Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

August 08, 2022146. If You Can't Pay the Time, Don't Do the Feet Liking
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Lords:
Maxx
http://false-panels.com/
Nelson
https://twitter.com/WritNelson/
Topics:
How many random numbers you can dial before you contact someone who is expecting you
Pocket versions of your art. (Mini games, mini sculpture, mini songs?)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Matthews_Band_Chicago_River_incident
https://poets.org/poem/so-you-want-be-writer
Microtopics:
Being non-binary in Washington.
Witch Strandings.
The crucial aspects that define a traditional Strand-Like.
What makes the nurturing not feel bad/weird?
Physically inhabiting a mouse cursor.
Playing shuffleboard on a Mario Golf power meter using the Oblivion persuasion wheel.
Several things that people like, existing at the same time.
Why nobody but Jim is making Frog Fractions games.
Dialing random phone numbers until you reach someone you know.
A nightmare creature from the abyss waiting by the phone for your call.
Everyone having exactly one mom and exactly one faceless nightmare creature waiting by the phone.
Phone number Minesweeper.
Birthday parties as an opportunity to force your friends to play the weird game you just designed.
Guessing the phone number of the burner phone in front of you.
Computers you can talk to in your local area.
Hacking the government mainframe that has all the Nintendo games.
Needing to have a soul before your soul can be sucked out through the phone.
Finding out how smart dolphins are after they meet the being from beyond the abyss.
Holding on to your childhood dreams of stealing a series of towers for your tower collection.
Figuring out how to put custom ringtones on your flip phone even though the Verizon rep said it was impossible.
What the Kidz Bop version says instead of "it smells like R. Kelly's sheets."
A coat that smells like my baseball cleats, yikesssss.
What if football wasn't good?
What would happen if a child held all of baseball in their hands?
Futilitris.
Supernova SWF Enabler.
Working in the Kidz Bop factory.
Who Put Goku In Fortnite?
Ending the game immediately when somebody drops the come bomb.
Not being allowed to say dang or shit.
The through line from miniature replica sculptures to Kidz Bop Breaking Bad.
Kidz Bop Oldboy.
The French opera singer who replaced her girlfriend with a dummy and then set the nunnery on fire so it looked like her girlfriend died in the fire, but her opera singing was so good that the king had to pardon her.
If Jim was arrested for dumping 800 pounds of sewage on an open air tour boat, how many people would try to solve the ARG?
Wiping the raw sewage off of your face and wondering aloud "is this Frog Fractions 2?"
Going to jail for making a cursed tweet.
What if your tweet only goes viral after the cursed tweet law is enacted?
Having to read your tweet aloud to everyone who liked it.
Going to jail for writing a cursed tweet and being sentenced to having to explain it to your mom.
All-ages interactive sculptures.
A child with a tiny screwdriver installing an emergency communication system in case someone has a bad time in their Radio Flyer.
A pretty intense poem by a pretty intense dude.
Why or why not to be a writer.
Warning young people against destroying themselves.
Being deeply desperately driven by the essence of what you are creating.
Needing somebody to remind you that your work has value.
The different coping strategies required to create a work that takes half an hour to finish vs. years to finish.
False panels.
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49 min
August 01, 2022145. A Visceral Tobacco Consumption Experience
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Lords:
Hallie
https://twitter.com/Hallie_9000/
John
https://twitter.com/robohunkx
Topics:
Finding value in shared imagined spaces and worlds outside of religious contexts
Final Fantasy Challenge: Zero Story; and other vaporware games & mods of which no record exists on the internet
Youtube streams movies now, and they have comments
Canterbury Tales General Prologue, by Geoffrey Chaucer
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43926/the-canterbury-tales-general-prologue
Microtopics:
The Ten Timers Club.
Podcasting for three years straight.
Fantastical ideas for famous bands covering Garages songs.
An increasingly hard to describe person.
Reclaiming the asshole.
The sort of thing that sometimes happens in Maine.
Finding the right microphone settings.
A podcast about what people think about that ends up being a video game podcast because that's what they're thinking about.
The barnacle on the indie game scene life.
Making a video game good on purpose.
Talking to your friends who talk you out of grad school because you need to be talked out of grad school again
Your own personal relationship with the divine.
Shared imagined worlds and how we talk about them.
