Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

March 06, 2023176. A Diglett Slightly Tan
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Hallie
John B
Topics:
Tabletop RPGs as educational platform
Flicky-likes
Etch A Sketch Animator 2000
Poem: "My Brother's Head Should Be Replaced" by Jack Prelutsky
https://youtu.be/TYXJyxT7QN4?t=1330
Buff Diglett
Microtopics:
471 very positive reviews.
Pizza Tower, the Tower of Pizza.
Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular.
Taking a drink of your Safeway brand Diet Cola Caffeine Free Soda.
Bouncy the Rat and her friends in the Wild Wood.
Providing a platform for people to talk to each other and learn about boundaries.
Why to add numbers together.
Teaching children math when everyone has a pocket calculator in their pocket at all times.
A peek under the curtain.
The edutainment classics.
Three D&D combat system as a way to get comfortable doing arithmetic in your head.
Providing an experiential experience.
A tiny video game console that looks like a Sega Genesis.
Trying to sex Flicky.
Maximizing your combo chain in Flicky.
Sonic 3D Blast as a sequel to Flicky.
Super Rub-a-Dub.
Flicking the controller to make the rubber ducky jump.
A dude collecting dudes who follow you in a trail.
Pix the Cat.
All the Bubble Bobble sequels, none of which use the bubbling mechanic.
Rainbow Islands: Towering Adventure.
Whip Whip: the word "whip" twice.
The Etch-a-Sketch: a terrible toy for terrible people.
Making animations that are perhaps five or six frames long.
Controlling with the knobbies.
The Magic Touch Pad.
A button that says "recall" on it.
Putt-Nuts Go to the Moon, featuring Alan Shepard.
Plugging your Etch-a-Sketch into your VCR to save your art.
The powder leaking out of the Etch-a-Sketch because you used it too much.
It's like painting but on a TV but worse than regular painting.
2000 gray squares.
The poet laureate of children.
The golden age of the CD-ROM.
Wanting a tomato to be bigger.
The Tomato Centipede.
Poems about homework.
A mole-type Pokemon.
Everybody independently coming to the conclusion that Diglett has a muscular human body down there.
Buff kittens.
Whether Dugtrio has one muscular human body down there, or three.
Three human bodybuilders cosplaying as Dugtrio.
Trying to search for "naked diglett" but Google autocorrects you to "naked woman"
Space Dentist!!
That one dentist out of ten who recommends that you go to space.
Organizing your video game garbo.
Support Topic Lords
55 min
February 27, 2023175. This Movie Has Marky Mark in It
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Erica
Jesse
Topics:
There's a Spanish word which officially cannot be written because the grammar and orthography conflict about how it should spelled/pronounced.
My personal relationship with Disco Elysium
Clue II: Murder in Disguise
All of the Words on a Bottle of Rolling Rock Beer in a Different Order
https://expatriotact.blogspot.com/2006/10/poets-corner-demetri-martin.html
This year's beast of a Mystery Hunt
Shareable alarms
Microtopics:
Texans with nothing to plug.
The Army Corp of Engineers coming to your town and kicking ass.
No, and no.
Fuck em, just get a laptop.
Fact checking the dinner table conversation with your laptop.
An interaction deemed normal.
The Spanish double-L sound.
Finally finding a way that spelling in English is more sensible than spelling in Spanish.
Desperately avoiding hearing French spoken incorrectly.
A place that is less like the rest of Canada than any part of the United States is like the United States.
A good relaxing podcast that leads to substantial academic progress.
Stormdancer Zero.
Secret of Monkey Island with additional D&D stat checks and communism.
Continents not connected to tectonic plates but instead freely floating in the mist.
When your stats talk to you.
Equipping a philosophical idea in your thought cabinet.
Where the resource extraction happens.
An alcoholic amnesiac video game protagonist.
Finding the richest person in town to explain to you how the world works.
Recreating all your characters from the ground up to be optimized for the game engine.
Cheating past the final boss in Baldur's Gate because the alternative is starting from scratch with a viable build.
