Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

October 17, 2022156. Society Is Moving in a Direction
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Alex
https://twitter.com/alexicographic
https://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames/
JP
http://vectorpoem.com/
Topics:
Your gravestone has a button people can press to play a sound clip, 10 seconds or less. It can loop or be a one-shot, your preference. What sound clip does your gravestone play?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9u8Fd7EHYAg
Counting the beats in eenie-meenie
SoundScan and the SoundScan Era
https://www.theringer.com/music/2021/5/25/22452539/soundscan-billboard-charts-streaming-numbers
There Will Come Soft Rains
https://poets.org/poem/there-will-come-soft-rains
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_Will_Come_Soft_Rains_(short_story)
The scorched-earth strategy for Lowest Positive Unique Integer
"Leaving beautiful ruins" in a videogame
Microtopics:
A return of many-storied adventure game developers.
A point and click adventure game that changed the trajectory of your life.
Suspenders as an architectural feature.
Onesie pajamas with a trap door.
People sneaking up behind you and trying to unbutton your poop flap.
Thoughts that are meant to remain unthought.
The famous elongated "some."
A marketing executive saying "nobody will know what a 'tetralogy' is."
Whether your game studio logo has a sound.
Console startup noises.
The button your loved ones can press on your gravestone to hear the Dreamcast startup sound.
King Solomoning the gif-vs-gif debate.
The governing body that decides whether your death is cool enough to warrant a gif of your death on your tombstone.
The kind of people who gravitate to a job that rates everyone's deaths on a five-star scale.
The IP situation surrounding your gravestone's looping wav button.
Your tombstone jukebox that plays David Bowie songs when people put a quarter in and the quarters all end up in your casket and if David Bowie wants them he can damn well come and get them.
Wagering on your ability to read emergent situations.
Electric Football.
Covering a metal plate with quarters and flipping the switch that makes the plate vibrate, creating the quarter configuration for optimal money gouging.
Becoming really good at beating a rigged game.
Becoming really good at funnel cake.
Dentists not understanding the motivations people have for drinking soda.
Largest Sip.
The liminal space between a Sip and a Gulp.
Gaming the outcome in Eenie Meenie Miney Moe.
Whether Eenie Meenie Miney Moe is a solved game.
A great opportunity to practice believing the lies that we form our wesociety on.
When Billboard switched from a call-stores-and-ask data collection system to an automated system to gather song sales data, and rap and R&B suddenly started dominating the charts.
Rockists fudging the numbers.
The pros and cons of getting a Billboard Hot 100 hit.
Jukebox charts.
The Billboard Humming chart based on them listening to the songs people are humming to themselves on the street.
Who loves the radio hits that everyone you know hates? (People you don't know.)
Knowing where to stick that quarter.
White dudes making 17 minute songs.
Axis of Discourse.
A directory of mp3s in your Jellyfin server.
Napster pivoting to NFTs but nobody notices or cares.
Nostalgia for the Spanish Flu.
A giant ball of iron with life forms clinging to it.
The earth continuing to be a lump of iron no matter how badly we treat it.
Potential human extinction and whether birds would notice it.
A fully-automated human house of the near to far future.
A band of roving pranksters in the post-apocalypse who are running around transmitting bad Roomba firmware updates.
Rolling up on prom with your entourage of four Half-Life scientists and five Barneys.
Rolling up on the rap battle with your entourage of backup singer Roombas trailing behind you.
The Mad Max series as prepper porn.
A good shelf to rest on in the collective psyche.
Friend deterrent strategies.
How strategy disclosure alters the gameplay of Rock Paper Scissors.
Disclosing ahead of the game or Rock Paper Scissors that your strategy will be to punch your opponent repeatedly, and how that affects the way the game is played.
Satisfactory: an open-world factory building game.
Building your factories and then leaving them behind.
Emergent haunted houses in abandoned player-built structures in persistent-world multiplayer games.
Having an idea for a game feature and having to build the whole game to try the feature out.
Being scared of weird old crap.
Adding Pokemon to Minecraft.
The last gasp of mainstream PC gaming before phones happened.
An 11 year old game developer getting thrown into the Capitalist snake pit.
The Human Attention Zoo.
Kids (or adults) having goofs.
The Golden Age of the Moddable Game Engine.
Getting a job based on your Roblox portfolio.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 6 min
October 10, 2022155. Do AI Researchers Know About Having Kids?
