Topic Lords

By Jim Stormdancer

Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week.... more

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How many episodes does Topic Lords have?

The podcast currently has 300 episodes available.

Topic Lords episodes:

July 05, 202189. Pope Hat Guy Covers You With A Towel
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Nathan
https://twitter.com/NathanShorts
Chris
https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall/
Topics:
Are mysteries actually better when you know who dun it?
Renting apartments that come with weird artifacts
Monster Island was a play-by-mail MMO written in QuickBasic that ran from 1989 to 2017.
https://if50.substack.com/p/1989-monster-island
https://if50.substack.com/
No Tengo Dinero by Righeira
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwxIGe1oOJQ
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/raj5mJ1sma4
Procrastinating because if I do anything I'll feel like I have to do everything
Microtopics:
The symmetry of USB-C.
The edibility of USB-C.
The months-long argument at Nintendo over which version of the Flag Gordon song to play when you plug USB-C headphones into the charging port.
Which version of the Flash Gordon theme is more likely to get you pulled over for speeding.
Columbo.
Whether a mystery story functions as both a good story and a good puzzle.
Revealing the identity of the murderer in the first ten minutes of every episode of your murder mystery series.
The inherent mystery provided by the horror genre's willingness to deliver the bad ending.
Murder mysteries that are mysteries to the characters but not the audience.
Whether it can still be a horror movie if the audience understands the rules.
Knives Out.
Enjoying a story twice because there is pleasure in seeing a well-constructed story play out.
Mental air conditioning.
Watching a movie before you watch it, so you know what's going to happen.
A huge wooden ankh in the bushes right outside your front door.
Renting a furnished apartment and it comes with a painting called "Bad Pope Hat Guy" right above your bed.
Covering the painting of Lucius the Bad Pope with a towel before going to sleep on the bed underneath the painting and waking up with the towel covering your head and realizing Lucius the Bad Pope just covered you with a towel.
Finding a knob of unknown purpose sticking out of the wall and deciding to pull it as hard as you can.
Fold-out wall stools.
A porcelain hand that came with the apartment.
Storing your porcelain hand in the toilet tank.
Everyone having that one friend who owns a jar of mercury and does the party trick where they float a penny on top of the mercury.
Your new girlfriend getting upset that you own a jar of mercury so you leave it in the common area of your apartment building and the next day it's gone.
Whether your jar of mercury contains any of the atoms of mercury that Hitler breathed.
Playing an MMO by mail.
How many frames per second a play by mail game runs at
Yelling "hey!" into the abyss.
Non-player monsters.
Crossing the Crystal Hills barrier.
Issuing weekly patches into your Netflix original movie until none of the original story or actors remain.
Checking the patch notes before you watch version 2.4 of your favorite movie.
Where to put the new material when you add to your branching path story.
Inventing the t-remover so you can patch a movie starring Brad Pitt to instead star Brad Pit.
Whether a music video is hand animated or early CG.
Video Toaster.
A 3D animated prism that's actually a 2D animation cel that someone is rotating by hand.
The significance of the orange ball with sevens coming out.
Inventing the circuit board to be the background in your cool music video and then realizing you can use it to design electronics.
One tiny tank having to bear witness and the other tiny tank refusing to.
The same music video being the origin of circuit boards, Macromedia Flash, and the Toejam and Earl loading screens.
Basing your squad of teen crime solvers on a 90s fad like Magic Eye.
Seeing ending credits at the end of a music video and realizing you were watching a short film this whole time.
Being inspired to speak by images in front of your eyes.
Seeing a galaxy brain meme in your mind's ear.
An outline of an abbreviation.
Bragging about your photogenic memory.
Where your mind's ear lives.
Your Bluetooth headphones glitching out in a way that is both cool and nauseating.
Needing to flip a switch in your mind and having to be careful not to touch the mind mouse trap next to it.
Being productive all day and then realizing you didn't do anything fun all day.
Moving to Minneapolis and realizing just how much you own.
A two year old who draws perfect circles.
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1h 7min
June 28, 202188. The Horned Lizard's Final Defense
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday/
https://frror.bandcamp.com/releases
Ryan
https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer
https://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio/
Topics:
What do animals know? Do they know things? How do we find out?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
Can we all just be adults and admit that invisibility sucks as a superpower?
Where is the machine learning startup promising to fix the concert videos where the audience claps on 1 and 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UinRq_29jPk
Toxic by Britney Spears
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZuxwVk7TU
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/x3eUVHdw54k
What mundane tool/item/technology do you wish were irrelevant, and what would you replace it with?
Microtopics:
Doing a perfect ollie your first time on a skateboard and then never skating again because you'll never top that.
Cooking every single dish in the human culinary encyclopedia and then starving to death because you refuse to repeat yourself.
Honor system rock paper scissors.
Making video games, one of which is called Catacomb Kids.
Naming your band one letter away from a common word so that your band is impossible to google.
An extremely austere and dour change log, like in Great Expectations.
Changing the "dragon breath" spell to "bear breath" because dragons aren't real but bears breathe fire.
A grim window into the world in which we live, dragonless and dragon breath -less.
A delicious treat for anyone who likes anise flavoring and salt.
A giant human sized licorice in a wedding gown.
Competing with nearby deer for the affections of the extremely salty licorice you're marrying.
Spendinga lot of your mental energy trying to figure out animal cognition.
Whether elephants worship the moon or in fact anything.
Dogs doing the things dogs do even if they've never been taught by another dog.
Where babies learn the things that their parents don't teach them.
Babies smiling when they see a face even though they're not happy to see you.
Baby reflexes that help parents bond with them during the time when they are hardest to love.