Revising your thinking about the Gros Michel banana.
Campy goofballs doing campy goofball shit except it's not Tim Curry this time.
The guy whose name Jim can't remember who played Chuck on Better Call Saul.
The VCR board game phenomenon.
Scenes sort of adding up into a narrative if you squint.
Seeing John Lithgow when nobody else sees him.
How to get Michael Land to talk to you at CES.
Out-of-work FMV actors.
Specializing in loving horrible FMV games.
The one place that hasn't been corrupted by capitalism.
DVD games vs. VCR games.
A DVD arriving too late to save a drowning VCR game industry.
The pride of seeing your topic grow up and take its place in the world.
Panache, aplomb, and savoir-faire.
Rolling, glass tanks of beverages that rocked that lined mountain.
Women as the exception to implied maleness.
A folk pop album featuring a disgraced CDC employee.
50 Cent rapping about going to prison for insider trading.
The Topic Lords Guarantee.
A series of interconnected puzzles that you solve as a team.
Flavor text explaining why it's fun to solve this math problem.
A beautiful puzzle hunt that is way too long.
Assuming that being good at solving puzzles is the same skill as constructing puzzles.
Waiting all year for a chocolate box that ends up being a marathon through Death Valley.
How to test a 100-person puzzle hunt.
Admonishing astronomers to "get good."
Puzzles that are like tiny little gifts that open up and dance in front of you.
A chip that controls a single light point on the wall.
Doing something for free vs. doing it for a pittance.
Losing your wedding ring but also your wedding ring screams once a day.
Your screaming wedding ring following you from house to house.
One o’clock: Time for Pants.
Remembering that it's time for pants no matter what time zone you're in.
The Playstation Vita's pants alarm.
Playing a competitive minigame to see who can wake up fastest.
Earning achievements for getting out of bed.
The app that is the opposite of sex.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 15 min
February 20, 2023174. Occam's Raccoon
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Chris
Alexander
Topics:
Words with similar sounds/meanings but no relation to each other at all.
Virtual marble runs with guns
https://www.youtube.com/@mikan2d
The "broom method" of dealing with a hydrogen leak
https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/706885583716466688
Poem by Dr. Seuss: “I have heard there are troubles of more than one kind. Some come from ahead and some come from behind. But I've bought a big bat. I'm all ready you see. Now my troubles are going to have troubles with me!”
Loveland Frog (Ohio frog bigfoot?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loveland_frog
Ghosts are real: what are the economic consequences?
Microtopics:
Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
Lords starting with Xa.
Moving boxes that have handles built in.
All else being equal, a raccoon did it.
Proto-Indo-European.
Putting the S in Island.
The era of Topic Lords when we only discussed Shakespeare.
Some of the things you expect are wrong, and vice-versa.
Bacteria finding proteins hanging around and deciding "this is part of me now."
Branching path structures shooting red and blue bullets at each other.
Escalating Revenge Core Destruction.
If pachinko were extremely elaborate and violent.
Oil timers.
Turning over the rectangle on your desk and forcing the red and green combatants to fight for you once more.
Apollonian circles.
The ancestry of Firefox.
Web browsers surrounded by water on all sides.
Using the entirety of your computing resources to do basically nothing.
A phone app that makes your phone display Flying Toasters but only while it's in your pocket.
Computers that are really good at getting hot and not very good at not getting hot.
An air conditioner but backwards.
Marbula One.
Marble races except every marble is armed with an assault rifle.
The year you finally get into Blaseball.
How Blaseball works.
How to detect a fire that you can't see.
Glass Onion: debunked.
A hell planet completely saturated with a volatile gas populated by lava monsters.
Why leave the house? Just send a probe and infer the existence of your neighbors.
What "from" means in "escape from the tank"
The jingle the hydrogen truck plays as it trundles by.
The Snack of the Stars.
Safety testing various propellants.
What your voice sounds like without any transmission medium.
The Gregorian Underwater Choir.