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Lords:
Jude
https://bikechurch.santacruzhub.org/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jude-jackson-605680100/
Shepard
Topics:
The attention schema model of consciousness
https://books.google.com/books?id=Ta4eAAAAQBAJ&pg=PP1
Studying a children's picture book in academia because it was successfully banned out of existence
Your favorite floor cocktail
Ode to Waluigi
https://www.stalberttoday.ca/local-news/student-poet-wins-national-award-1278635
Did generations used to be a thing?
Remembering what the mnemonic is but not what it is supposed to remind you.
Microtopics:
Bike Church.
Learning to fix a bike.
The audio book for Watership Down.
The book that inspired the plugging.
Our own brain's mental model of our attention.
If you are what you think then suddenly you're this other thing.
The brain's proprioception of itself.
The Turning Test as praxis.
A second brain that tries to second-guess the first brain.
An idea that is brilliant or not.
Have machine learning researchers heard about having kids?
X: A Child's Story.
A discount dystopian nightmare.
A book that is banned in twenty states but otherwise nobody cares about it.
Kids who inexplicably look like Charles Bronson.
The consolidation of media into six megacorporations.
Kids learning how to pirate again.
A specific right that can be sold or exchanged.
The end of the golden age of streaming.
What Napster was like.
Downloading an MP3 from an FTP site and then recording it to a cassette tape because you don't have that much hard drive space.
Ice that is still ice.
When the bartender pours your drink on the floor and gives you a straw.
The Forbidden Jungle Juice.
A story from back when most of Jim's friends were alcoholics.
Noticing a cocktail on the floor of the elevator and wondering how it got there and then you realize the elevator smells like a smoke bomb and you're like "oh ok"
Checking the ceiling of the elevator for ninjas.
The problem with the wine bar spit urn.
The coffee that you give to the poor.
Pouring your excess coffee into the donation box at church.
Dropping a loose muffin into the mail drop box to show thanks to the mail carrier.
A floor made of mail.
A dastardly Nintendo villain.
Thy time to attack Mario and Luigi.
Why thou dost not have thine own video fame.
Why thou art always cranky.
Whether a power flower fell in you mouth when thou wast a baby.
What it wouldst be like to be friends with Bowser and thou.
Fighting Geno the Explorer dangerously.
Why thou art not in Super Smash Bros. Brawl.
A poem that asks many important questions and provides no answers.
Hyper Mecha Sonic.
A thriller about video game mascots.
The bright line in the sand that makes Yoshi a pet rather than a friend.
Dumping your boyfriend Waluigi any time you need an extra few feet of jump height because at any time you can load up Mario Tennis and get another Waluigi for free.
Trying desperately to find or create a purple-moustachioed Waluigi.
The eight named generations.
The Reprisal Generation, of the Nomad/Reactive archetypes.
Why the concept of generational cohorts is unique to modern Americans.
Ming Dynasty Boomers.
Violence that is continuous and normal.
The Greatest Generation, who had no idea at the time how Great they had it.
A Radical for Fingers.
Seeing a king wearing a hat and trying to remember what that's supposed to remind you of.
Looking at your hands and trying to remember why this is important.
Not figuring out that your grandpa is hilarious until a week before he dies.
Waiting in the bathroom for the test to start.
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59 min
October 03, 2022154. QWERTY in the Streets, Colemak in the Sheets
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
https://frror.bandcamp.com/
Stevie
[email protected]
Topics:
Striped humans
Alternative keyboard layouts: teaching yourself to type in new horrible ways
Where did I get these floppy disks?
The floppy disk poems
How do I give a tech talk?
https://vimeo.com/91436410
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59hwI9Ae1qU
http://paperdino.com/save-the-date/
Microtopics:
The extent of Jim's patience vis-a-vis delayed plugging.
Wishing you didn't make things so you could talk about the things you didn't make.
Plugging the small random things in life, like bugs.
Sitting in a chair right now.
Trying desperately for forty years to never use Bluetooth.
George Michael's "Faith"
George Michael rehearsing a Queen song.
A Faith listening party.
The etymology of "Lobster."
Plugging bugs and unplugging crustaceans.
Invisible stripes along one's epidermis.
Mosaicism (as distinct from Chimerism.)
Blaschko Lines.
A secret invisible power to be striped.
The show where nobody knows anything.
Spiraling outward from a central point.
A thing that is a fact if you believe Wikipedia.
Describing an egg as ovoid because it is similar to an ovum, i.e. an egg.
