Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

May 15, 2023186. ADHD Shame Graveyard of Browser Tabs
Lords:
Tim
Ben
https://linktr.ee/zerofiftyone
Topics:
My Thursday Night
The daunting thought of: there is so much music that exists now - it's more than likely that your favorite song in the world is out there and you'll never find it in your lifetime.
I've been working on a small game in my spare time and I never want to ship it. I just want to have friends playtest forever.
Fine Feather
https://files.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/vyy9So4K.jpg
The terrifying field of Hostile Nuclear Architecture
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGJmB4MFj/
Do you have 103 tabs open in Chrome?
In Super Mario World, some secrets reward you by skipping levels and some reward you by adding new levels. Make up your mind! If the level add guy and the level subtract guy had just talked to each other they could've just left the levels as they were and saved everybody a lot of work.
Topics:
Having something to unplug.
Continuing to take care of your children.
Going to see the Mountain Goats for your birthday.
Sleep meds that don't interact well with grapefruit.
Caring for a newborn for a month and then suddenly having a nice meal.
A cocktail of factors.
Finding an amazing new artist you become obsessed with for the next few months.
Listening to music while you work.
A poster containing the source code for Pitfall.
How to keep finding new music in your thirties.
Phonograph.
Auto-brewery syndrome but for methamphetamines.
A good song that everybody likes.
Fear of stories.
Refusing to see a movie because you're afraid of what it'll make you feel.
Going camping in the woods in order to watch a movie.
Reliving your past experience in memory.
The soap operas that your ex's mom would watch.
Buying sheet music and playing it yourself in anticipation of when the orchestra comes to your town to play you the real thing.
Sheet music as a pre-release hype document.
Reading the manual of your new video game on the car ride home.
Crestfallenness.
Listening to a record with somebody.
Rogue topics that keep threatening to come up.
Playtesting as a way to get to know your friends better.
Approaching the things that are valuable to you through the lens of an illusion that you know is an illusion.
Lockdown hobbies.
How to enjoy hobbies.
Starting a Youtube series called "Ben sucks at baking" so you get a bunch of followers who will be disappointed if you get good at baking.
Dehydrating beer to get yeast out of it.
Making beer out of the yeast that's just hanging out in the air around you.
Gordy and the Monster Moon.
Nine year olds who are incredible at climbing because they refuse to eat fish.
A sparrow showing you its whole ass.
Whether sparrows are detested.
How to dispose of nuclear waste.
Attempts to make you hind brain think "I need to leave here immediately."
The meme of the skeleton playing the trumpet.
A field of Aztec death whistles activated by the wind blowing.
Trying to save the lives of people who live far in the future.
Speaking across time.
Whether this place is a place of honor.
An ADHD Shame Graveyard of Browser Tabs.
Going over all your browser tabs to see which ones remain relevant to you.
Details of how one bathes oneself that we never discuss in public.
A web browser that'll tell you "no, I think you've had enough tabs"
A brick that gives you a key.
How Elden Ring is structured.
A game that is a foray into a new design space that demonstrates how not to solve these design problems.
A scavenger hunt to find the next Topic Lords guest.
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1 hr
May 08, 2023185. 2000-Year-Old Head, Again??
Lords:
Danny
Kim
Topics:
Animorphs
My keyboard is registering double inputs again help me
Youtube channels that summarize movies like Cliff's Notes
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyXD1jAZBdZ4u0K-GLYC77Q/videos
https://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/?comic=2799
CatGPT
M3gan; technology horror movies
You don't get points for coins in Super Mario World!
Microtopics
A video game man.
The Animorphs train.
Children committing war crimes and having to live with the consequences.
How many books are in the Animorphs series.
The Visser Chronicles.
Yeerks living in the Yeerk pool.
Finding the person whose car you stole and explaining "here's your car back, I did a bunch of war crimes in it"
Hearing someone explain Animorphs repeatedly and never forming a single opinion.
The horror of noses moving around.
Refusing to read graphic novels because you can't read and look at pictures at the same time.
Animorphs: Shattered Reality.