Naming Helium after the sun because that's where we discovered it.
The Lorax threatening you with a bat.
My huge sawed off flashlight.
Stay back, officer, it's just just a flashlight.
Replacing your self-defense rabies bat every time it dies.
Brushing your self-defense bat's teeth.
Dr. Zeus's book of adult poetry.
Is the Death Star brutalist? Can brutalist architecture be round?
Bee Barns.
A four foot tall frog guy who lives in the woods.
A frog guy. A guy who is a frog.
A frog guy caught between two worlds of posture.
A Wikipedia user whose thing is to make photo illustrations of cryptids and extinct animals.
What happens to Pikachu's soul when it dies.
Ghosts: what do they do all day?
Ghosts exist, and they can talk, and they know all about the afterlife, but also they're huge liars.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 6 min
February 13, 2023173. How Much Anxiety Does Your Car Have?
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Maxx
Tyriq
Topics:
Nancy and having a continuous tone for a hundred years
Recommendations
Adding trinkets to other people's time capsules
A Psalm for the Wild-Built https://nextworldover.tumblr.com/post/705362430786748416/guooey-a-psalm-for-the-wild-built-becky
Microtopics:
Looking down a lot while you're on a walk.
What is this Meta for?
Discovering that there is a cliff and having a brief high-octane experience.
Sitting on the bus and saying the lore of the land.
A lego minifig that you found on the street.
Fritzi Ritz.
Making millennial shitposts in the 1930s.
Being wholesomely surreal for a hundred years.
Accruing canon.
Simple archetypes that have been honed to a point.
Writing a new punchline to the same joke every day for a hundred years.
Comics going on two silent retreats, one for the setup (at a monastery) and the other for the punchline (at an empty lot)
Coronation St.
The kids we met in 1964.
Whether South Park is still a thing.
Finding success at a young age and staying the same person for the rest of your life.
Retirement or Blade Runner Retirement?
User Friendly.
Web comics that started when the hardest part about making a web comic is uploading an image to the internet.
Web comics going from having bad art to having good art.
Telling someone to like art other than the art they like.
Politely accepting advice and then ignoring it.
Speaking into the void to ask for music recommendations.
If you don't see it, that's what you paid for.
Delivering Nancy comics daily for over 100 years.
Working on the same game for 10 years even though you like different kinds of games now.
Working within the framework of past you.
Every page of a webcomic as a collage of all the previous pages.
Pokey the Penguin: updated sporadically.
Enjoying a webcomic a lot.
Weird semi-robot creatures.
Haribogosean.
Recommending someone a nice leaf.
Wanting to accept recommendations but hating them viscerally.
Tricking music recommendations into someone's life like a fairy tale gremlin.
Introducing hot jams to the people of the future.
Burying a can of cheese for a hundred years.
Extra old tardigrades.
A sealed piggy bank where if you want to get the tardigrades out you have to smash it on the floor.
Opening up your terrarium every so often to swap out the moss.
This wholesome man with this forty year old bottle ecosystem.
The most advanced level of mummification, in which you become a mannequin.
Dumping a pile of garbage in the forest and leaving it to your children in your will.
The Artemis Program.
Returning to the moon to get the geocache back.
Inserting a completely fictional topic into the historical record.
Wax House, Baby!
A fake fact about the world that has been purged from Wikipedia but is still everywhere that scraped the data from Wikipedia.
Chosts from chostville.
The age of monetizing all your hobbies.
Trying to make a human connection via your art.
Digging up, modifying, and reburying other people's time capsules even though nobody's paying you to do it.
Keeping your citizens happy and healthy.
An intentionally altered view of how automated clothing production is.
Going on a journey together with a robot.