Whether a factoid is bullshit.
Whether humans are humanoid.
The distinction between a fact and a factoid and how it has changed over time.
Being slightly hungry and eating a single macaronus.
Batman training his successor in the sci-fi future.
Joining the villain faction because they get the cool hooves and horns.
Turning 90 and getting your internal organs tattooed.
Check it out, here's my solar plexus. Enjoy.
An injection that makes your bones glow in the dark.
Cold-Turkey Colemak Switchin'.
Holding your left pinky on the tab key to keep your place.
Iterating until you find the episode title.
Typing without twerking.
Being able to get your hands to do what you want without hurting.
Getting a split keyboard so your hands keep working.
The ease and laziness of the Wiimote and nunchuk allowing you to put your hands anywhere you want.
Twitchy aim dominating the PC FPS design space regardless of what the game designer wants.
Making poem floppy disks and using them as drinking coasters.
Cleaning out your mouse.
Disassembling a floppy disk and folding it into the shape of the Starship Enterprise.
Remembering where the USB floppy drive might stuff.
Whether cursed demoscene executables still curse you if you run them in DosBox.
Whether the Ring video still cursed you after it's digitized to DVD.
Maybe'm or maybe'm not.
A pretty cool knick knack.
A human head like pancake batter.
Bread that you put in a blender.
The old good lord, bad lord routine.
Picking a god and channeling its power into your tech talk.
A community of people that you want to like and respect you.
Various ways to prepare to give a talk, and why Tyriq always does it the wrong way.
Going to a talk and thereby consenting to be lectured by the person giving the talk.
Blaming the audience for picking the wrong talk if they don't like your talk.
How to run an ARG for no money.
Deconstructing the idea that canon and headcanon are in any way different.
Re-telling the same story over and over again.
Same bullshit, different number of dimensions.
A movie that was cooler when it was just a throwaway line in another movie.
Depicting the same overarching event but with details changed.
Games that require you to make a choice that you can't take back.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 18 min
September 26, 2022153. I Can't Wait for My Cockroach Lipids
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
James
Avery
Topics:
Stone paper
"The Flashing Blade"
The Number Ones
https://www.stereogum.com/category/columns/the-number-ones/
https://www.americanpoems.com/poets/stanley-kunitz/king-of-the-river/
BREAKING NON MAMMALIAN MILK NEWS!! Sorry mammals, cockroaches make milk and it is considered a complete food
Microtopics:
The latest on whether or not you've been canceled.
Spotify rejecting your album because you don't believe in yourself enough.
Spagbol.
The very one that is being digested by you now.
thisbolognesedoesnotexist.com
Paper that is 60% stone.
The price you pay for participating in art.
Coffee that is more powerful than a laptop.
What happens if you try to shred margarine.
Documents only for the document control society.
The Novelty FBI raiding your house and confiscating your Novelty Top Secret Documents and hiding them in their fake Groucho Marx glasses.
The guy who bought the last 100 Groucho Marx glasses from Party City.
Moustache Ninja.
Why more people aren't talking about Moustache Ninja.
The height of Pirate Ninja Robot Mustache Mania.
Ankle Biter Man.
Atrocities Guide.
One of many reasons why real life superheroes are a bad idea.
Superheroes: police except there is no oversight whatsoever.
Avery's Angels on Phoenix Jones.
If Seattle police arrest you for being nude, they are legally obligated to provide you with a dinner jacket for your jail stay.
Heath Ledger instructing the audience to charge their shower.
The Masked Magician Revealed.
TV stage magic.
David Copperfield raising the Titanic.
The Cheap Trick song that got to #1.
The songs that hit #1 because General Hospital used them on the soundtrack.
An antidote to the idea that music used to be better.
Breaking Up is Hard to Do.
Finding a way to enjoy art that you didn't like before.
Getting old and liking boring music.
What radio formats overlap with Beautiful Music.
A foam snake that shoots thirty feet into the air and then drifts into a nearby tree.
Tumbling over the rocks until you paint them with your belly's blood.
That other flesh, heavy with milt, bruised, battering toward the dam that lips the orgiastic pool.
Limber and firm in the state of his shining, forever inheriting his salt kingdom, from which he is banished forever.
The most animalistic and primitive part of your consciousness.
An Atari 2600 game inspired by a poem about a fish.
The level in Dante's Inferno where you have to fight unbaptized babies.