Why boys don't read Animorphs.
Marco turning into an Andalyte.
Eating via your hooves.
F for Furry.
The canonical source for all sexualities.
Non-Consensual Dippin' Dots.
Haunted Headphones.
How to compliment your partner's flams.
Taking a movie and turning it into a TikTok.
The dude from Dark with the face.
Twisted social experiment: whoever survives til the end gets to live.
2000 Year Old Head Again??
Blind Man Who Robbers Are Trying To Avoid For A Movie.
This Garfield Comic is Too Highbrow.
A Simple Rhyming Man.
I Had a Lover's Quarrel with the World.
A chat bot that only replies with cat memes.
An extremely asymmetric cat.
Hiding inside the couch.
A cat wearing a neckerchief.
AI dolls in horror movies.
A movie that is advertised relentlessly on whatever wavelength you're on.
Content warning: hilarious child death. The whole movie theater will laugh.
Haunted TikTok.
Topic Lords M3gan Edition.
Robot vs. Firmware Updates.
Robot vs. EULA.
Horror stories about firmware updates.
A toilet that screams at you if you're not licensed to shit in it.
Bathrooms that self clean whether you're still in there or not.
How many points coins are worth in all the different Mario games.
Incentivizing children to stomp on goombas.
Frog Fractions as an expression of score-related trauma.
An email where it's hard to tell who is fucking with whom.
The kind of people who like a game and leave a negative review on Steam that is clearly a joke but actually click the thumbs down button.
Curling: the most horny sport.
The game where people crouch really low and try to get a stone into a button.
Playing Frog Fractions for 420 hours.
The modern experience of being verified on Twitter.
The time Frog Fractions was crashing when you played it in France.
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1 hr 1 min
May 01, 2023184. Times New Orange
Lords:
Alexicographic
https://twitter.com/alexicographic
https://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames
Andrew
https://kittenm4ster.neocities.org/
Topics:
The 3-food problem: what 3 foods are pairwise good but bad all together?
Talking loudly during movie trailers as an act of anticapitalist subversion
Moon Mode on your phone camera is probably just pasting a good picture of the moon over your bad one.
https://in.mashable.com/tech/3114/are-the-moon-shots-from-the-huawei-p30-pro-fake
The Orange by Wendy Cope
https://gladdestthing.com/poems/the-orange
Learning Italian from a cartoon dog
Being able to identify McElroy fans by how they complement my woodworking
https://www.themcelroy.family/2020/7/31/21348515/maxfundrive-2020-how-to-fake-an-interest-in-woodworking
RIP List of Video Games Considered Artistic
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/List_of_video_games_considered_artistic
https://www.everywhereist.com/2021/12/bros-restaurant-lecce-we-eat-at-the-worst-michelin-starred-restaurant-ever/
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21152082-declaration-by-chef-floriano-pellegrino
Microtopics:
kittenm4ster's PICO-8 games.
Vibing with the Alfonzo's Bowling Challenge ethos.
A game that is implemented in under 8000 tokens.
The ideal game pitch.
Chocolate and cheese and something.
Choccoli.
Chocolate and gravy.
A lukewarm Americano.
A bunch of foodies who really know their foodstuffs.
A fish being strangled by Red Vines.
A GPU that has food inside of it.
The Turing test for whether computers can taste foods.
Asking Chat GPT what three foods you can combine to create a bomb in your kitchen.
Whether Gallium has calories.
Three people on a podcast who all think "trailers" should come after the movie
Finding out about a movie by seeing a trailer in a movie theater even though trailers are constantly spilling out of every screen you own.
Getting the wiggles out.
How to make the lives of people who enjoy looking at ads a little bit worse.
Yelling "fire" before the movie starts so fewer people pay attention to the pre-movie ads.
Wanting to become the reason all movies have "no leopards in the theater" PSAs now.
A toddler watching Youtube, yelling "no!" and throwing the phone on the ground when an ad plays.
Pushing the lever to receive your stochastic reward.
Youtube deciding you've seen enough ads lately and taking pity on you.
