Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

December 26, 2022166. There's Only One Best Topic
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Lords:
Erica
Maxx
Topics:
Freesound.org and the delight of sharing things without fame
https://freesound.org/people/Bram/sounds/15543/
https://freesound.org/people/Mrthenoronha/sounds/369065/
https://freesound.org/people/smokenweewALT/
Shutting down the FF2 ARG Twitter account
Leisure in the 70s
Snow by David Berman
https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/snow-14
The some potatoes diet
Plants that can see sorta?
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8903786/
Microtopics:
The Topic Lords discord.
Meeting friends in the Kingdom of Loathing chat.
A virtual birthday party crashing app.
Piranesi.
A website where people post sound.
Wav laundering.
Purchasing a lion sound effect from an off-Broadway sound effect shop.
Sending over the can crushing noises that you selected.
Someone's friend pretending to be a bird.
Having a roommate named Phil all of whose passwords were “Phil”
AAA games with Freesound user names in the credits.
Recognizing Brick Drop 5 from Dope Dragon 69's Freesound portfolio.
Officer, I was just making a video game!
The psychology of why no Freesound user has uploaded a good pneumatic tube delivery sound.
The bank teller watching you and registering your surprise at being delivered a tube.
The bank tellers noticing that you are shitting into the pneumatic delivery tube and lifting the Gallagher tarp in front of their faces.
Getting ready for bed and then suddenly recording an episode of Topic Lords.
SmokenweewALT recording water flowing sounds in Flushing, Queens.
The best Wikipedia pages.
Toe Cleavage.
Cats who have jobs.
Finding things on Wikipedia that are not directly related to one another.
Tweeting your disappointment that a weird thing turns out to be part of the Frog Fractions ARG.
The alternate reality where Frog Fractions 2 launched but nobody ever found it.
The final unsolved (and now unsolvable) FF2 ARG puzzle.
Who was solving things?
New ways to not be at work.
Another word for having a good time.
Choosing photos to represent the concept of leisure.
Phil relaxing on the couch next to his toilet paper.
Someone who doesn't have a bed but does have two lanterns.
The guy who has spent fifteen years uploading pictures of his foreskin to Wikipedia just in case someone needs a picture of foreskin.
Spending so long thinking about someone that you're unsure whether they're notorious to anyone but you.
A foreskin in repose.
Believing that genes are immortal survival machines that use our disposable bodies to endlessly replicate themselves.
The concept of leisure as a human right.
Serious vs. casual leisure.
Project-based leisure projects.
A poem stapled to the wall in a laundromat in Massachusetts.
Voices hanging close in the new acoustics.
Explaining to your little brother that the snow angels are angel corpses that a nearby farmer murdered.
Lying to your child just a little bit, as a treat.
The Seattle Space Noodle.
The last Burger King in Amsterdam.
The most normal person you know.
Running an impromptu experiment on the internet by asking strangers to eat nothing but potatoes and report back.
Trying the all-potatoes diet for thirty years.
Eating 40 potatoes a day.
Game designer and science communicator Nicky Case.
Halftato.
Overdosing on potassium.
Doctors telling you to cool it with the potassium.
Why doctors don't know how much chemotherapy to give obese people.
The doctor from the phrenology department measuring your neck to see if you have sleep apnea.
Parasitic plants imitating the host plant's leaves.
Recognizing silhouettes of birds from an 8x8 monochrome image.
Rapidly changing the hydraulics of your leaves.
A forest of Max mimicry.
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1 hr 12 min
December 19, 2022165. Spitting Wiggly Air
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Lords:
Mark
Shirley
Topics:
What would you do if you came downstairs and all of my clothes and my glasses were on the floor in a heap in a puddle of water?
Aphasia: What doesn't it mean?
Dr. Icecreamwala
https://www.icecreamderm.com/
Eternal Champion - I Am The Hammer
https://eternalchampion.bandcamp.com/track/i-am-the-hammer
Teen Censorship (what to restrict, if anything?)
SCA stuff: social skills in the SCA, thrown weapons, and winter camping!
Microtopics:
EEG, EKG and ECG.
Dogs and video games.