A game with one foot in the majesty of Greek mythology and the other foot in what it's like to bash someone's head into the concrete.
A great use of thumbsticks.
Whether Wisdom Tree would've published the Dante's Inferno video game.
Spending your entire life obsessed with the pear you stole as a kid.
An illumination of someone kneeling in front of a pear tree and weeping.
Pop songs about relationship situations.
An idea that is not as old as music.
A piece of music going right for the emotion, like the Windows Startup Sound.
Melody in lyrics, in conversation with each other.
Seeing a person and drawing a stick figure.
How do I get too much into my own head?
Why you're turning into a fish, and what the fish represents.
Sea Monkeys' Garden of Earthly Delights.
Do we want to get to the Cockroach Milk?
Being accosted on the street by Topic Lords fans asking for non-mammalian milk news but you're like "sorry I'm saving this for Topic Lords"
How many cockroaches it takes to make one serving of cockroach milk.
Sobbing in front of the slab of meat that Rocky punched.
Pouring cockroach milk onto stone paper to prove its resiliency.
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1 hr 4 min
September 19, 2022152. National Butterscotch Pudding Day's Eve
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Alex
Shannon
Topics:
Rebranding a Country
The single-celled dog
Joe Hart still hasn't cleared out the vampire dens
https://imgur.com/a/ODW4pBI
i hate it when i cant even write a poem about something because its too obvious.
https://tooquirkytolose.tumblr.com/post/689145075338543104
National Butterscotch Pudding Day (Sep 19)
Microtopics:
Tying on the tiebreaker.
Cambodian street food.
Topic Time!!
Two countries in the process of changing their names.
Whether sovereignty was ceded.
Tourism videos encouraging people to pronounce your country's name correctly.
History continuing to happen after you leave high school.
Changing your name to North Your Name to get an alliance with NATO.
A bonanza for globe manufacturers.
The United States of Mexico.
Germany's reaction to the United States changing its name to The United States of Germany.
Playing the wrong Korea's national anthem by mistake.
Switching to Roguelike Alphabetical Order so Zimbabwe doesn't always go last.
What does it mean to be a particular kind of animal?
Transmissible cancer.
A breed of dog that no longer exists as a dog but does exist as a strain of transmissible cancer.
CTVT.
HeLa cells.
Whether Henrietta Lacks is still alive.
How to fix 20,000 years of evolution.
A dog that is unlike extant dogs.
When you decide to change your evolutionary niche from macro to microorganism.
Cancer that is smart enough to not kill its host.
How cancer interacts with your mutant healing factor.
What this is and why it's happening to you.
Why a two year old wants to play in a copper mine.
What kind of mines New England vampires lived in.
Rearranging a corpse so that the vampire can't walk.
No Arizona Mine Draculas.
Joe Hart: defending our vampires.
Change that you can really make, if you live in Arizona.
Not getting the Google results you want because of sports mans.
The pros and cons of vampire bats.
Abandoned mines serving as habitats for 28 bat species that are crucial to the local ecology.
Persons currently experiencing vampirism.
Can't Have Shitting Gotham.
Adding line breaks to someone's complaint about a glow in the dark star to make a poem.
The imprint of one little glow in the dark star that had been missed and painted over in landlord white.
A life situation that is so poignant that it's impossible to write a poem about, so you describe it in prose and wait for a Tumblr user to come and add some line breaks.
A monologue that you could read in many different ways.
Returning to Tumblr because you have more thoughts on the painted-over star.
Responding to every text from your daughter as if it's a formal letter to a long-lost cousin.
Putting glow in the dark eyeballs on your closet door.
Putting you pudding under the Pudding Tree for Father Pudding.
How you grow the Pudding Tree.
Werther's Compromise.
Using Werther's Originals as dentures and you have to replace them every hour.
Removing the butter from scotch to get butterscotch.
Soft crack vs. hard crack.
Those terrifying Pillsbury tins that you bang on the counter and they explode and breadsticks come out.
How to determine if your candy in progress is in the soft ball stage.
What is pudding?
Having an existential crisis on Butterscotch Pudding Day.
Butterscotch Buttercream Frosting.
All the Lords that are fit to print.
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1 hr 1 min
September 12, 2022151. A Fantastic Way to Escape From Your Loved Ones
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Mike
https://twitter.com/mikeambrogi
Adam
https://twitter.com/adamdeGrandis/
Topics:
Cooking is awesome
https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1023147-tuna-crunch-sandwiches
Profound kid questions ("how do you like something?")