Cozy books entirely lacking in high-octane moments.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
February 06, 2023172. Don’t Apply Any Torque to This Bag
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Alex
Shannon
Topics:
Incomprehensible PSAs (Remember to slip, slop, slap, seek and slide)
Games which use player ignorance as a major mechanic (Outer Wilds, Tunic)
Man out of Space Easiest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE
Stepped on a plum (overripe plum) (barefoot)
https://utopians.tumblr.com/post/659350035592609792/stepped-on-a-plum-overripe-plum-barefoot-it
Australia trends (pre vs post pay, pay at pump vs parking meter vs toll camera)
Bats! Micro & Mega
Microtopics:
The Broken Earth Trilogy.
The Lightly-Massaged Earth Trilogy.
Turkish Delight vs. a Turkish Delight candy bar.
A candy that gives you the feeling of nostalgia but no corresponding memories.
Remembering to slip, slop, slap, seek and slide in the kitchen.
The three onomatopoeias for applying sunscreen.
Lamenting to your partner that you forgot to slip.
Posters that just say "don't forget to slip slop slap seek and slide" with no further context.
A cool grandpa following safety instructions.
Actionable snake advice.
Various ways to distinguish goats and sheep.
A music video that is also a drunk driving PSA.
How to use search atoms.
If you're on the train, that's a shame.
Rhyming platitudes about how social media is bad for your mental health and society as a whole.
A music video trying to get across a safe sex message to the kids.
Do They Even Know it's Christmas?
Something jarring to hear on the radio.
A desert wasteland full of crying children.
Tunic.
Reading the manual of the video game you just bought on the drive home.
Evoking the idea of playing old video games.
Jumping puzzles that cost you twenty minutes of your life if you fall.
A Jules Verne conception of the solar system where other planets are a five minute rocket trip away.
Learning a code and keeping it in your brain.
The Hourglass Twins.
Not being sure what to do so you go look at the moon.
The kind of game where most of the fun is figuring out how to play the game.
AAA games trying to make artistic statements about AAA games.
Hatoful Boyfriend as a better Doki Doki Literature Club.
A horror story about pigeons.
An ablative heat shield on your butt.
Manually aiming the rocket without being to look outside of your polyester bag.
The legality of dropping a moose out of a spaceship.
A safety mechanism that is not appealing to aerospace professionals.
Landing an airplane on Mars and then remote-piloting Mars rovers from inside the airplane.
The world's largest saltwater crocodile.
Pulling the quick release flap on the crocodile's mouth.
Don't Go To Space.
It's the 60s, and it's a bag.
A snorkel for when you land in the ocean and can't get out of your foam entombment capsule.
Bringing along a shotgun in case your escape pod lands in Siberia.
Clown First Lover Second.
A single paragraph with 19 parenthetical phrases and no other punctuation.
Deciding to hem your sweatpants.
Plum Nightmare.
Finding two extra poems inside an existing poem.
What to expect when you read a poem.
Whether it's illegal to drive barefoot.
Bare feet and there's textures down here.
The utter lack of technology at the pump.
No-flush toilets.
What kinds of towels they use to clean up messes in Australia.
Public restrooms that automatically eject you if you're not done in ten minutes.
Honeycomb candy with the same texture as instant coffee.
Look to your left; look to your right; one of you is a bat.
Visiting baby bats in the bat hospital.
Bats as pollinators.
Giving stuffed animals to baby bats.
The pollinating and bug-eating ecosystem.
A bat the size of a bat.
Spectacled flying foxes.
Bats reverse-nicheing back into mice.
Bats becoming nocturnal to avoid their creditors.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 17 min
January 30, 2023171. Reasons to Not Throw Your Phone in the Ocean
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
CisHetKayFaber
Kev
Topics:
Food from dreams and nightmares
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/adeonibada/man-dream-kings-hand-snack
Han Unification happened in Unicode and every time they add more emojis to the Unicode spec it literally hurts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_unification
The Super Mega Crossword
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/18/crosswords/super-mega-2022-clues.html
Down by the Bay by Raffi
https://www.vulture.com/2015/12/finding-raffi-c-v-r.html
Video game franchises known for secrets
Five-tined forks
[NMS] https://www.google.com/search?q=five-tined+forks&tbm=isch
Horrible exceptions to rule34
After recording, CisHetKayFaber managed to find their holy grail videos depicting the "exception." Jim's example is much better, but Kev was also correct in having faith in human ingenuity.
