Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

March 21, 2022126. Toast is a Fruit
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Lords:
David
Erica
https://https://twitter.com/YerrikTRB/
Topics:
Two plant families for the apocalypse
I choose you, Marine Phytoplankton! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phytoplankton#Diversity
I choose you, Apiaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apiaceae
I choose you, Poaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poaceae
I choose you, Fabaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabaceae
I choose you, Rosaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosaceae
I choose you, Liliaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liliaceae
I choose you, Rubiaceae! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubiaceae
Alternation of generations
https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/beauty/ferns/reproduction.shtml
I can't believe I primed myself to think of 80s horror by bringing up Ghoulies 2 and subsequently didn't think about Gremlins.
I got a Fitbit for Christmas. It keeps track of how many hours of the day I've taken 250 steps to encourage me to get up from my desk frequently. I've been getting up and walking three minutes at the end of each hour and continuing to walk for three minutes at the start of the next.
Ode to Spot
https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Ode_to_Spot
Stonecoin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
Things that have not gone wrong yet
Microtopics:
Uncovering the fatal flaw in the premise of the topic.
The Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
Marrying someone from the Frog Fractions Extended Universe.
Picking out insect photos that are still on the Internet.
Posting photos to social media as a way of convincing yourself that you have a good life.
A stranger's child slathered in various foodstuffs.
Using social media to curate a list of everything you were upset about today.
Getting a concerned phone call from a family member when you post angrily about world events and changing your phone number.
Which two plant families you'd take with you into the apocalypse.
Touching Cow Parsnip and then running for shelter.
Taking grass with you into the apocalypse so you can keep eating rice.
Drinking coffee and eating onions in the post-apocalypse.
Vegetables that are technically fruits.
Whether croutons are classified as a fruit or a vegetable.
Leaves vs. fronds.
The organs that produce spores.
Finding two distinct forms of plants that always appear together and eventually realizing that these are the same species.
Evolving cocoons when it would be way easier to just evolve a second mouth.
If humans didn't reproduce directly but instead spored little goblins who ran off to fuck each other and had human babies and we were like "ugh those goblins again"
Ghoulies 3: Ghoulies go to College.
Hard-Sporing Citizens.
A health metric invented by pedometer salesmen.
Muscles contracting to pump blood throughout your body.
The differing benefits of running vs. walking.
The evolutionary benefits of gigantic asses.
Linking intention to activity.
Walking around saying quotes from Rick and Morty and the hospice nurse just assumes you have dementia.
The racism hormone.
Why it's so satisfying to dismiss ideas that are different from your own.
Curing dementia by googling the things your grandma says and realizing she's just referencing TV shows nobody's seen in 30 years.
Two marathons looking backwards through time.
Subvocal oscillations.
The best 45 seconds of TV of the 80s.
The guy who writes all of Data's dialog regardless of who writes the rest of the screenplay.
The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem.
A love poem about tensor algebra.
The bar for what constitutes a love poem to tensor algebra.
Writing a poem about a cat to the cat even though the cat doesn't understand.
Web sites eating each other.
Living inside the Library of Alexandria as it burns down.
An alternative hypertext protocol similar to The HTTP and The Gopher.
Nerdy high schoolers who exist today.
Whether any given internet protocol is for the olds.
Worrying about all of these cryptos.
Watching the Olympics streaming on NBC and discovering that not only does TV still exist, it has ads for cryptocurrency now.
The Island of Yap, part of the Federated States of Micronesia.
Coin famousness scaling by size.
An oral history of money where everyone just remembers who paid for what and how much money everyone has.
A flat exchange rate of inches in diameter to US dollars.
The stability of a currency that is not currently being speculated on.
The guy who wrote jokes for Obama.
Presidential speechwriters paying attention to internet memes and incorporating them into the State of the Union address.
The inflection point in 2014 where suddenly everyone became much more aware of every bad thing in the world.
A comprehensive list of everything that has gone right.
The number of languages in which you have not embarrassed yourself this year.
Inventing ink live on the show.
An enormous 3D printer of clear domes.
Baked slimy okra.
Baking a couple dozen of your sporulated forms and their gametophytes into a pie crust, who immediately start singing when you cut the pie open.
A headlamp named Petzl.
Why is daddy laughing?
The magic summoning word of little boys.
An armchair fan of podcasts.
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1 hr 7 min
March 14, 2022125. Your Mom Won't Cry
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Danielle
https://www.twitch.tv/damaplaysgames
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2Fq8V-L5rfNvGa-DAQBPsg
Alexander
https://twitter.com/adlleong
Topics:
Learning to figure skate as an adult
Cursed mnemonics we never question
What was the first thing you remember buying online?
"Chi dara fine al gran dolore? L’ore" from House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
My daughter has strong beliefs about the afterlife
I don't actually want to speedrun anything, I just want to learn how they do it
Once a year or so my last friend who still lives in San Diego sends me an email from his phone number. The email is blank but there's a text file attached to it saying something like "hey are you still alive?" Everyone has a friend like that, right?