Kingdom: Two Crowns.
Whoops, I'm Dead!
Borker and Starina.
Waking up in the morning and telling your wife "and we're back!"
Sleeping with the Shirley-cicle.
When your wife turns into a puddle of water and you have to get a hot water bottle shaped like your wife to sleep with every night.
Hedge witches.
An Alex Mack situation.
Turning yourself into a goo accidentally vs. on purpose.
A dog athletic enough to pee on your glasses while you're wearing them.
Figuring out what muscle to flex to telepathically communicate as a glass of water.
Believing things you see written in an authoritative voice.
The kind of movies Bruce Willis has been making lately.
Aphasia vs. Primary Progressive Aphasia.
The four primary modalities of human language.
Figuring out how to hang out with someone you can't talk to.
Decoupling the word "yes" from its literal meaning.
Apraxia of speech.
Thanking colonialism for this moment of delight.
Serving your patients their prescription in a waffle cone.
Flying to the Bay Area to get some light dermatology done.
The battle-starved riders of Tarsul.
The demon priests of ill Nitaar.
Nolan Bushnell receiving feedback about the name Atari.
The God Blade.
Fist-pumpin', sword-swingin' heavy metal.
A good source of lore.
Cosmologies where god is a species.
Drinking his blood to see what happens.
Heavy metal bands fronted by blacksmiths.
Wanting your teenager to feel safe listening to fascist heavy metal in front of you so that you can talk to them about it.
Installing a web filter so that your child doesn't accidentally stumble into gross abusive porn.
Opinions about parent-child relationships from someone who was once a child.
Heavy metal bands who write music about white nationalism vs. heavy metal bands who are just white nationalist without writing about it.
Deliberately not separating the art from the artist so you get the extra enjoyment out of musicians who are cool people.
Videos of common household items being crushed under the wheels of a car.
Videos of people building things in the woods.
Devil's toothpaste.
Reacting to the sugar tax by angrily boycotting soda.
The Society for Creative Anachronism kicking you out if you dress up as a time traveler from the future or a 1950s greaser.
The SCA re-enacting the before-times, when morning zoo radio didn't exist yet.
Apex Nerds.
Geniuses above petty squabbling.
A better system of chilling out.
Going into the woods with your friend who likes building stuff in the woods and watching him build stuff in the woods.
Movies set in the 80s that have absolutely nothing from the 70s in them because everybody threw all that shit away on January 1st, 1980.
Handing out arm rings to your sworn men.
Instituting a buddy system where you buy each other awards.
Happy baby cow.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 12 min
December 12, 2022164. Dead Bodies Are Always in the First Place You Look
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Lords:
Nathan
MommysBestGames on Twitter.
Tyriq
FourBitFriday everywhere.
Topics:
Octopodes, continued
My wife and I are both teaching our son to drive, with separate lessons. It's going OK but with bumps.
The most widely-used crack for The Colonel's Bequest works by breaking the random number generator. This has wide-ranging effects on the gameplay.
https://www.benshoof.org/blog/case-cracked
How are we going to fix the camera in Mario Odyssey?
Microtopics:
Game Type DX.
Implementing the Xbox dashboard and trying to get it approved by Sony.
The most serious episode of Topic Lords.
Bringing up Octopuses every three years.
Giving yourself an electric shock because you're so bored.
Sea pork.
Eating the animals that are extremely convenient to farm.
Aoes sitting around waiting for something interesting to happen.
Chimpanzee pranks.
Making art because that's what people do.
Trying to disentangle making art from making a living.
Whether zoo animals would prefer their natural habitat or whether they just enjoy a chill cool time.
Inventing an octopus psychologist to figure out what parts of their lives they like and what parts could be improved.
Children of Time and Children of Ruin.
Molluscs having a good time.
Terraforming gone awry.
The impossibility of talking smart people out of bad ideas.
Why a teenager might or might not want to learn to drive.
How hard to push the brakes and how hard to push the gas.
Pushing the gas too hard and the car is like no, take a deep breath and try again.
Terrifying two lane roads.
Whether to start turning before you reach the stop sign.
Driving in Atlanta.
