Topic Lords

By Jim Stormdancer

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

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The podcast currently has 289 episodes available.

Topic Lords episodes:

September 21, 202048. Long Furby
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Lords:
Abby
https://twitter.com/mizabitha
http://abbydenton.podbean.com/
John
https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo
Topics:
A-life and v-pets of the late 90s: why did they die, where do we see them today (pokemon go, etc)
Nano Pets commercial with catchy jingle: https://youtu.be/R_KIwHHMVmQ?t=298
The only Wappy dog review on Metacritic: https://www.pocketgamer.com/articles/047860/wappy-dog/
Stack Up video by Jeremy Parish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb8RHzSW2yo
Stack Up in WarioWare, Inc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WBXh5cLJt4
A Long Furby: https://twitter.com/LongFurby/status/1002690751988453379
Another Long Furby: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/long-furby-wife-guy
Furby source code: http://www.seanriddle.com/furbysource.pdf
DadDoes review of Wappy Dog: http://www.daddoes.com/3912/wappy-dog-review/
San Diego, CA
Everything John forgot to mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_County,_California
Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve®: https://torreypine.org/
Geisel Library: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisel_Library
San Diego Zoo Safari Park: https://www.sdzsafaripark.org/
International Cottages at Balboa Park: http://www.sdhpr.org/
Salty licorice/salmiak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice
I have many friends, and am very popular, and awesome, and rumors about my smell are greatly exaggerated- John.
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station
San Diego depicted in the 1998 Midway arcade game California Speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8lSX1aUHQw
Hotel del Coronado: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_del_Coronado
“Nobody’s perfect.”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mHhr-aaLnI
Harmony Gold’s most popular move in years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk3p6hIdVeM
Send your Robotech questions and comments to: https://twitter.com/marwilliamson
California is on fire; get in the van, loser, we’re all moving to Pittsburgh.
Bloodlust Software and the 90s indie game scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf5KIss6csA
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9a48z3/the-story-of-nesticle-the-ambitious-emulator-that-redefined-retro-gaming
Not A Butt Face asks: "Marble Hornets Sex Tape ie. A Found Footage Style Webseries but the footage being sifted through is on Sex Tapes and just out of frame or partially obscured is a lurking unknown creature. Could this ever work?"
Microtopics:
Being a cyborg and being out of the closet.
Doing standup comedy in an empty room.
Figuring out the best way to get a podcast onto your phone.
Kevin Spacey ruining your podcast.
A 20th-anniversary digital Tamagotchi.
F2P Tamagotchi all getting horrible pain disorders that demand you pay daily microtransactions or they just scream all day.
A large company that operates suspiciously.
Reading a lot of Newsweek in grade school.
Getting high on your own supply of Newsweek.
An eight year old wearing a blazer with elbow pads picking up a Newsweek at the book fair to read about Tamagotchi.
Shaking the Chao garden to make the Chao fight.
Whether or not Nintendogs go to heaven.
Neglecting your real dog because you have an exciting new virtual dog.
Sickening podcast guests with your Pokemon Go strategies.
The sensor on Wappy Dog's tail that only exists so it can get upset that you pulled its tail.
That one banger on the Wappy Dog OST.
Your Robotic Operating Buddy's ability to pick up discs of a certain size and move them in an arc around itself.
Playing Stack Up over Skype and having to call your friend and have him reset the puzzle whenever ROB fucks up and drops the pieces on the floor.
The baffling absence of YouTube videos of Gizmo Furby interacting with Yoda Furby.
Steven Spielberg patrolling the internet for videos of Gizmo Furby talking to Yoda Furby and shutting them the heck down because that's not canon. (George Lucas is fine with it.)
A village of Furbies living on after the extinction of the human race.
Yes! Dad does!
Wappy Dog being immortal, but if he did die somehow he'd go straight to hell.
Pikachu turning to the player and asking "who was the last person you kissed?"
Trying to make a game that creates the same reaction in every player.
Confusing Yoot Saito and Noob Saibot.
Playing SimCity 2000 on a Game Boy Advance.
Becoming a chef so that you can figure out why burritos are better in San Diego than anywhere else in the world.
A library raised up in little feet with a swirly tail called The Spang-Dangler Building.
A library that looks like a big concrete tree.
A library that looks like a space invader.
Discovering Finnish Salty Licorice and finally not having to share your candy with your friends.
Lurking in the floorboards so that you can visit your introvert friend without them noticing.
Those big concrete nipples on Camp Pendleton.
Driving from Camp Pendleton to Mexico in less than a minute and then turning around and driving across an aircraft carrier.
Doctor Seuss's favorite San Diego hangouts.
Whether Jack Lemmon likes it hot in the ending of Some Like It Hot.
Taking part in the panda breeding program in the 70s.
Not knowing what the San Diego Convention Center looks like outside of Comic Con and just assuming it's always swarming with nerds.
None of the speakers showing up for the big Robotech panel at Wondercon so the marketing director steps up with PowerPoint presentation describing Robotech merch.
Everyone losing their shit over Robotech skate decks.
Singing and dancing when the sky turns black.
Trying to hide violence from children so the children rebel by celebrating violence as much as possible.
A full-featured Mortal Kombat clone developed by two high school students.
Whether One Must Fall stands up.
Choosing to release the first free-and-good-enough NES emulator and calling it NESticle.
How the mouse pointer for NESticle was actually a severed hand, and only the Windows icon was a scrotum.
Keeping your emulation legit by deleting your ROMs every 24 hours.
The only place the long-rumored SNESticle was ever released.
How early SNES emulators didn't handle transparency so you had to manually toggle the cloud layer in order to see anything.
Shock value Flash cartoons before and after 9/11.
A gif of a plane crashing into Oprah.
Going into work each day with the intent of trying to get fired.
Who today is carrying on the Bloodlust Software ethos.
Making the same ultra-violent video game as everyone else but adding narration explaining that "violence is bad and this game is important."
A hyper-detailed art style evocative of biology and gross innards without actually depicting any gore.
A tasteful logo that represents a butt pooping.
A barely-visible monster lurking in the background of every video uploaded to Pornhub.
Porkin' Across America.
Finding people who were already going to make a series of sex tapes and offering to lurk in the background in your Slenderman costume.
Training a neural network to insert Slenderman into the background of every movie.
Writing erotic House of Leaves fan fiction and waiting for the Internet to discover and reenact it.
An art critic giving your life a B+.
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1h 9min
September 14, 202047. Santa Barbarella
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Lords:
Chris's album "The Lost Backups" is out now!
https://b-e-e-k.bandcamp.com/
https://twitter.com/CHRISdelCAMINO
https://www.instagram.com/chrisdelcamino/
Jimmy is on LinkedIn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkd3_fowcFs
https://open.spotify.com/track/4nHfs2e1bRAeS5JHVa50yh?si=EO2vB_DQSrGJ5ov7s5x0Bw
Topics:
22 years later, I am able to answer Rimbo's question he asked me on the way to Wesside '98: "What is an Obispo"
Why "Starflight" is the greatest PC game ever made
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight
Drums that you play standing up (and double-sided drums)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz8XELwxAuw
Bulbous Cretin asks: "Tweeting the contents of Fred Flinstone’s frozen carcass before you dig in"
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/12/permafrozen-dinner/604069/
16 bits is not enough and destroyed music
Microtopics:
Plugging a 21 year old song that you still can't believe you wrote.