Microtopics:
Spin Rhythm XD and the Spin Rhythm XD level design community.
Learning to figure skate.
How to convert axels into 360s.
Figure skating in a half pipe.
Clockwise and widdershins figure skaters.
Putting a hair dryer in reverse so it blows cool air.
Using Zamboni technology to invent the ice skating treadmill.
Covering a carousel with ice and then realizing you don't need the carousel part because you can just skate in a circle.
The Beginner Effect.
Finding time for hobbies.
Cursed mnemonics for remembering how to spell "because"
Using eggs.
The extremely entertaining mnemonic that Jim uses to remember his social security number, but can't share with anyone.
Man Very Early Made Jars Stand Up Nearly Perpendicular.
My Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Noodles And Used Soft Eggs.
Elephants Go Ballistic Doing Flips.
Idioms translated from other languages.
Whether it's good for a stone to gather moss.
When it stopped being a big deal to enter your credit card information on a web site.
A piece of wood that tells you what the weather is going to be.
Buying a cassette tape from a friend you met on IRC by mailing them an envelope full of cash and having to pester them about it before they send you the album because just because they're good at making techno doesn't mean they're good at running a record label.
Speculating about how many game developers actually made a living from shareware in the 90s.
Cashing a check on the bus.
Asking your mom to go to the 7-11 to get a money order so you can mail it to a guy in Australia and he ends up not being able to cash it because it isn't an international money order.
Buying a lot of used books on half.com
Reading and discussing a poem in Italian.
The percentage of Topic Lords listeners who have read House of Leaves.
Removing all the outer layers of the onion to get to the SCP inside.
What events did and didn't happen in various layers of fiction in House of Leaves.
Listing every known building not designed in a Brutalist style.
Device 6 by Simogo.
50 Years of Text Games.
Print-on-demand procgen novels.
Creepy endless houses.
Loving babies and wanting to be a baby.
Inventing reincarnation from first principles.
Where six year olds learn about the afterlife.
Getting really worked up about the flu shot you're going to get in eight months.
Hearing a gross thing described but not being disgusted because you can't visualize it.
ADHD and Autism Tiktok.
The "rubbing styrofoam" diagnostic for ADHD.
Learning all the speedrun skills but never actually doing any speed runs.
Learning to do an ultra to get this strawberry.
The nega-set of games that don't have a bunch of stressful violence and also don't have a bunch of overbearing dialog.
Writing an album and then designing a level around each song.
Bisexual lighting.
Queen Latifah showing up to ask if you want to skip to the next checkpoint.
The kind of friendship where if you ever talked about anything but music the friendship would immediately collapse.
Known iPhone protocol weirdnesses.
Why is Apple like this?
How to set a custom ringtone on your phone back before everyone put their phone on vibrate.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
March 07, 2022124. Call Me Da5id; Da4id Was My Father
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
Xander
Topics:
The year was 1998, and choosing a name with numbers in it was a completely normal thing to do.
http://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres_are_switching_written_numbers_when_scanning
How do you overcome the inertia of old familiar tools when trying to learn new ways to do the same thing?
I confused Daniel Day-Lewis with Lou Diamond Phillips for years, thinking they were the same person. I'm not sure why but my hypothesis is that it's because they both have three names and they both have that "lou" sound in there.
If you really have to know: https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/dtxjg/til_that_limp_bizkit_actually_means/
Sweater Weather: a Love Song to Language, by Sharon Bryan
https://www.writersalmanac.org/index.html%3Fp=5543.html
I'm gonna try to make a bartop arcade machine with unconventional controls, I think. Anybody have any tips or suggestions or anything? Also more generally: How about that meatspace creativity? Anybody make anything that occupies real world space lately?
Ithkuil: the inscrutable conlang that was co-opted by Russian Buddhist cultists
Microtopics:
Making games and albums.
In the pluggable range.
The history of Byzantium.
The weird mysteries of what happened, what we know, what we don't know, and what didn't happen.
An average of all the books that don't exist.
Taking the average of two books.
The square root of negative Garfield.
A lossy compression algorithm for plain text.
The most information dense thing you can change.
LLLL Cool J.
Beware the LLs of March.
All the numbers you might append to your user name.
Wanting or not wanting to be like Xeno746.
Social signaling by putting numbers in your user name or by not putting numbers in your user name.
Role-playing having sponsors because all your idols are influencers.
Using the term "Information Superhighway" unironically.
Visually decorating your name.
Putting card suit emojis around your name and then appending "-chocolate"
Encoding your identity in emojis and adding them to your user name.
The double inertias of trying to move plus leaving your comfort zones.
Jim's advice for learning a new tool.
Working with a tool the way it's intended to be used.
Petting a cat the wrong way as a metaphor.
Actors we confuse with each other.
Hearing two bands on the same mixtape and getting them confused for the rest of your life.
Refusing to explain a gross band name on the show.
Trying to figure out what sex act your parents named you after.
That Tom Lehrer song that's just a list of all the elements, except it's all your favorite turns of phrase.