How to be sure that animals think and feel and have memory when we can't even be sure for other humans.
P-zombies.
A dog's mental model of the world.
The Far Side cartoon depicting a machine that translates dog barks into human speech.
Whether animals have to know stuff.
Meerkat accents.
The mantis shrimp having an innate ability to see ghosts, and learning our language to tell us that we're stepping on ghosts all the time and we're covered in ectoplasm.
A superpower that turns you invisible except for your eyes, so you're just a floating pair of eyeballs, not invisible at all, so you have to buy a pair of sunglasses to hide your eyes.
Putting two of the lamest possible superpowers together in the same married couple.
The lamest superpower that you would settle for.
The superpower of getting up when the alarm rings and not having to hit snooze even once.
The superpower of lactose tolerance.
The superpower of having practiced a lot.
Cutting a cantaloupe in half and the six of clubs is in there and the guy's like "yeah that's my card, but that cantaloupe was $9 at Whole Foods, thanks a lot."
How to convince general audiences that they should care when in the measure to clap.
Just assuming that audiences will be clapping in the wrong place so you add a single measure in 5/4 to your 4/4 composition to fix it.
Playing a concert video where the video and audio are desynchronized by exactly half a measure.
Inventing a snare drum that looks like a bass drum and vice versa, and filming a prank show where unsuspecting drummers play concerts with the inverted drum kit.
Going to fiver and asking someone to build you a drum kit that defies science and logic.
The one company that Topic Lords would accept sponsorship from.
Stopping the concert when the audience starts clapping on 1 and 3 and asking them "come on, did you spend $126 to get it wrong?"
Not finding out how low-poly these birds are until the quarter speed viewing.
Which side Britney's nails look most amazing from.
The outfit flight attendants had to wear in the 1950s, before they had the right to vote.
A flight attendant with pauldrons.
A loser with a sandwich that Britney wants to make out with in the bathroom.
Seeing someone's ass and wondering what the Blippi subreddit would think of it.
A dude who is a motorcycle.
Biketaurs.
Having the same facial expression as the motorcycle you're riding.
A sparkly Jackson Pollock that you wrap around yourself.
Stepping right in the laser.
Warning the janitor that you're turning on the office's death ladder so he's not surprised when he shows up that weekend to find 15 corpses on the floor.
A music video that is secretly the prequel to Jupiter Ascending.
Whether this hot Scandinavian guy is the same guy as the last hot Scandinavian guy.
Saving time shaving by dyeing your facial hair the same color as your skin.
Whether a stiff iron bar jabbing into your back would improve a bed or a chair.
Whether Britney Spears hallucinated the events of the Toxic video, and she's just an ordinary flight attendant.
How to fix bread closures.
Filling the moon with bread closures.
Getting a bread box so people stop having to manufacture bread closures.
How massive a bread is required to spin the bag at sufficient velocity to apply the bread closures.
Solving your headphone cord problem by never listening to audio of any kind.
Installing an ink sac in your fingernail so that you never have to look around for a pen.
A tattoo of a squid that you can squeeze to spurt ink into the eyes of your enemies, but the tattoo gets more and more faded as the ink depletes.
An awful thing that your ducks can do.
What's going on in that biome?
The horned lizard's final defense.
Dropping a tail if you need to escape.
A super ethical meat factory that spends all day terrifying the tails off of lizards.
An avocado-like spread made out of frightened lizard tail.
Nothing but adrenaline flavor in this tail.
How to live as a freelancer without being drained of all your bodily fluids.
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1h 13min
June 21, 202187. Fraudl With An Umlaut
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Sam
@SamJ314 on Twitter.
Chris
[email protected]
Topics:
We can't even describe spacetime because of our faulty perception of time, and how it relates to optical illusions.
Optical illusion: https://imgur.com/t6YdyVr
Flatland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
3 guys with non-transitive dice and a non-reproducing animal.
https://trick-dice.com/product/nontransitive-dice-set-of-3/
https://imgur.com/Rh3ubda
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/646004/do-cat-buttholes-touch-all-surfaces
In 2003, a judge ruled that the X-Men aren't human.
https://www.polygon.com/comics/2019/9/12/20862474/x-men-series-toys-human-legal-issue-marvel-comics
The Hustle, Rebel's arbitration deposition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yD4dVrzZY
"I have a bad case of diarrhea - Japanese learning English"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKjaFG4YN6g
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/UQmuZui_ajM
Zuiikin' English https://youtube.com/user/satisfyinglife
How concepts across languages differ but when we learn words as children we form this concept of a thing that the word represents.
Fun German words for English speakers: https://www.thelocal.at/20150806/ten-wonderfully-literal-german-words/
Splagchnizomai https://www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Topical.show/RTD/cgg/ID/7650/Splagchnizomai.htm
Aspie couple in the world, running our approaches with normies for evaluation with each other.
https://musingsofanaspie.com/2012/10/19/rules-to-live-by/
Interesting fiction read for Aspies: The Rosie Project https://g.co/kgs/RUwYG3
Cockney rhyming slang https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang
Microtopics:
Being unable to describe time without using time words like "before" and "now" and "always"
The "media player with a scrub bar" model of space time.
Why time only moves forward and why we only perceive any instant of it at any given time.
Taking time away from spacetime and just having a frozen sculpture of an instant.
Michaelangelo's David being the most famous space-without-time.
Optical illusions as a lens into the sorts of perceptions and abilities that evolution deemed entirely unnecessary to our propagation as a species.
Spoilers for Arrival.
Whether it was physically possible for life on Earth to have developed the ability to perceive additional times and/or spaces.