Trying to explain to a four year old how to play a light gun game but the game is over before you finish explaining.
The Space Alien Busting Song.
Drawing new mountains on the moon to test your camera's moon mode.
Here's the moon again.
A filter to replace pictures of your wife with the moon.
A Snapchat filter that makes you feel like you used to be attractive.
A filter that takes your bad photos of the moon and makes them even worse.
The worst bunny in the moon.
A good poem that rhymes.
Turtle metaconsistency.
Enormous and hilarious oranges.
Good art here, you guys.
Reading poetry in the original Helvetica.
BorgiaPro on various font downloading sites.
A cartoon that is entertaining even if you are not learning Italian.
Finding Armando's old hat in the attic.
Asking the clouds to move so that your hat can protect you from the sun.
Working within a constraint that produces delightful nonsense.
Photocopying yourself to create a black and white clone.
What drugs they'll give to kids in what countries.
Growing up but continuing to take the same drugs.
A little girl who is also a dog.
Subtitles that don't match what's being said aloud.
Watching Italian TV using a VPN.
The Andrew Lloyd Weber musical with the roller skates.
Roller bladers dancing in weird futuristic costumes.
Having positive fun experiences with language.
Learning a new language while skydiving.
Hiring an experienced skydiver who can give you foreign language lessons while you're both falling from a plane.
Getting bored while skydiving and looking at your phone but there's no WiFi up there.
How McElroy fans compliment someone's woodworking.
How to Fake an Interest in Woodworking.
Arguing about whether games are art.
All the games that anyone's ever called art.
Finding information about a deleted page on Wikipedia.
Philosophical debate on the creative qualia of electronic structured play. (Roger Ebert has a subheading.)
Whether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes philosophical zombies.
Whether the List of Zombie Video Games on Wikipedia includes voodoo zombies.
What Casinos are trying to do to attract kids who like video games.
Whether Lechuck is a voodoo zombie or a Romero zombie.
Hohokum.
Finding a bunch of snakes that each have different names.
What happens when you collect all the things. (Art.)
List of Paintings Considered Artistic.
Gimmick food that is more about the experience of eating a weird thing than the food itself.
A restaurant that doesn't have plates and just pours the food into your cupped hands.
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1 hr 4 min
April 24, 2023183. The Radioactive Scone Problem
Lords:
John
Quil
Topics:
Taking advantage of a rare opportunity to play a Legend of Zelda game before every aspect of it is documented on the internet
RCA's implementation of color television is one of the most impressive engineering feats of the 20th century
The guy next to me on BART talked to me the entire ride home from GDC. He made me play the phone game he was addicted to and compared my performance to the coworker he was also making play the game. He got a call from his wife and introduced me to her. He told me he was in prison for 30 years for murder. His step son is a pitbull breeder and he complained about how few free pitbulls he was getting. He smelled weed on the train and put on a loud voice to announce "I'm a cop, put your vape pen away." My stop was also his stop, so the monologue didn't let up when I got off the train. I finally escaped when he was distracted by girl scout cookies.
http://blueridgejournal.com/poems/rl-fall.htm
Are dumplings universal? It seems like every civilization has at some point invented their version of 'carbs around a protein' food
Microtopics:
The best part of the show.
The Great Lakes Pigeon Rescue.
How best to keep a pigeon.
Hiding in the discord
Solving problems in interesting ways.
A very interesting idea that just barely pays off.
Playing a new game all weekend for the first time in your life.
A game that is too spiky to be solved by one person.
A matchmaking service that puts you on a forum with fifty people who are each starting a Dark Souls game for the first time.
Accidentally playing geez Fez with your sister.
A riddle about risk management.
Not being able to throw away radioactive waste because you don't want to waste food.
Deciding which cookie to put in your mouth
Finding the password to someone's laptop in a video game by googling their information in real life.
Digital vs. Analog circuitry.
Piggybacking the color signal on top of the black and white signal.
Quadrature amplitude modulation.
Racing the Beam.
Being banished from the kingdom for partly understanding how television works.
Inventing two televisions so you can run one backwards.