Making a melody so dissonant and weird that the listener dissociates from music and just hears a sequence of pitches on its own merits.
Having a tongue party in your mouth.
The Sultan of Swat.
Loose Lips Buck Up.
Lifty Nifty, Bright and Shifty.
Making a bartop arcade machine with unconventional controls.
The kinetic feel of throwing and catching a flywheel.
Flipping a series of switches in quick succession.
A totally arbitrary control scheme that would be weird and interesting for one game but it's been used for thousands.
Designing your pinball table so that players nudge your pinball cabinet a bit but not too much.
Reasons for subtle variation in how pinball tables play.
Buying banned pinball parts at the pinball black market.
A pinball simulation of shooting cans with a gun.
The seesaw lever thing for going along the rails.
Bowling with a shuffleboard.
Being over monetizing your art.
Non-Functional Bullshit.
Non-Fungible Game Experiences, such as when the party you're DMing tries to intimidate NPCs with a severed leg.
Hobbies that feed your family.
Making sure your game remains mysterious by ensuring nobody cares enough to solve them.
Simmering on a thought before you express it.
Crunchy conlangs.
Idiosyncratic Oblasts of Russia.
Telling your boss at the DMV that you need time off to go speak to Russian Buddhist alien abduction cultists about the obscure conlang you invented.
Taking something functional and making something non-functional out of it to find out what it would look like.
A Dewey Decimal System for individual words.
Inventing a categorization system for all human knowledge that's extremely focused on maritime concerns.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 2 min
February 28, 2022123. Go Up, You Bald Head!
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Hallie
https://twitter.com/Hallie_9000/
https://twitter.com/watchyourrass
https://twitter.com/HouseRulesCast
Chris
Topics:
Playing card finishes
Esper Quinn adds: "As a decades long Magic: the Gathering player, card condition, handling and protection is something I've actually spent a lot of time thinking about. There's a guy on YouTube whose whole claim to fame is that every couple months he reviews every new sleeve (both inner and outer, for double sleeving), deck protector, carrying case, binder, etc. for card protection. Magic cardstock has actually remained consistent since 1993, though inks and printing techniques have shifted a lot over the years. In fact, new foil cards are way worse than old foils; for some reason, they tend to curl the card if not kept in a 100% humidity free environment. The curling can get so bad that sometimes judges won't allow them to be played in tournaments, since they count as marked cards!"
If the words religion and faith didn't exist, how would we talk about them?
Good Bones, by Maggie Smith
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/89897/good-bone
Homemade hair conditioner / masque is basically mayo
Microtopics:
Ripe and ready topics.
Making guests record their own obituary in case they die between when an episode is recorded and when it's released.
Watching Your Rass.
A podcast about people who form their identities around games, specifically Cribbage.
The Slim-Line B-7 "True Linen" Finish.
Switching out topics on the fly.
Practicing a magic trick in front of a mirror and fooling yourself.
Positive feedback loops.
Curling -- The Thing Noodles Do.
The benefits of cheap hobbies.
A Clarke Sweetone with a conical bore.
Bicycle Backs.
How quickly you wear out a deck of playing cards when learning close-up magic.
The most interesting card finishes.
Cardistry.
The Bicycle Air-Cushion finish vs. the Cartamundi True Linen finish.
E-llusionist Magic Supplies.
The best brand of cards to do the Faro shuffle with.
Two pieces of paper surrounding a cardboard core and enveloped in a plastic finish.
Peeling apart playing cards and finding a tiny map of Germany.
Something that comes from how people are.
Going to Blorp every Sunday morning.
Students with different educational needs.
Wanting to participate in a group that sets the rules but feeling really strongly that you shouldn't follow one particular rule.
Doing a lot of moderating of teen forums.
Conceiving of religions as fandoms of book series.
Being a super fan of someone who spoke out against elevating individuals above their individual experiences.
Eliezer Yudkowsky's Dune.
Scientist clergymen exploring the world.
The fossils of the language that we speak.
Dictionaries as the chalk outline around language's corpse.
Disney buying the Star Wars franchise as a metaphor for the Roman empire converting to Christianity.
Christianity before it was cool.
Talking dogs.
Comic book puppy trash acts.
The story from Kings where children make fun of a man's bald head and the man prays to God for help who sends bears to maul the children.
Being surrounded by hundreds of children making fun of your bald head.
Things that you thought were good but if there are ways they can be bad you want to hear about them.
Selling the world to your child.
Having a world view and having to learn to live with it.
Stones Georg.
Presenting the world's best self to your child.
Which end of the cow is the milk end.
The gestalt of a cow, which moos and creates milk.
Writing a poem live on the air by saying "dah" whenever you can't think of another word.
What happens if you shampoo but don't condition your hair.
The FBI coming to your apartment to arrest the free radicals making your hair frizzy.
Dropping mustard from your hair care routine because your head smells too much like a sandwich now.
Putting bean water on your head.
Hairdini.