Learning to drive because you have to get to college somehow.
The responsibility of being in charge of heavy machinery.
Driving and suddenly realizing you need to be paying way more attention right now.
Saying the worst possible thing to someone who is already anxious.
Detective adventure game structure.
The botched Red Baron Easter egg.
Walking by windows whenever possible.
Blinking, fidgeting and moving with lifeless constancy.
Serious Sam 3's copy protection scorpion.
Finding the thing you're not expecting in the first place you look.
Whether the Law and Order video games implement both Law and Order.
A detective game where you spend most of your energy preventing the detective from having a nervous breakdown or hurting somebody.
Game design that is driven by fun tech.
Getting a fancy new drill press and for a while all the furniture you make has a bunch of extra holes for no apparent reason.
An RPG character with the ability to manipulate the RNG.
A game design critique of darts.
Fingers in the brain, squishing.
Why Game Genie codes are encrypted.
The Sonic the Hedgehog 2 level editor.
BASIC Programming and Computer Intro.
The guy who wrote half of the Odyssey 2's game catalog.
Whether console exclusives, or indeed video game systems at all, should exist.
Why they set Mario Galaxy on planetoids.
Looking into a shoebox of fun.
Mario's fluctuating weight throughout the series.
A classic 3D platformer problem.
Manipulating the camera while you touch all kinds of other buttons.
The kind of Mario game that your dad can play.
Been solved. Not fun.
Trying to show Portal to people who have never played first-person shooters.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 13 min
December 05, 2022163. The Mean Horse Scenario
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Lords:
Mitch
https://www.youtube.com/@HBMmaster
https://www.google.com/search?q=w
https://www.seximal.net/
Laura
https://twitter.com/lmichet
https://cohost.org/lmichet
Topics:
What vehicle would you use to get around in the post apocalypse? Are we talking live animals, internal combustion engine vehicles, bikes, skiis, etc? Why did you choose this?
The Super Mario Wiki is a beacon that other fan wikis should look to for inspiration
The GTA San Andreas conversation system
Last Straw, by George Starbuck http://reesewarner.blogspot.com/2021/04/george-starbuck-nationalpoetrymonth.html
The gradual inflation of standard youtube video length
Microtopics:
Lowercase jan, capital Misali.
Collecting all 905 Pokemon after 25 years.
R-rated Pokemon competitor, "Seximals."
Free-range porn, or legitimate educational resource?
First impressions of seximal.net.
Counting up to 99 on your hands.
College basketball's tactical use of base 6.
The binary number represented by flipping someone the bird with both hands.
The Airworld situation.
A sled pulled by domesticated zombies.
Solving the tire problem so you can bike around in the post-apocalypse.
Horses destroying society by kicking every building down with their powerful legs.
Horsefingers.
Horseknuckles.
Being just tall enough for a horse to try to eat your hair.
Shoveling poop out of the bear bone barn.
Standards of accuracy and editorial quality in the Super Mario Wiki.
Niwa, the Nintendo Independent Wiki Alliance.
What Mario Wiki has to say about the Berlin Wall.
Abraham Lincoln's place in the Mario Canon.
Organizing the Marvel Wiki by universe number.
The most objective possible method of sorting a list of universes.
Regular Peter Parker vs. Ultimate Peter Parker.
10 seconds of scrolling.
A wealth of information not intended for a phone screen.
The ontological difference between characters and allies.
What species exist in the world of Mario?
Action Toad.
The wiki article about Baby Mario, a distinct character from the times various Marios have been babies.
The love child of Bowser and Shigeru Miyamoto.
Making invitations to your bachelor party with Mario Print World.
Different forms of pounding your butt on the ground.
The Ground Pound, also known as the Hip Drop, Pound the Ground attack, Bounce, Butt-Bash, Jump Smash, Smash Attack, and Butt Stomp.
How wikis get away with not being normalized databases.
A loose simulacrum of conversation.
A conversation that takes the form of a hand wave and then a gulf a million miles wide.
Pausing for several minutes to contemplate whether you've ever eaten octopus for breakfast.
Fifty ways to say "please don't hit me in the head with that wrench."