Musicians deserving royalties.
The secret fourth guest.
The rolling golden hills driving down the 101.
Knowing all the technical musical terms in Spanish but not knowing how to say "mop."
What would happen to the Cookie Monster if Big Bird was blue.
Whether or not the Topic Lords audience knows about the demo scene.
Whether or not Unreal by Future Crew is the same thing as Unreal Engine by Tim Sweeney.
Demo scenes and then demo parties.
Visiting Montreal and hiding in a high school gym for three days rather than seeing the amazing city with its amazing architecture.
Wanting to hold the Great American Demo Party.
Whether or not you should cover the ice when you hold a huge party in an ice rink.
Assembly 2010 mostly being a big LAN party with the demo scene folks tucked away in the corner.
The sun going down at 11 PM.
Boozembly 2010 taking place in the woods behind Assembly 2010.
Plugging a PC keyboard into your Mac and all the keys work perfectly in Schism Tracker.
Giving up on the Macintosh after decades because Mac hardware and MacOS are terrible now.
A laptop that is so broken that it shuts down every computer on the wifi network you try to connect it to.
Advertising the latest Macbook as having a physical escape key.
Running Ubuntu as an app on Windows.
The secret 16-color CGA mode if you plug in a composite monitor.
Modern nostalgia for the terrible four-color CGA palettes.
Storing an entire universe on a two-sided 360k floppy disk.
Landing on a planet and finding The Ancients and finding enough fuel to get to three stars over.
Stuffing The Ancients into your warp drive because there is no better fuel.
A project where you don't have to worry about bugfixes because if something breaks, the user just runs it again.
The thousands or millions of people out there who would give you money if they knew your product existed.
The market for Frog Fractions-themed N95 masks.
Making a live post to r/tipofmyjoystick asking for the identity of an educational space game during the podcast in hopes that someone replies before we finish recording.
Misremembering which band's drummer plays a snare drum and a tranceaphone.
A drum kit with tom toms so high that you have to jump up to reach them.
Two wildly different drum heads using the same resonation chamber.
Soundproofing a shed by adding 2500 pounds of sheet rock to the walls.
Converting sound pressure waves into heat.
Measuring the frequency response of these egg crates.
Putting squares on the walls having no effect on the sound of your saxophone escaping the room and annoying the people on the other side of the wall.
Walking right up to your wall and speaking and it sounding like you plugged your ears.
Placing yourself in a space by listening to reflections.
Spinning up the Periscope server on Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass so that you can Periscope yourself eating Fred Flintstone.
Making Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass lip-sync to WAP.
Who, exactly, needs to apologize for this topic.
Discovering that humans don't have a gizzard and really wanting a gizzard.
Whether or not a Twinkie is technically meat.
Texas Twinkies.
Wanting to eat 35,000 year old Mammoth meat but it turns into a smelly liquid when you thaw it.
Thousand year eggs not looking a day older than 150.
Which genres CD quality is and isn't good enough for.
Frequency-based MP3 audio being decoded into PCM so it can be sent out of a speaker, and then back into a frequency-based format by your cochlea so it can reach your brain.
The Magic Mushroom PC dot com.
Running timecube.com at the DOS prompt.
Classical music having way too much dynamic range.
Riding the volume knob to not go deaf while listening to the William Tell Overture.
Visible color banding during dark scenes in a movie.
El Camino except it's Del like Del Taco.
What LinkedIn is for.
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59min
September 07, 202046. Fetch Me A Renaissance Italy Nostalgia!
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Lords:
Elena plugs whale sharks.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_shark
Good whale shark faces:
https://www.businessinsider.com/whale-shark-was-caught-on-camera-trying-to-mate-2019-7
https://www.livescience.com/55412-whale-sharks.html
Kappa is Kappa on glowfic.com and viniferavaria on Twitch.
https://www.twitch.tv/viniferavaria
Topics:
Whale sharks.
Ask Me About My Bizarre Quasi-Fanfiction (Animorphs/Madoka thematic fusion, sword of truth retake, lilite satanist narnia...)
Did you see that video where the Super Monkey Ball superfan went on a quest to find the narrator's voice actor?
Quest to find narrator: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=inUkotGb-K4
A supposed new SMB game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gA4bjZm902c
A ZZT community member recreated the lost ZZT source code from scratch and it compiles to a byte-identical executable
https://blog.asie.pl/2020/08/reconstructing-zzt/
Josh asks "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuai_Kuai_culture"
Van Halen and the brown M&Ms http://www.compliancebuilding.com/2009/08/03/compliance-van-halen-and-brown-mms/
Bug reports and changelogs from video games that are just close enough to real life to be surreal
Microtopics:
The whale shark's incredibly silly face.
Lilite Satanist Narnia.
The Satanist version of what Narnia is to Christians and Golden Compass is to atheists.
Telling your best friend about the magical key you just found and going off together to have adventures.
Suddenly becoming monarch of a place you've never heard of and having to set policy when you're thirteen years old and have never taken an economics class in your life and also it's a magical kingdom so it uses magic economics anyway.
Building a paradise for people against their will.
Seeing enough sexism that you have to invent a splinter sect to get rid of it.
Nostalgic fiction from people with really weird backgrounds.
An 80s-ass computer terminal with an extremely full ashtray next to it.
Nostalgia for 16th century Polynesia.
Second-hand nostalgia.
Going on a quest to find the voice actor of a beloved video game.
Whether or not Sega is currently producing another Super Monkey Ball.
Whether or not you should monkey some balls.
Turning dials at the edge of a board and a ball bearing falls into a hole.
Going into the recording both with no context for the lines you are about to read.
Actors reading individual lines in a vacuum rather than reacting to each other.
Not having a good way to order the lines in your branching script so you deliver the lines to the actor in alphabetical order.
Using CD audio to store your sounds so you can only have 99 individual things you can play.
The last of the Guild of Weavers.
All the adults getting turned into swans and flying away.
An adventure game where you play a sequence of notes to select a verb.
Not having perfect pitch but being glad that there is a game mode for people who do.
Trying to summon a demon from beyond time.
Escaping reality with the other Weavers and all your friends are horrifically murdered and their ghosts are angry at you.
Pointing a decompiler at the game and typing in Pascal until it basically matches.
Comparing two executables by loading them both in a decompiler, rapidly switching between the windows and looking for differences on the screen.
Using the decompiler released by the NSA to reverse engineer ZZT, so you know the NSA must've reverse-engineered ZZT internally decades ago.
Whether or not the ZZT source code was lost in an interesting way.
How ZZT and Unreal were both sold as a video game but really the part people were interested in was the level editor.
More man-hours than a man has.
MMO developers releasing the client source code but not being allowed to release the server source code.
Nobody wanting to port a million line code base to another language.
Doing your best to elide over the more boring details.
Fixing about 30 complier errors and getting about another 30 because the compiler doesn't have great error recovery.
Going back to Flickr to find even higher resolution photos of bugs having sex.
Changing all the stars on the American flag to bugs.
What was going on in France.
How to fix the problem when your game is crashing in France.
