Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

January 10, 2022116. I Don't Trust Toilets Any More
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Laura
https://twitter.com/lmichet/
https://lauramichet.itch.io/tallbagel2
Rachel
https://twitter.com/rachel_sala/
http://wildhonesty.com/
Topics:
You are walking down the street one day when your hand transforms into a stapler! For the next 60 minutes, your hand is a stapler from the wrist up. The next day, at the same time, your hand transforms into a stack of post-it notes. Soon, you realize that at noon every day, your hand transforms into one of the objects in your office desk drawer. You discover that anything that goes into your desk drawer has an even chance of replacing your hand for one hour at noon every day. Your desk drawer has a volume of 4 cubic feet and is 12 inches wide, 12 inches long, and 4 inches deep. What do you put into your desk drawer? (If there is nothing in your desk drawer, your hand will vanish for one hour.)
What's the best way to hang out with friends long distance?
My childhood impressions of Zelda 1 were apparently formed during my twenties.
"A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts," by Wallace Stevens
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/21816/a-rabbit-as-king-of-the-ghosts
If there was one food you could delete from Earth forever, what would it be?
What should be a flavor of soda that isn’t?
Microtopics:
Tall Bagel 2: Avocado Hardtack
Awkward family dinner simulators
A topic that has been percolating in the bucket since its inception, getting better every year.
Safely scratching your butt when your hand suddenly turns into a gun.
Making a list of safe things for your hand to spontaneously turn into, like a hawk.
Putting a hawk in the drawer so at noon your hand turns into a hawk, then putting a hood on your hand so it thinks it's night time.
Putting a sandwich in the hand drawer so your hand turns into a sandwich at lunchtime.
Spending a lot of time at a computer drawing cartoon animals.
Finding out how sandwiches feel about being eaten.
Hypothetical questions that make you want to figure out how to break the laws of thermodynamics.
Keeping your magic drawer away from evil government researchers.
Knowing what is like to be a cannibal and to be cannibalized, because you chew your fingernails.
The consequences of replacing your hand with a gold coin.
Fully mediating which of your actions are perceived by the other party.
Fighting a large poisonous skull with your friends.
Talking to your friends for an hour without any awkward lulls.
Topic Lords, Jr.
Finding out that a cherished childhood memory could not possibly have happened the way you remember it.
Receiving photocopies of the Legend of Zelda manual months before receiving the game itself.
Reliability of witness identification.
Weird encounters that you tell as stories to your friends.
Becoming Samuel Pepys.
Acquiring most of your impressions of world history via what Victorians thought were important.
Remembering too much about your life and wishing you could forget.
Lying to your future self in your journal.
Benevolently gaslighting yourself.
That monument of cat, the cat forgotten in the moon.
Sitting with your head like a carving in space.
Poetry that is angry at the concept of making sense.
Letting the syllables wash over you.
The inversion of the power relationships you would expect in nature.
Whether Wallace Stevens had peers.
Correctly identifying 100 poem authors in a row.
Caring a lot about American poetry until you discover video games.
basketballsintrafficcones.com
Notes towards a supreme fiction.
What green things the cat was thinking about.
Being perceived by a rabbit as tall as outer space.
Writing for an assumed audience who doesn't exist any more.
Recommending enjoying being weirded out.
Deleting ranch dressing because it's just weird vinegary mayonnaise.
Getting that fake garlic grease zone going on
Screaming in people's ears all night.
Misspeaking and having to commit to what you said.
Throwing your back out by sitting in a relaxed position.
Gag sodas.
Soda flavor innovation.
Pebble ice.
Savory beverages like sipping vinegar or a cup of warm broth.
The fakest orange you ever did taste.
Being disempowered at dinner.
A relatable game where you can steal food from other people's plates with your long tongue.
Support Topic Lords
59 min
January 03, 2022115. Intrusive Thought Simulator
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
CisHetKayFaber
https://twitter.com/CisHetKayFaber
https://www.upturnedtable.com/weekly-podcast-2/
Dan
https://strangecurrencies.org/
https://twitter.com/SC_Reviews_Dan
Topics:
Learning something by doing, so you don't understand the theory behind it
The lonely realization that most people don't really care that much about the things that make you unique (not depressing) (I promise)
Shrek got a ten minute standing ovation at Cannes in 2001.
The Jabberwocky
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42916/jabberwocky
Cursed connectors and adapters
Vacationing alone is extremely efficient
Seeking Mr. Eaten's Name
Microtopics:
A name that has nothing to do with wrestling.
Upturned Table.
Topic hunger.
Hearing something and playing it back.
The particular rat-a-tat of that ratio.
The difficulty of making art compelling and simple at the same time.
In C.
A proc-gen song that is different every time you hear it but you have to pick just version to put on the record.
Meeting a group of people who all learned a skill in a certain context and being unable to convince them that you also have the skill but you learned it in a different context.
Not wanting to tell your family that you are trans because they would be very interested.
The dream of owning a board and card game store.
Trying to convince an extremely modest person to tell you something interesting about themselves.