Your friend asks how you're doing and you say "Han and Leia at the end of Empire" and your friend just nods.
Fighting a great beast together.
Promoting group cohesion by developing a shared frame of reference.
How in the 70s everyone watched the same three TV channels but nowadays everyone has access to all of every form of media all the time, and whether that's a handicap for developing a shared cultural reference frame.
Waxy potatoes vs. starchy potatoes.
Where to find non-starchy potatoes.
Harry Potter and the Sacred Texts.
The act of interpretation and the creation of shared symbols.
A Final Fantasy mod that you were very excited about in the early 00s but that now has no results on google.
Abraham Lincoln Land vanishing from the internet.
All the bad video games starring Tux.
Your boss saying "let me show you how the Peter Principle works" and promoting you to Project Manager.
Erasing the projects you are ashamed of from your personal web site.
Adding a clause to your will about deleting all your novelty web sites.
A web site where you write a bunch of fake reviews of fake bands and eventually start writing the songs yourself.
Mutually executable languages.
A betrayal of both movies and Youtube.
Commenting with a timestamp of your favorite part of Napoleon Dynamite.
Whether Pedro won the election on his own merits.
Creating an audition tape for the musical extravaganza your employer is running, getting the part, and later finding out that you were the only one who applied.
Whether John will ever release the video of him dancing like Napoleon Dynamite.
An entire stanza of completely unintelligible Middle English.
Wanting to go on pilgrimages to seek the Holy Blissful Martyr because spring is coming.
Pronouncing all the silent letters.
A well-SparkesNotes'd text.
Having a poem memorized but not in order.
How wishing someone a happy birthday before their birthday is illegal in Germany.
The least surfer dude.
Various tobacco saliva receptacles, some of which ding and some of which don't.
Chewing tobacco but not having the self-respect to get a spittoon.
The nicotine delivery method where you stick a tobacco blob under your lip like a walrus tusk and make TikTok videos.
Dip a.k.a. Snus.
A cool friend from Tennessee.
Big League Chew, again.
Asking the clerk for tar patches because nicotine patches don't give you melanoma.
Ending the show early because you believe so vehemently that vaping is good for you.
A pithy German word for having guested on Topic Lords ten times.
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1 hr 1 min
July 25, 2022144. Vultures Who Know the Difference (Between Sugar and Aspartame)
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Lords:
JohnB
https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo
Jesse
Topics:
Wario64
We need to bring back Dogme 95
Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name Again
https://saint-arthur.tumblr.com/
This Is Just To Say, by William Carlos Williams
https://poets.org/poem/just-say
Whatever happened to outdoor pop machines?
https://lovepittsburghshop.com/blogs/love-pittsburgh/may-the-pop-machine-be-with-you
Godzilla
Microtopics:
A Link's Awakening speedrun that may surprise you.
Lord clouds.
What's the deal with Wario 64?
Asking Webster's Dictionary to define Wario 64.
Your source for video game deals.
How Wario64 feels about Chris Pratt voicing Mario.
Geralt in the bathtub.
Wario World for the GameCube.
The hidden origins of Wario64.
Ten rules for how to make a movie.
Lars von Trier being traumatized by a dolly shot and inventing Dogme 95.
Unintentional Dogme 95 movies.
Unboxing a Criterion Collection DVD live on the show and there's just a DVD in there.
Creative freedom, the worst constraint.
A recipe for the worst movies in the fucking world.
Dogme 95 drinking game.
Making a flag in the bucket.
The Adventure 2600 continuity.
Bats that can steal things that shouldn't be able to be stolen.
A video game quest that was very difficult and obscure until someone wrote a FAQ.
The ludonarrative consonance of following your self-destructive obsession at the same time your character follows their self-destructive obsession.
Being confused about a story beat in a video game and having to seek out a lore genius on the internet.
The Random House Annotated Fallen London.
Becoming St. Gawain's Candle.
How the icebox plums poem became a meme.
Learning about poutine on social media.
Satirical poetry in the 1960s.
Things that are Ira Glass's fault.
Extreme meminess.
Wanting a god damn plum right now.
Pictures of normal people that are considered heresy.
Deliberately making your podcast guest's audio sound bad.
Continuing to read poetry even though you're terrible at it.
Asking Siri to get you a substantial raise.