One browser interpreting your integer as a percentage and the other interpreting it as a decimal.
Upending all of science because it's easier than disabling auto-formatting dates in Excel.
Approaching a project with the design goal of being as outrageous as possible.
Playing a game where you're unsure whether the time it crashed was intentional.
The rigid set of best practices for using snack foods to ensure machinery keeps working correctly.
The Van Halen brown M&M story as a conscientiousness filter.
That time Van Halen refused to play because there were brown M&Ms backstage and also the stage wasn't strong enough to hold all their equipment.
Rules that exist mostly as a way to determine how much the participant cares about being a good member of the community.
Forgetting your girlfriend's birthday and going back in time to get her a present.
Spending all day evaluating your list of people you might want to castrate.
Satanists ritually sacrificing themselves.
Being attacked by necromantically re-animated yak hooves and hair.
Your memories of seeing a lovely waterfall being amputated and necromantically re-animated and trying to drown you and it's extremely unclear how to kill the memory of a waterfall.
The process of getting dwarves to a place where they can do dwarf stuff.
Sadness that the badgers never made it into Faeries vs. Badgers.
A son waking up any minute now.
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1h 4min
August 31, 202045. Remember To Pronounce The Apostrophe
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Lords:
John B is @YouOldSoAndSo everywhere.
20th President of the United States James Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean Theorem: https://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/convergence/mathematical-treasure-james-a-garfields-proof-of-the-pythagorean-theorem
Khan Academy video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EINpkcphsPQ
Nick is @NickPancakes on Twitter.
Topics:
Micro game jams, Weekend of ZZT
WarioWare D.I.Y. archive: https://archive.org/details/WarioWareDIYWarehouse
Super Metroid and A Link to the Past Randomizer (a.k.a. SMZ3): https://samus.link/
SGDQ2019 co-op speedrun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uujsW7yFkZU
The primary motivation for information acquisition being grist for making and understanding jokes
Ken Jennings' books about knowledge acquisition and comedy:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79195.Brainiac
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36373629-planet-funny
These two contain the sum of all human knowledge:
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/1745/8107/products/IMG_E1971_1400x.JPG?v=1571480346
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/4/45/BillyJoel_StormFront.jpg
Roblox as the most popular game platform
Downloading Wikipedia: https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-download-wikipedia/
All roads lead to "philosophy" on Wikipedia: https://flowingdata.com/2011/06/08/all-roads-lead-to-philosophy-on-wikipedia/
Adopt Me!, one of the most popular games created in Roblox: https://roblox.fandom.com/wiki/DreamCraft/Adopt_Me!
I Wanna Maker: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1114940/I_Wanna_Maker/
Quill points out: this list of things unexpectedly named after people: https://notes.rolandcrosby.com/posts/unexpectedly-eponymous/
"Widenius has three children – My, Max, and Maria – who inspired the names for MySQL, MaxDB and the MySQL-Max distribution, and MariaDB" https://twitter.com/davidjustodavid/status/1288903463422722049
Becoming a film nerd
Turner Classic Movies, from the same company that brings you Mortal Kombat: http://www.tcm.com/
They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? - 1,000 Greatest Films, compiled using a Metacritic-like approach of looking at other people's lists: https://www.theyshootpictures.com/gf1000.htm
Also, their 1,000 Noir Films list: https://www.theyshootpictures.com/noir1000.htm
The Narrow Margin (1952): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044954/
The Tall Target (1951): https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044105/
A good starting list for train movies, by no means exhaustive or definitive: https://allgiftsconsidered.com/the-31-best-train-movies-of-all-time/
List of films on Netflix from the year 2000 and before, total count at the time of search approx. 250, compared to around 3,500 for 2001-2020 : https://reelgood.com/movies/source/netflix?filter-year_end=2000
Kanopy, a movie streaming service you may be able to use through your local library: https://www.kanopy.com/
Qwikster, b. 2011 d. 2011: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/5-reasons-why-qwikster-is-now-deadster/246465/
1939, Hollywood's "annus mirabilis": https://ew.com/movies/2019/12/22/1939-hollywoods-greatest-year/
1957 in Film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1957_in_film
Patton Oswalt's book about becoming a film nerd, Silver Screen Fiend: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571109-silver-screen-fiend
CBoyardee, Barkley: Shut Up and Jam Gaiden, and the failure of Barkley 2.
CBoyardee's Dilbert trilogy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6rGUlVvVJ4
www.nfl.com: Just check it out.
Barkley, Shut Up and Jam Gaiden: https://www.talesofgames.com/related_game/barkley-shut-up-jam-gaiden/
Hardcore Gaming 101 article about the game: http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/barkley-shut-up-and-jam-gaiden/
Barkley 2 Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/talesofgames/barkley-2-an-rpg-sequel-to-barkley-shut-up-and-jam
Barkley 2 PAX Prime 2015 interview for PC Gamer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hHSyDq_IyYE
A longer look at Barkley 2 from that same PAX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni2hceqpqHA
Barkley 2 - Janky Demo: https://talesofgames.itch.io/barkley-2
The gun's of Barkley 2: https://bowelflies.tumblr.com/post/185855518364/the-magical-realms-of-t%C3%ADr-na-n%C3%B3g-escape-from
Dingletopia, Gortarius' game that actually came out: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1286140/Dingletopia_Nation_Under_Siege_by_Orcs/
Not mentioned in the show, but CBoyardee also did some writing on the 2019 video game Katana ZERO: https://www.katanazero.com/
Cyberdwarf Body Pillow (Warning: Tsundere): https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/767094-dakimakura-body-pillow
Microtopics:
What the insulin pod had to say.
An extremely sexy insulin pod telegraphing its own death.
Mourning many insulin pods at a rapid clip.
President Garfield's proof of the Pythagorean theorem.
Making your first ZZT game.
Doing fetch quest after fetch quest until two AIs fall in love and a nuclear reactor explodes.
Attempts to archive the user-uploaded games before the Wario Ware DIY servers get shut down.
The only Meat Boy game to come out for the Wii.
A demon that can only exist on sand and is formed of the sand.
ShareCart, the save format shared between many different games so you can save in one game and load in another.
How much Dr. Sbaitso likes you and how much his henchmen like you.
Spending an afternoon trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes.
Flipping random bits to see what comes out there other end.
Generating a hash of a large file twice in a row and getting two different results.
Seeing an exciting glitch in Super Mario 64 and nobody being able to replicate it until someone tries flipping bits in RAM like a solar ray might.
The randomizer hack that combines Link to the Past and Super Metroid into a single game.
Thirty people all making different games and hoping something interesting comes from mashing them together.
Why the heck everyone is suddenly talking about cake.
The primary use for your understanding of the world being making and understanding comedy.
Your filters going to sleep first, so you make weirder connections when you're half-asleep.
How everyone would know all the world capitals if you had also been obsessed with them as a child.
Spending 10% of your brain on how to spell antidisestablishmentarianism and the rest on the lyrics to "We Didn't Start The Fire."
How to download Wikipedia so you can give your son Wikipedia before you give him internet access.
How Roblox is a much more popular game platform than any you've ever touched.
Not knowing how to make games that appeal to children, but knowing how to make games that remind 40 year olds of when they were children.