Microtopics:
First time long time.
A very light hobby that is kind of shallow.
Getting really into Rubik's Cube because you already love flash cards.
Being reminded of something right before you were about to forget it.
How best to memorize pizza coding and microphone specs.
Ignoring the room and being annoyed when people talk to you.
Work life balance being too tilted toward life
The King's Hand.
Orange Creamsicle Mashed Potatoes.
M&M fingernails.
A tweet and what happened with it.
Biting something with the wrong texture and having to stare at a wall for ten minutes.
UTF-8 character encoding.
Adding support for Asian languages to Unicode without consulting any native speakers for advice.
The international new global meme language of the internet.
PuzzleMania.
All the downsides of doing a crossword on paper.
Words that just happen a lot when you're constructing a crossword puzzle.
The Elden Ring of crossword puzzles.
Doing the crossword puzzle on paper so that when you're done you can say "looks right to me" and there's no app to tell you you're wrong.
Reading crossword puzzle clues to your wife as she falls asleep.
A time traveler from the future who invented time travel to bring us excellent children's songs.
A national treasure (Canada)
A fly wearing a tie, a bear combing its hair, a llama eating pajamas, &c.
A song intended to be performed improvisationally.
Extending the finger family song by adding more fingers.
Messing the cadence up with your fake mother voice.
Where the watermelons roam.
A mom saying nonsense that really makes you think.
Avoiding your mom because she keeps saying weird shit about a goose kissing a moose.
Unlocking a branch of a storyline by fulfilling a set of conditions.
Subverting overused fantasy tropes.
Finding a cool castle by going down a secret cliffside stairway into a hidden cave.
Systems that point you everywhere on the map.
Secrets of all sorts of scopes.
The Doom thing where they point out that you didn't find all the secrets.
Frog Fractions containing Rule 34 of itself.
Reacting to five-tined fork.
The fork optimization function that decided that four is the right number of tines.
Unknowing a conversation.
A Victorian flex of a fork.
When die-casting was invented.
A shovel with teeth.
Seven-tined sporks.
The Pornography Lord.
Human pairings and human activities that you would expect there to be pornography of.
Linda Hunt smugly declaring "ass to ass"
AI pornographers buying sex dice on eBay.
Weird combinations of words you can plug into a search engine.
People don't want everything; people only want some things.
The Frog Fractions pornography gap.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 10 min
January 23, 2023170. My Brain Likes the Things I Like
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Tyriq
FourBitFriday in all the places
Cort
Leftover Pumpkin Pie Curry https://savethefood.com/recipes/leftover-pumpkin-pie-and-turkey-curry/
Topics:
Fantasy consoles
https://github.com/paladin-t/fantasy
Tyriq's 80s homework
80s homework playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3SbI8kec0NtJp8szqsl4Ek0lZHqvHjaX
Tyriq's reaction: https://topiclords.com/articles/80s-homework-reaction
I meant New Kids on the Block, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_Starr
You can't slake an earworm with 3/4 of a chorus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlAeEcVnnvo
https://youtu.be/rI3yD3WAcz4
Aesop Rock - Ruby 81
https://genius.com/Aesop-rock-ruby-81-lyrics
Microtopics:
The album you finished.
A song that is entirely made of uncleared samples.
Turning leftover pumpkin pie into delicious pumpkin spice curry.
Interactive Pico-8 holiday cards.
Artificial constraints pegged at a level of technology somewhere in the 80s.
Writing specs for Pico-16 so that you don't accidentally make Pico-16 when you're making Pico-8.
Seeking a box to work within.
The most played entry in your Steam library is something your kids left running for weeks.
A collection of 50 games made for a console that never existed.
List of Fantasy Consoles.
The fantasy console hidden as an Easter egg in the Frog Fractions hat DLC.