Checking the change return slots on the mobile phone bank for quarters, to do your part to sustain the soda vending machine economy.
The cost of a 510 ml bottle of pop these days.
The fastest pop machine in the world.
Joking about the day we record the show when it comes out weeks later and none of the listeners have any idea what you're talking about.
Applying the sugar tax to beverages sweetened with aspartame.
The Godzilla movie with Inspector Gadget in it.
Redheaded Stepzilla.
The three Godzilla movies that are out of print in the US. (But not on archive.org)
Having to license all the Kaiju separately.
Movies that are in the public domain because they were not explicitly labeled as copyrighted.
Public Domain Day.
The personality traits of Sherlock Holmes that are and aren't copyrighted.
The Beast at 20,000 Fathoms.
Messing up a slow-motion shot by undercranking the camera rather than overcranking, but it has to go into the movie like that because it was your only take.
Making a movie where you can do as many takes as you want but they all have to go in the finished film.
Godzilla taking some much needed time off.
Invasion of Astro-Monster.
Watching the entire Godzilla series and learning why people think Avengers: Endgame is good.
A latchkey kid in 1960s Japan overcoming his bullies by imagining that Godzilla is his friend.
A dinosaur falling in love with a lighthouse.
Empathizing with the dinosaur who is completely misunderstanding the situation.
Why the English speakers in Japanese or Korean films are such bad actors.
An island protector of these native people brought to society for reasons of Capitalism.
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1 hr 13 min
July 18, 2022143. Your Face Is Looking a Little Impact Resistant
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Lords:
Chall
https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall
Jenni
https://twitter.com/horsewizrd
Topics:
Frogs evolved leaping before they evolved landing and a couple species haven't figured out the "landing" part yet.
https://defector.com/why-is-this-tiny-frog-so-awful-at-jumping/
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/horrifying-sculpture-depicts-human-evolved-survive-car-crash-180959878/
I got a weird device called a charachorder. Haven't used it yet though, it came 2 hours ago.
https://charachorder.com/products/charachorder-one
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_organ
Speedrun health hazards
"Bananas Bananas," by Greg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4aHhM624oI
I assumed the Chicago Bean would be kinda lame. I was wrong. It is super neat
Video games that are just a little place and you walk around and maybe go to a museum
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dnTeqsh47jw
Esper says: Speaking of low-stress games about existing in a space, I am forced by the powers of self-promotion to mention my own Hang Out In The Basement Simulator, a game about chilling in a basement. There's a nerf gun, a little guitar you can strum a few notes on, records, and over 30 hours of watchable TV (all scraped from little Internet Archive weirdnesses). https://aceofwands.itch.io/hoitbs
Microtopics:
Nose Goes.
Allergy medication that does not make you drowsy.
Coming out of the womb sleep-deprived.
Jenni from the Blockchain.
Pokemon Gockchain.
A good speedrun idea for somebody else.
Watching Mario 64 let's-plays to distract us from the disaster of our own interiority.
Why Can't the Pumpkin Toadlet Land?
Landing in a t-pose and rigid-bodying your way into a pratfall.
Which frog would win the X Games of frogs?
The distant future when everyone has evolved to survive car crashes and nobody is allowed to wear a shirt in the payroll department.
An editorial team choosing what links will go on the front page.
Photoshop This Tractor.
"Gone drinking" as a euphemism for crashing into a lake.
The history of social media on the internet.
Choosing the most obnoxious possible video to be your Zoom background.
What's stopping developers from compiling ffmpeg to Webassembly and including it in every web page.
Chorded word entry.
Getting an exciting new keyboard where it takes you three minutes to type youtube.com.
Switching keyboard layouts to fix your abysmal typing posture.
A very dim room full of typewriters.
Thinking about the cubic watermelons.
Another one from the Deck of Old Memes.
Whether Plato ever got to prove his cave allegory correct.
RSI in the speedrunning scene.
Waving your right hand up and down for twelve hours a day.
Hypertapping.
Tap to Survive!
Clickers that require you to watch the game run to efficiently progress.
The deep crevasse where Cookie Clicker lives in your brain.
Getting RSI from watching speedruns all the time.
Coping with the mental anguish of speedrunning.
Leomard Sportsinterviews.