Extroverts who when meeting an introvert, think to themselves "it's my job to bridge the gap"
Escaping when someone is distracted by Girl Scout Cookies.
Encountering the ARG that you made for yourself and then forgot about.
Not getting as many free pitbulls as you thought.
Getting off the train early to get away from the person who won't stop talking to you and he's like "oh ok I'll get off here too."
Your wife who hates when you impersonate a cop.
The episode of Train Hot Dog which was just Jim reading a stack trace for twenty minutes.
Trying to figure out what web site you can browse on your phone to get the person sitting next to you to stand up.
Jim's preferred San Francisco residents.
The orange bland ambassadorial face of the moon.
Wild spiders crying together.
What to do when the air raid sirens go off.
Moving to a new place where they don't have monthly nuclear accident drills.
John Vanderslice.
The Human Missile Crisis.
Showing fear for humanity before it's cool.
Poetry that is not meant to be read aloud.
Stripping the formatting out of e e cummings's poetry.
A poem that skips around on the page like Chutes and Ladders.
Topic Troves.
Carbs around a protein food.
A rooster named Pierogi.
Whether dumplings have to be slimy.
Putting the pudding in a protein.
A particleboard meat.
A McRib that's been injected with custard.
Sweet and savory things placed inside a carb.
What civilizations have never invented the dumpling.
How to get from agriculture to the Hot Pocket.
The singular of funfetti.
How to get into the Topic Lords discord.
Topic Lords the Phone Game.
Cheap Bots Toot Sweet.
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1 hr 2 min
April 17, 2023182. Baby Baby Mario
Lords:
Jenni
https://intfiction.org/t/lets-play-cragne-manor/56472
Chris
https://trustory.fm/cool-time-dice-hour/
Topics:
All the stuff we did in the 90s that is horrifying to modern parents now, like sleepovers and latchkey kids
The movie for Jurassic Park 2 is somehow worse than the book and the book is very bad.
The VR episode of Nowhere Man
I fucked up my car by running over a mattress on purpose
https://vhsviscera.tumblr.com/post/705867030403973120
There was a space battle over Nuremberg in 1561 and the local broadsheets reported on it with woodcuts:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1561_celestial_phenomenon_over_Nuremberg
http://blog.zarfhome.com/2022/01/way-up-in-middle-of-air.html
Microtopics:
Baby Mario and Baby Luigi being two different species.
Riff and Jenni play Rusty Lake.
Absorbing most of your twin in the womb and all that's left is his heart behind your nipple.
Nippleheart.
Cool Time Dice Hour.
Cragne Manor.
Heck of a project, terrible game, not recommended at all.
Cragne Manor's TV Tropes page.
A Metafilter thread about sleepovers.
Your mom asking for a report on all the swear words in the book you're reading.
Elsa Screams at Dentist.
Watching Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube to learn how to scream better.
Going to the bookstore by yourself when your are 13 years old.
Calling the anime repair guy when your anime goes out.
New guy just dropped: guy with trench coat full of VHS tapes who won't hand you the VHS tapes, he makes you reach in and take them.
Socializing your kids poorly so nobody will invite them to sleepovers.
Learning how sex works and then calling a conference on the playground to explain it to everyone.
Calvin's dad explaining that women only pee once a month.
Picking up the broken glass that your meth dealer neighbor keeps throwing in your cactus garden.
The tiny-handed thin-necked final girl.
Abraham Lincoln's wrestling career.
The one where they defeat the veloraptors with gymnastics.
The one where they defeat the velociraptors by showing them Elsa Screaming videos on Youtube.
Taking a bad book and adapting it into an even worse movie.
Doing drugs until the dinosaurs look like they have feathers.
Microscopic dust particles on the slicey bits.
Why blowing into the cartridge did or didn't work
Hunter-gatherers blowing on a blinking raspberry bush and cursing the defective lockout chip.
Being unable to hunt bison because of bison DRM.
A completely made-up kind of VR.
Downloading your estranged wife from the internet so you can reunite in VR.