Four joysticks in your garage waiting for an arcade machine to be installed into.
Languages that transpile to Lua.
Emulating the PlayStation 9.
A fantasy console for making 4D games.
A popular game engine that starts with the letters UN.
Civilisation's relationship with art.
Hop's Big Adventure in the Gift Dimension.
All the problems with Lua.
The Pico-8 show with the Pico-Lords.
All the things people were doing in the 80s.
Playing an inaudible guitar.
The sound of somebody being chased.
All the good Meat Loaf albums.
An inspiring thing that shows up a lot in your life.
A hip hop album entirely devoid of metaphor.
Listening to the first fifteen seconds of each song on an album.
Drums that are emblematic of everything you hate about the 80s.
A big decade with a lot of things happening.
Gil Scott-Heron.
Music that is distinctly of the 80s vs. music that happened to be released in the 80s.
The musical equivalent of oatmeal.
Not liking the whole chorus, but liking the first chord change in the chorus.
The bass part of Like a Prayer.
Your superpower: knowing what marmite tastes like and knowing your don't like it.
Hyperactive j-pop with way too many chord changes.
Creating a mashup that is better than the sum of its parts, but only for ten seconds.
Purging an earworm with another earworm.
We Need a Bigger Dumpster, by Cheek Face.
The parts of your brain that you're not on speaking terms with.
A photographic memory for all audio except for words.
Songs about love or romance or being horny: get that shit out of here.
"Baby Got Back," a song about Sir Mix A Lot's infant and her extremely loaded diaper.
Waking the sleeping beagle.
Some kind of intentional arson.
Painting an evocative picture of an extremely specific moment in time.
Uncles and aunts and stuff everywhere.
Thank you, Genius!
Bad or text-to-speech bad?
Trying to fix all instances of a given fact that is wrong everywhere on the internet.
Wesley Willis writing the story song "Oil Express" because he wanted to write about oil changes.
Lords Rule, Nuff Said.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 9 min
January 16, 2023169. Topicless
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
John
robohunkx on Twitter, robohunk on most social media platforms
Tim
Jamestown+
The Pathless
https://github.com/westquote/squidtasks
Topics:
America's self-denying culture of compartmentalization
Deus Ex: Revision is a mod for Deus Ex that changes maps just enough that it feels like a new game without losing what made the original special.
Napster pranks and more generally, fun with the early internet's poor security
The Last Titan
https://topiclords.com/articles/the-last-titan
Topic Lords update: A review of the Gros Michel (aka "Big Mike") banana
If AI can tell better stories than you, is it still worth telling them (and why)?
Microtopics:
Planning around time zone differences.
What bots are left after the bot purge.
Text parsers that make it sound like you have silly accents.
C++ Coroutines for Everyone!
Playing the Frog Fractions soundtrack on mandolin at Jim's wedding reception.
Seeing friends catch up.
Waiting until the weekend to celebrate your birthday because weekdays are not for fun things.
Topicless Topic Peasants.
Planning to do things all week so you have things to look forward to all week.
How to schedule a movie night.
How to hang out with your friends on weekends.
Hanging out with your friends once a week because your internet audience demands it.
Setting traps for yourself so that you involuntarily have fun.
How you felt in the Fall of 2014.
Embracing making bad things.
Making bad art and dropping it in the company Slack.
April cameos.
What to do when Jim makes a mistake.
Watching a 3D film on a 2D viewing apparatus.
New super duper secret places to sneak around in.
Lay D Denton.
Let me tell you about my Napster pranks.
A very specific example of Napster interactions.
Authorless messages.
Renaming your band's music to have the same name as popular songs so people will download it on Napster.
A very benign internet security prank.
Telling your friend that you've made an AI chatbot but actually it's you typing the replies and she falls in love with the AI and wants to talk to it all the time.
Philly Boys.
Taking bets on whether any given domain name leads to porn.
Writing a cease and desist letter to the owner of a domain name that you want, claiming that you need it for your nonexistent porn company.