The guests you can't find on Topic Lords.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
February 21, 2022122. If You're Cold, Your Oatmeal is Cold
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Maxx
https://mechcem.itch.io/
https://www.instagram.com/maxxyamasaki/
Ananda
https://www.instagram.com/a__gabo/
Topics:
Rare videos of European Hamsters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cf06WJQ4FnE
Would you rather eat: the last dragon or a human being?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hufu
What happened in the editor culture that made medical and mathematical Wikipedia absolutely useless for lay readers, and is there anything we can do to fix it?
All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace, by Richard Brautigan
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/09/weekend-poem-all-watched-over-by-machines-of-loving-grace/245251/
Esper Quinn adds: "I grew up very techno-utopian in that particular Y2K post-history stripe, where everything will be Extreme Sports and Peace Summits for the rest of existence once we can get everybody hooked up to 'broadband'. I loved the idea of the singularity, humanism, the maybe naive idea that once everybody can just understand how everyone feels by way of livejournal posts or brain implants we'll all be friends and start working together on things. I still have a lot of love for that era, and my dream video game concept I tinker with every couple months is an extremely Y2K-aesthetic snowboarding-ballsport called CYBERXROSS. I had heard this Brautigan poem before, though a bit late for that era; I want to say it was around 2012, just when Facebook (and post-bubble Silicon Valley Capitalism) began to really bare its teeth and sink into the world's throat, shattering the idea of technology as a Total Positive entirely. Oh well. I still love the poem."
Diatomite and our weird relationship to tiny cursed skeletons.
Making fermented foods. I want to make stinky tofu.
Microtopics:
Choosing to believe when somebody last ate oatmeal.
Outside oatmeal vs. inside oatmeal.
The wide world of breakfast goops.
Writing your to-do lists in calligraphy.
Minutes from the meeting where you are every member of the board of directors and you agree with yourself that you should remain CEO.
Jodorowsky's Hamster.
Videos of aggressive wild hamsters that they don't want you to see.
Ethical hamster breeders in your area.
Shipping a hamster in a box with a potato and when it arrives there's no potato but there's a potato's worth of feces.
The kind of habitat that pet hamsters need.
A German naturalist's hamster cage.
King Solomon's Ring, by Konrad Z. Lorenz.
Importing an entire pond into your house so you can observe it more efficiently.
A cheese shop in a small town staffed by the same person who runs the travel agency and the general store.
Imitation cannibalism hoax "Hufu."
Whether Winston can say good night.
Whether a three year old understands the ethical calculus behind eating or not eating the last dragon.
Eating raw dragon and getting Mad Dragon Disease.
Whether biomagnification would be worse in dragon or human meat.
Whether Wikipedia pages for difficult ideas should have tutorials.
A series of date nights in which you make Powerpoint presentations about armadillos for each other.
The Seven-Banded Armadillo.
A detailed technical description of the scoots on the Seven-Banded Armadillo's fourth moveable band.
Volunteer opportunities to study Paraguayan fauna.
Spending four years in Paraguay discovering and describing a new species of armadillo by going to the museum where they are stuffed and mounted.
The relief of discovering that other people fail at things too.
Mutually programming harmony, like pure water touching clear sky.
A cybernetic forest filled with pines and electronics.
The counterculture era of hippies and computers.
Solving every problem.
Making a machine to water your plants and going back to sleep.
Making art that is deeply alarming but also incredibly pleasant.
Violently bright emotions for short moments.
How to recognize utopias from the outside.
Fixing a poem you almost like and posting the result on Instagram.
Crypto bros perishing in the wildfires of this cybernetic ecosystem.
Exploring and coming to terms with the complications of the field you were uncomplicatedly excited about as a kid.
The set of questions that don't have words attached to them.
The Mossman Lock Collection.
Branches of technology that we didn't take.
Using a slab of diatomaceous earth as your bath mat.
The multivarious uses of the skeletons left behind after the primordial seas dried up.
Surrounding your pantry with ancient dry skeletons so when ants step on the skeletons they think "oh gross, this skeleton is so dry" and they go away.
Pouring nitroglycerin into ancient tiny skeletons to invent dynamite.
Scrubbing the exposed parts of your skeleton with much smaller skeletons.
Late night snack vendors.
Sarcophagus tofu.
Preserved organ dishes.
The difficulty of acquiring stinky tofu during a global pandemic.
Fermented meat products.
How to tell when your stinky tofu turned out wrong.
Drinking the band-aid beer.
Paying a nominal fee for a lab to DNA sequence your mystery meat.
Comparing sludge notes.
Adding kimchi to pizza sauce.
Drawing the Instagram logo out of diatomaceous earth on the floor and going to sleep in it and waking up and now you are Instagram and whenever someone uploads a video they're uploading it into your head.
Support Topic Lords
59 min
February 14, 2022121. A Delicious Treat for Your Brain's Ass
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Ryan
https://twitter.com/ryanikecomposer/
https://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio
Chall
https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall/
Topics:
What position do you sleep in and based on that which of us on the podcast is going to die first?