Doing an interesting thing but not making a mental note to tell your friends about it because you never learned to tell stories.
A guy whose family fled a corrupt governmental regime being surprised that you think that's interesting, because he knows hundreds of people who lived under a corrupt governmental regime.
Discovering a viable competitor to Disney.
Devaluing the Cannes Standing Ovation.
The Sarcastic Standing Ovation.
Shepard Tones.
How many people you need to pay to stand and clap to extend a standing ovation indefinitely.
Being the one guy who is yelling at everyone to stop applauding.
Moving the last scene to after the credits roll so that people have to find out who the key grip is to see the whole story.
Reading a game credits list on MobyGames and giving a standing ovation at the end.
Vorpal, manxome, uffish, frabjous and other words that didn't exist at one point but now do.
Understanding the rhythm of language even if the words don't make sense.
Alice Liddel.
A faithful musical TV adaptation of the entire Alice in Wonderland series.
An adapter from pneumatic air to stereo XLR.
Speakers and microphones as adapters between air pressure and electrical signal.
Using a microphone as a speaker and a speaker as a microphone.
The downsides of USB-C.
A sticker with induction coils on it.
Counting the pins on a Famicom cartridge.
How you're supposed to blow into cartridges differently in the United States and in Japan.
Breathing into your NES cartridge to apply a layer of condensation to the pins and improve connectivity.
Dry vs. wet exhale.
Bagpipe to stereo XLR connectors.
A vacation where you go exactly where you want when you want and never need to form a consensus.
The kind of AAA vacation that a 4000 person team of Ubisoft employees would go on.
Spending most of your vacation listening to podcasts in your hotel room.
Going on a vacation in order to scout out potential locations for future vacations.
Walking into a book store and going to the zine section and downloading some bespoke local podcasts.
Asking the concierge at the hotel what podcasts are good to listen to around here, and they suggest This American Life and Radiolab.
A cloud of scenarios that you can choose to interact with.
Whether the Last Constable is really last or whether she's just called that.
Paying for a second candle.
Waking up in the middle of the night to spend the turns you've accumulated so they don't go to waste.
Sailing the Unterzee in a majestic pleasure yacht.
Dreaming about going north.
Breaking into a dentist's office to steak the jar of teeth from the cupboard in the back.
Building up your Obscurity to endgame levels.
Knowing that to solve the mystery you'll need to destroy yourself, and choosing to do it anyway.
Playing the game to get to the text that you're trying to read.
The grindiest content in the game.
Selling your soul to devils and then realizing that you need to get it back so you can destroy it yourself.
Hammering on the button until it tells you where to go.
Whether anyone knows the plot of World of Warcraft.
A great place to discuss topics with people who might become your friends.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 20 min
December 27, 2021114. Memento Maury Povich
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Maxx
[email protected]
Elena
https://propinquity.me/
Topics:
Been playing Celeste recently and I'm real into the themes of conflict with oneself vs acceptance of oneself
The museum of Jurassic Technology and when it's okay to lie to your audience
Human jaw shrinkage
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_jaw_shrinkage
Feeding the Worms, by Danusha Lameris
http://poetrytreeonthecharles.net/2020/09/feeding-the-worms-by-danusha-lameris/
Linguistics of Swearing and Taboo
The weird Mummy trailer with the missing audio: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1jg5YlQuT8
Microtopics:
Getting a lot of calories for your money.
All your amino acids right there.
Superman grabbing the bumper and lifting the entire gestalt of the car.
A "superfood" in the sense of being beyond the concept of food, e.g. antidepressants.
Whether you get better at running events after running events for a decade.
Ultimately reconciling with yourself after making a video game about reconciling with yourself.
A platformer about depression and panic attacks.
The checkbox in a hard game's accessibility options that allows you to give yourself permission to use the disability options.
The 8-way joystick gate on the Nintendo 64 and the Gamecube.
Installing little pigeon spikes on the thumb stick to remind yourself to use the d-pad when playing Celeste.
Iterating when everything you do is slightly difficult.
A mixed record of enjoying platformers.
Putting in the effort to making someone's holy video game genre, such as the scrolling shooter or the masocore platformer, accessible to a non-believer.
A culture of something.
Being unable to process what's going on in a movie so you look up the Wikipedia plot summary mid-movie.
Media-related experiences that you miss out on because your priorities lie elsewhere.
Hating very difficult platformers but also being so good at platformers that you only get mildly frustrated at platformers that are generally considered very difficult.
An art installation that pretends to be a museum.
Visiting a museum and at the end of it being unsure what a museum is.
A glitch in your house where rooms occasionally disappear.
The genre of joke that takes the form of telling a lie, and the failure modes where the listener believes the lie and gets confused, or where they don't realize it's supposed to be amusing and think you're trying to deceive them.
Listening to someone tell a story from their life with growing horror and only realizing midway through that they're describing a dream.
Subscribe to Nitro on Discord and needing to write a SQL query to find the right emoji reaction.
Using a normally innocuous emoji in a way that is not innocuous on this particular Discord server.