Whether early humans transgressed somehow and their punishment was to wonder about everything all the goddamn time.
Whether or not we get to eat pizza after we die.
Being so annoyed by an optical illusion that you invent a machine to help you unsee it.
A non reproductive animal rolling a non-transitive die.
Mules vs. hinnies.
Mules being unable to reproduce because they're too unattractive to find a mate.
Putting lipstick on a cat's butt in order to measure what furniture the cat rubs its butt on, and the butt runs out of lipstick after two chairs.
Being too lazy to make a new line on the spreadsheet so you just append your new topic onto an existing topic.
Google alerting you to an imaginary 6.0 earthquake near Lake Tahoe.
Just sitting here waiting for the earthquake Google promised you.
Moving from New Jersey to California and discovering earthquakes.
Whether you should add 27 and 2.
The legal difference between a doll and a toy.
Having a fun time in the courtroom.
Getting your movie's rating changed by counting up the number of times female genitalia were mentioned.
Numinous dice.
A soundstage with a bench and a plant that are supposed to indicate that this scene takes place outside.
Referring to a scene transition as a wipe but everybody thinks you mean wiping your butt.
P-Low The Skillful Abbot.
Really enjoying your bad case of diarrhea.
Doing aerobics and chanting about having a bad case of diarrhea.
A classful of language learners each repping a different language on their shirts.
Different cultures discretizing the world differently.
A hypothetical culture that considers a "person" to include the hat they're wearing but not their left foot.
Whether the horseshoe is part of a horse.
Pointing at some clothes and saying "there's a person inside those clothes."
Pointing at a human head and saying "there's a person inside that skull."
Different places a person can exist within their corporeal body.
Feeling emotions in your gut because you have neurons in there.
Hanging out with dinosaurs and having to do brain surgery on their butts.
Finding out that your brain surgeon is a dinosaur and putting a post-it note on your butt saying "brain not in here."
Finding out that you are on the autism spectrum after you have your 10th concussion and aren't allowed to think hard for two years.
Wearing a bumper sticker on your forehead that says "How's my talking? Call 1-800-EAT-SHIT"
Struggling to understand why someone would use words non-literally.
Feeling very refrigerator about this explanation of Cockney Rhyming Slang.
How to apply the principles of running a playtest to human conversation.
Wondering about the thing you've got rattling around in your skull.
Conversational strategies that only work when you're talking to other autistic people.
Going through life assuming everybody has had a bunch of concussions.
Putting on Frasier to take enough of your attention that you're not thinking about anything else, but also Frasier not being worth thinking about so you don't think about that either.
Whether you want this show's listeners friending you on Facebook.
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53min
June 14, 202186. Dad Boy Prime And The Shadow of Grung
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Gary
http://duckfeed.tv/
https://www.patreon.com/duckfeedtv/
https://twitter.com/garybuh
Brayton
Bogwater convention coming to your town soon!
Topics:
Spirit Halloween's Youtube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3PL2DxHye4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJIbE6_Lt2w
A drug you never want to try
This list of people's favorite mugs, and how to generalize it
https://twitter.com/AnnaHollinrake/status/1382392715074211849
https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/1385291669801631744
Devo - Theme from Doctor Detroit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_A8Xe9M0NY
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/QIK-ngWWhhs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqnPciNhQXU
Mechanics or features of a game that the game doesn't tell you about
Which undead would you most like to become? Lich? Ghoul? Skeleton? Ghost? Zombie? Wight? Revenant?
Microtopics:
What a .tv TLD indicates.
Brayton's Bubbly Bog Water.
Airdropping incredibly earthy mineral water directly to your house.
Using the wrong musical sting.
The gas station that functions both before and after noon.
Drinking water out of a beer bong.
The algorithm providing a solid recommendation for once.
Going into Spirit Halloween and asking for something in an underfed Michael Myers.
Giving out vaseline for Halloween.
The truth according to vaseline.com.
Whether vaseline meets FDA requirements for human consumption and whether that qualifies it as a foodstuff.
Blooming your own onions at home so you can stop going to Outback every weekend.
All the other things you could bloom with your new onion bloomer.
A good way to go into a fugue state and have something on in the background while you're doing something else.
A redditor who went missing after acquiring some Datura seeds.
A recreational drug for which the lethal dose varies significantly from person to person.
Deciding whether to join a cult based on whether you hallucinated the cult leader high fiving Aquaman or selling celebrity maps under a bridge.
The serial rooster on the box of corn flakes who's roosting every time you see him.
The rooster jumping off of the Corn Flakes box, grabbing the butcher knife, and giving you career advice.
Explaining that cocaine isn't addictive and you would know because you do it every day.
Scrolling through a Twitter thread about people's favorite mugs to see all the great mugs.
Perusing the multivarious ways a person can like a mug.
The East Berlin traffic light man.
A trivet in your grandpa's kitchen that says Joint-S.T.A.R.S. and depicts a star firing a lightning bolt at a tank, and whether your grandpa is secretly an anime villain.
A dragon clutching the world in its hands with an American flag pattern on its spread wings.
The patriotism dragon.
Our favorite mugs.
Going on Twitter to relax.
Whether a big enough knife counts as a sword.
Devo Vevo.
Dan Aykroyd speed walking while people make fun of him for the entire duration of the film.
Mark Mothersbaugh jogging in a sealed garbage bag so he can quickly lose enough weight to qualify for his intended Devo weight class.
The belt from the 1920s that jiggles you.
Recording a commentary on a Dan Aykroyd movie as part of your podcast about Binding of Isaac collectibles.
Replacing every transition wipe in Star Wars with Mark Mothersbaugh floating across the screen.
The illusion of intentionality.