Making a mixtape of yourself playing clarinet and your younger brother reading poems, for your girlfriend Sara.
Your vengeful ex-girlfriend turning you in to VEVO for music piracy using the mixtape you gave her as proof.
Using music to anchor a repeated moment.
Using this episode of Topic Lords to score your morning routine.
Warrant canaries.
Bananas: they're underground.
The return of the Banana Box.
The tropical fruit that tastes like mayonnaise.
The cheese of the sea.
Cloud Gate in Millennium Park.
Chicago Bean Radiation.
Walking through the Chicago Bean and getting mirrored left to right and subsequently only being able to digest animals that also wandered through the Chicago Bean that you catch and kill.
Wearing a hospital wrist band informing your duel opponent that your internal organs are mirrored left to right.
Mirror image twins.
Fighting little ASCII bears and solving exploding bomb puzzles.
What you do in Proteus.
The game where you hit the ball back and forth over a net.
A board game where you vacation in feudal Japan.
The Museum of Other Realities.
Seiklus and Gebub's Adventure.
A place to wander while interesting things happen to you.
The talking tree that says "invest in leaves."
Legends of Murder.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
July 11, 2022142. Threatjazz
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Ben
https://twitter.com/KosmologyB
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
Topics:
Which real life occupations are the closest thing to actual Adventuring? And would you want to do any of them?
Getting a tattoo has somehow motivated me to be healthier
It's weird that some instruments you play with your hands and others you put in your mouth
The Mushroom Hunters
https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/11/25/the-mushroom-hunters-animation-neil-gaiman/
Discovering how much butter and sugar is in your common or garden cake has filled me with sheer horror
A public call to action for the creation of Violence/Threat Jazz as a genre
Microtopics:
The collection of music songs that you put on the internet last year.
The Citizen Sleeper trailer.
Managing a game's Steam store page.
The conversations you don't have.
Adventuring as it is conceived of and perceived.
Going into the field and being exposed to health hazards.
Rock climbing and its relationship to speed running.
All the big parts of the world having been discovered already so you need to be satisfied with discovering tiny parts.
The difficulty of spending a lifetime rock climbing when you don't enjoy rock climbing.
Whether being sent off to war feels or ought to feel like an adventure.
Lockdown tattoos.
The uncle who convinced you to get an eyebrow ring.
Designing a tattoo so that it still looks right if the recipient suddenly gets swole.
The Clean and Jerk.
Compressing yourself inwards as you hit the ground.
The idea of caring about your appearance.
Looking in the mirror and feeling good about yourself.
A portion of meat that is ruining your aesthetic.
Your full-sleeve Gigantamax Meowth tattoo.
Ark from Terranigma.
A tattoo of a goat because you love goats a lot.
Putting pictures on your body and looking cool.
Going full body-mod in your old age.
A Rotom right up there in your armpit.
Walking around looking like a JRPG character with an asymmetrical pauldron.
The right torso for me.
Bone tattoos that are just for you because nobody can see your bones.
Waiting until you are 80 years old for eyeball tattoo technology to get safer.
Screaming higher and higher until you take a shower.
Airflow and handflow.
Licking a musical instrument that makes noise when it's wet.
Chromatic spittoon virtuosos.
Melody Pops.
How to survive long car trips before portable video games.
Lollipops you could write with.
Chocolate cigarettes wrapped in rice paper.
Rebranding your offensive children's cigarette brand to "Fads."
The formulation of laws to follow facts revealed.
Food Tasters.
One king left and so much food to eat.
Why so much fiction is so obsessed with royalty.
Cracking a nut in your brain.
The moon's excellent product placement.
Cakes for people to jump out of.
How to marble a cake.
The butter iceberg.
The inside scoop behind all the drama.
The Sharks and the Jets snapping at each other.
The dude in Mad Max Fury Road playing a flaming guitar on top of a moving truck.
Where to see Ben's cats.
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1 hr 8 min
July 04, 2022141. Toast in Its Original Format
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Avery
Jesse
Topics:
Laserdisc
Tracing the lineage of racehorses on Wikipedia
Bread is too wide to fit in toasters
https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1335354217335148546/photo/1
Variants of bowling, now mostly lost to history, are like glimpses into possible worlds metaphysically close to our own
Microtopics:
How to sound like a douchebag if you are a programmer who lives in Oakland.