Using emoji reactions to replace the parental paratextual back channel of information that body language gives you in a real life conversation.
Whether "human jaw shrinkage" refers to over an individual lifetime or over millennia of evolution.
Human jaws getting smaller not because of evolutionary pressure, but because we aren't chewing tough grains and nuts as much as our ancestors did.
Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety and not realizing it until you're in your sixties.
Not experiencing pain, fear or anxiety so you only feel mild disappointment when you get a cut on your foot and your dog eats your foot while you're not paying attention.
The tickly sensation of yanking metal wire out of the ground.
Recreational anaphylaxis.
Drinking hot tea to burn your tongue so your dad won't be disappointed when you react to incredibly spicy ramen.
The sweetness of apples permeating the pores all over your stringy body.
The feathery tops of carrots.
At what point things become gross.
High and low variance fruit.
Mush that is beyond comprehension.
If going on the bus to work was that chaotic Willy Wonka tunnel.
Getting more reminders of life in your life.
Google procedurally generating a vacation montage of the time you visited a Holocaust memorial, and playing a jaunty tune over it.
Giving people unlabeled interfaces that they subconsciously learn how to use.
Using a fishing rod to hanging a sad mannequin head in front of the lens when you're taking photos that you don't want Google to create a jaunty montage of three years from now.
Ling 269.
What that guy is saying in the weird Mummy trailer.
Pan-Pan the Human Man.
Studying the brain of the guy who can only say "pan," and there in his brain wrinkles you can read the word "pan" in the place where most people have the dictionary etched.
An aphasic situation.
A comprehensive timeline of euphemisms for genitals going back to the 12th century.
A novel mince to your swear.
Practicing minced oaths until they are internalized enough to move into swear storage in your brain.
Finding a stranger in the Alps.
Americans coming back from World War I with a bunch of new slurs.
The Holy Shit Shift, where the offensive part of the phrase "holy shit" shifted from one word to the other over time.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
December 20, 2021113. Only You in Particular Can Prevent Forest Fires
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Danny
https://twitter.com/dannyodwyer/
April
https://twitter.com/aprilsaur
Topics:
Favorite desserts for when it's hot out
The horror of almost being older than Princess Diana
The developer of Abraham Lincolnland has gone on to run a business selling shirts with Vaporwave Abraham Lincoln's Face on them.
http://www.lincolnsoft.com/games/all/
https://lincolnapparel.com/
I Would Like to Describe by Zbigniew Herbert
https://poets.org/poem/i-would-describe
Irish surnames as American girl names
Words that you misunderstood as a child and how that affected your life
Jordan Mechner calling E.Y. Harburg on the phone
https://jordanmechner.com/archive/#2009-11-rainbo
Microtopics:
Priming with a prompt.
Using the Inception noise too much so Christopher Nolan angrily accosts you and you can get his autograph.
A selection of nice suits.
The swirl of the chocolate and vanilla duo.
So classy but also so messy.
The counter with fifty different ice creams in buckets.
99.
A stick of flaky wispy chocolate that you stick into your ice cream.
The two biggest KLF fans in America.
Mid-Atlantic Podcast Time.
Ordering a hot latte in the middle of Summer.
Realizing it's winter and going back into the coffee shop and asking the barista to put your iced coffee in the microwave.
The treat that you would least like to have in the summer.
Hanging your Christmas Pudding from a clothesline.
Hollywood Pudding.
The Devil's Sandwich.
A fancy lad who eats nothing but olives and fig newtons.
Morbid Distance Markers.
Royalophilia.
One princess dies and TV becomes useless for days
The ethical considerations of faking a news segment.
The last time you'll ever think about Princess Diana.
All your dead relatives living in your head.
Never saying your child's name on the internet.
What body part is touching the poison oak in this metaphor.
Refusing to go outside without an EpiPen.
Abraham Lincoln fighting Nazis in the cyberpunk future.
Bringing back beards for presidents.
A 60-page readme about how to run this game in various driver configurations.
Sitemaps.
Selling shirts with Abraham Lincoln's face on them at Milwaukee Marker Fair.
Going full neon.
Covering the entire surface of the shirt with a garish vaporwave pattern.
Describing courage without involving a dusty lion.
Drawing a single original word from your breast, like a rib.
Falling asleep with your hand in a mound of planets.
A fleeting moment of recognition that is often very centering.
Standing at the limits of language.
Word tattoos.
Mostly salt up top.
Describing a moment or a feeling or a concept that is unrelenting in your mind.
Using a trembling glass of water emoji but nobody knows whether you mean anxiety or an approaching T-Rex.
His and Hers Mound of Planets Tattoos.
The Irish guy in the room.
Paying respect to your Irish heritage by naming your daughter "McPhee."
8 out of the top 10 baby names of 2020.
Having a reaction that nobody else is having.
Don't Start Fires mascots.
Thinking that Smokey the Bear is instructing you to start forest fires because you don't know what "prevent" means.
Only you in particular can prevent forest fires.
Whatever flips your boat.
One of those weird European psychological horrors.
Ha-Ha Hollywood.