A beat poet playing a bass constructed out of a bass drum
Our favorite fake lap steel guitar solos and what synthesizers they were played on.
The geniuses at genius.com having absolutely nothing to say about Devo's Theme to Doctor Detroit.
The Charmin Bear's mom's opinions on ass wiping.
A Transmissible Toilet Paper Disease That Affects Only Bears.
Rubber Krulwich.
Jogging and Pimps: the Doctor Detroit Story.
One of those Doctor Detroit marriages you always hear about.
The Curse of Doctor Detroit.
Flying out of a still frame of a hot dog.
Mark Mothersbaugh wearing an inflated bodysuit so that his silhouette matches Dan Aykroyd's when they speed walk together.
Going to the area labeled "combat zone" in hopes of finding someone to shoot.
Hiding aliens in your space game and never telling anybody about them.
Hiding a main quest in your space game and never telling anybody about it.
Getting a gamer treat for peeking into corners.
How Portal should've warned you about its unusually high fall damage on the box.
The pros and cons of being a lich.
Whether April would stick around if Jim turned into a lich.
Dying at Chuckie Cheese and being stuck there as a ghost forever.
Whether being a zombie secretly feels awesome.
The tragedy of Quake's wireheading grunts.
Dying on the subway and having to listen to buskers for eternity.
The parable of the good lich and the good billionaire.
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1h 2min
June 07, 202185. Corsets For Snakes
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Alex is on the Topic Lords Discord.
Shannon is offering vaccines.
Topics:
Human-led gaming over the internet (like escape rooms). How the DM is walking a line of controlling everything vs being completely controlled by the players. How to design games to be played like this over the internet.
Best and worst parts of camping.
Shutting off the PC speaker as a service.
Call Me By Your Name.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6swmTBVI83k
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/a1u_79xLemA
Is "The Birds" the first genre zombie film?
Microtopics:
Safe and effective vaccines.
The difference between spring rolls and egg rolls.
Teleconferencing an escape room.
All of the items that came out of this drawer.
A room escape game set in outer space where the players on separate ships communicate via semaphore flags.
Running a massively multiplayer tabletop campaign and inventing the middle manager dungeon master.
How Room Escape games have adapted to the pandemic.
Going camping and wondering "Why are we in the woods? Why are we not in our cozy warm house?"
The novelty of not having your luxuries.
Being imprisoned on a cruise ship and only then deigning to be entertained by cruise ship entertainments.
Enjoying a bonfire because the woods doesn't have Netflix.
The novelty of sitting outside in the dark.
Camping as a simulacrum of being an ancient human.
The sound of wind through the branches.
Symphonies being largely unlistenable unless you're held captive in a nearly entirely quiet room.
The relative ease of paying attention when you're not surrounded by distractions.
The relentless temptation of pulling to refresh.
How bad the flame wars get on the fake Twitter set up just for the attendees of JoCo Cruise.
Waiting to find out whether your cruise ship will be permitted to land.
The dynamics of having a Twitter just for your dorm.
Bringing all 29 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica because you won't have the Internet on the cruise ship.
Going to a sake bar in Japan to learn how to like booze.
The legality of throwing your drink in a kid's face if they give you sass.
Knowing it's illegal to dance on the street in Japan and deliberately adopting an exaggerated swagger whenever the police are around.
Japanese police's different standards for when white people are dancing.
Whether Japanese police have truncheons or just those flashlights with traffic cones on them.
Getting a job and trying to figure out how to be useful at it.
The PC speaker beeping long after your program has crashed.
Writing a program in the machine language debugger because Windows 98 still comes with programming tools.
A kid swinging over pits.
Commander Keen in: Invasion of the Vorticons.
Back when it was a big deal for the PC to run a game that looked like a NES game.
Eventually realizing that the game you're playing where the cat chases the mouse is actually just a screen saver.
Not being able to convince your dad to buy a CD-ROM drive for the family PC but luckily the N64 uses cartridge technology.
Visiting your friends who own an N64 and playing Mario Kart and Goldeneye and then going home and saying "this is the real shit, check out Pac Man 2."
Being informed that you are in for a treat.
Clouds giving the sun a big hug.
The influence of Spongebob Squarepants on the music video for "Call Me By Your Name" by Lil Nas X.
A snake turning into a cone head.
A very slow jog.
Your under-eye makeup really bringing out your scales.
Corsets for snakes.
Mini-Marge with a smaller version of the same hair.
The denim police taking you to denim jail for fashion crimes.
Wearing clothing with your name on it.
Sequence breaking the endless staircase in Mario 64 by giving the stairs a lapdance.
Nearly having descended the entire stripper pole.
The core strength required to give Satan an extremely slow lap dance.
An extremely entertaining sequence of images.
Exquisitely crafted metaphor that you'll miss entirely if you never look at it.
What zombies were before George Romero invented the modern zombie.
The concept of a zombie as a horde of cannibals.
The fresh ideas that Night of the Living Dead brought to the The Birds genre.
Giving Lovebirds the side-eye.
Night of the Living Dead being progressive regarding its black protagonist but not its woman protagonist.
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1h 10min
May 31, 202184. Whirling Away Into The Unhearable
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Erica
@YerrikTRB on Twitter
Erica plugs Kitchen! The Musical, and also Micah’s books: https://tinyurl.com/46k5zfnm
Micah
@micahwrites on Twitter
Micah plugs Bermudez Triangle, “Chilling Tales for Dark Nights” https://www.youtube.com/user/chillingtaleswi
Topics:
In praise of bad hidden object games
HOPAs, or Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures, made by studios in Hong Kong and Eastern Europe:
https://www.eipix.com/hopa-games/
http://blueteagames.com/
https://elephant-games.com/games/
https://www.world-loom.com/
HOPA Let’s Plays: https://www.youtube.com/c/YourGibs/playlists
Better designs for the human body
Modularity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_(biology)
CRISPR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR
When you say "excuse me" you're asking forgiveness for doing something rude, such as burping. When you say "excuse me" as a demand that someone move out of the way because you're impatient to get past, the demand is itself the rude thing, so you should have to say it twice.
