but the birds have learned to repeat the ads.
Birds who sing the song that turns your skull into a speaker.
A scrub jay watching you with binoculars from across the street, reading your lips while you talk about the brown note, so it can teach the rest of the birds the song that makes the humans shit their pants.
Describing memes on podcasts.
The fungus that killed all the leftovers so the leftovers we eat today are a completely different varietal of leftovers.
Why leftovers-flavored jelly beans don't taste like real leftovers.
Spending more money so people don't perceive you as poor.
Food that you don't have to cook again.
Eating pizza straight out of the freezer.
Taking an ice cold slice of pizza into a hot shower.
Toaster pizza.
Cat body temperature pizza.
Rosemary garlic pop tarts.
Whether a day old poptart you forgot in the toaster counts as leftovers.
Leftunders.
Increasing crime by 100% but it's all good crime.
Flip phones Georg and whether he should be counted.
If anyone in the world decides not to eat something, that thing is canonically leftovers.
Wanting to be in a forest.
Dudes talking about themselves and the roads they've traveled.
The Most Misread Poem in America.
Pop quiz: individualism or fake individualism?
Doing a Twitter poll every time you are making a life decision and then taking the road less traveled by.
Dialects of emoji.
What Unicode looks like in the future where we communicate by swapping brain lobes with each other momentarily.
Doing the emoji hand clap for every word thing in your Great American Novel.
A screen reader reading out ascii art of a forest and after six minutes the blind user is like "nice forest!"
What the audio book for House of Leaves sounds like.
Lexicalogical collapse.
Veiny eggplant.
Which end of the eggplant emoji the droplets go on.
Genetically modifying eggplants so they look like dicks while unbeknownst to you another scientist is genetically modifying dicks so they look like eggplants and everyone remains confused.
Going to the bulk bin and scooping rice directly into your shopping basket.
If rice is like water and Bruce Lee is like water then Bruce Lee is like rice.
Trying to Tetris into a curve.
When a service works perfectly fine and they change things for no reason.
Searching Podcast Addict for a podcast and it comes back with a one episode podcast called "Please Update Podcast Addict"
Uber and Lyft becoming uncompetitive because they're trying to be profitable.
Ads that aren't even beamed directly into your skull so that good are they?
Advertising by teleporting a brain hemisphere of someone who loves your product with your target audience so you can share their knowledge.
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57 min
June 05, 2023189. If You Don't Know Who Your Wario Is, You're the Wario
Lords:
Alexander
Yaros
Topics:
Somewhat Dim Mirror
Unique and weird self-bootstrapping computer language - Forth
I've been getting emails from an Online Casino Guide offering analysis of the relative popularity of characters from the Mario Bros. movie. How did they get my email, and how did they know that this is the kind of thing I want to gamble on?
The Kraken, by Alfred Tennyson
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kraken_(poem)
NES dev scene and new games still being released
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0Yg0GAX5vw
You have to heat a black hole to cool it down
Winston is suddenly really into Power Rangers which I'm not super thrilled about, but it does make me happy that the appeal of cheesy MIDI rock won't be lost on future generations
Esper says: "The tradition of taking Japanese action stuff and reworking it into an entirely different show is pretty wild, and pretty common. The original idea behind the western release of Sailor Moon was actually going to be a live action cast of young girls who transform into "cartoon scouts" or something, and the legendary anime Macross (known for animating lots of missles with cool smoke trails) was brought over here and entirely rewritten to be Robotech, an already existing western property. Power Rangers specifically comes from the Super Sentai tokusatsu series, of which there's actually two or three dozen seasons, each with more or less individual continuity. They're fun and goofy to watch if you get a chance to see the originals; I was mostly surprised by how self-aware they are."
Microtopics:
Just playing games you already know whenever you find the time for games.
Dystopian fiction about all the little annoying things.
Dystopian fiction about all the terrible TV shows that are on now.
A guy who thought his idea would work but it didn't.
A black mirror but a little less black.
How really shiny black things work.
Logging in to watch people make themselves miserable.
Reverse polish notation.
Giving up on operating systems and deciding to live inside a Forth interpreter.
Going back to the Cambrian period and being like "what is this shell thing and what is it trying to accomplish?"
How Forth is like Eurovision.
Borrowing someone's RPN calculator and being very confused for a moment.