Are limes overpowered?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrus_taxonomy#/media/File:Citrus_tern_cb_simplified_1.svg
Why do we have fingernails? Sure they protect the nail bed but the nail bed wouldn't need protection if the nail weren't there. Are they really just claws but shitty?
This poem written on a whiteboard, author(s) unknown:
https://imgur.com/a/dDRjZuX
https://cafemom.com/entertainment/kourtney-kardashian-travis-barker-relationship-timeline/valentines-day-Kardashian-Barker
Microtopics:
Reading someone's grocery list and trying to decide if it's ironic.
The importance of firing Jimmy Wales.
Trying to make a garbage fire better but it's not better yet.
Filming yourself becoming the villain so that the documentary won't be disappointing.
Topic Sloars.
Not really knowing what a sloar is except that you can roast in the belly of it.
The place for Buster-Heads.
Sleeping the wrongest.
Going to your dentist for sleeping advice.
Sleeping in a position to minimize the number of times per hour you stop breathing.
The sleep paralysis demon not being able to sit on your chest because you sleep on your side.
Sleeping in a nanofiber web suspended from the ceiling.
Whether sleeping cuddling a pillow is good or bad for various bones and organs.
Famous Racist Pillow Peddler.
Doctor Wu says you're going to eat shit.
Sleeping like the number four.
Lying in entirely different positions at the beach because you don't want anyone to know how you sleep.
Trying the number four leg and letting Ryan know how it goes in the morning.
A night of making cocktails using limes.
Deciding that limes are too powerful and we need to put them in their place.
Garnishing your beverage with cornflakes.
All citrus fruit descending from the mustard plant.
Demanding that every foodstuff be as delicious and useful as limes are.
A pile of nasty pasta mistake.
Chocolate pasta that you boil and put on your ice cream.
A Wikipedia rabbit hole of citrus fruits.
The three ur-fruits that control the fate of every citrus fruit you've ever eaten.
An open faced lime growing in the wild.
Optimus Lime.
Thinking of a pop culture pun and asking the bartender for it because it's probably a beer.
Extremely lumpy limes.
Filling city hall with gorillas so they'll eat all the snakes.
Hot dog fingers that are homogenous all the way to the end.
Manatee toenails.
Where whales keep their finger bones.
Awesome ladies with orca fingernails.
An extremely informative image search that you don't recommend to anyone.
All the gross ways Takis can fail.
Origami claws.
The state of the spit valves on those Cool Ranch Bugles.
Sweet and Salty and Chocolate and Peanut Butter Bugles.
Ultra-Powerful Butter Flavor.
Coming out of your bunker after 200 years and not knowing who Batman is but seeing the "ultra rare cheeto shaped like batman crying" and thinking "wow it's like a man, but also a bat, and he's weeping because he'll never solve his parents murder"
Making NFTs of every character in FF2 minigame Biker Chicks and then trying to get all the Kickstarter backers who sent in photos to buy their own face, because if they don't someone else is going to own their face.
Selling visitation rights to your collection of rare Cheetos.
Rare Cheeto NFTs.
Buying Cheeto earrings and becoming Cheeto Earrings Guy.
Something in red that was where "garlic bread" is -- erased.
Painters buying big slabs of bathroom stall at craft stores so they can paint on it.
Keeping your finger on the pulse of garlic bread related poetry.
The dark recesses of Jim's Travis Barker poetry headcanon.
A traveling japesman who modifies any exposed whiteboard poetry to be about food.
Where you do your business after dark.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
February 07, 2022120. The Mouse is For Hippies and Slackers
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Daniel
https://twitter.com/dmullinsgames
Jonah
https://works.rip/
Topics:
Chop socky – when are we gonna get that energy back into the world media producing environment? Also listening to movies instead of watching them.
The Resident Evil series
Flettner airplanes
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlmvHfIAszo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K6geOms33Dk
Double feature:
The Eel by Ogden Nash https://poetrysplash.tripod.com/ogdennash2.htm
The Lama, by Ogden Nash https://www.madisonpubliclibrary.org/poetry/poem-a-day/lama
Indonesia: The 4th most populous nation on Earth. You never hear about it
Watching stuff "going into it without hearing anything about it" -- how do people actually do that? Also me walking into a movie theater.
Microtopics:
A website for dead people who will pay $12/year for as long as they're dead.
Hummus.
Whether Inscryption is more popular than hummus.
Starting a topic with an anecdote.
Walking around a city with the audio of a movie playing on your headphones.
Watching a foreign film subbed because you're too cool to realize there's a subbed version in the settings.
What you notice when you strip the visuals out of a visual medium.
Porting Doom to ears.
Whether blind people have their own Steam.
Going through several iterations of reinventing how you shoot zombies.
A woman scaled up 2x on every axis.
Brazil's first new console after the Megadrive.
Porting Resident Evil 4 to the Megadrive.
Jim's entire history with the Resident Evil stories.
A goofy Zelda boss but it's in a horror game for some reason.