A Rough Whimper of Insanity.
Max Headroom: a guy with a weird forehead who shows up in media sometimes, like a California Raisin.
Explaining Mac Tonight to a 22 year old.
The worst car you could have possibly imagined.
Delightful clean all-ages nonsense.
Demonstrating your allegiance to 90s-era edgelordism.
Cresting the event horizon of random bullshit.
The VR apparatus hanging off of your wasted body.
Adding more vanilla than the recipe calls for.
Putting a hapenny on the spice vendor's tongue and reaching into his trench coat to pull out a bag of cumin.
Poking bytes into memory to mod Cyberpunk 2077.
Whether Pico-8 is more or less racist than Dickens Fair.
The space battle that took place over Nuremberg in 1561.
UFOs vs. UAPs.
Tie-Fighters and Star Destroyers over Nuremberg.
The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office: if you got an anomaly, yo, they'll resolve it.
Asking the Pentagon for money for a cab fare to go investigate unexplained aerial phenomena.
A mass hysteria of the collective unconscious.
Marrying your cousin and going into space.
Anakin is of the species Baby Mario and Padme is a Baby Luigi so when they breed they'll have an infertile Baby Wario or Baby Waluigi.
The fan theory where Jar-Jar is the Sith Lord.
The origin of angels as a terror.
Pre-hurricane ice crystal patterns.
Making biblically accurate angels out of everything.
Generational memory from back when we had wings.
Fish wings.
Being drunk all the time because you don't trust the water.
Aspartame's bitter aftertaste, and also fuck Stevia.
Coke Grownups.
Pepsi Peeps.
Eating the whole bag of Pepsi Syrup Peep Gushers and now you can't play D&D tonight because you just have to lie on the floor clutching your belly and complaining that nobody saved you from your life choices.
Food that exists to overwhelm your senses and your ability to make decisions.
The two genders of time.
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1 hr 3 min
April 10, 2023181. My Own Personal Kennedy Assassination
Lords:
Avery
Tyriq
Topics:
Adam, Father of all humankind, was maybe a giant
Heathcliff is still going and it's weird
I've heard a million novelty metal covers but still nobody's done Truly Scrumptious / Doll on a Music Box from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang
"The Phone Call" by James Tate
Microtopics:
Withholding all your best URLs until the end of the episode.
Using lowercase Ls in place of Is and seeing if anybody notices.
Leaving capitalizations to the whims of chaos. (Your fingers.)
Teachers explaining that if you can't write in cursive by junior high your teachers will throw things at you and call you stupid.
Adam and Eve growing to 18 feet tall.
Pre-flood humans and their towering heights/lifespans/IQs.
How to make your wisdom teeth fit again.
Conspiracy theories that have no bearing on anything.
Fighting wars over the estimated radius of the earth.
The Nephilim.
YHWH fanfiction.
How many Jesuses are alive today.
The friend you have with superhuman charisma and whether they ended up starting a cult.
Getcherself a nice cult, settle down, have a thousand babies.
The guy who was both a dwarf and a giant during his lifetime.
Every tall person having been short at one point.
Chain-smoking tweens drinking martinis and yelling at their secretaries.
A Topic Lords ouroboros.
Hypothesizing why the elderly people Heathcliff lives with have a child.
Having a child for some reason.
A humanoid robot with the word "meat" printed on its chest.
The kind of people who read comics every day.
Zippy the Pinhead.
A weird underground subculture comic that somehow made it into newspaper syndication.
Mustache Mondays vs. Mustache Lasagna.
A milk mustache but for lasagna.
A cartoon anvil that has its weight imprinted on it.
Two side characters explaining the situation to each other.
One of the birds says to the other, "Christ, what an asshole."
Historians a thousand years from now deciding whether Heathcliff should be included in the Bible.
After recorded media stops being a thing, episodes of The Simpsons being passed down as oral history.
Rhapsodes.
Contests for the best rhapsode.
Hector of the Shining Helmet vs. Hector the Booty Inspector.
Fillet episodes in the Odyssey and the Iliad.