A Social Security Number that has way too many sixes in it.
A disc that is the same size as an LP but looks like a CD and has a movie on it.
Arcade games breaking whenever you transport them.
Laserdiscs rusting.
Integrating the likely degradation of the viewing medium into the piece itself.
The Matrix on Betamax.
The guy who owns all the Betamax players in your province.
The canonical paths to becoming a Laserdisc collector.
All the criteria used to curate the Criterion Collection.
The advantages and disadvantages of CAV discs over CLV.
Getting off the couch to flip the disc over halfway through the movie.
Asking your robot butler to flip the Laserdisc over.
Potoooooooo.
Seeing the name of the Wii for the first time and wondering if it's a typo for World War 2 or if it's a typo for WiFi.
Finding the They Live sunglasses and finally being able to read the Snickers ads.
The three racehorses that all thoroughbred racehorses are descended from.
Knowing more about the history of racehorses than about your own family tree, because racehorses are worth more than people.
War booty from the battle of Vienna.
The General Studbook.
Going blind in one eye from staying up for three days straight doing logarithms.
Bell Right Hooks and Cuban Menstrual Crisis.
Whether the clown face registry still exists for juggalos.
Nothing Sweet About Bees.
What happened to bread?
Your basic 4:3 bread vs. 4K ultra-wide bread.
Your favorite toaster from the 1940s.
A four slice toaster kind of day.
Making food better with science and it's going to be way better than nature because it's science.
Convincing Mr. Smeg not to put his name on the toasters his company manufactures.
What market research firm decided that podcast listeners want underwear and mattresses.
Constant angular velocity: the only way to rewind a movie.
A magnetic poetry set that includes the word "Kafkaesque."
How Kafkaesque the miscreant insects are.
Whether Jim has ever touched any other human being.
How Zoomers don't know about Graggle Simpson.
A possible scenario that is metaphysically close to our own.
How metaphysically close Canada is to the United States.
Getting up at 4pm every day and bowling.
A 3D model recreation of five-pin bowling.
The amount of data visualization competence that went into dimensions.com.
Candlepin and Duckpin bowling.
The dimensions of various famous bowlers.
Getting a parakeet and finding out how much water it displaces.
Making a flask out of a parakeet so people think you just brought your pet parakeet to work and aren't drinking on the job.
Buying a propane tank to use as a water bottle.
What's wrong with Jim's listeners?
Karate tournaments in the 80s and 90s.
Assuming Avery's identity and looking in the mirror.
To Mock A Mockingbird.
Certified Bird Mockers.
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1 hr 7 min
June 27, 2022140. The Most Edible Petrochemical
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Lords:
Kevin
https://www.jwst.nasa.gov/ or http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/nircam/
https://youtu.be/in6RZzdGki8
https://youtu.be/lrY04VPDg8I
John
Topics:
Reading the other headlines/articles on newspapers in films that flash on screen solely for the headline
http://www.chess-in-the-cinema.de/
The Game Boy Camera/revisiting the PXL-2000 topic and other toy cameras/tech
Best Halloween candy: candy corn or pumpkin-shaped candy corn?
Icarus, by Edward Field
https://genius.com/Edward-field-icarus-annotated
Douglas Hofstadter
Microtopics:
The James Webb Space Telescope.
The thing you get the most DMs about.
Recording a fan's answering machine message in the Mario Frustration voice.
The guy who "fixed" the NES triangle wave.
Bandlimiting your oscillators.
What the real Lordheads know.
Another place to shitpost.
3D entertainment.
Deku momentum problems.
The analog stick mod for Mario 64 DS.
A remaster that is in direct conversation with what it's remastering.
The pros and cons of Mario 64 DS.
Abandoned let's-plays.
Waterworld for the Virtual Boy.
Wario Ware and Rhythm Heaven.
How to give Nintendo money in 2022.
Prodigy Child Wins Every Award Given.
Pausing movies to read the nonsense headlines that the prop designers didn't expect you to read.
Pausing the movie to complain about the nonsensical Scrabble game depicted.
A movie about people who don't know how to play Clue.
A mahjongg game that is a literary microcosm of the players' lives.
Leaning across the couch to your girlfriend and saying "that's Chappie's chess game."
Playing Super Mario Bros. with the Power Glove.