Mr. Jaws
https://youtu.be/JeYCOFblZRg
Distant Regard by Tony Hoagland
https://condofire.com/2018/12/16/poem-of-the-week-distant-regard-by-tony-hoagland-via-alison-mcghee/
Having very tight standards that you hold in one part of your creative life that you totally ignore in other parts. As a game artist, it drives me crazy when people make creative decisions without solid design to back them up ("My game has a PSX art style because I think that's neat"), but as a musician I played in a garage rock band without any reason other than "50 year old music is neat".
Microtopics:
Desktop Dungeons Rewind.
A rug that looks like a cat's face.
Starting a game studio with your life.
How the whole butch/femme thing works.
After the fall of civilization when the guy with an iPod is the most important person in the village.
Your FK-IK rigging skills really paying off in the post-apocalypse.
How much kayfabe is happening right now?
Whether the PS5 exists and whether you can play Jamestown Plus on it.
A great way to nurture and nourish your loved ones while also staying away from them.
Soaking Ls.
Whether Jim has a sister-in-law.
Top three texture-bothers-me foods.
Jim's position on eating eyeballs.
A snack that can look back.
Sucking on the window to the soul.
Ordering your tuna salad extra starchy.
A deep appreciation of the sandwich arts.
Making a Youtube series where part of the bit is that it's really professionally made but also that means you need to do all the dang work, and also maybe you're not good enough to do it as professionally as you think.
Getting a real video editor to do the parts that are edited like a normal video but editing all the parts that are bullshit yourself.
A daughter in rock climbing camp.
Describing Cosmic Cat socks to your dad.
How to enjoy things.
A series of experiences that enter your body via your sensory organs.
Laying a framework for understanding the self.
Encoding your musical taste in a C program.
Configuring human behavior on an iPad.
Feeding the Reddit grist mill with season 4 of Westworld.
Living near a pleasing combination of straightaways and turns so you have to hear people racing motorcycles at all hours.
The emotional status of the teenager who flipped his car in front of your house.
What to say after a car accident to convince passers by to not call 911.
An SUV that looks like a t-rex just tried to eat it driving the wrong way on the Bay Bridge.
Bombing back into San Francisco in your exploded car.
Seeing someone driving recklessly but it's okay because the car has a bumper sticker saying "Everything is fine. We're not drinking in here."
Taking a joke that someone else made and making another joke out of it.
As topical an artifact as you can imagine.
Repetitive and familiar two-minute chunks of sound.
The They Might Be Giants album that has the giant squid on the cover.
Singing Fingertips from start to finish.
The amount of work that went into the cover art of Dickie Goodman's Mr. Jaws.
DJing from a dinghy.
Writing a thank you note to your travel agent.
The clouds blowing overhead like governments and years.
Secular Americans having to reinvent gratitude since they don't pray.
Parts of you that you think make you a better person.
Valuing something in yourself but not being sure how you got there.
Having taught yourself a bunch of hard things and learning to trust the process of learning a skill.
Civilization: something we agreed to do.
The difference between doing something professionally and doing it for fun.
Trying to sneak into a giant hovering ball of rock.
People who are hungry for topics refusing to hire you.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
September 05, 2022150. Your Honking Monotoe
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Jenni
https://twitter.com/horsewizrd
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
Topics:
Hot Topic
Toe picks
https://imgur.com/a/ARHZn5x
Topical medication
Groke asks: My friend (who is completely unaware of this podcast and did this apropos of nothing) emailed the Mars chocolate company to find out why the Topic candy bar has that name. "Dear Mr Smith, Thanks for getting in touch about our MARS product. The Topic bar has been a firm favourite since it's introduction in 1962, unfortunately over time the origin of how the Topic chocolate bar came to be called Topic has been lost and now it has become a mystery that we are still trying to discover'. If you need any more information, please let us know. Kind Regards, Nasteha Tiirow Consumer Care Mars Chocolate UK Reference No: 00366098"
Test of Proficiency in Korean
Topic Records
https://myhomeworkdone.com/blog/poetry-topics/
Microtopics:
Who has been on Topic Lords the most often.
Plugging a leaky dog.
Whether dogs know about consent.
A store in the mall that teenagers go to.
Stranger Things merch in the Hot Topic.
Squeezing the timeline.
The goth-emo shift of the aughts.
The phrase "big tiddy goth girlfriend" which will far outlast the word "goth" in general usage.
