Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

May 30, 2022136. Thanks for Inventing Dengue Fever, Mark Rosewater
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Erica plugs increasing optional mask compliance by farting
Jenni plugs birds
Jim plugs metaplugs repeating plugs
Topics:
The System, and by extension, The Talenti Cup System
Decentralizing social media is gonna be real good for people not yelling at each other & kinda bad for sharing specialized information
We just taught Winston about "peeing in the woods" when we were going on a hike and now he wants to "pee in the woods" everywhere
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45521/i-wandered-lonely-as-a-cloud
Mark Rosewater designed devil fruits
Esper says: "As a longtime (since 1999, with only one substantial break) Magic: the Gathering player, it does my heart good to hear Mark Rosewater come up. His GDC talk about lessons he's learned in designing games is really sharp stuff (if a little 101 in places), check it out sometime."
Decarbonizing the language
Microtopics:
Meta-plugging repeating plugs.
Bee Movie but it’s text to speech.
Increasing optional mask compliance by farting.
Mass: the volume of gas inside you, and how to increase its compliance.
A meme that people teach to each other.
Packing a shoe into a box and opening up a big box of mold years later.
Categories of things that fit into one-pint gelato cups.
The Body Box.
How to make itinerant lifestyles bearable and possible.
Organizing your entire house into the House Box.
Using your Dunbar number to keep track of your house plants.
Getting on Topic Lords by searching "pineapple on pizza"
Social media platforms that are owned by a rich asshole.
Drastically improving productivity in the workplace by banning the email forwarding of news articles.
The overwhelming feeling of shame when you don't have a take on the latest discourse.
Going on Tori Amos AOL chat to talk to your social group.
Buddha's list of 89 things that make you angry.
We've invented a new way to be angry.
Repeating topics because you've forgotten what you were just talking about.
Peeing in the laundry closet and calling it peeing in the woods.
Explaining to a three year old when it's ok and when it's not ok to pee outside.
Pee-ka-boo.
Everything sucks and I have no control over anything but I can poop in the front yard.
Taking increasingly larger shits in Richard Kind's cat box.
How George Clooney gets away with poop modification.
Taking increasingly larger shits in the Li-Cor machine that measures leaf respiration.
Whether playing Tom Jones at work constitutes sexual harassment.
Tom Jones in his leisure suit.
Cleaning up the lyrics to make rock and roll palatable to white people but leaving in the line about the "one-eyed cat peepin' in a seafood store."
Whether it's still sexual harassment if nobody points out that it's sexual harassment.
Jocund company.
Telling the story of the time you saw a bunch of daffodils.
Seeing a bunch of daffodils and shouting "Fuck! These fucking flowers are fucking pretty as shit!"
Conceiving of yourself as an indoor person, separate from the outdoors.
Reading a Japanese dictionary of dirty words and saying "Fuck! These fucking dirty words are fucking good as shit!"
Conceiving of interior spaces as being one with exterior spaced.
You can't unpee the bush.
Finding and eating devil fruits.
Eating the fruit that lets you talk to dragons when dragons don't exist.
Seeing a gun dog and assuming that it was a dog that ate a gun fruit but actually it was a gun that ate a dog fruit.
What happens if you eat a second devil fruit.
Dengue fever creeping up into Texas from Mexico.
The best place to contract Dengue Fever.
Burning the candle at both ends of the day.
Eating the burrito from both ends.
Harvesting the bioluminescent fungus.
Turbines on a windless morn.
Burning solar panels as a fuel source.
The worst thing to happen to Twitter/the best thing to happen to Mastodon.
The Dunbar Number for plants.
Voting someone out of the marriage because there's only room for one person in here.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
May 23, 2022135. I've Been a Bad, Bad French
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Nate
http://mommysbestgames.com/
https://twitter.com/MommysBestGames/
Fred
https://twitter.com/brobbeh
Topics:
Why do rice cookers play music but not microwaves?
https://twitter.com/_LucasRizzotto/status/1516205625662836739
If all your needs are met in a utopian society will we still need sports and competition?
Hot Ice, Cool Sounds
Goblin Time by Emma
https://mastodon.art/@emmajuettner/108103474257806186
Esper says: "My long-held suspicion has always been that humans are generally way less prone to salt-related health issues than suggested by nutritional science. I think a lot of that stuff was ginned up by cigarette companies trying to deflect blame. But I try not to go full-on conspiracy theory about it."
Nerds candy has a Dungeons and Dragons themed box. Is this good for D&D?
If the four horsemen of the apocalypse were recruiting for a fifth member, how would you convince them to hire you?