The Heaven's Vault conversation system.
Ten different voice actors saying the same twenty lines.
A normal poetry thing.
Trying to find the poem "The Last Straw" by George Starbuck but Google only wants to show you articles about how Starbucks doesn't have straws any more.
Poems that use two meters at once.
Showing the frivolity of the line lengths.
Back when Youtube videos were limited to ten minutes.
Just sitting here making feature films by myself.
Al Gore, the guy who invented the Algorithm.
Promising things in the show notes that definitely aren't going to go there.
What happens in an ecosystem where there is no pressure to make your work shorter.
People who have time to watch a three hour Youtube video.
Watching a movie over the course of a week, ten minutes at a time.
Multitasking poorly.
How to find people on Cohost.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
November 28, 2022162. The Best Lawyer on Fiverr
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Quil
Maxx
Topics:
Maybe I just don't like apples
Opposite Costco
The Sweet Science
The Village and the Curious Hole
http://thesciencesalon.blogspot.com/p/village-and-curious-hole.html
BALLU the best robot
https://youtu.be/EdSoUbXirVI
https://www.strandbeest.com/
https://youtube.com/shorts/lbxJlwQ6-U8
Microtopics:
Making robots and video games in Seattle.
Cohost dot org.
Tumblr without Tumblr's weird nesting.
Finding interesting people to follow in 2005.
Cohost's discovery apparatus.
Making bad music on the internet that's not very enjoyable.
The worst fruit. (Apples.)
The enormous gulf between the audiovisual experience of watching someone eat an apple and eating that apple yourself.
The world's most apple growing place.
"Extra honey" apples.
Upgrading your teeth so that you can eat stone fruit without pitting them.
Installing a machine in your mouth that you can pour wheat into and it extrudes noodles right into your throat.
What wheat becomes if you chew it.
Pasta-flavored gum.
Vaguely salty orange chewing gum.
Installing an app to play a "biting an apple" ringtone into whenever you bite any fruit.
Japan's canonical fruit ranking with melon at the top, as seen in Pac-Man.
The way in which the B-tier melons are substandard.
The most cherries per slot machine.
Pivoting to chewing gum after San Francisco bans your gambling machines.
Buying just one leaf of parsley from Opposite Costco.
Naming your company after the idea of charging for things.
Buying hundreds of jigsaw puzzle pieces in bulk.
Tito Beverage.
You win stun, you lose stun.
Doug Bowser's Heel Turn.
Inaptronyms.
Punching somebody and all their honey comes out.
Preferring to punch people who bruise extremely precisely.
Hypothesizing that you are about to be punched in the face and setting up a control group.
Using science in an interesting way in 1832.
Little Alchemy and other combine-'em-ups.
What to play if you like adventure game inventory puzzles but not the rest of the adventure game.
The phone number you could call as part of the Frog Fractions ARG.
Investigating where the wind knocked over the fox shrine.
Finding an infinitely deep hole and dumping all your garbage in it until you realize you can use it to solve the housing crisis.
The deepest man-made hole.
The town that is permanently on fire.
An extremely plausible hellmouth.
Thanks, Hellmouth!
Inventing Hell in the 1970s.
A video that you can silently play in the background.
A robot that is just a large helium balloon.
A robot that is neutrally buoyant.
Strandbeests.
Making the goofiest lil guy.
The exploded cell phone ghosts.
A traffic cone skateboarding with ska playing in the background.
The Topic Lords startup incubator.
Cony Hawk.
Support Topic Lords
58 min
November 21, 2022161. How Much Can This Dog Deadlift?
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Shannon
Avery
Topics:
Measure words
Is color even real?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/hdrdlt/poem_my_cat_is_sad_spencer_madsen/
Microtopics:
Game Changer.
Why various albums aren't on Spotify.
During the American Revolution when the British were always quartering punk bands in colonial household.
The Bug Porn calendar that Shannon drew for the FF2 ARG.
A singular bug in a pin-up pose.
A praying mantis cosplaying as a nun.
Learning a language and then forgetting it because you're too embarrassed to speak it around people.
A soup vs. a bowl of soup.
Thousands of years of associating this thing with this other thing.