Wanting information and figuring out how to get it.
John Romero still having the Apple 2's memory layout memorized 40 years later.
Trying to remember if you've done a podcast.
A cat trying to get you to come to bed.
Only grace tweets.
Overwatch boops.
Overwatch: Global Offensive.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
December 13, 2021112. Getting a Lot Of Vengabus Vibes From This
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
JP
John B
https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo
https://twitter.com/vs_everyone
Topics:
Showing "Akira" to someone who has never seen any anime before and telling them, "this is what all anime is like"
https://twitter.com/kbonds420/status/1378850398665125892
Bizarro, Dan Hibiki, Homsar, and other not-quite-doppelgangers/parodies who exist in the same world as their progenitors
https://twitter.com/TheDemoScout/status/1457602338013728769
The Tonkachi Editor
https://glitchcat7.com/the-complete-history-of-kaizo-mario/
"There was an Old Man of St. Bees, by W.S. Gilbert
https://edwardleartrail.wordpress.com/2016/04/16/there-was-an-old-man-of-st-bees/
Microtopics:
Capcom vs. Everyone.
Corpus maintenance.
Death from Seventh Seal vs. Death from Castlevania.
Moms teaming up based on both being tagged "mom."
The philosophy of tagging tools.
Alt-Universe Prompts Bot.
Coming up with a list of every character in pop culture.
The Ryu Number.
Gary Busey playing himself in Hitman 2.
Shattered Shield At Shattered Shield.
Saturday Night Anime on the Sci-Fi channel.
Roger Ebert's favorite early 90s anime.
Anime that is just Cyberpunk C-Span.
Mario's Macross for the SNES.
Evolutionary bottlenecks in video game design.
The Akira Bike Slide Tribute.
A completely ridiculous context in which to invoke the Akira Bike Slide.
Serious war movie guy plummeting to his death.
A generic karate guy with similar moves.
Spoilers for all of Mr. Karate's sons.
Inventing a new protagonist based on a typo.
Meeting a savvy and helpful hologram that is a projection of an AI run by the World Trade Organization, and later meeting the pop star the AI is based on and she's a total asshole.
Meeting the Evil Scooby Doo Gang in the Evil Mystery Mobile.
A story about the mirror people escaping from behind the mirror and it turns out you were one of them the whole time!!
Wholesome Comedy Doppelgangers.
Batzarro, the world's worst detective, who killed his own parents and is trying to solve the murder.
Planning out your Mario mod on graph paper and then typing it into the hex editor with the Famicom controller.
Conlon Nancarrow manually cutting strips of paper out of a piano roll.
Making tiny ROM hacks using the Game Genie.
The Awakening of Tinkerers.
A landmark case in IP law.
Trying out randomly generated Game Genie codes because it's the 90s and you have nothing better to do.
Hacking Game Genie codes to give you even more lives.
Parts of the logic which are scrutable.
Talking about garbage and finding out if it makes it into the show.
Scrupulously avoiding burning cast.
Burning Cast Xtreme Fishing.
A chair with only three legs.
Playing a glitchy video game and reality starts breaking down in front of you.
Dumping computational work directly into the framebuffer.
The episode of That 70s Show that was about circuit-bending Pong.
When things look like they should rhyme but don't.
Robot Carnival.
Rainy weather in San Francisco on this cursed episode of Topic Lords.
Overthinking the poem.
The Uncarrot Tarot.
The clashing colors of slant rhymes.
Metamagical Themas.
Jokes you can play musically.
A disaster episode of Topic Lords.
The Mote In His Eye.
Being here for history.
Support Topic Lords
53 min
December 06, 2021111. Put It in a Vice and Squish It
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Erica
Abby
Topics:
Scale modeling hacks for broke hobbyists
Nobody should live here redux: nobody should live here either
Anal Sampling Mechanism
Wallace Stevens - The Emperor of Ice Cream
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45234/the-emperor-of-ice-cream
Andrei Tarkovsky, game designer
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyzFSsNQYoXBo4zjmTmncoA
https://www.youtube.com/c/SulMatul
Microtopics:
Photoshopping your co-guest's face onto a platypus or maybe it's a beaver.
Wanting to depict someone as having a really excellent body without knowing what that means to them, so you photoshop a swimming trophy into their hands.
The claw beavers use to comb oil into their fur.
An after-dinner lemon.
Memorably embarrassing yourself as a mnemonic aid.
Playing along with someone's schemes to get them to leave you alone.
A cool hacker whose anti-establishment principles drive her to pirate every episode of Digimon.
Differentiating between the real world and the cyberpunk dystopian future by the number of Digimon available.
Painting the peg of a loose action figure joint with clear nail polish so the peg gets a little thicker.
The downtown Los Angeles Gundam shop.
Not being permitted, socially, to carry around clear nail polish, so you get a flask and write "man juice" on it and pour the nail polish in.
Man Juice, For Men Only.
Finding a vice big enough to squish an entire city block.
Desperately searching for how to do something and finding a single forum post from fifteen years ago, with a single reply from the same poster saying "never mind, figured it out."