Microtopics:
A shmup about how Microsoft screwed up their Xbox 360 dashboard.
Screaming for 24 hours straight and having a heart attack, or vice versa.
Remastering your obscure protest game and needing to build a museum explaining the context for the protest.
An educational title about how to find games on the new Xbox 360 dashboard.
An infinite runner with extremely awkward horse controls.
Using all the right dark patterns.
Meeting an indie game developer in San Francisco and recognizing him because he's a white guy with a beard and glasses who likes Dark Souls.
A pot that's specifically for rice and it knows when to school cooking the rice.
Only rice cookers get to sing a song.
Installing an AI in your microwave so your microwave can try to murder you.
A codependent washing machine.
Landlords in California doing an end run around renter's rights.
The keyless entry system on your apartment that has a battery backup just so it can play "These Boots are Made for Walking" when it can't let you in because the power is out.
3D printing some laundry to fold because people are bored in your Utopia.
Extremely soporific TV.
A mashup of music and sports.
Gathering to watch a live band play while a chef makes crepes.
Whether you can be bored while watching two things at the same time.
An orchestra trying to live-score a basketball game.
Trying to listen to an arcade game in the arcade.
Goblins in our community.
A bullet point list of how you can help a goblin.
Spicy radish waffles.
Blackwheat crepes and whether they're really black.
Lemonade crepes.
Dipping a sandwich in mustard.
The pros and cons of salting food.
Chickens laying pre-salted eggs.
Paying a monthly subscription to Monsanto to keep up the injections that make your tongue exude its own salt.
Getting in line to hate Monsanto.
Whether nerds are more or less likely to eat Nerds candy.
A candy for people who forgot D&D exists.
Candy&D.
A series of Nerds-themed D&D campaigns.
Hiring people and paying them.
Star Trek Jeopardy where 70% of the answers are 1980s pop culture because the federation is obsessed with the 80s.
Seeing yet another college sports question in the New York Times crossword and deciding whether to get irrationally angry at Will Shortz.
What Jim embodies that is the worst thing.
Death, war, famine, pestilence, crypto and late-onset melatonin.
John Cleese teaching sex ed in a boarding school.
Starting with death and going downhill from there.
Convincing Death to not kill anyone and Death just rides off and mopes.
Whether the four horsemen listen to podcasts or if the internet is down during the apocalypse.
The four new horsemen of the new apocalypse: crypto, gaslighting, late-onset melatonin and Elon Musk.
How to find people to follow on Mastodon.
How to be a part of a human-sized community.
The Topic Lords subreddit.
The photo of a middle school basketball team that somebody posted to the Topic Lords subreddit.
How to keep spam bots out of your Discord.
Batbarian.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 16 min
May 16, 2022134. A Bad Case of Footmouse
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Maxx
[email protected]
Michael
https://www.instagram.com/softseabunny/
https://www.tiktok.com/@creative.rabbit
Topics:
"World's greatest author Chuck Tingle"
Way of making moving easier, collective tips?
https://overmental.com/content/the-beautiful-zelda-artwork-of-katsuya-terada-7898
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataHand
Melatonin parenting decisions
http://false-panels.com/fjf/
Microtopics:
Rabbit nose speeds.
A stranger from Australia handing you a twenty dollar bill.
Lining a trench coat with Steam keys.
How to make Elden Ring feel like a video game rather than a slog.
An incredible variety of fantastical biomes filled with body horror monstrosities that are inexplicably bad at killing you.
Playing Elden Ring with passive enemies
Big columns with massively muscular horsemen.
Sheep curling up into a wheel and rolling away.
Fostering a different sense of what accomplishment means.
Ramps interweaving the stairway.
Going into a spooky house and the house is like "why would you come in here? Can't you see I'm haunted"
Going into a spooky house in hopes of seeing bespoke content.
An author of real books that people think are memes.
A tornado that has a butthole because it must've picked it up with all the other debris.
Lesbian candy corn.
High-functioning chocoholics.
Having sex with the State of California and reading the list of things that the State of California has found to cause cancer.
Making a career out of exploring the weird connections in your own mind.
Writing to Chuck Tingle to ask for more details about the 747's genitalia.
Moving house and then moving house again immediately, to save yourself a packing/unpacking cycle.
Having many shamefully confusing objects and making the movers wear blindfolds.
Making your friends wear blindfolds and rely on LIDAR when they come into your house.
Putting all your vacation souvenirs in storage and going to your storage unit when you want to remember your vacation.
Three drawers of cables organized into power cables, USB cables and audio cables, all neatly constrained with velcro.