Getting out of legal jeopardy by constructing a gay porn web site.
An old god, his glory lost to memory.
A computer named Roboticus that you can't bear to decommission.
Looking on a diorama of dusty objects that represent your lost past.
Banana history.
A banana that you've never tasted.
Buying fruit from the Miami Fruit Organization.
The shocking flavor of electrolytes.
Fat Mike vs. Big Mike.
Quantifying 45 apple varietals without realizing that there is also wide variance within varietals.
Having to eat 10,000 bananas before you can safely say you know what they taste like.
Eating a bunch of types of bananas and realizing that they all pretty much taste the same.
Cotton candy flavored grapes.
Strawberries the size (and flavor) of a human heart.
Grapples vs. grapples.
A banana that is certainly a banana that you can eat.
The time Deep Blue glitched out and made a random chess move and Garry Kasparov couldn't figure it out and resigned the match.
Teaching a computer how to get flummoxed.
The purpose of making art.
What about Mario coins?
K-Mart music.
Smarty Pants, Brain Quest and Booty Blocks.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 13 min
January 09, 2023168. Take a Gasket, Leave a Gasket
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Erica
Jenni
Topics:
Stronger with Stogner
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o0MwD8dyko
What is & isn't ahegao, prescriptivistly
Wanna Feel Old? 10 Hilarious Examples Of Anti-Piracy Measures In Video Games
https://screenrant.com/anti-piracy-video-games-funny/
The Lanyard by Billy Collins
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50975/the-lanyard
The "what the fuck" genre of narrative & why it frequently has an unsatisfying ending
Ed O'Brien on backing vocals
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWuAn6C8Mfc
https://floodmagazine.com/44288/ed-from-radiohead-sing-his-own-name/
Microtopics:
Fighting for credit.
The discord: it's fun in there.
Forgetting an entire lord.
A lot of work to get twice as many views.
A convenient thing you can put old food in so it doesn't go bad as quickly.
Gaskets: there's a name for them.
The British vs. the American conception of a frown.
Frowning with your face gaskets.
Doing a cartwheel to feel happier.
Alan Snape.
Doing a racy political ad on top of a 40-foot pumpjack.
What the Texas Railroad Commission does.
Getting the idea for OPEC from Texas.
A political ad using the Sugar Hill Gang cover of Apache as a soundtrack.
The suburban Texan mom solving the climate crisis single-handedly.
Twerking at the sunrise.
Field-dressing a moose.
Fantasy-footballing a female running mate for Theodore Roosevelt even though they didn't have women back then.
Getting so annoyed at an ad that you have to log back into Twitter.
Scrolling social media and getting angry by yourself.
The crucial elements that comprise the ahegao face.
Electronic Girl.
The phylogeny of the e-girl.
Is it Soup?
Looking at Zelda's face and thinking "okay, that's soup."
Whether ahegao or Betty Boop are sexy.
A face that people make to indicate horniness.
The Betty Boop ahegao: it's bad, folks.
What is otaku's plan for us?
Project Lords.
A web site with JavaScript implementations of video game code wheels of various 90s video games.
Everybody playing the free version of chess for thousands of years when the paid version is a way better game.
Why there is no Casio Loopy emulator.
Finding a tiny blood reservoir for the smallest blood sacrifices.
Who wrote the Vagina Monologues?
Moving as if underwater from typewriter to piano.
What a lanyard is and what it's for.
How to repay your mom for all the things that she's given you.
God's Eyes.
Replacing your son's butt-gasket.
Being old enough to remember when it was normal for schoolchildren to make their parents an ashtray.
Making a gumball dispenser in wood shop and using it to convince your mom to buy you a big bag of gumballs.
1899.
A sequence of mysterious things happening.
A mysterious TV show that ends when you overwater all of your boyfriend's plants.
The final episode of Lost, where the giant panda shows up and explains that "I'm god and you're in my dream!"
Comedy typing directly into the Topic Bucket.
What makes a good ending to a mystery-focused story.
Mystery as marketing hook.