The incredibly accurate clone of Counterstrike that some rando made inside of Roblox.
Roblox users calling platforming levels "Obbies."
The window in your life where you don't talk to children.
Watching a four year old play Minecraft and they're just breaking and replacing the same block over and over to see if it happens the same way every time.
A Roblox level that is just a series of waterslides.
"I Wanna Maker," for making your own masocore platformers.
How PageRank is named after Larry Page and Debian is named after Deb and Ian.
How Price Club is named after Sol Price and Main St. in San Fransisco is named after Charles Main.
Jim trying to figure out when humans first called a street Main St. and giving up.
"Taco Bell" appropriating respectfully because it respects the romance language adjective-noun order.
Reading about aptronyms in Marilyn vos Savant's column.
Sending your octuplets to a carnival owned by Larry Kidkill.
The late NASCAR racer Dick Trickle.
Changing our names to Fuck and starting a band called The Fucks and that's it, that's the tweet.
Unemployment as a prerequisite for starting any hobby as an adult.
Film Noir figuring out how to tell adult stories after the Hayes Code was enacted.
The constraints of being set on a train leading to compelling storytelling.
The train movie as a slightly less constrained bottle episode.
Whether they allow trains on the Internet Movie Car Database.
Yelling at librarians until morale improved.
Libraries often offering ebooks and movie streaming.
Netflix streaming having a limited selection of movies but the disc mailing service having every DVD, but it takes two or three days to get it.
Filmmakers being huge nerds and that's why they keep making movies about making movies.
1939 and 1957 in filmmaking.
The history of Barkley Shut Up And Jam Gaiden.
Destroying Manhattan by performing a Chaos Dunk.
Setting your cyberpunk universe after basketball has been outlawed.
The dangers of running a successful Kickstarter.
The game design conceit that there should be way too much of everything.
Bizarre unthinkable development processes that somehow in the end produce a shippable game.
A 397-page forum thread of people asking "Where is Barkley 2?"
The second concrete product of the Barkley 2 Kickstarter, after the CyberDwarf body pillow.
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1h 4min
August 24, 202044. Oops! All Biogel
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Lords:
Jenni is emailable at [email protected] and plugs Chris's cooking channel on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRsnCRAIi-VsRPPX4AtzVGQ/
Maxx is on Twitter as @mechcem or emailable at [email protected] and plugs their game bookclub thing.
https://groups.google.com/g/game-book-club/about
Topics:
Not caring if you're duplicating thought work that was done by a ton of people forever ago because you're having a good time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punnett_square
Correction on Japanese crop microbiome.
The PXL-2000 camcorder
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PXL-2000
This is the first Wikipedia page for a movie that has the entire movie embedded in the page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_to_Bali
Search and rescue as an excuse for robotics research.
What if poop worked like, you ate dinosaur chicken nuggets, you got dinosaur poops.
It's annoying that it took me so long to realize I love writing dialog trees.
Microtopics:
Thinking that other people have had sex, when they haven't.
Making a very good one about fried green boys.
The dominant recessive two alleles punnett square stuff.
All the mystery flowers that have been reproducing willy nilly.
Finding out about Redstone and reinventing computing from scratch.
Whether figuring out all the crafting shapes is a good part of Minecraft.
Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility and enjoying the plastic bag upgrade tree.
Waking up in an abandoned cryogenics facility but there's lots of fish sticks so you just eat fish sticks.
Whether fish sticks are frozen fish or are born sticks.
Making a stick into a spear by holding it in your hand.
A shopping cart breaking into almost enough pieces to make a new shopping cart.
The soul of the shopping cart ascending into heaven so you have to play a fishing minigame to get it back.
A good starter project where after your finish it there are birds in it right now.
Beginner knowledge work projects feeling useless because somebody already wrote the program you just wrote.
3D printer projects resulting in a physical artifact even when there's an error.
Constantly being annoyed that you're not a scientist in the 1300s.
How Tycho Brahe was the "greatest naked eye astronomer" because he owned a sextant and had a bunch of spare time that he spent looking up.
An "octant" possibly being 33% more than a sextant but nobody on the podcast is sure.
Trying to figure out what "congresstant" means.
Japanese far right nationalists being terrified of Koreans touching their rice.
Hearing a Japanese person say a fact about Japan and just assuming that it's true.
Wes Anderson accidentally validating far right Japanese nationalists by putting their caricatures of a foreigner in Isle of Dogs.
Watching Japanese television because your Japanese isn't good enough to tell who's being a far right douchebag.
Muting a TV show and procedurally generating subtitles whenever someone speaks.
Localizing an anime without knowing what characters were originally saying.
Sitting there with your 2020 sensibilities going "oh my god."
Saving video to audio cassette.
The camera that filmed the two minute performance art scene in Richard Linklater's Slacker.
Not having time to watch Monty Python movies but hanging eventually internalizing the whole oeuvre from when fans quote it.
Picking a movie and having to communicate only in lines from that movie for the rest of your life.
Looking for the movie with the most words in it but Google only wants to tell you the movie with the most f-words in it.
Not having seen Casino but deciding to say only things that they say in Casino from now on.
According to this one web page Jim found, Team America World Police only having 1600 words in it.
Hearing a line from Casino and immediately forgetting it.
Singing Come to my Window by Melissa Etheridge except with blueberries.
A mask that covers your eyes but plays a tone in your ears based on the distance of the closest object in front of each eye.
Watching the entire movie inside the Wikipedia page for the movie.
Embedding Myst in Wikipedia.
Putting on your business card that the Frog Fractions Wikipedia page is rated "GA" for "good article."
Plugging the Wikipedia article for Frog Fractions into GPT-2 and learning facts about future sequels.
Insect-inspired robots.
People asking what your robot design is for and always saying "search and rescue" and everybody believing you even though search and rescue people never use robots.
Making robots that are too small to get military funding because they can't carry a payload.
Taking an ultrasound of a fly while it's flying.
Inventing the idiom "cheap as a moth."
Harvesting antennae from dead moths and attaching it to your circuit board with Bio Gel and your circuit board has a sense of smell until the antenna rots away an hour later.
Moths not having a circulatory system but they do some stuff with liquids.
Whether or not Jim's wife needs an army of robot bugs for her park ranger crew.
Your life goal being to annoy your neighbors with the self-replicating robot mosquito you invented.
Smearing bio gel on you battery connectors and then inserting any foodstuff into the battery compartment.
Putting flies on leashes.
A robot-fighting praying mantis with a perfect record.
The mantis refusing to fight any given robot more than once.
Oops, All Biogel.
Enjoying looking at all your little dinosaur poops.
Eating alphabet soup consecutively and sending a photo of the toilet to your message recipient.
Discovering your superpowers at a baby food tasting party.
Eating baby food for the first time and vienna sausages bursting from every pore.
Identifying a strange substance by putting it in your mouth.
Tasting the ash of a cremated person and pooping out their face, then applying the electricity and they come back to life.
Not discovering that you love writing dialog trees until you're 41.
Making a mixtape of Nintendo DS ROMs for your partner.
Writing a dialog tree into a stressful email so you get all the future stressful emails out of the way too.
Your girlfriend reading your dialog tree linearly so she thinks you want to break up, get married, have a baby, and move to Pittsburgh.