Turning doing donuts in a two car garage into a boss fight.
Being bad at puzzles that aren't supposed to be puzzles, like how to use this can opener.
A Flettner airplane made out of KFC buckets.
The Magnus effect.
The downside of an airplane that drops like a rock if the engines lose power.
The world's first portable steamroller.
An airplane that is heavy enough to create its own runway.
Putting a dog in the Youtube thumbnail.
A poem that was short even before you cut the last 25%.
A joke poem that becomes even more of a joke when you cut out the punchline.
Dad giving you permission to memorize the shortest possible poem.
Web design nostalgia.
Hypertext protocols that predated HTTP.
How HTTP ate every other hypertext protocol's lunch.
This thing that was invented in the 70s.
Tetris the Grand Master, and how it would be better with mouse input.
Hypothetical keyboard-only interfaces for audio editing software.
A keyboard macro scripting language thing for transcribing sheet music.
How to pronounce "Latex"
Pronouncing the typesetting puns.
Being surprised when a country has almost as many people as the United States.
Gamelan.
Being Indonesian and knowing more about Indonesia than most people.
Whether modern day Greeks get annoyed when you try to engage them about Greece 2000 years ago.
Thinking you know where New Zealand is but not.
Growing up in the US and spending all your geography points on remembering which state is which and not having any left for the rest of the world.
Talking about yourself in any person.
Why nobody reviews Frog Fractions games.
Soda speak.
Divesting yourself of places you might get spoiled.
Middling Marvel Movie Buddies.
How to make choices without having enough information to decide.
Totally wasting your plug.
The premier place to send answers to the Inscryption ARG.
Counting the number of syllables in the sentence that claims to not be an ARG clue.
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1 hr 2 min
January 31, 2022119. Book 'Em, Dildano
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Jenni
@horsewizrd
Chris
Topics:
The coming schism between Wordle purists & Wordle metagamers
Amazon kindle fantasy best-sellers is ruled by niches that nobody outside of kindle or Royal Road users have heard of
https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football
In high school I knew a guy who, one time, managed to use up all the ink in a ball-point pen. The ink tube in there was just totally empty, it was astonishing. Nowadays whenever we run out of olive oil I get the same thrill. I did it! I used all the oil!
The Tiger, by Nael, Age 6
https://twitter.com/826DC/status/966009025090473985
Why can't Wizards or any of the clones figure out how to make D&D fun to play at high levels? Why is this an unsolved design?
Zardoz & Barbarella have similar energy except Zardoz comes across as sincere & Barbarella comes across as falsely ironic to hide the sincerity
Microtopics:
Jim's sip of tea.
Making your husband Sleepytime tea so he goes to sleep while recording the podcast.
Making a video of yourself arguing with your cooking teacher to post to social media.
What is a Wordle?
The Wordle sheriff joke.
Muting the green block emoji so you stop seeing all the Wordle bragging.
How to improve Wordle's psychic damage output.
Wordle except instead of five letters it's five abstract concepts.
Paranormal reverse-harem.
Pricing your paranormal reverse-harem book at $250 and discounting it 99% so users are like "paranormal reverse-harem for $2.50? I can't afford not to!"
All the topics you can't sell books about on Amazon and all the coded tags you use to sell them anyway.
Whether Amazon will ban your book as containing bestiality if the genitalia is on the human side of the minotaur.
A horse with human intelligence with a penis growing out of its back, and whether anyone has sex with the penis.
The liminal space between bestiality and reverse-bestiality.
Arguing in traffic court that your car is just a collection of atoms and the distinction between those atoms and those of the world it's traveling with respect to exists entirely in our minds.
Doing a crime just to go to Horse Court and see that horse judge you.
Admitting that you are That Guy.
Sending your pens to the pen dimension.
Graduating from high school and discovering that the weird lump on the knuckle of your middle finger isn't just you having a weird skeleton.
Writing good handwriting.
Refilling the salt pig from the salt cylinder.
When the sauce is burning and the only solution is to salt it right now.
Going to Horse Court to decide which of you bought the pepper grinder.
Popular with the robots.
Whether the poem works on a third level.
Writing the best poem.
Viral Poetry Sensation "The Tiger."
An "invisibility cloak" which is just an empty hanger.
A magic supply store where half the items are just jokes on the purchaser.
The adult poetry workshop where you drink a glass of wine and transcribe "The Tiger" by Nael, age 6, then take it home and show it to your parents.
Trying to look at the thumb tips your friends are going on about.
Braving Omicron to buy a thumb tip.
Hypnotizing a napkin.
A magic trick where you make a rubber band disappear, but only for yourself.
Aging two years while dead.
Whether Nethack's difficulty curve is better than D&D's.
A weird combination of spells that is broken in a non-numerical way.
What the wizard did when the spaghetti-os were on too high a shelf to reach.
Letting the players fight Thor even though you know they'll figure out a way to kill Thor.
Thor swinging his hammer and killing you without having to roll any dice because Thor doesn't have stats.
The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance.