Appealing to 60 year old men who need something to put in their basement.
When tour wife and kids leave you and your turkey sandwich is dry and lonely.
Ancient web forums that aren't getting any more radicalized because nobody is posting there any more.
The scum of mold you get on top of your pickling brine.
How Koreans deal with moldy kimchi.
Transcending all human notions of gender by both using blush to make your Gundam model look muddy and using a soldering iron to make it look like it has bullet holes.
The ways The T-1000 is female-coded, actually, e.g. taking on a child care role, but the filmmakers clothe the robot in a masculine skin for some reason.
A beaver with a swimming trophy who doesn't want to go in the lake because it's too cold.
Eating your lemons and sitting in the dark of the lodge, as the winter will soon be over.
Whether beavers get pruny.
Why and how to get pruny.
Animals that have hands.
Otter brains: too bigs for their skulls.
Finding out what animals have in store for us.
Living in a town built over a big bubble of petroleum and your neighbor's yard having the cutest little oil derrick.
Rinsing off with distilled water after you shower so you don't get a rash.
Living in a town that has no social scene so on Saturday night you and your friends go downtown and try to track down where that shrimp smell is coming from.
Gas fields flaring all around the city.
A combined oil derrick/Bitcoin mining rig that you can plug right into the ground and forget about.
The ability to voluntarily control defecation.
The sixth sense that's just in our butts.
Taking care of you butt consciousness.
Shitting your pants once and upending all of science.
Whether anyone poops in Rain World.
A cat who is also a slug who is also trapped on the Wheel of Samsara.
Reading a poem and refusing to click on the poem guide that explains what the heck it means.
Approaching poems as inscrutable puzzle boxes where you have to crack the code to even figure out what the hell they're talking about.
Approaching making art as aN opportunity to bore the shit out of your friends and family.
Pulling the theme of a story like a string and the entire story falls open like a sack of grain.
Demanding more delicious curds and dawdling wenches at your funeral.
Needing a weird cow to anchor your painting of a grassy field.
Whether the crowd-pleasers actually have something there. Something other than all the money, I mean.
Making a funny reference to a contemporary TV commercial in your poem about a funeral.
The King of Carrot Flowers.
Busy wrists make for busy minds.
Stanislaw Lem's "Solaris" as the basis for every video game except for Rain World.
Stalker and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
The mysteries of The Zone and why it exists.
The Emperor of Ice Cream of Tarkovsky movies.
Experiencing what is like to live in a non-functional economy.
Being in the company of a doctor piloting someone through a pandemic-ridden city.
Stand-Up Tragedy.
The cheapest way to fame.
Renaming your PhD thesis "Anal Sampling Mechanism" so your advisor will finally look at it.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min
November 29, 2021110. There Will Be a Last Tweet
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
James
https://twitter.com/triplefox
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
Topics:
Nostalgia is a curse
https://bluerenga.blog/tag/adventure-500/?order=ASC
Nonogram puzzles
https://www.kesiev.com/stampadia/
As the exodus continues, all that will be left of the public-facing internet will increasingly be the people too hard-headed or hard-hearted to burn out.
https://inessential.com/2021/10/04/in_case_i_dont_write_here_again
The Village of Reason
https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/village-reason-8055
Instead of writing in a journal, recording the journal on the phone
Microtopics:
Extending your failure through time.
Swatch clock, Swatch clock! Swatch clock, Swatch clock!
Swatch Internet Time.
Counting up from the beginning of time, January 1st, 1970.
The perfect method of keeping time.
A Swatch body horror beast.
The promise of being made of meat.
UFO 50's release date: May 5th, 5050.
Deciding that nobody should feel your least favorite emotion.
Making a new better future without looking to the past for your aspirations.
The world before Later On.
Remembering 80s pop songs way better than when you last took a shower.
Making a mix tape with a song on it about when you last took a shower and sending it back in time to your younger self so this kid will listen to that song over and over and you can finally remember when you last took a shower.
Nostalgia vs. taste.
Trying to replicate your favorite thing and falling to replicate it, but the failure is way more interesting than the thing you were copying.
Adventure 500.
Recreating something you love from memory.
A game jam where everyone picks an old video game they like and tries to recreate it from memory without looking at any references.
Simplifying while depicting by choosing what details to focus on.
An inverted form of nostalgia.
Cloak and Dagger (1984)
Putting product placement of the video game adaptation of your movie in your movie, but then the video game never comes out because it's 1984.
Pepper's Adventures in Time.
All the names of Nonogram puzzles.
Finding out about Nonogram puzzles and deciding to try them and finding the hardest one you can, and after a few days of being unable to solve it you put it into a Nonogram solving program and it tells you this is an impossible puzzle.
The Konami Pixel Puzzle Collection.
When you do and when you don't want to be stultified.
Roguelike Celebration.
Beach Umbrella Games.
Printing out a generated dungeon and solving it like a Sudoku.
Utter not-knowing-where-to-start-ness.
thewebsitethatyougotoeveryday.com
Rolling dice and losing all your chill.