Giving your rabbit decoy cables to chew on so that the important cables remain safe.
Throwing away 70% of your stuff.
Whether it's a lie if you have books on your shelf that you haven't read yet.
Apocryphal John Waters quotes.
Having an outfit for hacktivism.
Mounting the spines of books you've read above your hearth.
Data Hands.
A keyboard that doesn't work in direct sunlight.
Foot Mouse and the Data Hands.
Staring into the abyss, wiggling your fingers.
Underwear computing.
Late-onset melatonin generation.
How to deal when everybody in the family gets sick at once.
An island made of bureaucracy.
The fax machine in your underwear computer.
How to pronounce "James" according to Jim's facebook profile.
Armchairing a request for poetry in the rudest way possible.
Streets that duel like coarse teeth.
The matted thing that leaves its woman without the duck.
Hooking your poetry generator up to a receipt printer so people can print a new poem on demand.
Writing a poem and finding out what you meant later.
Soup repair.
A man who is nice on British TV but angry on American TV.
Old Enough!
An extremely relatable two year old.
Being tasked with juicing some oranges and spending the next hour chasing the dog.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 1 min
May 09, 2022133. Every Tumbleweed is an Antique
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Duncan
http://duncanrobson.com/
https://twitter.com/dunkr
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8V6QtlRbro
Avery
https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases
Topics:
Judging by the selection on eBay, the 1960's and 1970's seems to have been the golden age of belt buckles.
https://www.filfre.net/2019/07/chief-gates-comes-to-oakhurst-a-cop-drama/
The time a parent of my kid's friend said "Do you remember Tetris?"
JVC PocketMail
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PocketMail
The Prelude, by Matthew Zapruder
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/53843/the-prelude
Hyperspecific collections
Yiwum, the city in China that produces 60% of all the Christmas decorations in the world
Microtopics:
An album that someday will be available on Spotify.
The Mauretania comics by Detective Pikachu.
The kind of work that falls out of relaxation.
The Golden Age of Belt Buckles.
Going into an eBay fugue state.
Promotional belt buckles.
The British obsession with American long haul truckers.
The kind of video game where you have to file copious paperwork before and after you shoot someone.
What Police Quest was before and after Daryl Gates was hired as lead designer.
Whether there were any racist belt buckles in the 1960s.
Buying 20 $2 games for Christmas rather than the one $40 game your kid actually asked for.
Men's names from the 1960s and 1970s.
Hewlett Packard belt buckles.
The personalized belt buckles you'll sell at your merch table when you go back on tour.
A conference about fingers.
Talking to the funeral director before you're dead just in case you die someday.
A point-of-sale system for funeral directors.
Bidding on a Cheeto and getting outbid.
Having It's-Its and That's-Its in the freezer and completing your collection with a What's-It.
Remembering Tetris.
Being a parent and making friends with people you have basically nothing in common with.
Talking to normies about your nerd interests.
Going into the Forever 21 and yelling "Skeletor!" and everybody cheers.
People high-fiving you as you walk down the street in your Wolverine costume.
Listening to an adult man gush about Power Rangers to you and realizing that probably Star Wars isn't any good after all and you just happened to be the right age for it.
Star Wars fans trying to convince each other that being based on the Hero's Journey makes a story good art.
Reading a mathematical proof that Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is actually exactly as good as Raiders of the Lost Ark and having no choice but to believe it.
Remember Tetris? This is a topic about Tetris.
Writing email in the jungle and getting the chance to send it if you survive all the quicksand.
A product using technologies developed by NASA, i.e. one of the programmers drank Tang once.
Dongling things to the Palm Pilot.
An article from 1999 titled "Email on the Move."
Check your pocket… you've got mail!
Preserving your Motorola Razr M in amber so Jim can buy it on eBay the next time he's ordering a batch of Orbitz.
The Linux open source phone that everybody likes but nobody's heard of.
The idea of chocolate.
A disappointing and super creepy bed and breakfast.
Art where the artist has disguised a message for you.
Contrasting a Diet Coke with Coleridge and Wordsworth.
Freedom Power Style Motion.
Having a bunch of Tumblrs and never going on Tumblr.
Hours Played.
A new weird thing that a video game can be.
Collecting tumbleweeds.
A tumbleweed the size of a car that stops at the red light.
Movies from the 1930s giving a false impression of how much you need to worry about quicksand.
Sentient poison oak.
The sentient tumbleweed episode of The Outer Limits.
Consuming media by fast-forwarding to the tumbleweed parts.
A book of polaroids of all your favorite lighting fixtures.
A list of every move in every game that Mario has ever been in.