Dark Academia: emo but in school.
Trying to do actual research in an Elden Ring library.
Rustic Dark Academics.
Buying a sweet Kirby t-shirt at GameStop and getting a compliment on it from your therapist.
Minnesota: the Land of Lakes.
Dogehouse Laser Tag.
A variety show that shows a variety of Youtube videos.
The internet and real life merging, to the detriment of both realms.
Everyone's top four toes.
Intrusive thoughts about feet, the worst body part.
What the guy who runs the nude model sketch thing thinks of your feet vis-a-vis your age.
The most awkward encounter of your life until the next day when you run into the same guy again.
Sending a picture of your feet to the same friend every year.
Putting 720° in a Marble Madness cabinet so that when people can't figure out how to play it and ask you how, you can ask them to show you their feet.
Top ten toe beans.
Mr. Frito-Lay smelling a dog foot and thinking "I want a chip that smells like this!"
Nothin' but thumbs.
Whether a horse hoof is just one big toenail.
What people would look like if they had the proportions of animals.
The indecency of seeing a bird's knee.
Medication you're supposed to use topically but it also tastes good.
The ester they use to indicate that even though this hand lotion smells good, it also smells like you shouldn't put it in your mouth.
Very petroleum-based very fake coconut.
Chris Hemsworth answering a question at a press conference when one of his assistants says "it's time for your hourly chicken" and shoves a chicken breast in his mouth.
Deep-frying the inedible part of the edamame.
Chewing your food as many times as possible.
Elaborate traffic jam metaphors for chewing food.
Hitting the big four-two.
The Box of Celebrations.
Describing a Twix bar without ever saying the name Twix.
When the moon hits your eye like a big chocolate gravy, that's a mole.
Trying to buy just one Andes Mint so you go to a hotel or a steakhouse in 1997 but the host won't let you buy it, they're like "just take it and leave."
Triscuit: it's one more than a biscuit.
Champion Racehorse Electricity Biscuit.
The Shape of Electricity, starring Pikachu.
Winston drinking all of your water.
Being proud that you translated a sign in a language you're learning, then looking just below that sign and seeing a translated sign in your native language just below it.
Sneaking into somebody's room and replacing their diary with their diary translated into Korean.
Saloon: just a salon with an extra O.
The room where you keep your art collection in a pile on the floor and visitors can come in to dig through it.
The podcast where we talk about Robin Tunney.
Selling Soviet and left-wing political music by mail order.
The Hundred Best Poetry Topics.
Why it is so frustrating to be frustrated.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 2 min
August 29, 2022149. Croc Nutz
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Erica
David
Topics:
A partnership between you and a tool
Schmalhausen and Vernadsky, my own personal ARG
Stop trying to make "a wedge is a machine" happen. It's not going to happen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine
The Poetry Teacher, by Mary Oliver
https://voetica.com/voetica.php?collection=2&poet=27&poem=5712
Drinking vinegar
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short-chain_fatty_acid
Microtopics:
Taking an allergy pill and getting something unexpected.
Nap skeptics.
Non-stop napping.
Wanting to eat nothing but spinach for two days so you go to Disney World and pay extra for all the park employees to tell you that in the happiest place on Earth we only eat spinach.
Who gets to chew the grape next and for how long.
Forgetting a story after you tell it, so you can tell the story back and forth forever.
A plastic grape that dissolves in your nose.
The least favorite thing that you bought during the pandemic.
The collective politico-pandemical nightmare.
A shitty partnership between you and a shitty tool.
Ol’ Slicky.
Tools that bring you distress.
Whether it's legal to open carry a claymore in Texas.
A decoration you can put on your truck just in case nobody knows what an asshole you are.
Whether you can open-carry a dildo in Texas if the dildo is also an assault rifle.
Gluing a penis to things you don't like and explaining that "this is a partnership between you and a tool."
Papers that you really approve should've read fifteen years ago.
The parallel world of the Modern Synthesis.
Soviet biologists who were recognized in their time but have since been forgotten.
Stalin's purge of scientists researching Mendelian genetics.
Being evacuated to Kazakhstan and fed only wilted spinach so that you can finally write the book you've been thinking about.
Bringing your adopted pet wolf back with you from Kazakhstan.
Growing up after the Russian revolution in St. Petersburg.
Delegating research by convincing the Game Detectives folks that there is a pop culture reward behind it.
Your own personal ARG that only you care about and doesn't lead to any goal except knowing more facts.