Gmail basically being a dialog tree nowadays.
The Gmail Labs feature that predicts the three suggested responses that your recipient will see, so you can rewrite your email until they only get three variations of "Wow, what a great email!"
Ostensibly being a comedy writer but laughing harder at dialog written by an algorithm.
Japanese people making an acknowledgement noise for every word you say, and feeling way too validated.
Reading RPG-style text and imagining somebody making a grunting noise every time a letter appears.
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59min
August 17, 202043. You Vs. The One Your Mom Told You To Worry About
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Lords:
Alexander teaches math at the college level, which has been quite an experience the past few months.
Jonah makes music for video games, for example Pony Island.
http://works.rip/
Topics:
TI-83 games. Specifically, Tie Fighter / Bobsled / Indy500.
The jazz fusion act that inspired all video game music.
This is the concert we refer to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBD1_mrRUIk
But these are the specific T-Square songs included in the episode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZaUPGjjA4c
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRRmA1I3UNY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6V3KDQh9DVI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYie77YHkns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EWI_%28musical_instrument%29
"Pronounced EE-wee also known as a robo-oboe"
This particular Adventure Playground seems to imply the purpose of the nails is to allow children to build things. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adventure_Playground_(Berkeley)
Wikipedia in different languages has different opinions on stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture-bound_syndrome
Quill asks: "My name is [name] and i'm here to say [...]" rap cliche can be dated back to a 1940's Chiquita banana commercial"
https://youtu.be/RFDOI24RRAE
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/whomst-among-us-let-the-dogs-out/
http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME05/Oldsweetsongs.shtml
Jamming at full leisure speed.
https://jsenzel.itch.io/old-friends
Cartography and meteorology on weirdly-shaped fantasy worlds.
https://imgur.com/a/AFwvAoB
The Doctor Who theme was created before widely available synthesizers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75V4ClJZME4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkIEkLww3lg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0aflcF0-ys
https://goodak.weebly.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide-predicting_machine#/media/File:099-tpm3-sk.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_KLF
https://freshonthenet.co.uk/the-manual-by-the-klf/
Microtopics:
Using only the funny TLDs.
Trying to figure it out as you go.
Getting seriously into online homework grading.
Learning the weird object-based Perl they use for checking homework answers.
A podcast with a larger than normal demographic of math teachers.
The most accessible way to develop very small games.
Whether Tie Fighter / Bobsled / Indy 500 is one game or several.
Swapping games over the audio port.
Adding a line from Cool Runnings and renaming your racing game to Bobsled.
Remaking the entirety of Pokemon Red in a TI calculator.
All real world work being done in ways that would get you expelled if you were still in college.
Commissioning your high school classmate to make a bowling minigame in TI-Basic.
A thousand years in the future when nobody knows where TI calculators came from or how they work, but they're still the only calculator allowed on standardized tests.
Jazz fusion's towering influence over video game music.
Thinking a work is wholly original because you have no context for its inspirations.
Playing a riff from Kirby's Dream Land in a solo over Chick Correa's "Spain."
A band fronted by duelling wind controllers.
Having fun exploring and jumping on things.
Jumping into any part of a three hour concert and hearing a water level.
Japanese video games' sense of mystery benefitting from the American ignorance of their influences.
Deliberately exposing children to risk in play.
Rigorous safety procedures pushing back against incredibly unlikely outcomes.
Small children being basically indestructible.
48 hours of sitting in a room with fans blowing on you, and you're a ghost.
Getting a lot of nosebleeds and hearing everyone's pet remedy for nosebleeds.
Trying all the nosebleed remedies and ending up with a bunch of cool hobbies.
Your favorite nosebleed remedy being dipping your french fries in the chocolate shake, not because it stops the bleeding but because it's delicious.
Wikipedia's surprising plausibility.
Reading Wikipedia and believing things on it even though anyone can edit it at any time.
Private services that seem like they really ought to be a branch of the government.
The pre-history dark ages from which we have no mind uploads.
Each of the Rice Krispies elves singing a verse about their onomatopoeic sound.
Grandmaster Flash watching that Chiquita Banana commercial in the 40s and being like "someday I'm gonna be a rapper and bite that one line."
Tracing a Miami Bass chorus back to a football chant.
The Cool S and the Epic of Gilgamesh being of similarly obscure origins.
The intense frustration of not being able to tell the difference between writing a song and remembering a song.
The damning similarities between "Yesterday" and "Georgia on my Mind."
Music lawsuits being decided by juries of non-musicians.
A Midsummer Night's Dream containing a performance of the Greek play that Shakespeare ripped off when writing Romeo and Juliet.
How to pronounce Ludum Dare.
Taking the weekend to do a game jam and making a game in about four hours and then deciding to watch a movie and relax.
Acrobats with extreme control of their bodies, except for time management.
Learning to scope on the fly by doing game jams.
Starting with a bouncing ball no matter how big your game idea is.
Doing an entire company's worth of git merges and everything collapses into a steaming heap.
Joining a game jam as a scrum master.
Putting separate minigames together into a single game.
Having no idea how to estimate the time it takes to do tasks you do every day.
Making a spreadsheet to find out whether you're making a new web site for your Fall class.
Playing Frog Fractions 2 to find Alexander's chess jam game.
A problem with no fully satisfying solution but hundreds of partially satisfying solutions.
Peeling an orange and then try to make the peel as flat as possible.
What the day/night cycle would be like on a donut planet.
Trying to imagine the political machinations informing the cartography of a fantasy race.
A tide chart for if you have two moons and you're inside a donut.
Land-biased maps where the land is displayed intact but oceans are cut into pieces.
A map displaying any given straight-line path from the front of a penny to the back.
Unwittingly making merciless caricatures of Mr. Lincoln.
You vs. the one she told you not to worry about vs. the one you told her not to worry about vs. the one your mom told you not to worry about vs. the one your mom told you to worry about.
The performance of the 1963 Doctor Who theme.
Doing what feels like interesting work enabled by modern tools and finding out someone did similar work 100 years ago using much more primitive tools.
Cutting audio tape into microscopic strips and rearranging them into interesting sonic textures.
A weird proto-physical synth non-synth thing.
Moving your hand in physical space with no visual reference like a chump.
Artists doing laborious work with primitive tools when they could've just waited 100 years and it would've been so much easier.
A phone app that you take photos with but you have to wait three days after you finish the roll to see the photos.
All the joy of constraint and none of the headache of actually working with 8-bit hardware.
Inventing the math and physics to predict the tides as you're building your tide-predicting machine.
Writing a song about how to get a #1 single and then doing it.
Having a bunch of hit singles and then burning the money you made.
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1h 5min
August 10, 202042. Refrigerator Roy, or Stephanie I'm So Sorry
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Lords:
Elizabeth is not on the Internet but plugs http://oyate.org/, which puts historically accurate books in the hands of Native American children.
Erica is already on the roof of your car and plugs Glittermitten Grove, a game which is full of surprises https://store.steampowered.com/app/536890/Glittermitten_Grove/
Topics:
I'm going to have to ask you to leave the goat outside: driving the bookmobile in rural Washington.