Retiring to the offline colonies.
The potential that you could hypothetically be friends with every cool person in the world.
A person who tweets whimsical things.
A video essay on TikTok that includes screenshots of Twitter.
Trying to make friends by dumping your sugar in the street.
The different life choices you might've made if you had to make friends in real life.
Befriending an ant colony and watching your friend count shoot through the roof.
Trying to wedge a crowbar of understanding into a cryptic poem.
All the ways reading poetry can make you feel bad about yourself.
The actual thing and the shadow it casts.
Taking your hindbrain for a brisk jog around the block.
Needing to play Brain Age for the Nintendo DS before you can understand this poem.
Omitting words from your poetry reading because it's all about the words you don't say.
Whether it is entertaining to learn how to analyze poetry in public.
Q.R. Hand, Jr.
Applauding: too loud. Too scary. It startles the poet.
Terminator, Jr.
Transitioning from writing your thoughts in a journal to recording your thoughts on your phone, to just talking to yourself, as you realize what you actually want to get out of the process.
Trying to remember anything ever.
Collecting art references.
Reading the phrase "mariachi trumpets" in your diary and trying to figure out what it means.
GPS tagging your journal entries so you can retrace your steps thirty years later.
An open source phone that nobody will ever use because there are no apps for it.
A bed contraption that, when the alarm rings, dumps you into your outfit for the day and makes you breakfast.
Writing with your hand maybe two times a year and wondering how much more disused handwriting needs to get before people will be willing to stop teaching it in grade school.
Being told in math class that you need to learn this stuff because you won't have a calculator all the time which is technically true because they won't let you keep your phone while you take the SATs.
How to navigate the internet and discern fact from fiction.
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59 min
November 22, 2021109. Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like Batman Crying
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Lords:
Stevie
Avery
https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/
Topics:
Collectable cheetos on Ebay
https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=rare+cheeto
Japanese websites are stuck in the 90s. Any theories?
https://search.marginalia.nu/
Medieval European and ancient Egyptian philosophy.
Brad asks "Denatured alcohol: alcohol that has poison added to it to prevent people drinking it. What other things do we / could we intentionally pollute to restrict their usage?"
The unusual puzzles of StarTropics.
Microtopics:
Defining poop by its shape.
The lava of the human body.
The Content Distribution Baby growing up into a Content Distribution Man.
An angry internet mob that won't say why they're angry so you just have to fix every problem until they go away.
Legally changing your name to add a silent and invisible Bitcoin logo.
Searching for collectible Cheetos on eBay.
A Cheeto shaped like a lobster claw.
Putting a Cheeto shaped like a cockatiel on eBay for months but nobody's buying so you give up and eat it.
Whether there is a subculture of investors collecting rare Cheetos on eBay or if it's just a subculture of people listing Cheetos on eBay as a joke.
heritageauctionsforcheetos.com
Bidding $40,000 on a Cheeto shaped like Harambe when you have no intention of paying, because the worst that can happen is that your eBay score goes down by one point.
Buying a penis-shaped collectible Cheeto for $1.40 but still waiting on it because it got caught up in escrow.
Bidding on an eBay auction and walking away when you get outbid.
Looking at collectible Cheeto auctions and then eBay won't stop trying to sell you posters of ladies canoodling.
Cheeto misprints and their value on the collectors market.
Arnold Schwarzenegger if his legs were joined together like a seal.
The web sites we visited back before the internet had the power to reach into the real world and strangle it.
A search engine optimized to return pages that are mostly static text.
Loading the bottom of your web page with keywords.
Keeping a designer on payroll so that every few years your interface can alternate between having gradients and being flat.
Asking Jeeves things and he tells you the answers, like a modern day Delphi.
Let's play: Flaming Hot Cheetos or Freezing Cold Cheetos?
A cheerleader pyramid made of butlers.
Scraping Wikipedia and formating the results like a book.
A postcard with a picture of Kim Jong Un saying "Live, Laugh, Love."
Pharaoh culture.
A Canticle for Liebowitz.
Medieval monks stumbling into a bomb shelter.
Making an illuminated manuscript of instructions on how to build a bomb so you can give it to the Pope.
The Learned Bede.
The four dudes in your culture who can write and create original work.
Kingdoms in medieval Europe, centered around the manors of rich noble Romans.
Nearly everyone dying from the plague so all the public servants are in their early teens.
Intelligible Forms.
Aristotelean ideas about science.
Going real alien.
Ultra Rare Cheeto Shaped Like The Venerable Bede.
The first dinosaur of Egypt.
Inventing the razor because of your unsightly back hair.
Waking up from anesthetic to find that the surgeon shaved body parts nowhere near the incision site, "because you're a hairy beast."
First, do no hair.
The Egyptian book of the Dead.
The Egyptian conception of the afterlife, where you go underground and a guy with a crocodile head weighs your heart against the Feather of Truth and if your heart balances, you get to sit in a long line with your male predecessors for eternity, and that's the best possible outcome.
Religions competing to provide the best afterlife.
When we as a species learned to attach afterlife outcomes to ethical behavior, as opposed to dying in battle.