Desert Chrome.
Drawing a van and airbrushing your drawing of a van.
Jean-Claude Van Dad.
Spending the rest of your life googling "van dad."
Zoning your city by the kind of Christmas decorations sold.
An ocean of booths selling plastic Santa Clauses as far as the eye can see.
The city that sells the other 40% of Christmas decorations.
The Christmas memeplex.
Clone shoes with strange names.
Running shoes for dogs.
A romantic comedy set in the city in China entirely dedicated to selling Christmas decorations.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 2 min
May 02, 2022132. A Miserable Pile of Knuckles
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Cort
https://twitter.com/postgoodism
Jenni
https://twitter.com/horsewizrd/
Topics:
Novel uses for hundreds of surplus ceramic clown statues
Thinking about household stuff as a system you can design to meet your needs instead of a cultural lifestyle obligation
Sidetalkin'
https://sidetalkin.com/
Big Black Elephant
https://www.poem-generator.org.uk/18tpkl8q/big-black-elephant.html
People are reluctant to shift their paradigm in real life but give them a video game & they're all for it
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/12/invaders-from-mars.html
Games or sports that started out as fictional, but that people actually play
Microtopics:
Jenni, she slash her.
A poem that could've been an email.
OST Jam.
If every time you were in a room there was someone else in the room doing the game thing you were doing.
Just trying to enjoy a leisurely video game when suddenly a co-op partner shows up and starts getting impatient with you.
Animals but wet.
Animals but they are in the ocean and don't have legs so they can't kick butt.
The duality of having legs.
The many-faceted world butt.
Try fish: you're welcome.
Becoming deeply involved in the design and production of novelty clown statues.
Who's this unsold clown?
Whether the prenup addresses any of the potential clown situations.
How many clowns could fit in a bed and breakfast.
Monogrammed businessclowns.
How to buy yourself a Lordy.
Sending unsolicited clowns in the mail.
Stacking the clowns until you can ascend to clown heaven.
Cleaning help and support for neurodivergent people to clean our filthy filthy houses.
The act of living in a house and putting things in places.
Keeping your silverware in the freezer.
A house where the forks turn into spoons.
A basket for clothes that are not so dirty that they need to be washed immediately.
Food that is technically rotten but not so rotten that you can't eat it.
The room in your house where the gravity is lower and you float.
Holding a phone up to your face like a taco.
Hundreds of pictures of people holding weird shit up to their heads.
Why all the women are at the end of the page.
Announcing a new consumer electronics device by submitting it to sidetalkin.com.
Side-snorin'.
A fun web site for if you want to look at objects.
A pregnant woman with her belly painted to look like your face.
Copying all the worst aspects of the Virtual Boy.
Whether you want to download jivetalkin.midi.
A poem shaped like something.
Updo bleak curious quiet.
Desert thumbs.
Rather pale pagasus.
A poem that generates its own blurb.
The entire front edge of the pegasus.
Why so political, pagasus?
Any thumb you want it to be.
Defining a thumb by its oppositionality.
Rooting for and with the thumb.
Your boomer aunt who has a really specific idea of gender roles.
Disrupting your toothbrush.
Your beaver farm where the underwear comes down the chute and you feed the underwear to the beavers and put the beavers in the juicer and sell the beaver juice to Lenny who gives you gems you can use to play Scrabble but you only get so many tiles per minute unless you're willing to sit and tap video ads, and whether that's a paradigm shift.
Willingness to think through processes and systems.
A shmup where you control a whale research vessel.
Taking the one skill you have in this life and using it to create heavy handed, ineffective political satire.
Making an exit poll to find out what percentage of players actually learned something from your propaganda simulator game and what percentage just min-maxed the numbers because it was a fun puzzle.
What paradigm you're imagining shifting, exactly.
Every game developer's cottage-core retirement fantasy.
Making video games without ever talking to anyone on Twitter.
Who's the beardy guy dot com.
Scrolling through pictures of beardy guys until you find the right one.
Jugger.
Carrying the macguffin into your opponent's goal.
Arcane rules about who's allowed to touch the dog skull and when.
The global governing body in charge of the rules of Discs of Tron.
The schism in the Jugger community.
Teaching a three year old chess boxing.
Snapdragon.
Taking turns grabbing raisins of a flaming bowl of brandy.
Tucking a clove into one of the raisins and whoever grabs that raisin out of the bowl of flaming brandy gets to stop reaching into the bowl of flaming brandy.
Flaming tennis ball catch.
Calvin Ball, III.
The delicate balance of taking letters out of a username until you get to one that's not taken, before you get to names that are definitely taken because they're so short.