Bookmobiles as a center of rural life: https://news.wsu.edu/2015/04/08/the-world-on-wheels-bookmobile-the-center-of-rural-life/
"Every time we avalanched from one end of the stage to the other, the Unabridged Dictionary would come too" and other hazards of driving with books, from Mark Twain’s "Roughing It": https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3177/3177-h/3177-h.htm#linkch03
The Ellerbe Lawnmower Races: https://www.yourdailyjournal.com/sports/72886/ellerbe-lions-club-hosting-local-race-saturday
Hot Saw: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Saw
Arguing with your husband about the insects in your fridge.
The tiny moth that haunts Erica’s fridge: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gracillariidae
How do you pick an effective charity?
Erica's effective charities:
American Civil Liberties Union: https://www.aclu.org/
Southern Poverty Law Center: https://www.splcenter.org/
Natural Resources Defense Council: https://www.nrdc.org/
Doctors Without Borders: https://stories.msf.org.uk/rescue/index.html
Page Ahead: http://www.pageahead.org/
Okapi Conservation Project: https://www.okapiconservation.org/
Erotica in the public library.
Elizabeth says: "The best way to find the erotica in your library is to use the subject headings in the [WorldCat] catalog [https://www.worldcat.org/]. The easiest way to do this is probably to search the catalog for '50 Shades of Grey' or some other erotic novel you know is in the collection, select the book to open up it’s library record, then scroll down to the subject headings and select 'Erotic Fiction.' That should bring up everything in your local library system. If you’re looking for a particular kink, I suggest searching for a reading list on goodreads, then checking the world catalog, located at WorldCat.org to find the library copy closest to you. Remember, even if your library doesn’t own a copy, you can still request an inner library loan- just call the branch nearest to you and ask for help. :)"
Menage series H.O.T. Cops: https://www.goodreads.com/series/60473-h-o-t-cops
Hot cops, the gay erotica series: https://books.google.com/books/about/Hot_Cops.html?id=z_4Gp2msCZIC
A real Tingler: Unicorn Butt Cops Beach Patrol https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/24896554-unicorn-butt-cops
Hiring assistants (for field biology) and then trying to live with them.
The Bowerbirds Hymn for a Dark Horse, written during an otherwise unproductive field season: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3JoUAJv82I&list=PLOJWuc3CN303oJ_TuSjU1C4J03uAGWlgv
It's all tied up with memories of living in the Rocky Mountains for me, but it's a very North Carolina album. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yf1v9_ZOtY&list=RDv3JoUAJv82I&index=2
The Bowerbirds get their own details wrong interview: https://redefinemag.net/2009/bowerbirds-band-interview/
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is not just about being neat: https://greatist.com/live/what-is-ocd-not-a-neat-freak#1
"[Passengers] always run to the side when there is anything to see, whereas a conscientious and experienced steamboatman would stick to the center of the boat and part his hair in the middle with a spirit level," and other wisdom of evenness from Mark Twain’s "Life on the Mississippi": https://www.gutenberg.org/files/245/245-h/245-h.htm
Microtopics:
Breaking format.
Representing Native Americans with integrity and dignity.
A video game that is full of surprises.
A baby who wants string cheese so much he pulls the entire handle off of the refrigerator.
Little walking chaos machines with a penchant for string cheese.
The story of why you don't have a phone.
Dying of dysentery because of string cheese.
Really getting the soap deep into that charging port.
A giant red school bus but instead of seats it has bookshelves.
Bookshelves with seat belts.
A very serious version of the Oscar Meyer Weinermobile.
A small town with a population of 300 where nobody sees each other except for once a month when the bookmobile visits.
A literacy earthquake.
A therapy goat that doesn't have any paperwork because you just discovered that being around the goat makes you less anxious.
Spreading hay all over the conference room and letting the guinea pigs loose.
Guinea pigs who are not embraced by the community at large.
Goats and libraries being natural enemies.
An enormous encyclopedia flying at your head every time you hit a bump in the road.
Small children encircling the Bookmobile and chanting because they are excited for books.
Lust for literacy.
Removing the governor from your riding mower and driving it over an obstacle course at 90mph.
Dividing your lawnmower races into weight classes.
Souping up your eight foot chainsaw and every child in town immediately crying when you turn it on because your Hot Saw is so loud.
Taking your three year old to see Jaws.
Sleeping through Alien (1979) as a six month old shaping your creative direction forever.
Buying a corn dog the length of your femur.
A corn dog that is so long that you can't hold it and put it in your mouth at the same time.
Putting down a blue tarp because it's Washington and everything is done with blue tarps.
Covering a tarp with dishwashing liquid and then putting kids in full body rubber tubes and goggles with slug antenna and making them race.
Making your slug race medal out of a metal that is constantly slimy.
Negotiating getting a minifridge with your future roommate.
The special kind of organism that can overcome a plant's defenses to live inside of it.
A moth living in your fridge and your husband is like "that's not my moth."
Not being able to release your refrigerator moth into the wild because you don't know that biome it came from.
Finding out what parts of your diet you share with the moth in your fridge.
A symphony of Roys.
The ant colony that has entirely taken over the bathroom who are all named Roy.
The amount of biomass required to observe you pooping before you'll get embarrassed.
Giving a Lordy award to Refrigerator Roy.
Whether what a given charity uses your money for is even that effective in the grand scheme of things.
Not feeling the need to donate to the charity of the week because you've already given money to an organization addressing the systemic causes of the problem.
Receiving more donations in a week than you have in the past 10 years and not having any idea what to do with the money.
Giving money to the folks in the office passing the hat around, then finding out that they're using the money to go on vacation.
Grocery stores gauging your level of disposable income by asking you to make charitable donations at checkout.
Libraries shifting from providing people books they ought to read, to providing people with porn.
Judging porn by its cover.
Recommending Hot Cops without reading it yourself.
Bodice rippers written in the 90s starting a romantic relationship with a rape, but modern bodice rippers depicting explicit conversations about consent.
Treating every request with dignity because if you have a cranky day you immediately lose the trust of the community.
A middle-aged woman from a conservative community trusting you enough to ask for porn recommendations.
A feud in the garden club about the etymology of the Purple Prussian Potato.
Coming in every week to ask the librarians how the Purple Prussian Potato got its name when it predates Prussia.
A librarian getting through the terrible parts of their job so they can focus on the ridiculous potato question somebody asked.
"Unicorn Butt Cops Beach Patrol" doing what it says on the tin.
Having to sleep in the same tent as your field assistant for months, but not being able to be friends with them because then they won't take orders.
Calling a friend who is a manager at a food processing plant to ask for advice on de-conflicting your field assistants who are constantly blowing up at each other.
Hiring field assistants to measure bird populations for eight months, but instead of counting birds they write a critically acclaimed album about the North Carolina landscape and wildlife.
All these problems going away if you just had a budget to hire people.
Having to carry twice as much water because the adrenaline jockey rushing ahead of you thinks he won't need any water.
Measuring plants for 14 hours a day.
LI-COR machines that measure leaf respiration.
Coming back from your field work after six months and your friends gave up on you because they haven't been able to call you on the phone.
The exhaustion of having to be in charge all the time because you live with your employees.
Refusing to go to town for pizza because you can't afford to be friends with your employees.
Realizing you're becoming somebody's dinner party story.