How singing works in tonal languages.
The people who keep insisting that orange doesn't rhyme with anything.
That time Tom Lehrer rhymed "orange" with "bizarre enjoyment."
Memory palaces.
Stand over mouth next to person equals.
The "two six-packs" mnemonic for remembering what the two dots on the guitar fretboard mean.
Mnemonics that you would prefer to forget.
The blue/black/gold/white dress.
Changing the perceived color of an object by changing the lighting in the room.
Whether light is real.
Naming a color and never telling anybody the name.
Keeping a color swatch because your memory of a color might drift over time, but the swatch fades.
Perfect pitch for color perception.
Getting two sensory outputs from a single sensory input.
A deeply visual species.
Striving to be amazed and confused by things normal people take for granted.
Visualization but for smells.
A list of attributes of what your daughter looks like.
Blind sight.
Seeing but having no experience of sight.
Hashtag Kant Folks.
Discerning green and pink.
Do these two sexy nazi ponies look the same to you?
The purpose of music theory.
The invention of standardized tunings.
Where to find poems.
A cat who does not have a cat.
A cat wondering why nobody else in his family is a cat.
Things it is funny for a cat to be sad about.
Why the family cat didn't go to college.
Making sure to get a pet early enough that you child can see it die before going to college.
Getting a second dog vs. getting your dog a dog.
Dog IQ tests.
The placards at the dog shelter listing each dog's D&D stats and alignment.
Cockatiel owners.
A sporting event that measures how hungry you are.
How many cinder blocks you'd pull for a kingdom's Klondike bar.
Looking into a well during the full moon and saying Avery's name a hundred times.
Dating a string of Lisas.
Six Songs For Lisa.
Starting your six song album on song number three.
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59 min
November 14, 2022160. Dracula Never Brushes His Teeth
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Lords:
Elena
Shannon
Topics:
I went to Burning Man and now maybe I don't bite my nails?
Pros and cons of vampirism
Krista and Tatiana Hogan are conjoined at the brain. They share thoughts, senses and control of their bodies.
"Gray cube, rectangular light"
https://codewriteplay.com/2019/09/10/legends-of-gamedev-clarissa-darling/
Microtopics:
Nominally saving everybody a big hassle but in fact completely failing to do the job.
Checking the double secret server.
Will Wood.
Listening to music but not learning a lot.
Biting your cuticles.
The Burning Man dust/paste situation.
Trying to get dust under your fingernails when you don't have fingernails.
Getting rid of the textures on your face which just causes more textures to happen.
A cuticle lab kit with fancy sticks and creams that you don't understand.
Nail-buffing cubes.
Losing some unpredictable aspect of your person at Burning Man.
A man made up of all the aspects of personalities that he stole from Burning Man attendees.
Leaving your nail biting behind in the temple.
Cutting your nails short ever since you got that gardening gig.
The weird traveling bruise you get when you hit your fingernail too hard.
Every shovelful had so much danger in it.
The perils of gardening barefoot.
Wearing gloves but not wearing shoes because you like the mud between your toes.
Dracula Daily.
Starting a mailing list for someone else's diary.
Couriers telling you that they delivered the boxes of soil and thanks for the shillings.
Explaining what a vampire is after the vampire is already dead.
Vampirism as a pyramid scheme.
Leaving and returning to your soldered-closed coffin at will.
God's meaner creatures.
Vampirism as a recipe for seasonal affective disorder.
What a bummer it'd be to discover that hell is real.
Living a thousand subjective years and learning a bunch of skills.
Getting up every night and finding a child to eat because that's all you have time for.
Dracula the trainspotter.
The Kirby dimension that his victims all go to and hang out together.
Offering value to the world that compensates for the person you have to kill and eat every day.
The guy in Dracula that is obsessed with technology and records his diary on wax cylinders but doesn't think to write the date on them.
Doctor C-Word.
The Blood of Manly Men.
God Sends Us Men When We Want Them.
Running out of manly blood but luckily a Texan shows up.
Affixing small electric lights to your chest so that you can explore a basement.
The spider that got so big that it was just a really big spider, you know, the really big spider everybody talks about.