Having a dream once where all the great kings, after they die they go to the House of Dust and eat clay for eternity, and deciding that that's a fact. That's canon now.
The nine parts of the soul.
Being constantly surrounded, your whole life, by monuments to death big enough to see from space.
Adding a scent to natural gas so that you can smell when it's filling your house.
Whether antifreeze is sweet and if so can a cat taste antifreeze.
How one might test whether cats can taste sweet.
Tongue meat analysis: a great way to tell.
The Inverted Qualia Problem.
Asking a cat if it can taste sweet, and the cat asks "what does sweet mean" and you say "sweet my internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth" and the cat is like "I also have an internal experience when I put these white crystals in my mouth."
A video game related topic.
Trying to locate your missing uncle who has been abducted by aliens.
A video game NPC asking you for a password and to find it you can to have to dip the video game's manual in water in real life.
An 80s video game puzzle that requires you to be familiar with solfege to solve it.
How you could get away with a lot more bullshit back in the 80s.
The experience of suddenly realizing that it's the piece of paper.
Going into a portable trailer made up like a cool bachelor pad and noticing that you don't have a reflection in the mirror and upon further examination realizing that the mirror is actually a window into the same room reversed, down to the clock running counterclockwise.
Sneaking irrelevant puzzles into someone else's room escape game.
Forcing the employees of an escape room to escape an escape room of their own. (Jail.)
The ultimate unrequited high five.
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1 hr 9 min
November 15, 2021108. Sitting and Being Angry at Your Phone
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Mark
Shirley
Topics:
Neuroscience!
Fertility tracking is more complicated than I realized.
When it turns out that a character in a movie is movie-star hot because it's a plot point, rather than because they're portrayed by a movie star, and I guess then the audience is supposed to pretend all the other characters, also played by movie stars, just look like regular schlubs.
Immortal - Call Of The Wintermoon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VBdAY8eA9w
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/I4XK7YqwgFg
Tiktok food trends that are more about elaborate assembly than flavors.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vesYREe6_uk
Microtopics:
A band from Sweden that just released a demo.
Album art with a big giant snake and a shirtless barbarian dude whipping a mace at a guy.
A punk band composed of mixed race middle school riot grrls.
Speaking to a rude 12 year old and running off to write a bitchin' punk song about it.
Observing someone's career arc via the podcasts they guest on.
Talking yourself out of being a scientist.
Helping people with early-stage dementia manage activities of daily living.
An acquired language problem.
Adapting to not being in an abusive workplace environment.
How a process improvement is received when you suggest it to your BevMo manager vs. when you suggest it to the head of your neuroscience lab.
How every retail store is as understaffed as possible by design.
Switching from a retail job to an office job and suddenly being trusted to decide when to go to the bathroom.
How the world might be different if the people in charge had to live in the world they created.
Thriving in Our Hypercapitalist Dystopia.
Trying to have a kid and learning a whole bunch about your own body in the process.
Giving kids facts instead of ideology or even advice.
Going to pregnancy club and wondering if there's an aspirational pregnancy club.
Taking your temperature when you emerge from slumber.
Peeing on sticks. (A medical process.)
Not trying, not preventing.
Cervical mucus.
A bad batch of kombucha can kill you, and other ways kombucha is like a pregnancy.
Being naturally blessed with high motility sperm.
Asking your doctor if you should run a bunch of tests and they're like "just chill" and you're like "take my blood, please"
The science of trying-adjacent.
Drinking too deeply of the colloidal silver.
A bookish nerd who is portrayed by one of the most attractive humans on the planet but they're wearing glasses.
The incomparable Finn Carter.
Trying to cast an actor to play an unattractive person but Steve Buscemi is busy and you can't find a single other ugly actor so you cast Scarlet Johansson and have the makeup department put her in uglyface.
Doing an image search for "ugly actors" and every single result is of a South Asian and freaking out until you find out that there's a Bollywood movie called "Ugly."
Putting "the frumpy one" from a movie in a room next to a bunch of normal people and realizing that you need to blow way past the conventionally-attractive bell curve to even be allowed into Los Angeles.
A music video that was shot on VHS and uploaded to 2006-era Youtube.
Goth clowns scowling and looking out from behind trees.
A troupe of grumpy goth clowns in leather daddy outfits discovering and exploring ancient ruins.
Cutting your frenulum so you can stick out your tongue as far as Gene Simmons and waking up choking on your tongue meat every night.
Grumpy goth clowns crouching in doorways.
Hearing a variety of different screams and growls.
Training to scream for several hours a day, every day, without ruining your screamy bits.
Doing the crabcore thing decades before crabcore.
Googling "candlemass bewitched" for a good time.
Watching TikTok on Reddit because you're old.
Extremely simple and compelling recipes that can't possibly work and will in fact cause a fire in your chicken.
Making bad content to make people mad.
Trying to redefine porn as anything you enjoy.
Making a series of recipe videos with your nonstandard measuring cups so people need to buy your weird measuring cups to follow along.
Elsagate.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.