The Flaming Lips album that comes on four CDs that your supposed to play simultaneously, but nobody's ever bothered.
How they handle hidden tracks on Spotify.
How to deal with skits when you're ripping rap albums to mp3.
The Meat Puppets playing a set in the middle of Nirvana'a MTV Unplugged set.
Writing a song about a shooting star who's been turned into a rat and has just fallen in love with someone named Tristran, and trying to figure out what rhymes with Tristran.
Working at the Brill Building.
Tin Pan Alley.
Nearly jumping out of your pants.
Taking a high-paying job as a murder victim.
The one where people wear horse skulls.
The Scrambler, from issue #12 where the panels were all out of order.
Working at the oil refinery until a giant spider comes and steals the Light of the Silmarils.
Whether there's a werewolf in the Silmarillion.
Biblical Exigesis.
Getting email saying that your art is improving someone's life.
A phone that can receive text messages but you have to pay extra to know who they're from.
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1 hr 4 min
April 03, 2023180. We Are All Stardust Poop
Lords:
Ichiro
Adam
Topics:
I learned how to animate by watching cartoons as a child (and I'm curious what else folks absorbed as a child that impacted the kind of adult they became)
I created a Totally Human Rapper that can read up on a game and cut a rap video.
Frog Fractions is banned from AGDQ
"Frog Fractions" by Totally Human Rapper
Tiny Mass Games small games cycle.
Microtopics:
One of the episodes with a cold open.
Live from New York, it's.
Using ocean water as a mixer.
Being of poop and returning to poop.
Using the Boston river as a mixer.
Learning everything you know about love from Robotech.
Losing your fiancee and marrying an alien instead.
Paying $6/hr to play a MUD.
Corresponding with your MUD lover via dead tree letters.
Playing a MUD and cheating on one avatar with another avatar and eventually realizing that they are played by the same person.
Sleep is Death.
The cool part of the Metaverse circa 2005.
Learning what human relationships look like by watching Saturday morning cartoons.
Sarah and Duck.
Pocoyo.
Busting ghosts. (A very important time in a boy's life.)
Retired Men's Nude Beach Volleyball League.
The center of your Venn diagram as a creator.
Ichiro Paydirt.
If Tank Girl were a streamer.
Endless Seinfeld pulling a Microsoft Tay.
The year of the deluge of AI generated crap.
Making a BBS door game about traveling into space.
Zooming out of yourself and looking at it with ghost eyes.
A game that appears to be family-friendly but is actually porn-adjacent.
The Timic skip.
A very respectful way to play Frog Fractions.
The two concessions Jim made to game design in the Frog Fractions remaster.
Catering to the you demographic.
Blanking on Tim Ambrogi's name.
Noted base jumping game "ahh"
An underlying engine that just won't swear.
Saying something interesting enough to be debated by a bunch of people.
Stemming the tide of mediocrity across streaming platforms.
The value of making dinner for two people vs. making art for millions of people.
Having a thought in your head and wanting people to hear it.
Gluing all the ports shut.
Games that gradually destroy themselves.
Follow the Frog, an arcade action adventure.
Where Totally Human Rapper gets his ideas.
How to jailbreak ChatGPT.
A deck building auto battler without the deck.
A well-scoped game design.
Not really having anything to say but loving to wrestle with language.
An AI generated game about AI generated games.
Polishing a prototype enough to put it in front of a mass audience.
Rating AI-generated food.
Synergies and combinatorics.
The development process for each Frog Fractions game.
Answering to ask things.
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1 hr 1 min
March 27, 2023179. Get Bad
Lords:
Alex
Shannon
Topics:
Reading music badly
Minigame: guess the animal from bad old-timey descriptions
How to pronounce "MacPaint"
https://www.tumblr.com/destinationtoast/708530541060816896
Airport teleportation
Microtopics:
Games that you should not play if you get addicted to games.
Roguelikes that take a reasonable amount of time to play if you are bad at them.
We're Not That Bad!™
The Sunnyvale Singers.
Producing music with a piano.
Two guards, one who can't read a book and the other one who can read a book aloud but doesn't know the language.