How our intuition for what makes a person can be thrown off completely by simple biology.
Two brains that are slightly overlapped.
A closed system that can answer questions about itself.
Raising a child as if it is two people.
Split-brain patients.
Interpreting the two hemispheres of the brain as two individual people who are working in concert.
The storytelling part of our brain that we call consciousness.
Having control of three legs and an arm vs. three arms and a leg.
Trying to relate your subjective experience to other people.
What is the self?
A dog that likes another dog but doesn't like a different dog.
Cantilevered rainbows.
Clarissa Explains it All.
Clarissa Explains Indie Game Development.
Processing events in your life by making games about them.
Bringing out the special poetry lady to teach you poetry.
Writing a book of poetry where the typesetter also has to be a poet.
Writing a poem where you describe the scene from Fullmetal Alchemist where the two brothers burn down their house and your teacher is like "are you ok"
Writing a poem from the perspective of the piece of paper you're holding up to protect yourself from the rain and your poetry circle is like "I'm so sorry about your sister"
How to write a relatable poem.
The extra fridge that holds the food that you don't ever actually eat.
Who's got the tiger with the baseball bat?
Fragments of different jagged shapes.
Zero-Inbox Your Fridge.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 6 min
November 07, 2022159. It's Beautiful That We Once Existed
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Kev
Cort
Cort's new album: https://postgoodism.bandcamp.com/album/tourism
The Frog Fractions vinyl: https://www.turtlepalstapes.com/product/frog-fractions-green
Monty Python's three-sided record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monty_Python_Matching_Tie_and_Handkerchief
Locked grooves: https://www.yoursoundmatters.com/locked-grooves-endless-fun-literally/
The Most Wanted Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jId-qaEwuvI
The Most Unwanted Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gPuH1yeZ08
Topics:
Before age ~4 you don't really make long-term memories, but you can develop long-term habits. How to best exploit this.
Spark : The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain https://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-Brain/dp/B08RZD6D4Z
Extreme "kids in trench coat" trope scenarios
Necrophilic landscape http://2dcloud.com/the-necrophilic-landscape
Artist Morgan Vogel https://www.tcj.com/morgan-vogel-1986-2020/
Krista and Tatiana Hogan are conjoined at the brain. They share thoughts, senses and control of their bodies.
"Autopsy" by Ross Sutherland
I can't find a text transcript online, just a few records of Ross performing the poem. Nor does Ross himself have a "home page" per se. Here's a link to his podcast, it's great: https://www.imaginaryadvice.com/
Neighbors overplaying the same playlist
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Woman_(soundtrack)
https://www.worstideaofalltime.com/
Is it unambiguously good that technology makes creative expression easier?
Microtopics:
Mic on, pants off.
The inherent meaningless of "limited editions" in a finite universe ultimately bound for a slow heat death.
Vinyl record Easter eggs.
A big ol' spiral cut into the vinyl.
Limited characteristics of a physical process.
Mental models of what it means to master an album.
Novelty vinyl colors.
Jim's burgeoning record collection.
The most glorious twenty minute act of art terrorism.
Losing access to your old memories because your brain changed formats.
How to erase medical debt by just not paying it.
Borrowing money from your toddler.
Spark: the revolution of exercise or some other subtitle.
Mollusks eating their own nervous systems.
Eating your own childhood to launch yourself into adulthood.
Upping the emotional stakes with large animals and near-death experiences.
Putting your girlfriend in mortal danger so that she's more likely to want to marry you.
Getting pigeonholed as a really good butt.
Getting surgically separated so you can disguise yourself as two kids in a trench coat.
The hemispheres of the brain as independent entities which happen to share a body.
Lumps of biology.
Every person's unique inability to speak to other people's interiority.
Walkie-talkie telepathy vs. "perfect mutual understanding" telepathy.
One mind with two faces.
Superhuman limb/vocal cord coordination.
Segue Week.
Burroughs cut-ups.
Vigorous grandparenting with a face of terror.
A modern-day television quiz show phoenix.
The impenetrable free-form rhymes of a heart attack in October.
The greets.
Tracker music instrument names as cut-up poetry generators.