Hard boiling a million eggs to scientifically determine that you're super sick of eating eggs.
Food Wishes.
That's Just You Cookin'.
A cool chef with a cool attitude.
A chef with a cadence of speaking that really annoys your dad.
Learning to improvise when faced with an unexpected situation.
How to get joy out of cooking.
The fugu preparation certification.
Watching somebody spend five minutes washing some extremely starchy rice.
Having two gimmicks.
A knife that you can also use as a spatula.
Using fresh stream water in your forest cooking videos.
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1 hr 22 min
November 08, 2021107. 27 Kilobytes of Pure Magic
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Ryan
https://twitter.com/ryanikecomposer/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldtX4d5qanA
Jenni
https://twitter.com/horsewizrd/
Topics:
Video games providing an illusion of competency & how jarring it is when they don't
Carcinization
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carcinisation
Manualism
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwxvOKuLUQ0
Did you ever play "AR games" with your own imagination when you were a kid? What kind?
Microtopics:
Whether Jim enjoys it when nobody can decide who should go first.
Whoever can blurt their name out fastest.
Dog Airport Game.
Eating pizza around a three year old.
Wizard With A Gun.
A song for a trailer where the trailer ends but the song keeps going for years.
Hiring a team of monks to take turns notes on a church organ for seven hours at a time.
When one of the monks you hired to play the organ for seven hours at a time dies and keels over onto the keys and it's a cluster chord but we'll take it.
Jack Pumpkin Skellington.
What happens when Merlin gets off in space.
How many wizard/firearm puns we can think of. (2)
Making a movie about the legend of King Arthur with all the magic removed and Merlin is just an old man who needs a bath.
The highly relatable legend of King Arthur buying Excalibur from the katana shop next to Spencer's Gifts.
That time King Arthur lost his wedding ring under the bed and had to sweep it out using Excalibur.
A collaboration where one person writes the first half of the story and the other person writes a 4chan reference.
Making paintings with the art skills of a writer.
The illusion of hyper-competency.
Moving your thumb a fraction of an inch and your avatar onscreen does a cartwheel off of a robot's face.
Driving behind Wario and he has that big purple caboose and you just want to slam it.
Blue Shell pacifists who try throw a Blue Shell without hurting any other drivers
Whether that skeleton who shoots lasers at you has a wife and kids at home who would also shoot lasers at you.
Mr. Friendly.
Having to solve each topic before you can move on.
Someone trying to pirate your music on Youtube but instead of music you poured vinegar into the tube and when they listen to the other end of the tube they just get an earful of vinegar.
Flies landing on your psoriasis patches because they ooze a little bit and probably smell like rotting meat or at least oozing meat.
Going into a psychological death spiral because you just realized that you and everyone you know is just rotting meat, and then coming out of it and letting everyone know that they can just skip the death spiral, there isn't any sweet loot down there.
Reminding the listener that everyone they care about will die someday but it's okay because Wario's juicy purple butt exists.
Providing foley for your death just in case in case you die silently while recording the show.
Writing a song to play at a friend's funeral but they're not allowed to hear it until then so when they die they go into the Great Unknown Mystery of whether your song is any good.
Whether this 27k wav file that you've been instructed to play at your funeral counts as music, strictly speaking.
Writing an intricate eight minute sonata with the intention of time-stretching it down to less than a second.
Meeting crab scientists who talk about carcinization and then turn into crabs right in front of you.
Transmorphing into a crab and deciding to hold a knife all the time just because you can.
Finding out about carcinization and then staying up all night wondering when you're going to get your crab claws.
Finding out whether anyone at Berkeley has designed a musical instrument for after you turn into a crab by googling for "Berkeley carcinization instrument"
A vent-based apparatus.
Wrapping your fingers in electrical tape and getting a preview of what making music will be like after we all turn into crabs.
Chilling with a pile of rotting meat on a beach, like "what's up?"
Hands feet and they're all around sticking out in every direction so we can just roll everywhere.
The fate of the Butthole Foot.
Centaur World, where everything is centaurs.
The mighty centaur, with the bottom half of a bull and the top half of a cenobite.
A centaur thing a wrinkle through time flew
A man with a body of a motorcycle.
Centaur court, the court where the bottom half is replaced with a horse.
Gerry the manualist.
Playing songs on your hands for 52 years.
Playing AR games with your own imagination.
Picking a dirty spot on the window to be your avatar and moving your head around to make it dodge obstacles in the background, which doesn't look any sillier than when you play a VR game except that since you don't have a helmet on your can see the people giving you the side eye.
Imagining that your parent's car shoots missiles out of the hubcaps.
Tony Hawk with feet sticking out in every direction except from his butthole.
Doing Christ Air after Christ Air on your way to get some Arby's.
One professor refusing to judge your thesis because the two of you go to the same school and all the other professors refusing to judge your thesis because the first professor's reason for not doing it doesn't make any sense so the school just gives up and lets you graduate.
Wanting it until it turns out to have been a bad idea to want it.
Being a professional for five seconds a week.
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1 hr 6 min