The point of games.
The creativity that exists in fiction that you wish you could capture in nonfiction.
The advantages of reality over fiction.
Becoming disenchanted with capitalism in the 1920s.
The Demon Haunted World.
Escaping from Stalinist Russia into Nazi Germany.
Cheers to a boring life.
A slightly tilted floor.
Electrifying the wedge so it's finally a machine.
The xkcd comic from 15 years ago that lampooned the way Wikipedia articles used to be stereotypically bad.
Being good at math and assuming that also means you'd be good at writing an encyclopedia.
Whether Wildlife Ecology is a different field from Wildlife Biology.
The shittiest source that Wikipedia will accept as a citation.
Citing George W. Bush as a source in your peer-reviewed paper about climate change.
All the dogs arriving at once.
Dogs teaching students how to write thirsty happy poems.
Dog Songs (2013)
Deliberately putting line breaks where they seem least intentional.
The Wedge of the Poetry World.
Dinging the pan to proceed.
The manufacture and use of short-chain fatty acids.
Fixing an ulcer with vinegar.
Fuck you, I'm drinking a shrub.
Drinking balsamic vinegar and then rinsing with baking soda.
Butter and vinegar, together at last.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 6 min
August 22, 2022148. Dual-Wielding Ingresses
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
CisHetKayFaber
https://twitter.com/CisHetKayFaber/
Phone
Topic Lords:
Why are Japanese adult video titles so long and weird?
3DS Street Pass
Service at Lou's Diner is incredible
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYnEmyq-0sA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJb-czNC_ls
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, by Gil Scott Heron.
https://genius.com/Gil-scott-heron-the-revolution-will-not-be-televised-lyrics
People that do things
Microtopics:
Seeking penance from the Topic Lord.
Dual-purpose infotainment.
Getting a new job that is better for your mental health.
The People's Republic of Wal-Mart.
Maximizing human dignity.
Jennifer Government.
Works of stilted microfiction describing porn contents.
Information density and reading speed in Japanese writing.
Accidentally machine-translating the wrong field.
Organizing your porn by publisher.
The full title of Robinson Crusoe.
When movie trailers stopped giving the whole plot away as a matter of course.
Setting your most recently played game to "Health and Safety Information" before going out to collect 3DS street-passes.
Trying to get 3DS street passes on in suburbia.
Edging towards the playground to get 3DS street passes without getting close enough that people notice you edging towards the playground.
Walking backwards into the playground, staring at your 3DS.
Taking over a gym and leaving something behind.
A lady with three phones and a tablet out who you are sure is making a drug deal but it turns out she's just playing Pokemon.
Collecting all the territories in 3DS street pass.
The critically acclaimed MMORPG Final Fantasy XVIV now with the free expansion up to level 60.
A problem that helps you exercise.
Wandering around Willow Glen dual wielding Ingresses.
Attacking a portal in an AR game and some guy in cargo shorts comes out of his house to politely ask you to stop.
Min-maxing your Burger King visits to become the mayor of Burger King.
Hacking the limiter on your chocolate milk tap.
Lou's superhuman beverage production.
The era of automats.
How they stored coffee in the 1950s.
Having one of each thing on your menu ready to give to potential customers immediately.
The turnaround on a queue of hamburgers.
Spaghetti and blankets at the Japanese McDonald's.
The MegaMuffin.
The Bojangles biscuit game.
Losing yourself on skag and skipping out for beer during commercials.
Nixon playing a bugle.
A revolution to get rid of the nubs.
Sliding a color TV into a stolen ambulance.
Only letting people into the revolution who can't spell Natalie Wood's name.
Dreaming about the end of television.
The BBC covering climate change by talking about how nice and sunny it is.
The guy who wanted to work at Nintendo so he got a job working at Nintendo.
Improving your tools and workflow because you're procrastinating doing actual work.
Playing Tetris on a gamepad vs. on a keyboard.
Tetris APM.
Switching joycon hands because you're accustomed to using the arrow keys with your right hand.
Making friends the wrong way in Japan.
Making things on purpose vs. making them accidentally.
Knowing how to act in a Japanese meeting.
Learning how to work towards a goal every day whether or not you feel like it.
How to tell when a game is ready to ship.
Going to the grocery store and explaining to the cashier about the cool art you make and they're like "great but you still have to pay for this food with money."