Super Obituaries!
The potentially transformative effect of reading your own obituary.
The perverse incentives behind soliciting reviews of unfinished games.
The awesome power of knowing that your feedback will be considered.
The neighbor who only listens to Rod Stewart's Greatest Hits over and over again.
Listening to entire albums until you're so sick of them that you underflow and love them again.
The song you have to listen to to get to Roxette's It Must Have Been Love.
Bad podcast ideas.
Novelty t-shirts whose joke is only funny once, but you still wear it once a week
The shirt with the Fight Club and the cognitive science reference on it.
Shirts/tattoos as pop culture dog whistles.
Getting a tattoo of the Colossus' weak points so that you can meet the people who stab you there.
Naming your game's public alpha something innocent so it doesn't arouse suspicion when your friends see you playing it.
The hazards of wearing a shirt promoting a pop culture reference you know nothing about.
Wearing a shirt that makes people try to talk to you about a video game you've never played.
All the people you disappointed in high school.
NPCs in Thief Deadly Shadows talking about how hard it is to get a job making games.
A bright future where nobody can make a living making video games.
A bright future where AIs curate collections of AI-generated content.
A case for the 1991 film "Super Mario Brothers" as the pinnacle of entertainment.
Charles Martinet doing the Mario voice as he leaps to his death from a roof in "The Game."
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min
October 31, 2022158. Bark Mitzvah: Where Your Good Boy Becomes a Mensch
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Erica
The Real John B
Topics:
The Nancy Drew Point and Click adventure series
Advances in garbage food technology
The mysterious grunting voice playing over the American Airlines intercom
https://waxy.org/2022/09/a-mysterious-voice-is-haunting-american-airlines-in-flight-announcements-and-nobody-knows-how/
A poem I found: "The Cow" by Oliver Herford
https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo/status/1053873522823446528
Klik, freeware and indie games in the late 90s and early 2000s
http://freegames.org/GameHippo
Microtopics:
Other topic podcasts biting Jim's steeze.
Spending the next hour blushing.
Holding a Bark Mitzvah to watch your Good Boy become a mensch.
Releasing a director's cut from beyond the grave.
Bad games that you can't get enough of.
Adventure games that make you feel like when grandma would visit and bring you donuts.
Secret Fandoms.
The new Nancy Drew series where Nancy Drew is an airhead and nobody likes her.
A 70 year old woman playing a teenager.
Whether game designers play anything other than World of Warcraft.
Why the Nancy Drew adventure games are not on phones.
Putting Nancy Drew in Fortnite.
Friend of the show, Dropsy.
You don't have to be an American to eat a garbage diet, but it sure helps.
Food color technology over time.
When Froot Loops added the fourth color.
Speaking truth to power about the little silver disc that you microwave pizza on.
The starchy packet that helps the noodles cook.
A job that requires the skill sets of both a chef and a materials engineer.
Things that come out of boxes nowadays.
Watching meat substitutes grow up.
Plastic golems living in your body.
Getting your first reading glasses at your Old Mitzvah and giving a speech starting with "now I am an old."
The second person this hour who has admitted to the pharmacist that they need reading glasses.
The baby technology section at Walmart.
Snot removers that'd also be great for insect collection.
A sock that measures blood oxygenation.
Earwitness accounts.
Working on the American Airlines announcement system and adding strange grunting noises to the playlist.
Electrical noise that is being interpreted by a system intended to transmit the human voice.
The guy who does all the grunt voices.
A sound that is like audio from a music album.
An incredible technical smartass who got annoyed at luggage fees.
A fridge full of snacks in the middle of the plane.
Every passenger getting up and going to the snack pit.
Wrestling for Cheez-Its.
All the folks who are into weird pranks and technical glitches making a pilgrimage to the American Airlines flight with the weird grunting.
Nancy-likes.
The Three Investigators, presented by Alfred Hitchcock.
Joining the discord for more on the ukulele plane.
Back in 1901 when they worried about Peak Cow.
Milk punch.
Eggless egg nog.
Celebrating all the positive ways cows influence our lives, and also we eat them.