Support Topic Lords
51 min
April 25, 2022131. GDC Santa Rides Again
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Mike
Kev
http://www.radcade.com/
Topics
Embracing creative chaos is very hard but paradoxically extremely common?
Thanatosensitivity
GDC happened this year! They really did it
Tarantulas on the Lifebuoy By Thomas Lux
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48483/tarantulas-on-the-lifebuoy
Being left handed in a right handed world
Microtopics:
Wanting to learn to program and moving to Maine.
Learning to program by implementing a meticulous copy of Metroid for the NES.
Choosing to live a life that feels like an anime training montage.
How to learn to program while having kids.
Radical content for radical gamers.
Having one's mind blown by works of art, as one does.
The "stone soup bubblegum and baling wire everything went wrong" method of making art.
What happens when the plan makes contact with the enemy.
Writing a film with the magic of wintertime as a core theme and not being able to get the permit to film until spring.
Iterating on your idea with insights you've gleaned from working on your idea.
Ascertaining the recoverability of any given error.
The kind of disaster that happens when a culture accustomed to low-cost-error problems tries to work on high-cost-error problems.
Improvising bridges.
Programming vs. the disciplined engineering fields.
The pros and cons of storing a bunch of elephants on the roof.
The user experience of death.
Digital ghosts on LinkedIn.
Logging in to LinkedIn for the first time in eight years and getting a bunch of IMs from a friend who died six years ago.
Dealing with your dead friend's estate and having to close out all the relationships they were maintaining on OkCupid.
Thanatechnologies.
The human events taking place on a separate flow of time than internet time.
Slug World.
A human brain computer interaction conference at Noisebridge.
alt.ctrl.GDC
Spending all of GDC on the lawn.
A GDC talk except instead of talking to an auditorium full of 500 people, you're talking to a hotel room full of five people.
The Unconference Phenomenon.
Substance-to-fluff ratios.
Your three GDC lives.
Going to the talks where they talk about the stuff we're doing to figure out how we can do our stuff better.
The ascended platonic GDC.
Getting all Dunbar's Numbered-out and spending all your time talking to people you know.
Showing your game at a conference to increase the odds that one of the seven people at Sony who can get your game into the Spring Fever promotion will walk by and notice you.
Making a leveraged play on your charisma and luck stats.
GDC Santa with the sack of boxed copies of Glittermitten Grove.
A map of TXT World stitched together out of screenshots, like in the good old days.
A greybeard coming out of the woodwork to admire your ANSI art map.
Disrespecting the expo.
Realizing that somebody is about to ask you how your GDC is going and getting the drop on them by asking how their GDC is going first.
Katie hauling off and gassing you up.
The hazards of being Jim Stormdancer.
A reward for not loving the death of the ugly and even the dangerous.
The tangled underworld of your socks.
Pretending to not be afraid of spiders because you don't want your son to be afraid of spiders.
Growing up with rhino beetles in Liberia.
Hog snakes.
The extremely specific feeling of a desperate beetle clinging to your pruny fingertip.
Formative bug experiences.
Millions of termites growing wings to do their big ol' termite sex party.
Sweeping up all the termites who are taking a nap after mating season to fry in palm oil as a special treat.
The morning where the entire town is covered in bugs which sucks but you get to eat them which rules.
Reminiscing about which body parts of a termite are saltiest.
Getting accustomed to eating termites by the time you get to the bottom of the bag.
Left-handed zippers.
Trying to use the wrong scissors and assuming that you have some kind of developmental problem.
The Uniball Jetstream Rollerball, with a pressurized ink reservoir.
The prince who was promised.
Fretting with your dominant hand.
Picking a specific guitar string at speed.
Whether handedness exists.
Drawing with gross motor movements.
Left-handed mugs.
Left-handed drums vs. open-handed drums.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
April 18, 2022130. Gilding the Lemur
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
https://frror.bandcamp.com/
Stevie
https://www.hryx.net
Topics:
Watching TAS videos and wondering how much of what is happening is necessary vs flourish
If Jeff Bezos wanted to recreate Jurassic Park
Chocolate-dipped fruit has such an enormous gulf between perceived effort and actual effort that as a gift giver or potluck attendee you are all but obligated to take advantage
Strong Men, Riding Horses by Gwendolyn Brooks
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?contentId=28113
The creators of Earthworm Jim: Where are they now?
Microtopics:
Tunic.
Finding collectible pages of a game's manual inside the game.
Games in fake languages.
Playing imported games in emulation and trying to figure out how to play even though you don't speak the language.
Curveballs.