Your Dymaxion map of the globe.
The next emulations of Hewlett-Packard reverse polish notation calculators.
Online Casino Guides and the kinds of email they send.
A gaming and entertainment experience.
Naming your movie @ and getting incredible engagement on Twitter.
How recently Nethack has been patched.
Carpetology and the study of rugs and carpets even though they're not in the same phylum.
The Dungeons and Dragons Chick Tract.
A kid named Wario.
The Abysmal Sea.
Unnumbered and enormous polypi.
Interpreting a poem as a political statement when it's clearly about how giant squids are super cool.
Lauding this poet's skill with language even though he didn't know the difference between abyssal and abysmal.
Calling a poem a sonnet when it doesn't meet the criteria of a sonnet just because Tennyson wrote it.
Wanting to be huge and eat sponges, like the kraken.
Dendy.
Buying NES games made this year.
Sokoban with a Twist.
MOON 8.
Releasing chiptunes on vinyl shaped like a square.
Russian Roulette for the NES making good use of the Zapper.
Two people who are really bad at archery.
Pointing your Rambo exploding arrow at the exploding barrel sitting right next to you.
A turn-based thing where you can kill zombies.
Forklift simulators in VR.
NES Maker and GB Studio.
LLVM's NES back-end.
Making a NES game in C and never using local variables.
Finding the free time to do all your hobbies.
The bigger I am the colder I am, and if you heat me up I get bigger and colder. What am I?
A tear in geometry that just leaks shit.
Care and feeding of your pet black hole.
Pascal's Breakfast.
Whether it's in your best interest to believe in waffles.
The International Cult Registry.
Trying to make a portmanteau of waffle and apocalypse.
Violence against putty monsters.
The Horsemen of the Apocalypse Power Rangers spinoff.
A Power Rangers spinoff made in the last three years that has the exact same production values of the original.
Writing a new TV show around the action scenes from a different TV show.
Taking the most expensive special effects shots from every movie and putting them all in one uber-movie.
Tricking Harrison Ford into being in your movie because he's so old now.
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56 min
May 29, 2023188. An Extremely Gendered Sniper Rifle
Lords:
Maxx
Erica
Topics:
Zines and Jam Games; stuff that's understood to be breakable
https://itch.io/c/689872/indiepocalypse
Birding in the pandemic
Itinerant Filmmakers
http://www.meltonbarker.org/
Meditation on Capitalism
I found the tweet that the image came from, but still don't know the author of the poem: https://twitter.com/Sierra_OffLine/status/1100852286585221122
Microtopics:
The Bugzooka
Booms and busts of little insect invasions.
A little vacuum chamber that you squish closed.
Sucking a fly through a tube.
Cry havoc and let slip the bugs of war.
Egads, Bugzooks!
The Bug-A-Salt Passion Assassin 3.0.
A middle aged dad of the type that would buy a salt gun
A bugzooka in active use.
A balding man who looks like Jeffery Epstein crawling on the floor in his underwear to promote the Bug-A-Salt.
Professor Fly Presents: Fly Facts.
Judging the anatomical correctness of Professor Fly.
Hammacher-Schlemmer ads for bug-catching devices.
Whether women make better snipers.
Aiming at the fly on the wall with your laser sight.
Mr. Pinch.
A fly in a lab coat who lives in Seattle.
A photocopied leaflet about your band or political cause.
The best, most well-produced musicians in the world.
Ways to frame game jams.
A good brain hack for if you feel the urge to be a product.
Indiepocalypse.
Electric Zine Maker.
Whether the pandemic is over.
One of the birdiest places in the United States.
Talk Irby to Me.
Becoming texting buddies with a famous bird systematist from Cornell.
A Big Year.
Yelling bird coordinates at someone you just met.
Winston's favorite bird and why he likes it so much.
Knowing something about ravens. (Not what they eat.)
The Northwestern Crow.
A crow catching live shrimp and stashing them in the moss.
Collecting black walnut husks to dye wool.
Feeding crows who bring you lipstick from the 1940s.
What to do with a 10 pound bag of unsalted peanuts.
A movie where every kid in town foils an attempted kidnapping and then holds a talent show.
Ark Music Factory.
Hiring a record label guy to write and record a song with your daughter so she can star in a terrible music video and become a survivor of internet celebrity.
Social media survivors.