How to end a mystery-focused story in a satisfying way without solving the mystery.
The most normal-looking guy in Radiohead.
The one guy in Radiohead who doesn't have any fans.
From the Basement in Rainbows.
A super chill guy keeping time with his leg.
Does Ed from Radiohead only sing his own name?
A Pokemon Named Ed.
Idiosyncratic ways to describe your favorite band member, that unlock your unique adoration.
The only member of the band who smiles.
Absorbing it all as the luckiest person alive playing with your pals in a huge venue.
The kind of Radiohead fan whose imagination is so powerful that you can't safely let them into Radiohead concerts because they might imagine a bomb.
The kind of Topic Lord who listens to the show.
Having some delightful chats in Texas.
Posing on the pumpjack where nobody will ever see you.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 20 min
January 02, 2023167. Riker's Doing the Biting
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Danny
https://dbsoundworks.bandcamp.com/
Akash
https://www.akashthakkar.com/
Topics:
100KHz microphones
There's an entire town in Alaska that's contained entirely in one building - https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2015/07/us/whittier-alaska-american-story/
Tired: CRT filter in emulated video games. Wired: grainy magazine screenshot filter in emulated video games
http://folklore.usc.edu/childrens-song-hitler-is-a-jerk/
Coming back to games months after starting, forgetting what happened, totally forgetting how to play, and never playing again/starting over
Vampire Survivors genre name
Microtopics:
Sleeping with 20,000 podcasts.
Hyper Light Waiter.
Rift of the Necrodancer.
Picking up a dog ribcage and the rest of the dog comes with it.
A cat flowing out of your hands like water.
Which organ you smell with.
Dipping your fingies into the chicken vat to refresh the chicken smell.
Serendipity, providence, kismet, fate: Stormdancing.
Nyquist vs. Dayquist.
A big talking world snake named Carlosti, just like in the Edda.
Pitching a character's voice down four semitones to indicate that they're the bad guy.
Inventing a sound never heard before.
Doing a fun click.
Whether to take Tidal seriously.
Moving to a town that lives in a shopping mall.
Snowpiercer but the wheels fell off.
Signing your kids up for Twitter because they have to learn about death somehow.
A tiktok sensation dancing with a subway sandwich.
Visiting the sewage treatment plant next to the Forever 21.
The only two Invisible War fans in the world, on the same podcast together.
Crimothy, Jermdom and Frenchalor.
The Archie Effect.
A video card that's broken in an extremely specific way.
Reading a brochure about Super Metroid over and over.
A controller made of marzipan.
2x Sai vs. SuperEagle.
DLSS but for pixel art.
Star Wars but every six seconds it's a different director.
Paying composers to make original music because you enjoy the idea of paying people to do work.
A poem by Nega-Kanye West.
The engine that drives the popularity of the "Whistle while you work / Hitler is a jerk" rhyme.
Bratwurst vs. Vienna Sausage.
Whether Data has functional genitalia.
The episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation where Data stars in a porn film in order to better understand that part of the human experience.
Star Trek Next Generation Triple-X Porn Parody: it's a satire.
Trying to find the Star Trek Next Generation Triple-X porn parody but all you can find is endless copies of the Babylon 5 porn parody.
Searching the internet and the universe for an answer.
Pressing both the sticks in and the sea monkeys come out.
What's cool about Dark Souls.
Trying to get your mom to play Skyrim with the Macho Man Randy Savage mod installed.
Video games: fuck the whole town!
Game of the Year in the sense of Time Magazine's Man of the Year.
Roguelikes: they're like Rogue.
Single-stick shooters.
The kind of game that a CSI character would play.
What Fortnite was before it was a PubG clone.
The extremely bitter blog post about the Edge team giving up and wrapping Chromium.
Where to play Frog Fractions 4 and 5.
How to feel about numbers.
The most expensive Vampire Survivor-likes.
Where to find Drop 7 2.
Arcade Paradise.
Bootleg Fractions.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 6 min