The Steam reviews for the 8-bit wrestling game that appears for three seconds in The Wrestler.
The only digital camera that was under $100 in the 90s.
How to get images off of the Game Boy Camera.
Hooking together a TV, VCR, SNES, Super Game Boy and Game Boy Camera and plugging it in with a very long extension cord so you can shoot a movie outdoors.
An in-your-face student film about what happens when computers can detect emotion.
Using your Game Boy Camera as a webcam on Twitch.
The Game Boy Camera's music sequencer.
The Game Boy Camera asking ROM hackers if they are feeling ok.
The Gold Zelda Camera.
The gold Breath of the Wild cartridge that tastes like the Master Sword.
The Cool Cam.
The Lefty RX.
Ranking candy by its volume to surface area ratio.
Getting sick of candy corn naysayers.
Wax Lips: Ya Gotta Eat 'Em!
A powder that's been glued into a little puck.
What the American Oil and Gas Historical Society has to say about wax lips.
The oleaginous history of wax lips.
Edible dinosaur bones.
Bananasaurus Rex-flavored string cheese.
The Genius of the Hero falling to the Middling Stature of the Merely Talented.
Looking back on your best work and knowing you'll probably never best it but still liking your life more now.
A short story with extra line breaks.
Turning any text into a poem by resizing the window so there are extra line breaks.
Robert Altman's follow-up to MASH.
A retelling of Icarus featuring the wicked witch saying a slur.
What it means to be conscious.
Godel, Escher, Bach: I am a Strange Loop except more confusing.
Writing a book for the general public and having to figure out how to make your ideas fun.
Searching YouTube for "Crab Cannon" and only finding music for weirdos and no cannons of any kind.
Martin Gardner's column about math games in Scientific American.
Metamagical Themas.
Using math to do fun space stuff.
Stream Frasier Online Free.
Rubik's Cube except spelled like an asshole.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 16 min
June 20, 2022139. She Died as a Space Racist
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Dan
https://strangecurrencies.org/
https://twitter.com/SC_Reviews_Dan
Shepard
They are known as Earthnova in the Discord and has one published work: http://thelitmag.com/2021-edition/this-story-has-a-ghost-in-it/
Topics:
Only playing narrative/story-driven video games once
Sometimes life is like an adventure game, a skill or item that's useless when you get it is needed years later
Sleng Teng Riddim
https://www.engadget.com/2015-12-04-casio-and-the-sleng-teng-riddim.html
Here's an argument that the riff originated with David Bowie: https://axischemicals.wordpress.com/2016/01/11/david-bowie-digital-reggae-kingpin/
Tyger! Tyger! by Robin Johnson
https://mobile.twitter.com/rdouglasjohnson/status/1517804673998237697
The internet and college are two great tastes that taste terrible together.
The first time I beat my father at Scrabble
Explaining traffic jams, or at least this one traffic jam
Microtopics:
Wanting to see all the stuff.
Replaying a series of four RPG length games to see the alternate endings.
Getting the most video game endings for your dollar.
Tenable and untenable ways to have an adventure.
Recapturing the magic of your first time (with emulators).
Getting every video game you wanted for a system and then enjoying that for 10 minutes.
A giant archive of every DOS game ever.
Losing your nostalgia for old games via emulation, but keeping your nostalgia for the box art.
Falling out of love with Windows Vista.
Keeping your custard pie intact until the yeti needs it.
The bread maker approach to learning a new skill.
Why there are no cupcakes in Frog Fractions 2.
Playing Go against someone better than you and suddenly losing.
The Go community rallying around the identity that computers can't beat the best Go players.
Whether computer Go has shaped the way humans play Go.
An extra creative extra special humany thing.
Beating a chess expert by convincing them to play something else.
John Henry's retirement plan.
Being promised a Yamaha DX7 but receiving a Casio MT-40 instead.
Writing a part for a rock and roll rhythm section that is accidentally a great reggae rhythm section.
The origins of the Amen Break.
Setting up a situation where you can write your own notes.
Figuring out where the genre can go with this new tonality.
Stripy guys and chonky units.
The best kind of tigers. (Floofers.)
Learning about slant rhymes one morning and that afternoon writing a poem that rhymes "eye" with "symmetry."