Brood X: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22362042/cicada-brood-x-map-2021
Palo Verde beetles
https://www.azfamily.com/weather/phoenix_weather_blog/the-monsoon-monster-beetle/article_bb4bd606-0476-5c0e-ae2a-ddbe1467d9d5.html
https://arizonareport.com/big-black-arizona-beetle-palo-verde/
Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_hissing_cockroach
Beastie Boys - Sabotage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5rRZdiu1UE
https://youtu.be/-TQgbVk9jss
Deodar Cedars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedrus_deodara
Ryan Reynolds and the Deadpool Cinematic Universe
Watching Shakespeare
The Hollow Crown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Crown_(TV_series)
Henry V: https://globeplayer.tv/videos/henry-v
Falstaff, who is actually more in Henry IV than Henry V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Falstaff
Hamlet in the original Klingon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF0k4qV1I1Y
Richard II (the one that precedes Henry IV) https://tinyurl.com/344kjjp4
Microtopics:
Kitchen! The Musical.
Inviting the general public to write the musical that exists only in your head.
Introducing the guest who is bad at introducing himself.
Running a white-hat ARG on company servers to research and understand the employees you fired for running an ARG on company servers.
In praise of terrible games.
Procedurally-generated hidden object games.
Organizing your life in a video game when you can't organize shit in real life.
Where the Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure fan communities are congregating online.
Using the block button on the pile of dishes in the sink.
Asking the manliest gamers to play feminine-coded video games and discovering if they become less manly.
Ladies who want to wear big dresses to be fancy ballroom ladies.
Gamers who don't congregate online but instead enjoy video games by themselves.
Where the Russian developers who make games for American women congregate online.
Clicking on something to make it go away.
Improving humans by adding components vs. by replacing components.
The legality of inventing a new organism by adding or deleting genes.
The Modular Human.
Plants undergoing full genome duplication.
The Diploid Human.
Using your hundred tongues to speak a hundred languages at once.
The one line you remember from "Kitchen! The Musical"
Saying "excuse me" in a higher and higher pitched voice until you're only saying "excuse me" to dogs and bats.
Running an errand in Tucson and incidentally removing horrifying beetles from multiple strangers’ hair.
True bugs and untrue bugs.
True bugs, with piercing and sucking mouthparts.
A reimagining of the insect phylum that includes small dogs and especially annoying children.
Hissing cockroaches that repeat what they hear like a parrot, so when you walk through the forest all you hear is a chorus of raspy voices saying "agh, get it off of me!"
Brood X, scheduled for this summer!
Brood X: Brood In Space.
OS X: OS In Space.
Which is worse, piercing and sucking mouthparts or sawing and sucking mouthparts?
What color of flashing lights civilians are allowed to use.
Pretending to be police.
The invasive plant species that the Sabotage music video is trying to highlight.
Hypothetical potted plants in the background of Powerman 5000's When Worlds Collide.
Being sentenced to community service and filling your rap punk band's trailer with fresh vegetables.
Nick Cave throwing a chair.
A poolside interrogation to find out if someone has a waterproof phone before you push them into a pool.
A cloth dummy falling off of a bridge.
Whether that cloth dummy had a cloth family.
Whether 1970s porn stars styled themselves after 1970s cops, or vice versa.
Popeye the Sailor Moon.
Everybody at the party dressing up as sexy cops and handing the real police a beer when they show up at the door.
Accidentally bringing up sexy cops every time you're on the show.
Chill dudes in short ties.
Taking a picture of a tree out of your moving car and asking a botanist to identify a blurry mess.
A boss who thinks your name is Marcia.
Meeting somebody with overlapping energies.
Total freedom from all societal expectations.
Setting up a movie streaming service that only streams one movie to promote your new phone company.
Buying every copy you can find of your first movie.
Watching multiple sets of people trapped in the same reality where they play out the same dramas and say the same lines over and over.
The one time Shakespeare wrote a stage direction.
Every time Shakespeare has been adapted into a movie.
Who even likes Falstaff.
The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged.
Re-subtitling your movie using lines from Shakespeare.
The origin of Klingons as Shakespeare characters.
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1h 7min
May 24, 202183. The Wide World Of Pores
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Stevie
https://www.hryx.net/
Avery might be on Spotify.
Topics:
BREAKING NON MAMMALIAN MILK NEWS: the Arapaima, the largest freshwater fish, feeds its young with a milky white substance that has a hormone found in mammal milk.
Boats
https://www.vesselfinder.com/
https://twitter.com/sfships
https://twitter.com/Nature_Grrrl/status/1375168720495075338
Angle Grinder Man
https://wiki.rlsh.net/wiki/Angle_Grinder_Man
https://wiki.rlsh.net/wiki/Bearman
The Safety Dance, by Men Without Hats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjPau5QYtYs
Unedited (syncable) commentary segment: https://youtu.be/NxucdoBgtSc
Music generated by food
https://twitter.com/simongeist/status/1366072913301037057
Ron Gallagher, who toured small clubs doing his famous brother's act, eventually resulting in a lawsuit and the estrangement of Leo Gallaher (the famous Gallagher) from his family
Microtopics:
The miracle of life on this very special episode of Topic Lords.