A monthly in-person cozy casual game development meetup.
Discovering what people mean by "within" when people say "inquire within."
What happened to all of the art.
What a whale bone smells like after you clean it.
Whether it's grosser to drink bone marrow or eat oysters.
The most charming of all the crabs.
TAS runs.
The various kinds of tools that might assist you in creating a tool-assisted speed run.
Human-Mediated Speed Runs, or HMSRs.
Proving the ideal speed run.
Some kind of sequence that is based on a timer.
When the TAS run does a little dance and you're trying to figure out whether that's important to the run or if they're just killing time.
The game became Snake.
Whether coffee cures or causes cancer.
Like listening in a mirror.
The vapors.
Trillionaires not being as rich as they used to be.
A big big island full of organisms that are just waiting to be coated in gold.
Painting your entire body and dying somehow.
Lemur-friendly paints.
People who've eaten breakfast and then died.
Dipping some shit in some crap.
Watching Food Network to discover the Science of Chocolate.
An attractive morsel.
Pastries with fruit fillings.
A solid cube of a mass of dessert-object.
Taking advice from someone who hasn't even been on several hundred podcasts.
Frantically putting the Topic Lords banner back on your wall when you see Jim approaching.
Releasing Topic Lords episodes.
Shuffling off of this mortal topic.
Making a movie to promote your new chocolate bar.
A type of chocolate that tries to be solid.
Spaghetti-Os as a back formation of Spaghetti-O-ification, which is what happens when pasta passes through a black hole's event horizon.
Using Hawking radiation to retrieve lost Spaghetti-Os from within black holes.
The movie playing the sound of somebody peeing to let you know that now's when you get up to use the bathroom.
A crowd of people doing foley work for a restaurant scene in Murder She Wrote.
Picking somebody for Animatronic Angela Lansbury to murder and then picking somebody for her to pin it on when she solves the crime.
The fine line between true and false.
The fine line between foot and floor.
Desert-eyed, rentless strong men pasted to stars already.
A source of praise for the patriarchy.
Addled by landlords.
Whether being pasted to the stars is good.
The elbow of the topics.
Earthworm Jim.
A muscular goofball earthworm.
Whether you can say "groovy" and still be angry.
A strict no-sequels policy.
Not the thing you're here to talk about.
George "The Fat Man" Sanger.
Wall-E but a Roomba but also one of those 90s wireless phone cradles.
Games you can play for free on the web.
All the good times we had at Blockbuster Video renting movies from Blockbuster Video.
How public libraries still exist and offer more movies than your local Blockbuster Video had and they're free and you keep them for a month rather than two days but nobody gives a shit because libraries don't have branding or advertising.
A perfect solution to a problem that everybody wants solved urgently.
Weirdly buff creatures that should not be buff.
Music band with animal companion solves mystery.
The Dog & The Stoner & The Band & The Ghost.
Queen Slug-for-a-Butt.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 13 min
April 11, 2022129. Yet Another Country Where They Don't Pee
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Alex
Shannon
Topics:
Regional Trash animals
Dynamic water features
The Pee Pee Dance is nowhere to be found on Wikipedia
The Bells, by Edgar Allen Poe
https://poets.org/poem/bells
Recipe essentialism
Sei Shonagon's Hateful Things are relatable
https://www.basicincome.com/bp/hatefulthings.htm
Microtopics:
Striving to sound like a motor that has just been switched off.
A very healthy vasovagal response.
Separating the platelets from the plasma.
Donating blood to anybody on the street with a needle and some brownie brittle.
Determining the blood type of this synthetic fake blood.
Brownies except they shatter like glass between your teeth.
Trashimals.
Visiting a new place and delighting at all the local pests.
Living in Florida and just bumping into crocodiles on the street.
Monkeys climbing your body to steal your food and break your camera.
Fairy penguins nesting in your storm drains.
Scooping rattlesnakes into a bucket, going to a military base and dumping them into the tank cockpits.
Only realizing that it's weird to have a rattlesnake in a jar on your porch when a Frenchman wants to come see.
It's a Canyon Thing.
Finding out that a mongoose is not the size of a goose.
One of the more hazardous trashimals.
Looking out the window and realizing that someone forgot to close the garage door and you're just going to have to wait for that grizzly bear to leave.
The mountain lion who visited downtown Berkeley.
A regular household goose.
Turning off Niagara falls at night.
Seeing behind the veil of the world when Niagara falls gets switched off.
Going to Hawaii to see the milky way.
A universal human experience that remains completely undocumented.
The squeeze and grab strategy.
Something you wouldn't want to sample in Costco.