Buttons corresponding to the doots.
Given a starting note, figuring out what the next note is supposed to be.
Not being able to sight sing but faking it by looking at the vertical distance between notes.
Music direction reading "lower than you think" (but in Italian)
Knowing the chord progressions to 10,000 pop songs.
Ways to make music.
Moving between shapes even without hearing them.
Playing accompaniment to silent films.
Improvising music differently each time.
Pliny the Elder describing the camel leopard.
An animal with the neck of a horse but the head of a camel.
A bigness answering thereto.
Enjoying the alligator too much.
A curse on four legs, equally pernicious on land and river.
Inflating the chameleon.
Spontaneous generation.
Horned ghosts catapulting themselves around.
Hunting an elephant by tricking it into leaning on a tree that won't support it.
Whether elephants have knees.
Vultures gestating for three years and giving live birth.
Vultures and condors reproducing without mating.
Your good friend Ms. Paint.
Naming your dog a Japanese-sounding name with no regard to Japanese phonotactics and then arguing with people who try to correct you.
Baking a cake that is 80% vanilla extract.
A poem in the options of a Tumblr poll.
Starting from a point of trust but slowly starting to doubt yourself.
Orpheus and Eurydice.
A poignant way of putting the reader in the character's frame of mind.
The value of Oregon Trail.
Iterating the Orpheus and Eurydice prisoner's dilemma, where whether looking back is the right move is different every time.
Choosing to buy a certain amount of supplies and watching that not work out for you and the character you named after your best friend in the media lab dies.
Extremely short form interactive fiction.
Making an important decision and never finding out if it was the right decision.
Performing Sicilian Reasoning to finesse the outcome of this online cake ingredient poll.
Making a perfect stairway in an online poll.
Making a phone app to help people choose the best option in the cake ingredient poll.
Instantly teleporting from your seat on the flight to the entrance to your destination airport.
Teleporting from the TSA interrogation room to the entrance of the airport.
Teleportation gravity wells.
Establishing an international airport out of your home.
Hoping the cops never figure out that you can only teleport to the entrance of an airport.
Stuperpowers
Gerrymandering your teleport destinations.
An international airport that is 100 miles long and 1 centimeter wide.
Asking a friend to convince you that a certain building is an international airport.
Drinking a glass of water while standing on your head to convince yourself of what an airport is.
Hiccups Gone Install.
You Only Get Screamered Once.
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1 hr 4 min
March 20, 2023178. The Lathe of Kojima
Lords:
CisHetKeyfaber
Phone
Topics:
Calculus ruined incremental games for me
SFF PCs are ridiculous and hilarious
What's the deal with HDR?
Ode to Ice Cream by Vada Sultenfuss (from the movie My Girl)
Metal Gear Solid 2 is the most important game of 2023
Microtopics:
Appropriating wrestling culture.
Idle games vs. incremental games.
Trimps.
Physics and calculus educators each pretending the other field doesn't exist.
Jerk as a unit of measurement.
Ruining a child's mathematical career by teaching them linear algebra.
Floating point precision.
Optimizing the area under the curve.
What's the jerk of my progress?
Position, speed, acceleration, jerk, jounce, hyperjerk, metajounce, binge warp, migrational spank, barflurch, dark jaunt, catastrophic snap, whipfuck, and Newton's Torment.
A real aerodynamic phenomenon.
Ruining the bench racers.
The kind of people who form an online community around a game.
The NGU IDLE speedrunning community.
Slaying the starting area killing slimes for 90 hours.
How big 26.8 liters is.
Rehoming your PC.
How many shoeboxes your PC case is equivalent to.
A graphics card that is perpendicular to the motherboard.
How many parakeets could fit in your PC case using modern parakeet packing algorithms.
Making a novelty enormous soda can to use as a fake scale comparison in photos.
Bending your hand at a weird angle.
JEBKAC.
The jerk of your PC case.
Turning the gamma up in order to see a video game.
Squashed gamuts.
Adding more bits to describe the color.
HDMI stratification.