Fish milk.
The pigeon milk t-shirt.
Fish lactating out of their heads so the baby fish can swim through the milk cloud to improve their complexion.
Photos of proud fishermen holding fish bigger than they are and drinking milk off of their heads.
The top ten pores.
The defensive pores millipedes use to shoot itchy silk at you like silly string.
How if arachnids couldn't eat they'd die and how that's awesome actually.
Solid state arachnids.
The velvet worm.
Painting so many enormous millipedes that your boyfriend goes to the pet shop to get you an enormous millipede to draw from life and he comes back with no millipedes but he does smell like almonds for a week.
Creating a listener survey to see how many listeners made it past the topic about fish milk.
Not naming the RRS Sir David Attenborough but throwing a bone to the internet by naming its little buddy boat that pops out Boaty McBoatface.
Whether they're actually called pilots.
Losing a whole boatload of rubber duckies so to this day rubber duckies are washing ashore along with disarticulated left feet.
A Twitter bot that just says hello and goodbye to boats entering and leaving the San Francisco Bay.
Tweeting at a boat to say "you're killin' it out there, boat" and being immediately suspended by moderation bots.
Thousands of boat watchers in dinghies all over the ocean watching boat movement through binoculars and sending updates to vesselfinder.com via carrier pigeon.
Birds that are constantly changing their names.
How slough and slough are actually two different words.
The rest of the boat.
How snowplows get their names in Scotland.
The top eight snowplow names in Minnesota.
All the plow names that didn't make the cut.
Plugging a hair dryer into the cigarette lighter and attaching it to your front bumper to melt the ice as you drive.
A cop writing you a fix it ticket because your hair dryer cables are too tangled.
Superheroes who make house calls.
The police being completely unable to apprehend Angle Grinder man when his phone number and web site are totally public.
Construction Luigi.
Angle Grinder man and Wheel Clamp man both having the same publicity shot of doing a split and grinding the concrete.
A mob of masked superheroes descending on you and beating you up while you try to drink a smoothie.
Extreme Elvis.
A superhero named Bear Man whose superpower is that he only eats salmon.
Pouring one out for the Petoskey Batman.
Trying to think of how The Safety Dance goes but all you can think of is the Humpty Dance.
Getting a taste of Youtube's time-stretching algorithm and spitting it right back out.
Really enjoying the tall grass.
How to tell if somebody is running, frolicking or fleeing.
An excellent prop stone wall with a bunch of old looking rocks.
Extreme expressions of joy bursting with love as you walk through town screaming at everyone.
Continuously jumping and smiling and not being sure which will tire you out first.
S for safety.
Putting a lute in the music video when there's no lute in the song.
A split second of trenchant-seeming serious political commentary at the very end of this lighthearted music video.
Chumbawumba turning out to be serious political artists.
Going to genius.com to find out what The Safety Dance is really about.
Claiming that The Safety Dance is not a nuclear protest song per se even though you don't really know what "per se" means.
Drum hits triggered by popcorn pooping.
The popcorn vessel.
How all music is food-based if you think about it.
How humans have been singing since they had mouths.
Using popcorn as both a source of entropy and a tasty snack.
Tracking down the source of experimental saxophone music in the subway so you can give them money and it turns out to be a squeaky belt in the escalator.
The vegetable orchestra.
Powering your synth rock band using a bank of potatoes.
How potato-covered audio cables don't sound better than regular audio cables even though they are more delicious.
The Gallagher Prime story.
The Greek Tragedy of the Gallagher Bros.
Hashtag let Leo work.
Gallagher and Alf both being popular before we discovered what entertainment was.
All the paperwork you need to fill out to put music on Spotify.
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1h 2min
May 17, 202182. Breadless French Toast a la Dig Dug
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Hallie
@hallie_9000
Chris will find you.
Topics:
The Pokemon Sylveon is supposed to be cute but it freaks me out and let me tell you why
Savory french toast.
Remember briefcases? People would just bring paperwork home with them. To work more, at home, for free. Fucked up, if you think about it.
Everytime we touch Detective Pikachu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQyM2AU7nZo
https://youtu.be/YUWq_aBiE_s
The ethics of making a robot daughter
https://www.etsy.com/listing/955388068/long-furby-custom-plush
https://www.etsy.com/listing/912086346/3-ft-long-furby-purple-fur-customizable
https://www.google.com/search?q=furby+sylveon&tbm=isch
https://www.etsy.com/listing/951517045/custom-furby-oddbody-long-furby-alien
Microtopics:
Whether it's possible to do Soupertasters remotely.
What show this even is.
Never watching the best episode of a show because if you do the rest will be worse than that.
A game where you explore a tavern and then the game ends.
History littered with the corpses of couch-co-op-only games.
A hypothetical podcast about the dark history of cribbage.
The best vertically scrolling shooter set on British colonial Mars.
Adding faeries to rebalance the meta which has been overrun by dragons.
A little quadruped with features.
Ribbon-like feelers that make you drop your guard.
OG European fairies who steal children and leave rusty nails in their place.
A cute fairy dog that will fuck your shit up when you're not looking vibe.
The mortifying ordeal of realizing that all the Pokemon who look like they're wearing clothes? That's actually their skin.
A Syveon swinging around Viridian City like Spider-Man, eating birds and avoiding cold iron.
Turkey-flavored bread.
Making a Monte Cristo with savory French toast.
A sweet omelette with a lot more bread than egg.
Breadless French toast.
Omelette a la Dig Dug.
Filling crepes.
Using eggs as glue for putting a bunch of yummies together.
Lobster burritos.
What briefcases are for.