The tiny sommelier in your butt.
Recipes calling for eggs or milk but not specifying which kind.
Pee shivers.
A reading face for radio.
A sort of runic rhyme.
The rhyming and the chiming of the bells bells bells bells bells bells bells.
Edgar Allan Poe as an emo Dr. Seuss.
The gamut of all the things bells can be.
Adding more bells to the end of each verse.
The Jabberwocky rewritten in the style of incomprehensible in-jokes.
A cake recipe with two ingredients.
Keto-something something cookies.
Mashing the crosshatch shape with a fork.
The Easy Cookbook: Over 100 Satisfying Recipes Made with Four Ingredients or Less.
Ice cream made from eggs and peanut butter.
The fourth ingredient is your car.
Writing a book of listicles in the 11th century.
The way the snow looks on the roofs of the village under moonlight, and how the plebian villagers can't appreciate it.
When one is in a hurry to leave but one's visitor keeps chattering away.
Shameless old people putting their feet up on braziers.
One's attachment to a man depending largely on the elegance of his leave-taking.
Trying to maintain all your clandestine relationships in a palace where the walls are made of paper.
A person who recites a spell after sneezing.
When one is about to be told some interesting piece of news and a baby starts crying.
The exorcist staying up too late and falling asleep in the middle of the exorcism.
All the interesting poetry and prose from a historical era being written by women because the men were expected to write in their second language.
The Empress receives the gift of a phonograph at the dawn of voice recording, and she turns to and is like "uh, figure out something to do with this."
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1 hr 8 min
April 04, 2022128. Intermittent Fasting Kirby
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Jenni
Chris
https://imgur.com/a/t34TMw8
Topics:
Every tree in this desert is a bean
The statute of limitations on spoilers implies a social contract where we agree to consume media as soon as it's available instead of consuming it at the right time for ourselves
This list of words that men know but women don't, and vice versa
https://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13428-018-1077-9/tables/2
https://twitter.com/v21/status/1372635082205364226/photo/1
Ozymandias by Percy Shelley
https://discoverpoetry.com/poems/percy-bysshe-shelley/ozymandias/
https://twitter.com/PateraQuetzaI/status/1156300892733243392
41 out of 42 people start life with some time to chill by themselves in the womb but twins don't, what's that like
Oldschool AD&D is hard to start but ultimately less video/board gamey which is great
Wordle speed runs are surprisingly riveting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pk4qPtOelv8
Microtopics:
Plugging every Xalavier Nelson game.
Standing in a three bean soup.
Everyone's favorite Fire Emblem hero, Spiky Ball Tree.
Sweetgum.
Producing liquid amber but not calling it liquid amber for trademark reasons.
Whether it's possible to have green wood.
A traumatic formative art school experience that you take out on trees for the rest of your life.
Ablative armor.
Spoilers for the first novel ever written.
Seeing Empire Strikes Back dozens of times in the theater while in the womb.
A spoiler policy that makes people hate you.
Getting consent to gaslight your girlfriend about movies she hasn't watched.
Picking a movie line to be the only joke you ever say.
The list of movies for which there is no statute of limitations on spoilers.
Using a pen knife to cut open your forearm to reveal the servomotors inside any time there's a lull in the conversation.
The SpoilOrbs.
Inventing the video game haptics to allow a game designer to kick you in the balls.
Kittencore Dark Souls.
Junji-ito's cat diary.
Clutter in movies.
Hiring excellent schlubby actors.
Back when it was notable and interesting that Linda Hamilton got fit for Terminator 2.
Getting an AI on the job.
Laura Panini.
Live coding skeletal animation.
Rotating around a creepy lady.
Asking if anyone's seen something but nobody has.
When you push the button on the monitor and it goes all wibbly wobbly for a second.
A list going there.
A word that you only know if you read a lot of G.K. Chesterson.
Little Kirbys that help you out in the event of a prolapse.
How nobody in the UK knows what "goober" or "wine gums" means.
Abseiling and rappelling.
Putting "kerbside" on a list of words that Americans don't know.
Polearms that were descended from boar hunting.
Asking a thousand Americans to say yes or no to every word in the dictionary.
The Katana Yakuza Thesis.
Reading poetry in a funny voice.
The kind of person who would end a poem with a semicolon.
Reciting a poem about a guy you met yesterday who told you most of the poem.
Hearing from a guy about a rotting stump of a conquest.
Writing a poem where you meet a guy who tells you about a song that used to be on his iPod that you can no longer download from mp3 dot com.
Yelling at a long dead poet about punctuation.