The colors that future mankind will invent.
Being unable to use certain hex color triplets because the Pantone license expired.
When ice cream tastes good.
Poems written by works in progress.
B.R.R. (Before Rocky Road)
Not having seen My Girl but having seen the cover at Blockbuster.
Growing up in a mortuary.
Bragging that you know how to play the theme to Jaws on the piano.
Nick at Nite.
Playing with Legos with I Love Lucy in the background.
Timeshared cable channels.
Nickelodeon's audience being kids and Nick at Nite's audience being the elderly so the channel's average audience is middle-aged.
The most important game of 2023.
The core switcheroo.
Psycho Mantis reading your memory card.
Playing a really whiny guy who just sucks.
Whether they've invented pausing cutscenes yet.
Pausing a 40 minute cutscene to go make pizza rolls.
AI heel turns.
Metal Gear Solid 2 beating out Vampire Survivors for most important game of 2022.
Why Hideo Kojima's dialog sounds like an American 90s movie.
Political theory outsider art.
The anti-Noby Noby Boy.
A discord channel brimming with Lords.
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1 hr 7 min
March 13, 2023177. An Episode Your Landlord Should Not Listen To
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Alicia
Ryan
Just type his name into google.
Topics:
Seattle's reaction to snow vs the Bay Area's reaction to rain: who is more dramatic?
Would you rather fart bones once a month or have Goldeneye "big head mode" on in real life for a year?
Moral philosophy lessons from the California DMV
Nancy
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1966/08/18/nancy/
Common everyday items that make you mentally "time travel"
Microtopics:
Structurally reinforcing the scrotum.
Plugging mundane chores around the house.
Why do you live here, Seattle?
The lamentation of a failed joke being funnier than the joke itself would've been.
Turning the tire towards the curb when parking on a hill.
Driving in inclement weather.
Milking oats.
What it means for society when you make oat milk at home.
The rain we occasionally get except way more.
Bettie White-out.
When an imaginary kid uses his last words to put you on blast.
The advantages and disadvantages of big head mode.
How to get on the bus with big head mode on.
Whose bones you're farting right now.
Big Head Mode Confirmed in GoldenEye 007.
The yoga pose that is most optimal for shitting bones.
Getting your GoldenEye big head stuck in the automatic doors at TJ Maxx.
Whale bones on your mattress.
Which bones you can do without.
Bone pellets.
Using your broken tooth as a fidget toy.
An absolutely staggering amount of dental work.
A perfectly lovely root canal.
Using your bone-lasered rib as a fidget toy.
Extra ribs just loose in your torso somewhere.
Ribs of betrayal stabbing you in your soft pink innards.
McRib, more like MacBethRib.
The DMV letting you know that your custom license plate is "in the mail, you fucking pervert."
A grizzled PI paid to determine whether Dr. Puff is a real doctor.
Dark, but fair.
The moral philosophy of the DMV.
The 4chan veteran the DMV hires to detect profanity in custom license plate applications.
Three letters that mean a car thing.
You just got passed by a bad driver.
Nancyverse lore.
The one place in the world where the cost of living is higher than San Francisco.
Slant rhymes that slant so much they fall over.
Writing a Nancy fan poem just so you can slip increasingly awful rhymes into it.
Making your poem worse and worse as it goes on because what are the readers going to do, stop reading? Nobody has Netflix in 1966.
Using hand-crank egg-beaters when it's not the Prohibition.
Everybody at the office party with those paper guillotines, going to town on reams of paper.
Jim's hotel waffle story again.
Paying $8 for this novelty bust of Duke Nukem because you liked Duke Nukem 1.
High school kids dressing just like you dressed when you were in high school 20 years ago.
JNCO jeans with a dragon on the back pocket.
That Nostalgia Cycle: it's gonna come around.
Using two different keys to unlock and start your car.
The best car for the kidnapper on the go.
The first car to use the same key for the door, trunk and ignition.
Locking the exhaust pipe so nobody can put a banana in there.
Separate keys for locking your sun and moonroof.
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1 hr 4 min