Developing OCD in your first quarter of college and your roommate moving out because you don't have any coping strategies yet.
Your time to blossom and find other weirdos like yourself, except it turns out even the weirdos don't want to know you.
Discovering that you are crazy in your first year of college and then having to figure out how to navigate this country's broken mental health system while crazy.
Maintaining totally symmetrical stimulus on the left and right sides of your body.
Steamboat captains obsessed with navigating exactly down the middle of the Mississippi river.
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1h 15min
August 03, 202041. Non-Euclidean Christianity
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Ryan is @RyanIkeComposer on Twitter and @RyanIkeAudio on Instagram and is probably not working on Skyrim 2?
Tyriq is FourbitFriday everywhere and really wants to finish Catacomb Kids.
https://www.ckgame.net/
Topics:
What's a fandom you're not a part of, but kind of wish you were?
Pointless Automatons
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/04/opinion/future-scooters-central-park.html
https://www.strandbeest.com/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HitchBOT
http://www.tweenbots.com
Please help reconstruct this lost pun: "vegan jazz standards" with nutritional yeast
Mallow asks: "how do you grapple with / think about your legacy? (things that sprang to mind included the relevant timeframe, obligations to the future, how/what people inherit from their ancestors, and how (self-)censorship is a way to cut off a legacy)"
Consistency of idiolect
Disfluencies providing value to the listener: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000300.html
How can we appeal to Gen Z so when they take over we aren't executed along with the Boomers?
Microtopics:
Clapping just because it's fun.
A trainwreck of three people talking over each other.
Being in a corridor and punching a weird alien.
Topic thirst.
Pokemon Snap making you even more of a pariah, if that's even possible.
Throwing apples at a Snorlax until it wakes up, like the shitty kid at the zoo.
A reverse body snatcher situation, where you're the only alien walking around in a skin suit.
Enjoying a game more if it doesn't involve collecting things.
Going to a free R&B concert every Sunday.
Going to a white small town Lutheran church which was boring and lame.
The organ coming in for particularly high-energy moments.
Somebody telling you that you are inches away from going to hell in the same basement that they just had an alcoholics anonymous meeting four seconds ago.
Having to worry about all your atheist friends going to hell.
Non-Euclidean Christianity.
Refusing to put anything in your ears to make the music be less music and going deaf for three days.
Big moving contraptions that resemble some sort of life form made out of shafts of PVC that wander along the beaches.
Having no purpose other than to exist.
Having made so many things extinct that you feel obligated to fill the ecosystem with weird new robots.
Sentient scooters running wild in New York City.
An adorable robot that can only roll forward and relies on passers-by to navigate.
Automations existing wholly outside of the human sphere.
A battlebot that got loose in the forest, a ramp rolling around the forest floor flipping over pinecones.
Wanting to believe that battlebots are real so badly that you forget that they have RC drivers.
A robot with a nuke or at least a flail.
A village of Rube Goldberg machines triggering each other forever.
Listing jazz standards except replacing one of the words in each title with "nooch."
One of those jokes that you construct for 17 people to get, but those 17 people really appreciate it.
Slipping in the shower and the last thought in your head before you die is the game of the jazz standard that makes the best nooch pun.
Not being sure whether an answer to your question is possible but proceeding under the assumption that it is.
Not allowing yourself to die until you know the answer.
Carrying around the answer to your life's question in your wallet so whenever you're ready to die you can read it and the paramedics will find you crumpled on the floor holding a note that just says "The Girl From Ipanoocha."
Just wanting to be a person who has a finished game.
Being driven to finish your current project so you can start the next one.
Realizing that just because you made a promise to finish one project, you're allowed to do other things too.
The projects that anyone can come in and finish vs. the projects that will die with you.
Not having the attention span to finish a big project unless you owe it to somebody.
Having some realizations right here on the podcast.
Convincing yourself that the thing you want to do can fit as part of your larger project.
Making music and never playing it for anybody because you're just making music because you enjoy it.
All the great artists of the past having had a record label or a church they were beholden to.
Michelangelo just deciding "this ceiling looks wack, I'm gonna fix it."
Thinking of your unpublished works as increasing your posthumous clout.
Putting your unpublished works in the attic because that's where people find posthumous art.
Selling one album to somebody in New Jersey in your twelve year music career.
Starting a patreon for people who want to support your main work and putting only unrelated works behind the patreon paywall.
Uploading yourself to the cloud and making jam games forever for an audience of nobody.
Adopting new phrases into your lexicon and letting other ones vanish.
Adopting the vocal mannerisms and vocabulary of people you hang out with.
Needing a phrase that means "diggity dang" but replacing each one after six months as you get sick of it.
Talking to someone who doesn't use "umm" or "like" and instead just pauses for the same amount of time, and never being sure if they're done talking or if they are about to headbutt you.
So-called "disfluencies" like "umm" and "uh" providing value to the listener in that they signify that the upcoming idea is more complex.
Why everyone talked so fast in the early 20th century.
Op-eds from Victorian times complaining about how young women are constantly saying "prithee" and "perchance" now.
Needing the revolution to start soon because the boomers are about to die of old age and then the guillotine falls squarely on Gen X.
Boomers writing op-eds about how Gen Z hates Gen X and millennials too, in hopes of inventing a generational divide that they're not on the wrong side of.
Giving the next generation instructions on how and why to destroy you.
The age segregation in the American school system resulting in most people knowing only people their own age for much of their lives.
Cultural generations shortening as cultural change speeds up, until twins born minutes apart are on opposite sides of a war.
Starting an Instagram to try to connect with the kids.
College costing either zero or infinity dollars depending on the letter your last name starts with.
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1h 11min
July 27, 202040. I'll Show Them... I'll Invent Superman!
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
John
Biker Chicks Tier List. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1591151119
Jesse
https://twitter.com/thefringthing
Topics:
Canadian Heritage Minutes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm
YouTube playlist of Heritage Minutes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCWANopglXI&list=PL1848FF9428CA9A4A
List of Heritage Minutes on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heritage_Minutes
What are your tips for collaborating with people with a higher or lower skill level than you?
Are we allowed to talk yet about how for decades all 3D games were incredibly ugly
https://twitter.com/BlazeHedgehog/status/1247200134057717760
The website I build in high school & college is lost to the ages, or: how to reconstruct memories of your past without external records
The lost Willie Brown records
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shellac
Willie Brown - Future Blues: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=An9rC8olaVY
"Grandma Blues" cover (prank?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5F9xhKLJbXs
PBS History Detectives episode about Paramount Records: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKQbZV4lQk4
Microtopics:
Being a playable character in Frog Fractions 2.
Ranking every Biker Chick from worst to best.
Regretting not having more Canadian Lords on the show.
Still making your TV PSAs even though nobody watches TV any more.
The big robotic articulating arm on the space shuttles.
That time Quebec was going to quit Canada.
A group shot with one teen of every ethnicity and gender configuration.
Reenacting the time someone told the creator of Superman that nobody will care about Superman.
Canada's revolting safety PSAs.
Hanging maple syrup for treason.
The biggest man-made explosion prior to the invention of nuclear weapons.
Celebrating the people who people who became successful after leaving your country.
Trading on the low-key anti-Americanism that is part of the Canadian national identity.