Stardom: it's not good for you.
Whether kids today still want to be movie stars.
Bitmojis and other things that put you in a little cartoon.
A customized birthday greeting from a Weird Al.
Paying Rudy Giuliani a pittance to wish your mom a happy birthday.
One of the Breaking Bad hitman twins undercutting the other by $300 on Cameo.
Preserving your Too Short custom rap tape on Youtube.
A poem written in BASIC that is spoilers for Mad Men.
The light in your Ikea bookshelf recognizing the light in you.
Doing line number archaeology when reading a BASIC program.
Seeing text from the other side of the page through the page.
Do It.
Instructional Art.
Finding 25 identical objects and naming them all Jimmy.
Flying Maxx to the Permian Basin to teach your students how to repair microscopes.
Support Topic Lords
58 min
May 22, 2023187. The Second-Best Whale Playground in Emeryville
Lords:
Cort
Stephan
https://lonelystarsoftware.itch.io/playdapon
Topics:
USB-C cables that only work in one orientation
http://blog.zarfhome.com/2023/04/usb-c-and-plague-of-grackles.html
Playgrounds seem to have gotten really good again in the last ten years
Bedtime guitar update
Where the Wild Things Are
https://genius.com/Maurice-sendak-where-the-wild-things-are-annotated
Classic hardware has become a kind of fantasy console
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/04/wi-fi-in-an-nes-cartridge-super-tilt-bro-takes-the-1985-console-online/
https://www.thenew8bitheroes.com/
https://www.gbstudio.dev/
Constructing a computing environment as a nested series of cages for a child to escape
Microtopics:
Extra plugs.
Mr. Saitou
How to sideload software onto the Playdate.
Trying to make Sifteo happen.
Where to find all the fancy MacIntosh dithering algorithms.
Ableton for the Sega Megadrive.
Who Zarf is.
EU legislation saying that phones must charge via USB-C, which is unsustainable, when the text of the law ought to have been "Apple, knock that shit off."
Getting rid of your bucket of cables.
Never throwing away wood because you might need one that shape some day
Never throwing away oddly shaped pieces of wood because you might become a carpenter some day.
Playgrounds getting bad and then good again.
Getting breakfast at the Emeryville Public Market.
Whether swings or seesaws still exist.
Giant wooden castles with bridges going between them.
How to make the spinny playground things safe.
A regionally variable playground.
What countries have and don't have playgrounds.
The San Lorenzo Community Park.
A big stone bear you can climb on.
Whether any of those playground speaking tubes have ever worked.
Wanting the world to have magic in it so you lie to your kid about science.
The Dennis the Menace playground in Monterey.
Periodically removing the poison oak.
Growing up and being on the other side of the memory.
The Dead Dad playground turning into a fenced-off deathtrap.
Procedural memory for nice melodies.
Mountain dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers.
Walking around with a bandolier of mountain dulcimers, one for every key.
What happens when you're living in the Appalachians and you want to make a violin but you can't.
What to do with your ability to play an instrument when you have no free time.
Maintaining a consistent strumming pattern while singing.
Strumming and finding finger positions intuitively.
Here's all the notes. Play the right ones at the right times.
The Virtual Console of musical instruments.
Jim's favorite note in the mixolydian mode.
Where the Wild Things Are for Xbox 360.
A poem with hardly any punctuation.
Going on a journey of many weeks in just a few pages.
Max in a wolf suit fighting bees with a stick.
Maurice Sendak Kart Racer.
Dinosaur Time.
Clapping for names you know.
A building with dinosaur bones in it.
Rumpusing things.
Games where you whack shadow spiders with a stick.
GB Studio.
Putting a wifi adapter in an NES cartridge.
The Mario modding tool set.
An IDE for making NES games.
Pi-Boy D.
Doing homebrew development on a system that is still in active use.
Castlevania: Passacaglia of Disrepair.
GBA of Theseus.
Making a Lynx game that supports 8-player multiplayer, when there aren't 8 people who own the system.
Porting a game about matching colors to a monochrome display.
Giving your kids a computer running Linux to teach them sysadmin skills, but they just play games on their phone instead.
Branded Scratch Wrappers.
Composing new music for the extended What the Golf? cinematic universe.
How to unlock your school laptop to play the Chrome Dinosaur Game.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 9 min