Whether scientists knew extinctions were possible in 1901.
Looking for free games on the internet in 1999.
Letting the Game Hippo domain lapse and a domain squatter picks it up and the rest is history.
Dink Smallwood.
A multidirectional shooter with a cool perspective trick.
All the search engines they had before google.
The Williams College MUD that you could log in to and visit Williams College in the MUD.
Graal Online.
Receiving a box of shareware from your mom's coworker.
PC games from before developers realized that computers would get faster.
Typing swim fast enough that you don't drown.
Please Copy That Floppy!
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 10 min
October 24, 2022157. The Boy Who Cried ARG
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Lords:
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
https://frror.bandcamp.com/
Chall
https://twitter.com/mrchrislhall
Topics:
The future/present of Jim's mario videos.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3SbI8kec0Ntxnf9mof2tU-QZLQ0Mq6zd
Catatcomb Kids lore in the context of the fact that I like worldbuilding but find it hard to tell actual stories.
Bigger Luke
The Green Street Mortuary Marching Band.
http://www.syndicjournal.us/a-ferlinghetti-memorial-supplement-60-narrations/ferlinghetti-memorial-supplement-the-green-street-mortuary-marching-band/
Have you seen any phantom kangaroos? And also: should I choose to believe in cryptids? If so, which ones?
Microtopics:
Giving someone else's biography.
7-Day Roguelikes.
Feeling ambiently like you are hanging out with somebody.
An emulator that works when you are not screen-capturing in OBS, but freezes when you are.
Making a backup of your Bowser's Fury save.
Video recording setup evolutions.
The pros and cons of extremely variable video lengths.
Playing Tony Hawk with Mario modded in.
What working on a Zelda game does to a person, psychologically.
Doing things that make people believe you're doing an ARG.
Twinbeard Rates Mario.
A robot co-host that eventually starts finishing your words for you.
Wanting to be a writer until you try writing.
A world that naturally develops in your brain.
How to tell stories.
Coming up with a bunch of characters that want things.
Reading stories in hopes that stories rub off on you.
Putting yourself in a situation where you write a lot of dialog trees.
How to make a platformer without doing any level design.
Expecting the same person to write the music and the lyrics.
The difference in the ideation process of world building and story telling.
A fact about the world that is true.
Captain Thalmoo surveying the battlefield.
Figuring out mid-burrito that there was a war, and deciding who won it.
A grain that flowers like lavender.
Searching Fiverr for Conlangers.
Paying $2 for something at the Dollar Store.
Logging Onto JimNet.
The Canon Bigger Luke Hypothesis vs. the Hamill Hypothesis.
The Inch-Luke Hypothesis.
Inch-Lukers.
Bigger Luke conspiracy theorists just assume that Han Solo stays the same size.
The real Skywalker was the bigger Luke all along.
The Boy Who Cried ARG.
Promising your wife that your son will not be Frog Fractions 3.
How many pages of laws a person is subject to at any given time.
Designing an ARG for your teenage son and he's like "ugh dad, again?"
Mortuary marching bands.
The patriarch who has just croaked.
The sister with the bent frame.
Uncle Louie with the wig.
Getting a free concert because someone died.
A funeral as a pleasant gathering of people you haven't seen in a long time.
Getting arrested for publishing Allen Ginsberg's "Howl."
Dressing up as an ancient sea captain.
How many funerals this marching band is playing today.
Hiring your nephew who has a Casiotone keyboard to play your funeral.
Hiring the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band to play at your kid's birthday but all they know how to play is Taps.
Bringing an axe to the funeral in case there's an emergency and you need to open up the coffin quickly.
If a guitar is an axe, a tuba is a bent axe.
Unbending the Tuba.
Why brass instruments are so twisty.
If you unwind a French horn it'll reach the moon and back.
The large flutes that are curly.
The son of a flautist.
A bookshelf that you blow into and music comes out.
Potential downsides of cryptids.
Wanting to take EMF meters into a creepy house even though you don't believe in ghosts.
The script scientists developed to let you fall in love at will.
How many blue coins out of five you would rate your wife.
Taking the Race IAT every week and analyzing your results over time.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 11 min