Godlike wizards feuding over who took the leftovers out of the office fridge because they ran out of real problems to solve.
The Dying Earth series by Jack Vance, except with football.
That Insidious Beast by Zack Parsons.
Instructions for a fruit.
There is no Antimemetics Division, by qntm.
Counterfeit Monkey by Emily Short.
Sean Connery in a red diaperkini.
The big head that floats around and vomits guns and explains how guns are better than penes.
When they invented the concept of copies of movies.
Your deal with the devil where if you fail to make Lord of the Rings you have to make Zardoz, but you succeed you get to make King Kong.
Scantily clad rocket people.
Barbarella lying in a thumb harp being yelled at by a dude wearing a Dalek and reading from a piano roll.
Learning how to draw by looking at promotional shots from Barbarella.
Mario fanfiction through the lens of Cyberpunk.
Whether they have sarcasm in Japan.
Tom Nook slapping his own nipples for ten hours.
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1 hr 4 min
January 24, 2022118. The Dinosaur Poetry Gap
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Eitan
https://www.firehosegames.com/
Xalavier
https://twitter.com/WritNelson
Topics:
When I was a kid I hated gym class. Now I'm kinda sad that no one forces me to play sports on a semi-regular basis
How long is it polite to stare at a person before it gets weird for you, specifically (assuming they haven't seen you).
When asked why some people find her music to be spiritual, Enya explained that "It's the amount of reverb we use."
"Eighty Million Years Ago," by Bill Watterson
https://sites.google.com/site/mrkoofloradale/common-lessons/language/languagemorecalvinandhobbespoetry
Untrue facts about human anatomy
Things that have been on your "I'm gonna do it" list for 10+ years, that you will in fact probably never get around to doing
Why do cows have four stomachs but only one butthole?
Microtopics:
Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator.
As many digits as you can imagine.
The trope where you change costumes at a party to make people think you are more than one person.
Your game's extremely long title breaking Steam's web site.
Petting dogs using a different hand each time.
A cat person who made a game about dogs.
A giant person insisting that you go outside and play sports.
When seagulls are full grown but they haven't realized they're adults yet so they're still begging other seagulls for food.
A teenager realizing that they are now bigger than their parents and could beat the shit out of either of them at any time.
Remembering that you enjoyed basketball in grade school and deciding to play basketball as an adult and realizing that the only adults who are still playing basketball are a thousand times better than you are.
Observing and fearing that you will be observed in turn.
Trying to predict who will decide you are a creep.
Deciding whether you are a creep vs. letting others decide.
Watching an elderly person for as long as they are still alive.
Staring at someone forever in a nursing home and nobody gives a shit because there's no staring time limit in a nursing home.
PvP for Perverts.
Finding white papers to determine how long it's safe to stare at strangers under various conditions.
Knowing everything you need to know about someone after seeing them for 1/10th of a second.
Paying doppelgangers to do good deeds so people instinctively associate your appearance with good deeds.
The Serious Batmans.
A guy who is the Penguin who was raised by penguins.
Figuring out how to make everybody feel every emotion all the time.
Your own voice being very small but the voices you hear being really big.
Listening from inside the Gregorian chanter's mouth.
Finding a dungeon in which to sacrifice your goats.
The Church of Satan asking to put their goat on display.
Picking the most terrifying name for your rationalist philosophy.
A 10 year old putting the Transformers movie on hold at the local library.
A 30 minute toy commercial that somehow got run on television.
Watching Optimus Prime die.
A surprisingly queer road trip impacting robot-kind through time and space.
Transformers: More Than Meets The Eye.
Chasing after a glowing cube that's going to give you power.
Edison making documentary about electrocuting an elephant to prove that DC power is dangerous.
Falling in love with a pigeon with laser eyes.
The Christmas story where bloodthirsty reindeer are stalking Rudolph and he hides in a closet and they spot the light glowing under the door.
Giving your child the talk about where Fortnite skins come from.
The Santa FPS where your gun is all the reindeer and instead of muzzle flash Rudolph's nose glows.
A ripped Santa Claus running over Peter Parker.
Fore and aft serrations.
Dawdling by the candy shop and being devoured.
The terrible secret of Ragnasaurth's bones.
Taking back the soul of the nation via Tyrannosaur poetry.
TikTok? More like "tick tock it's time to write some dinosaur poetry."
How neurotransmitters definitely don't work.
The volunteer who proved that if you uncoil all the blood vessels in the human body they will reach the moon and back seven times.
All your serotonin languishing under a heat lamp because whoever runs the diner in your brain is a real dick.
How to convey facial expressions via sound effects in an audio medium.
Gymnasts getting hiccups by rotating too much and having to rotate the other way to cure them.
Not being old enough to have a bucket list.
Fried butter.
Waiting on tenterhooks for when it's ok to eat fried butter again.
Deciding on your deathbed to take a bath in butter.
Learning enough about tubes that you can hack the IV bag whenever you want to get more opiates.
Two-socks McGillicuddy.