Taking a 45 minute break to worship the military.
Deciding that an idea is important and jamming it into the brain of millions of people.
Doing your best to enjoy yourself even though you are the worst musician at this particular jam session.
The high pressure world of game jamming.
The anxiety of waiting to be picked for a sports team.
Trusting your collaborators.
Not being a mentor so much as a friend who is around to answer questions.
Feeling like you failed your tutoring student but he was pleased and passed his course, so probably it was fine.
The ongoing war between R programmers and Python programmers.
Making your favorite programming language tolerable by totally replacing the syntax.
The smoke effect in Super Mario 64 looking like the MS Paint graffiti tool.
Goldeneye slappy hands.
The difficulty of going back to the video games of the Ugly Period.
Playing old video games on an unreasonably large CRT TV that you can't move by yourself.
Using modern technology to remove the texture filtering from Nintendo 64 games.
Conditioning gamers to desire the next step in graphical realism.
An epic story with three CDs full of cutscenes.
The old movie connoisseurs who want to see only the best examples of terrible stilted 1940s acting.
Making a video game in the mid 00s and having to support both SD and HD aspect ratios.
Moving your web site from Geocities to a cooler hosting provider in France who then stops hosting web sites because of a change in French law.
A gap in your personal history where no written records exist because they were on the early internet.
Letting a web site expire because you built it on old technology that your hosting provider now charges extra to support.
A government form asking you to remember every place you've lived for the past fifteen years.
The threshold for memory sticking.
What we would do with our missing histories if we had them.
Allowing yourself to remember a period in your life and then putting it in deep storage.
The object as a record of a moment.
Dredging the river near the defunct Paramount Records factory in Wisconsin, in hopes of finding pre-war blues records.
Old blues music now being exclusively the province of rich white boomers.
Writing and recording a fake Willie Brown song to prank record collectors.
Recording blues albums so you can sell phonograph cabinets to Black folks who can finally afford nice things.
Your record company being unable to obtain shellac during World War 2, so you go back to making chairs.
Training a neural network on old blues records to recreate a song using the single shard of the shattered shellac record you found.
Finding shards of different shattered shellac records that happen to fit together, and mashing them up.
Digitizing LPs by putting them on a flatbed scanner.
That time a news broadcast showed the QR code of someone's Bitcoin wallet on screen and someone immediately emptied it.
Cutting a new key based on a photograph of someone's key ring, when it's way easier to just break a window.
Recovering ancient room ambience by analyzing the striation on ancient pottery.
Breaking a code by beating the decryption key out of somebody and not having to read any cryptanalysis white papers.
Putting fake information about yourself on Spokeo as part of your personal ARG.
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...more
1h 12min
July 20, 202039. A Delicious Mushball
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Shane is a Jesuit Regent who used to make video games.
https://twitter.com/OptimistPanda
Donate to the Jesuit Refugee Service: https://jrs.net/donate
Nathan makes games mostly about jumping and shooting 2D monsters.
https://twitter.com/MommysBestGames
http://mommysbestgames.com/
Topics:
Beforeigners (Norwegian TV show about refugees from different historical periods showing up in present-day)
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASr0n5LnWnU
Curating your child's entertainment so they grow up with good taste
I spent half an hour watching someone solve a Sudoku and it was amazing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4
Brandon asks: "Taking care of children vs taking care of pets"
Other jobs game designers would do well performing, after they leave game dev
History of changing worldviews -- not just Darwin, but things like the Big Bang and Continental Drift were originally seen as crackpot fringe theories
Microtopics:
Saying your names at the beginning of the podcast and activating your wonder twin powers.
Quality inventive gameplay-driven entertainment.
Doing an earnest plug for once.
Figuring out how to make games for someone other than gamers.
Your game dev heroes being in their fifties and chasing success they had in their twenties.
Taking a vow of poverty and annoying off your wife and child.
Needing to find a patron because your art is not commercially viable.
No longer having your finger on the pulse of indie games.
Assuming the internet will be all over a particular TV series but somehow there are not endless memes about it.
Vikings apparating into modern Oslo and and solving a murder mystery.
The show about Vikings solving a modern-day murder mystery somehow not incorporating The Immigrant Song.
The American remake of Beforeigners where it's still about vikings so the protagonists can be white.
Finding out that a game is only four hours long and asking if it could be two hours instead.
Introducing video games to your child in order of release so they develop a taste for the classics.
Figuring out how to introduce your child to the Internet without ruining them.
Installing an internet proxy to protect your child from depraved porn by replacing it with videos of normal people having normal sex.
Today's teens playing Bushido Blade and discovering that it has a pocket sand button.
The classic game history situations.
Wanting your child to like all the hobbies you think are boring.
Watching a man repeatedly astonish himself at his own ability to solve a puzzle.
Feeling like you are in conversation with the puzzle designer.
Watching a movie over and over again.
Taking the smallest possible step when a problem seems impossible.
One of those Master Class videos if the person was discovering that they were a master while making the video.
A five year old taking the family car to California to buy a Lamborghini with the $3 in his pocket.
Feeling your family tree stretching out forwards into the future and behind you into the past.
Watching your child grow agency and opinions and knowing it's your responsibility to shape them.
You and the cat enjoying each other's company while the cat doesn't die.
Your kid doing something bad and everybody looking at you.
Cheering when your child goes down the stairs correctly.
Game design teaching you to see the world as systems.
Studying economics at an academic level and feeling like you're turning our game design skills inside out.
Trying to convince people outside of game development that being a game developer has taught you anything meaningful.
Being failed up to a level design role because anyone can scrub out a tile map.
Level designers getting more respect when it started requiring technical chops.
Needing a web page and getting your nephew to do it rather than paying an expensive consultant, because frankly 99% of people can't tell the difference.
Trying to write your own CSS renderer because you don't want to just make it a web page.
Trying to convince your friends that you were once a big shot in the game dev world.
The Societate Jesu having an incredible faction progression.
Giving people progressively cooler titles instead of raises.
Getting an extra year of being a priest before you die.
Doing a cool thing while you're alone and getting bummed out that nobody saw it.
Trying to throw fruits and vegetables as close as possible to the ceiling without actually hitting it.
Hating doing marketing so much that you invent a project where the whole point is that it's a secret and you'll never promote it.
How South America kind of fits right into Africa.
Hypothesizing continental drift and the scientific community telling you to fuck right off.
The lost continent of Lemuria.
Fringe scientific theories only gaining traction when existing scientists die.
Taking comfort in the fact that how people in the past were wrong but what we believe now is definitely correct and we'll never have to change our minds.
Being presented with contrary evidence and dying on the spot.
The most delicious bolus.
Eating cookie dough rather than ruining it by putting it in the oven.
The variety of textures and flavors of drinking milk and then eating cookies. (Not dipping the cookies in milk.)
The worldview shift that leads you to change your handle from Cynical Panda to Optimist Panda.
Playing Bomberman '93 with your nine year old and eventually having to explain to him that 93 is your dad's age.
An alternate-history Spock-with-a-goatee video game console.
Living in your house for 30 years and suddenly discovering three additional rooms.
Buying a NES and SNES classic even though you've been playing those games in emulation since the 90s.
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1h 9min

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