A game where you've got a corgi and you've gotta get her somewhere to do stuff.
Bringing a knife to a briefcase fight.
Using briefcases to store underwear.
Whether you want to sit in the briefcase or boxercase section.
Asking president Clinton "boxers or briefs?" on a live Q&A.
An adorable chonky Pikachu.
Detective Pikachu turning out way better than it had any right to be.
Two and a half hours of Pikachu jazzercising.
Whether Pikachu is made of shiny plastic like in Pokemon Go or is furry like a mouse like in Detective Pikachu.
Hiring internet meme people to do concept art for your movie.
Pokemon MC Hammer's extremely baggy purple leg skin.
Realistic Homer Simpson and realistic Mario.
Diving straight into your uncanny valley reflex and poking it with a stick.
Doing an image search for "realistic Mr. Mime" and regretting it immediately.
Psychic stigmata.
Star Trek: The Next Generation and Frankenstein's conflicting takes on whether it's a good idea to construct an artificial person.
Trying to make a robot daughter but accidently making a murder bot.
Committing your kid to Git so you can roll back when they find out about the time you spent on 4chan.
Best practices for doing AI research without committing murder all the time.
The "bunch of delicious stuff in a pan plus eggs" approach to AI research vs. the "frittata" approach to AI research.
Observing and understanding the outcome of training a neural network and writing an ordinary program to do the same thing.
Agreement.
The alternate ending of Frankenstein where Dr. Frankenstein accidentally installs a baker's hand on the monster and it goes on a baking rampage using up all the flour in town.
To what degree parents can be held responsible for what their children do.
How it's okay to disown your parents but not your children.
A chatbot with servomotors in it.
A Furby molar.
A burden too great to bear alone.
A Furby living in a hollowed out tooth filled with corks.
Waking up next to a ceramic tooth with a face every morning.
Whether MAME has Furby support.
Douglas.
A Furby with baked beans instead of skin.
A Furby with teeth in the middle and it's not okay.
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...more
1h
May 10, 202181. The Pianist-Oboist War
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Alexander
Amanda
Topics:
The disappointment of sci-fi stories that are just reskins of stuff that happens on Earth.
My bitcoin.
https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/543952090800734209
I can't decide whether I'm more annoyed that Wienerschnitzel doesn't serve schnitzel, or that they did for three months in 2017 as a gag.
Jesse asks "First encountering a song through parody."
Bad habits that adventure games teach you.
Microtopics:
Shrinking your pony until it's really small.
Pulling down the console and typing +mlook.
Skyrim modding as a more convincing representation of magic than the spell system in the game itself.
A very cryptic twitter account that just posts numbers.
What @math_ebooks did to be suspended.
Wanting to land on a planet and look for Bob but a different planet gets in your way first.
Sci-fi as a safe lens for exploring our culture without getting people's defenses up.
Reverse mystery stories.
Starfish people who communicate through music.
Watching Solaris because you're really into boring sci-fi.
An alien invasion movie without the invasion.
Final Jeopardy asking you to identify the Close Encounters of the Third Kind melody from the interval names.
The fires of Musical Jeopardy.
The correlation between how tightly strung your instrument is vs. how tightly strung you are.
The Star Trek episode where the Enterprise discovers a musician planet where there's a war between the pianists and the oboists.
Edmonton, the early Bitcoin hub.
SETI@home never finding anything interesting.
Losing your Bitcoin wallet.
Buying a $40,000 coffee with Bitcoin in 2013.
Giving your college hard drive to a friend to ask them to try to find your Bitcoin wallet without first scouring it for incriminating evidence.
Deciding you no longer need a memes folder on your hard drive because you can easily find as many memes as you need on the Internet.
Dressing up as the Murder She Wrote theme song for Meme Day.
Whether the Murder She Wrote theme song is a meme.
The barbecue joint that accepts Dogecoin.
Going to Remedy Chai in Edmonton and getting a butter chicken wrap and a $40,000 chai.
Liking both hot dogs and schnitzel but hating Wienerschnitzel.
A joke that most people won't get or notice, and the people who do will be annoyed by it.
My First Book of Space.
Hating potatoes until you discover that they are delicious and then hating them even more.
Your refusal to admit that actually you like potatoes as foreshadowing to every argument you ever have on the Internet.
The Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dog burrito skipping right from marketing's brain to consumer's mouths without ever being taste-tested by anyone.
The Brain to Mouth social movement.
The culinary dimensional space of meat product folded into bread product.
A hybrid chef/engineer who has an understanding of both fast food pipelines and how to prepare a tasty meal.
Hearing every Weird Al version of a song before you hear the originals.
Mathnet.
Bible versions of pop culture songs so you can sing along to the radio without being full of sin.
The guy at Bible Camp who rewrote the lyrics of pop music to be about God, who retired back when Christianity was groovy, so the most recent pop music you're allowed to sing is from the 1970s.
It's getting cold in here, so put on all your coats.
Sherlock Hemlock.
Vincent Twice Vincent Twice.
Monty Python's popularity among Americans who are completely oblivious to what it's satirizing, so a whole generation of American nerds grew up thinking inscrutable nonsense is the pinnacle of comedy. (Which it is.)
A combination of things you usually don't see tickling your neurons in a novel way.
The scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio show where Douglas Adams is making fun of disco.
The missing album that the Backstreet Boys only released in Canada so they could practice being famous.
Time traveling to past and future Space Quests.
Doing ridiculous adventure game shit to get a book of matches when you could just go to a store and buy a gosh darned book of matches.
An adventure game where you can do what makes sense.
How the Infocom hard boiled detective text adventures were structured differently from traditional text adventures.
Wanting Roberta Williams to adopt you and now you've blown it.