Blake hearing about the Great Vowel Shift from his grandpa and deciding that that would be a great way to make Tyger! Tyger! sound old timey.
Googling why Blake tried to rhyme "eye" with "symmetry" and finding dozens of implausible theories, all expressed with complete confidence.
Making an impression on the world of poetry by not being good at it.
Hipster throwbacks to the great vowel shift.
Calvin and Hobbes panoply of tiger poems.
Holding off on reading more Calvin and Hobbes tiger poems until you’re done recording the podcast.
Not letting online schooling get in the way of your online education.
Whether someone will figure out how to do a college class online before we transition back to in-person classes.
Whether ASL is especially well suited to bring taught over Zoom.
Doing yard work and wearing protective equipment so you can't pull out your phone to check Twitter.
Lying down in court.
Realizing for the first time that your parents don't know everything.
A framed photo of the one time your mom won at Risk.
The one thing you and your dad are both interested in.
Sports montage of getting better at Scrabble.
Driving or better yet watching movies with cars in them.
Everybody slowing down to take a look at the two headed chicken.
Driving towards a shadow and being blinded by the sun to what's beyond the shadow.
A time loop where the car in front of you slows down for no reason and then you slow down for a good reason but the car behind you thinks you're slowing down for no reason.
A car driving on a road.
Stacking a bunch of human reaction speeds on top of each other.
Slot cars as a fun and disastrous solution to traffic.
The slot car model of public transit.
Finding everybody on the Discord.
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59 min
June 13, 2022138. From Infracheddar to Ultrableu
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Lords:
Elena
Alexander plugs https://www.constantpodcast.com/
Topics:
Hosting a party is way better than going to a party
The Pearl Jam Liner Notes method of writing first drafts
Lagrange Point Lasagna
Jonathan Swift, "Ode on the Longitude"
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Works_of_the_Rev._Jonathan_Swift/Volume_17/Ode_on_the_Longitude
The theory of spontaneous generation
It turns out Sunday Roasts are a whole Deal
Diagnose my tongue!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rI3yD3WAcz4
https://www.buzzfeed.com/danielralston/the-true-story-of-the-fake-zombies-the-strangest-con-in-rock
Microtopics:
Unfindable Lords.
The Constant: a History of Getting Things Wrong.
Continuous vs. discontinuous weighted blankets.
People asking you about your life so you have to give them all the necessary context on your life so they'll understand.
A masquerade ball where you receive a quest to find someone wearing a dog mask and talk to them about topology.
The smallest of talk.
A continuous unplanned unstructured talking with each other that you expect to just happen by itself.
Bringing a cheeseboard to a party so you can go sort it whenever the conversation gets awkward
Sorting the cheeseboard from sharp to mild and then sorting the cheese by color but nobody at the party is allowed to actually eat any.
From Infracheddar to Ultrableu.
A sorting algorithm gaining intelligence and trying to understand itself.
Teaching your friends sign language so they'll be quieter at parties.
The weirdness of reading aloud.
Writing while talking.
A species of alien that can follow two conversations at once.
Balancing the complexity of your word choices so your sentence flows nicely.
Writing the most important word of each sentence first and then going back and filling in the rest of the sentence.
Worrying about commas later.
Taking so long to implement the core of your idea that you've forgotten the details.
How to bake brownies that are all edge pieces.
How to bake brownies that's all center pieces.
Sous vide brownies.
People who only like the center of the falafel.
The perfect solution for the person who prefers the grossest part of the brownie.
Opening a portal to the lasagna dimension and scooping some out and feeling safe because there's no e. coli in the lasagna dimension, just lasagna.
Tectonic plates in the lasagna dimension.
Subduction lasagna.
The asteroid equivalent of brownie soup.
Forming trade alliances with the people who live in the air pockets of the lasagna dimension.
Lasagna creationists.
The Earth is a rock lasagna.
Whether lasagna or baked ziti is more likely to be naturally occurring.
Bepst and besht.
A long-standing problem in navigation.
Figuring out how to determine longitude in the Age of Navigation.
Getting kicked out of Cambridge because you don't accept the Trinity.
Firing a cannon at noon so everyone knows what time it is.
Such explosive ships, in such known locations.
A new method for discovering longitude both at sea and land, humbly proposed for the consideration of the public.
The Jewish Space Lasers of the 1700s.