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 9 min
August 15, 2022147. Part-Time Cryptids
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Laura
https://twitter.com/lmichet/
Nick
http://nicknicknicknick.net/
Topics:
Can the biological function of expelling waste be improved in any way? Should humans expel waste differently?
The Hobbit: Dopesmoker Edition. (it's great)
Gato Gonzales and the Guts Pose
Nick at the Montreal Screwjob: https://imgur.com/a/45Opfxq
The Fish, by Elizabeth Bishop
https://poets.org/poem/fish-2
Twitter's UI has changed "Top 3" and "Top Fives" into "Top Four"
Every Monday, when you wake up in the morning, you discover that you have grown EXACTLY one millimeter taller. This continues throughout your life, so you will grow about 5.6 centimeters per year for the rest of the time you are alive. In ten years, you will be 1.8 feet taller than you are now. If you are 30 years old right now, you will be 7.3 feet taller when you reach 70. If you are 5.5 feet tall now, you will be 7 feet tall in just over 8 years, at which point you will start to look really weird. How does this change your life? What do you do about it? There is no cure for this condition, because it is caused by magic, not science, and there is no countercurse.
Microtopics:
The type of band that has four songs per album.
Creating ambient soundscapes via a series of guitar pedals.
Johnny To.
Interpersonal violence and the right to be perceived as human.
A world where everyone knows Judo for some reason and they fight each other with Judo all the time.
The quality of life edge that birds have over humans (their urine to feces ratio)
A nozzle in your wrist like spider man so you can poop into the tiny hole in the wall that everyone's house has for wrist poop nozzles.
Improving the human condition with a wall hole and maybe a wall tank.
Burying a pile of trash but also putting a photograph and a floppy disk in there so if you ever get in trouble for your pile of trash you can claim it's a time capsule.
How geniuses empty dumpsters.
Everyone taking the first Monday of the month off of work to poop and at 6pm the city's plumbing system explodes.
How to monetize pooping teens.
American poor being condemned to a low quality poop zone whereas in Europe they have luxury poop villas.
Locking your dumpster so it's not filled with old carpet overnight by marauding carpet installers.
A Person on Twitter.
Playing a stoner album at the same time as a stoner movie.
An album/movie combo entirely bereft of revelatory synchronicities.
The most wrinkly hobbit.
Whether Gandalf was actually smoking something or if that's just something people joke about.
Brian Moriarty's multiple GDC talks about looking for secrets where there are none.
Writing a classic rock album intended to be played simultaneously with Boss Baby 2.
Rodolfo "Gato" Gonzales's legacy in Japan.
What the Guts Pose means to you.
Assigning elaborate meaning to each fist in a fist pump.
Henry Cavill reloading his fists.
Playing Rock Paper Scissors with Mario whenever he collects a moon.
A little head tilt to get you in the right mood to pick up rocks.
Whether Guts Berserk is named after Guts.
Elden Ring as Berserk fanfic.
Understanding and enjoying Elden Ring in a new way.
Attending the Montreal Screw-Job but not having any idea what's going on.
Taking a photo to prove you were at a historical event but the flash just reflects off the bald head of the guy in front of you.
A poem describing a fish.
A five-haired beard of wisdom.
A poem with fantastic mouth feel.
Catching a fish while dad is in the bathroom and screaming at him to hurry up because you don't know what to do with a fish.
Downloading a poem to your hard drive.
A good idea or at least a fun idea.
Whether you can believe the web design on this whitehouse.gov.
Killing software like only a 90s dad can.
Eating nachos every night.
Wanting to do things in fours because on Twitter you can attach four images to a post.
Top Four Favorite Sandwiches.
Refusing to share your top anythings.
That time Nintendo burned a hole in the palms of millions of children.
The ways Pokemon Go encourages you to put your phone down.
The kinds of places that society benefits from Pokemon Go not being played.
The Pokestop Review Process.
Two excellent reasons not to ship the Virtual Boy as a helmet.
VR chaperones.
Being okay with growing too tall but only if you have friends who are also growing way too tall.
Small inconvenient things about growing taller.
A cryptic giant living on a mountaintop.
Being 10 feet tall and retired and figuring out how to live in a normal sized house.
Doing CSG with caves and shirts.
Modular clothes that you can reconfigure to cover your changing body.
A wisp of a person with an eternal tube sweater.
Not wanting to become a spaghetti but respecting anybody who wants to become a spaghetti.
Growing to twice your adult height and getting cast as the monster in every horror movie.
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1 hr 1 min