The Seattle of Mexico.
San Francisco, The Everbrown State.
Roberta Williams tracking you down and adopting you against your will.
Luring Roberta Williams to your house with promises of trained chickens jumping through hula hoops.
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51min
May 03, 202180. Xenogears Disc 3 For Smash
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Styger
JP
http://vectorpoem.com/
Topics:
Comestibles as fan fiction
The most unexpected CD to be launched from the face of the Cenobite from Hellraiser 3 that launches CDs out of his face.
https://cenobite.fandom.com/wiki/CD
I got a mandolin slicer for Christmas from someone who was afraid to use it, and I am also afraid to use it.
Ghostbusters, by Ray Parker Jr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe93CLbHjxQ
Bustin'. https://youtu.be/0tdyU_gW6WE
You Could Stop at Five or Six Stores https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T1OHha9agg
Jeffrey Tambor Is NOT the Guy From "Ghost" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVLWybF_pwo
JoJo: Trick with cigarettes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJwD8q-OXLQ
Oldest food you've eaten. ie oldest substance or object you've consumed.
https://youtu.be/Ga5JrN9DrVI
Do pigeons love nacho cheese?
Here's an alphabetical list of every move in every Mario game, from "1,000-Fold Arms – Paper Mario: The Origami King" to "Zero Laser – Super Smash Bros. Brawl."
https://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_special_moves
A. How would you fix this list?
B. Who wants to do a podcast series where we rank them all?
Microtopics:
Attack the Block.
Movies where a delineated area is involved in some kind of fight.
Lord quality: trying to keep it high.
Cooking dinner as a fusion of the cuisines of the two countries that you are about to watch play a sport.
White game designers in the 70s deciding that there isn't anything spicier than paprika in this astonishing fantasy world.
Doing some home cooking and inventing a new sandwich in the style of the McDonald's fish fillet.
The $100 cheese steak.
A chef getting famous by serving incredibly high end Big Macs to rich people.
Each bottle of Tabasco tasting uniform even though they're all composed of peppers grown in many different countries.
How to explain cenobites to Thomas Jefferson.
A transporter accident aesthetic.
Not liking the music in the club so you turn the DJ into a cenobite with a CD drive for a mouth.
Supertramp's Breakfast in America.
All known AOL installer CD-ROMs originating with the cenobite who launches CDs out of his face.
A CD that was killed by Mountain Dew.
The cenobite with a CD drive for a face launching Xenogears disc 3 at you.
Xenogears disc 3 for Super Smash Bros.
Sympathy for the developers of Xenogears and in fact of any video game.
Novelty CD shapes.
CD-ROMs cut to the size of business cards with your portfolio on them.
Destroying a slot loading CD drive by putting a small or oddly shaped CD in it.
Learning to trust yourself to be around sharp knives.
Strapping a mandolin slicer to yourself like a keytar.
A great spooky house under the freeway.
A house made of neon tubing like the ghost ship at the end of Monkey Island.
Telekinesing the furniture.
Being haunted by ghosts that are clearly just a couple dudes in t-shirts.
Getting a bunch of B-list celebrities to shout "Ghostbusters" and act scared.
Getting movie footage for your music video by pointing a video camera at the movie screen.
Finding synergies between disparate elements of pop culture.
Bleh hands.
Slimer with a dozen cocktail weenies in his craw.
Reaching a compromise that will allow Ray Parker Jr. to haunt your home in peace.
The Ghostbusters hiring spectral Ray Parker Jr. to haunt folks and drum up business.
Vincent Schiavelli's filmography.
A Ghostbusters/Columbo crossover episode.
The trick where Chevy Chase eats a cigarette.
Slimer always believing that he ate the whole thing.
Food age.
Eating extremely old cough drops.
Not being able to tell if cough drops have gone bad because they always taste like that.
Asking someone with a philosophy degree whether cough drops are a food.
Accidentally taking enough philosophy classes to qualify for a degree and someone tracks you down to hand you your philosophy degree like a subpoena.
Bog cheese.
Whether anyone has successfully eaten millennia-old frozen mammoth meat or if it all turned into black goo.
Several thousand year old tomb honey.
Unboxing and eating military rations on video.
Eating hardtack from the American civil war in 2016.
Being extremely upbeat about rancid meat.
How to tell if vacuum sealed food has botulism.
Having the vocabulary to describe all the different ways food can go bad.
Trying to buy civil war hardtack on eBay and bidding on a pile of rocks.
The most pigeon-dense place you've lived.
Taking incredible risks for a single cheeto.
Whether nacho cheese is incredibly beautiful to a tetrachromat.
Nacho cheese as a nest building materials.
Global incidence of human tetrachromacy.
Space photos recolored into the visible spectrum so humans can look at them.
Pointing a spectroscope at nacho cheese to figure out what pigeons see.
The world's tiniest superpower.
How to grow up in America without having played a bunch of Mario games.
List of soups.
Sitting at your Wizard's Desk for too long and getting Wizard's Foot.
Fan wikis taking the shape of fan patience.
Begging the wiki editors to turn this list into a normalized database table.
An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can jump.
An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can't jump.
Mario visiting San Francisco.
The Golden Gate Bridge existing in the Mario multiverse.
Japan fitting perfectly in the Super Mario Bros. 3 universe, because Japan is also a magical foreign land I've never visited.
The alternate reality where Mario Odyssey depicted world tourism in a hyper-realistic fashion.
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as a fictionalized depiction of an Olympics that never happened.
ESPN broadcasting CPU vs. CPU basketball matches in NBA 2K.
Linking to a web site but not encouraging people to go there.
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1h 5min

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