The sense in which GPS is extremely loud.
Putting a log on the fire and salamanders come out.
The riddle where to understand the answer you have to know that bees come from lion carcasses.
How earth used to have enough energy to spawn humans out of clay but now it only has enough juice left to make bugs and snails.
A recipe for scorpions.
The Tragedy of the Sunday Roast.
The St. Tuppensday Brouhaha.
Million Shilling Idea: serving Sunday Roast all week.
Victorian orphans mining for Bitcoin (or "bittums") out on the Playa.
Eating a Yorkshire pudding at a Lagrange point and sopping up gravy from the gravy dimension.
Via Gravia.
Nega-scurvy, where you eat too much fruit and grow extra teeth.
The Yes Ship of Theseus.
That time the Zombies broke up and then had a hit record and then fake Zombies started touring the US until someone from the real band noticed.
The Caramelldansen saga.
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1 hr 1 min
June 06, 2022137. Burying the Machete (So Nobody Can Open the Coconuts)
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Lords:
John
https://twitter.com/robohunkx
https://twitter.com/AshbyBrewery/
April
https://www.instagram.com/midnightgardenstitchery/
Topics:
Playing Grand Theft Auto 5 because I miss hiking in California
Embroidery
Jokes that three year olds tell
Moondrop's Tale
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Q6h1_gLGH7hDy3uhWpLtqapbpRqVFkawAbQ1ywVEu4E/edit
Skeleton Jelly: https://imgur.com/lbIoX
Survivor
https://survivingtribal.com/2017/08/04/survivor-flashback-friday-survivor-gabon-gif-end-gifs/
Excluding certain topics from my Twitter recommendations has never been harder (and also: trying to understand why Russell Crowe keeps showing up in the "suggested posts" of the AshbyBrewery account)
Microtopics:
Return of the Beast Lord.
Whether the Beast Lord fucks around.
The Beets Lord.
Hearing clapping and encouragement and assuming it's for you.
Being a tourist in a video game.
Riding a quad bike up Mt. Chiliad.
Getting past the first mission where you need to do violence to a lot of people so you can peacefully explore Los Santos.
Driving down the highway at night and taking a random turnoff into the wilderness and going on a hike in the moonlight.
The Grand Theft Auto V Not Hurting Anybody Challenge.
Taking a self-guided tour of the Bay Area in Watch Dogs 2.
A Short Hike mod for GTA V.
A needle art or craft.
Art vs. Craft.
What is the Citizen Kane of needlepoint? When will we see the first needle that can make you cry?
A piece of physical media that you look at.
Physically doing the thing to make it look like the image you have in your head.
An art form that has been around for as long as thread.
The joy of buying art supplies.
The anxiety relief of various stitches.
A boy who contains multitudes.
Getting dad a sidewalk for his birthday.
Cross-stitch route planning.
Marking notable locations in red.
The only way out. (Through.)
A three year old who wants to do something but delays as much as he can anyway.
A three year old who is just like adults except with way less impulse control.
A work in frogress.
The tale of druid Moondrop Honeysuckle.
A disembodied voice telling you to call it "granny."
The ancient place beyond the dead star in the Ultraviolet City.
Going into a random bar and hearing a poem about your mom.
Granny the Mind Flayer.
Falling sideways through reality and having to fight the big boss.
Recording season 42 of Survivor over Zoom.
The evolution of Survivor meta.
Finding a clue in the crook of a tree.
Throwing the flint into the ocean.
The gif of the two women gasping and the dude behind them smiling.
The Ashby Brewery Twitter account.
Why the algorithm thinks you care about Ratchet and Clank.
How to make Twitter livable on PC vs. on your phone.
The work every internet user puts into not being shown the stuff they don't want to see.
Mark Zuckerberg pointing at his mugger and shouting "See less of this! I'd like to see less of this!"
Eating the rich and having to worry about biomagnification.
Mr. Beer.
The Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio.
All the Brews That's Fit to Print.
The Ashby Brewery and Video Game Studio quarterly brewsletter.
Being the bee man.
Not using Twitter in a while and Twitter emails you about what Russell Crowe is doing lately.
Extensively DMing Russell Crowe and then blocking Russell Crowe and then forgetting that either thing happened.
Why they call him John Mystery.
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1 hr 17 min