Whether the guy's name is Fried Jesus or Fried Jesus.
When you saw one set of footprints in the sand it was because you collapsed thirty miles back.
Loss-leader churros.
A really ethical company in a sea of Wal-marts.
The pros and cons of having four stomachs in sequence vs. four stomachs in parallel.
The cow not being impressed by the extra buttholes you installed at first, but later thanking you when it needs to propel itself around in microgravity.
How much of your surface area needs to be butthole before you are yourself considered a butthole.
A 76% butthole being.
If the new butthole is shaped like a smiley face, does that mean the cow is happy?
Professional with a capital p.
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1 hr
January 17, 2022117. Your Self-Inflicted Artistic Purgatory
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Brad
@bradspendlove on Twitter
Check out https://twitter.com/so_writing, especially episode 6
Quil
Topics:
What superpowers like shrinking and invisibility suggest about how we conceptualize reality
Is there a point where you can call the silly things you make "art" and not feel like an absolute tool about it? Not a debate about what is vs is not art. But I feel weird if I make a bunch of bad music and call it "my art"
Stinky meat and stinky feet
http://www.stinkymeat.net/
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hamilton-if-it-was-sung-entirely-by-adam-sandler/id1382504305
Hope is a Thing with Feathers, by Emily Dickinson
https://poets.org/poem/hope-thing-feathers-254
Visual novels are neat, but I'm never sure whether they belong in my video game queue or book queue and therefore I rarely play them because I always think I could be playing a "real" video game or reading a "real" book
Cortical homunculus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cortical_homunculus
https://www.etsy.com/listing/509252848/angry-little-friend-taxidermy-monster
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homunculus_loxodontus
Microtopics:
Accidentally agreeing to be on the show.
Doing nothing in Chicago.
Computer creativity.
Making an argument that a computer program is creative.
"Honey I Shrunk The Kids" as a philosophical text.
Using a set of mirrors to give yourself 360 degree vision.
Imagining additional colors.
Assuming the listener knows what cellular automata is.
A platonic dude in the way you would conceive of a dude.
Trying to find a game that uses cellular automata but it's occluded by search results for Conway's Life and Nier Automata.
The top four Live 'em Ups.
A game that left the world when Flash stopped being a thing.
Putting tremendous creative effort into a project but not being willing to call it your art because that would be pretentious.
Calling your bad music your "works" because they make ye listeners despair.
How you conceptualize the things that you make.
Attaching a label to the semiotic representation of a thing and thereby changing the nature of the thing.
Making a song in the amount of time the song takes to elapse.
Having done NaNoWriMo once and then being able to tell people you're working on your second novel.
Wanting to have the identity of being a creator.
Something that is cool to be and do.
How to make art that feels meaningful when you are surrounded by art that is way better than yours.
Ancient handwriting samples.
Doing psychic damage by singing the wrong words to a song.
Leaving a plate of meat in your neighbor's yard.
Deciding it's time to stop your science experiment and go to a doctor.
A storied history of people screwing up their bodies for the sake of internet points.
The melding of art and science.
Piss Christ and other works that are intended to annoy.
Trying to elicit a strong emotion but not caring too much which emotion it is.
What it takes to know Bennett Foddy.
The idea that heavy metal bands were trying to get listeners to kill themselves.
The euphemism treadmill and the inverted euphemism treadmill.
How come there are still kids if kids keep growing up??
Slurs in various stages of reclamation.
How there are stupid people out there and they're not bad people, they're just stupid.
Jabroni origins.
Replacing all your pejoratives with "ridiculous."
Mario running up the infinite euphemism treadmill saying successively more watered down swears.
The purpose of comparing an emotion to a bird.
What is a poem? A pile of lines about a bird.
Conceiving of hope as a bird sitting outside your window and waking you up way too early.
Enclosing poems in letters to your friends.
Making art for a person and sharing it just with that person.
Reading "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" in the Sick Sad World announcer voice.
Reading poems in a sarcastic voice and analyzing how it makes you feel.
Reading Emily Dickinson poetry in the voice of somebody begging for their life.
Whether Poe's Law is the sarcasm thing.
Whether Machiavelli was doing a bit.
A performance of the entirety of Hamilton in the Adam Sandler voice.
Getting famous for singing "All Star" and having to sing it for the rest of your life.
The realm between video games and books.
How the phone would be the perfect venue for a visual novel if it weren't for all the phone games.
Approaches to consuming media.
Watching half a movie and then falling asleep and eventually realizing that now there are at least five movies you've watched half of.
A library book from 2019 that you still haven't returned.
Mapping the size of your body parts to how much space they take up in your brain.
A Cortical Homunculus Funko Pop.
Shrimp Obama Magnet.
T-shirts about adrenal cancer.
Angry Little Friend Taxidermy Monster Sculpture Oddity.
Too good an idea to just let be a joke.
Symbolizing the emotions of people who wait at the dentist's office.
Max Rebo, the popular jizz-wailer.
Seeing the two tabs but not knowing the difference between them.
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1 hr 3 min