Poetry about not knowing something but it's unclear whether nobody knows the thing or if it's just the poet's personal ignorance.
Painting ancient Greek statues flesh-colored.
Percy Shelley the nonsense man.
Smash Mouth cancelling their concert at your county fair after they got famous.
How to pronounce "shewed"
What's wrong with looking upon me?
23 And Me informing you that you have a mom.
The familial incest tab on 23 And Me.
Twins: There's Two Of Them.
Twins in the womb listening to the Empire Strikes Back soundtrack and elbowing each other.
A person who could exist and would be attractive.
Geocities turn of the century vibes.
The t-shirt that Jim's wife bought him.
How Futurama made the name "Hubert" cool but "Pubert" is still no good.
Having six kids and naming them all Pubert.
Naming an ice cream shop "Fucklers" because who can stop you? (The police.)
Fucklers: Sole Owner of my Name Ice-Creamery.
The holding company that owns every disused mascot.
The Hamm's Beer Bear.
Wordle speed run categories.
Mathematicians who debunk Minecraft speed runs.
Trying to invent fake commentary for a sport you know nothing about.
Yelling advice to recorded speed runs.
Watching everybody believe Wordle conspiracy theories.
Comparing notes about reality.
Preferring having friends over being right.
The absolute best time to get off of social media.
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1 hr 8 min
March 28, 2022127. Let's e e cummings This Up
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Cort
https://twitter.com/postgoodism
Fabian
https://twitter.com/rygorous
Topics:
Black Square Day (inventing holidays and subsequently forgetting everything about them)
Nostalgia for old computers isn't because they were good, but because they sucked in ways that were simple to understand
The Dirtywave M8 tracker
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, by Robert Frost
https://www.greatestpoems.com/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening/
Microtopics:
The music videos of Max Cooper.
Styptic pencils.
Doing archaeology on your own Google calendar.
A stable time loop where your future self adds "Black Square Day" to your calendar.
Bringing a palindrome to the palindrome party.
Telling your visitors "it's Black Square Day; dress appropriately."
Celebrating the day you really burned the casserole.
Black Squaroling.
A way that your community organizes itself.
Getting in a pissing contest with your neighbors about whose house has the most black squares.
Booting up to a BASIC prompt so you need to write a short BASIC program to load the program you want to run (probably another BASIC program)
How the Commodore 64 BASIC determined where the line you were editing started and ended.
How Commodore 64 BASIC stored lines of code internally.
Survivorship bias among early microcomputer users.
Accepting a certain level of brokenness because fixing the problem will take an unbounded amount of time.
Machines that are simple enough for a single human to understand vs. those that are not.
What percentage of the Commodore 64's ROM is dedicated to implementing floating point math.
Varying levels of nostalgia for developing for the Playstation 3.
The room in London that the Playstation 2 had instead of a debugger.
The Tool PS2.
Fetishization of the mid-2010s tower PC
Second order nostalgia, for what 90s emulation of 80s games looked like.
Nostalgia for objectively terrible art style.
All the walls swimming all the time.
The 15 year nostalgia gap where nobody wants to remember the early 3D console games.
Making music on the toilet every day.
Trackers.
What Trackers are better at vs. traditional DAWs.
Music that ships with its own source code.
Technical limitations transforming into a unique aesthetic.
How to hide a second song in the same tracker module.
Doing a thing on the screen while music loops.
A portable device to edit spreadsheets that only has a trackball.
Looking at your song through a straw.
Loading a ProTracker module in FastTracker.
Trying to identify which tracker created the MOD you're reading by looking for file format bugs unique to that tracker.
Fixing bugs by hex editing an executable and that becomes the version everybody uses now.
What you call it when an archaeologist writes the file spec.
Unknown sources of dubious quality.
Lore of unknown provenance about how to play a mod file.
Watching dense notation scrolling by.
Loading tracker music into various players to see how their performances of the same material vary.
Trying to load up music you wrote fifteen years ago and needing to source old versions of all the plugins you used.
Watching the woods fill up with snow.
A very evocative one of those.
Whether sleep represents death in this poem or if it's just sleep this time.
Why write a poem.
Interviewing the author of a poem and then interviewing everyone who ever read the poem before writing the authoritative interpretation of that poem.
A joke that doesn't really seem like a joke at all.
Rating a poem on a five star scale and then deciding how many of those stars belong to each of the stanzas.
The Three Musketeers sequels that nobody has read.
Getting paid by the line and adding a character to your story that speaks only one word at a time.
How to write 300 books a year.
Taking out the but because there's nothing for it to but.
Ceramic clown statues.
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1 hr 14 min