Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

November 01, 2021106. Hearses for Snakes
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Shannon
Alex
Topics:
Corn maze vs hedge maze: which one is better? What's the best maze material?
World Record Corn Maze in Dixon CA: https://www.coolpatchpumpkins.com/
Projectable Halloween Decoration Animations
https://vimeo.com/465549120
For the halloween season: the spookiest story I know, about Dave Mustaine sleeping on a chair.
Rob Zombie - Dragula
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqQuihD0hoI
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/tRtRpWqxh5o
Google spirit
Interactive halloween costumes
Reverse Trick or Treating: https://youtu.be/xhS_CjECO90
https://www.hearsehub.com/
One Cut of the Dead 100% Tomatometer rating: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/one_cut_of_the_dead
Microtopics:
Top ten dog features.
Top one dog feature.
The resident holiday specials expert.
One Cut of the Dead.
Opening the door and saying "hello!"
Maze season is upon us.
Eating your way out of the corn maze.
Laminating your corn maze so the corn doesn't blow over when it rains.
Topiary vs. Scarecrow.
The barrier that humanity doesn't realize it can cross until it's across the threshold.
Building a maze out of "employees only" and "wet floor" signs so nobody even realizes they're in a maze.
How to ethically put someone in a room escape situation without getting their informed consent first.
Whether Dustin has teeth yet.
The best maze material is the social contract.
Pepper's Ghost.
Bone Chillers 2.
Projecting animated ghost pirates rear projected onto your window.
An actual live human Pepper's Ghost and whether that ghost sees us as the ghosts.
Interactive ghosts.
Turtle Talk.
Wanting to spend all day pretending to be a skeleton.
Dave Mustaine's terrifying sleeping injury.
Saturday Night Palsy.
Losing feeling in your fingers because you carried groceries too much.
Taking law school exams without any feeling in your fingers.
Disrupting ambulances by taking an Uber to the hospital.
Keeping a big basket of Epipens and Narcan in your cab, just in case.
Whether they give you another one if you use your Epipen on someone else.
Chatting with a doctor online and they ask you your favorite kind of beans and then they're like "oh yeah you definitely need Narcan" and write you a prescription.
Getting your Narcan certification and treating every human interaction as an opportunity to deploy your Narcan.
Mr. Zombie.
Rob Zombie doing the "What is Love" head bob in his Dragula.
Withholding the Dragula for most of the music video, like how they didn't show the shark for most of Jaws.
Extremely tall guitars.
A tiki head spray painted silver.
T-posing Rob Zombie singing at the ceiling.
A woman who is in this music video to not wear a lot of clothes
Ghost Dad playing keytar in the back.
The most adorable Rob Zombie.
The origin of the silver headed tiki robot.
The silver headed tiki robot doing a high kick.
Watching the music video for Dragula and then excitedly searching Craigslist for hearses.
A hearse with a tramp stamp.
The two happiest days you'll ever have with your hearse.
hearsehub.com
Local rug artists.
The kind of person who would think it's fun to role play a Spirit Halloween employee.
Coronavirus is transforming the death care industry, according to Funeral and Cemetery News on hearsehub.com.
Getting a hearse long enough to be pulled by a mini dachshund.
Logrolling the snake coffin over a series of snake pallbearers.
Crowdsurfing for Snakes.
A guy dressed up like Pokemon Go for Halloween where you spin his helmet to dispense a Pokeball and then throw the Pokeball at Pokemon that are also part of the costume.
Reverse trick or treating.
Setting up a haunted maze in the front yard of every house you trick or treat at and when nobody answers you have to just wait for them to get home because dang it you spend half an hour setting up the maze.
Kill or Queen?
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1 hr 2 min
October 25, 2021105. Ficus on a Leash
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Tyriq
FourBitFriday everywhere.
https://www.ckgame.net/
Chall
@MrChrisLHall
Topics:
How cars age vs how people age
Learning the wrong lesson from childrens media (due to being an incompetent child)
BOFH: Servers Under Siege
https://www.old-games.com/download/1796/bastard-operator-from-hell-servers
Korn - Freak on a Leash
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRGrNDV2mKc
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m_L7WeZVlQ0
Do other people just have boring dreams??
Forgot to mention on the show, but on the Topic Lords discord, dreams go in #announcements.
Turns out, running has everything I love about walking, but it's very time efficient
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUXow3d3-b0
Microtopics:
Make game.
The properties of houseplants.
TikToks of feral houseplants.
Three people trying to remember the name of the musical starring Rick Moranis about carnivorous plant.
One (1) 2004 Toyota Camry, tan.
Speaker covers turning into sand.
Sometimes being in charge of your body and sometimes being in charge of your car and sometimes being in charge of both.
A make of cars as an enormous number of identical twins.
Paint is shirts for cars.
Whether paint is shirts for cars or tattoos for cars.
Coming home with a new nose and nobody recognizes you.
Cars doing most of their aging in instants.
Seeing a car for the first time in many years and being unsure whether it accumulated all those dents and scratches over many years, or if someone took a hammer to it five minutes ago.
An airplane outside of your house waiting for you to finish recording this podcast so you can board.
Plastic surgery for an airplane.
Getting tired looking at your aging car so you cover it with sweet blue LEDs and now nobody can ever look at it again.
Being sarcastic in movie for children who are too young to understand sarcasm.
What happens when young foolish screenwriters try to write wise old characters.
Bad ways of teaching history.
Teaching only the things you can test.
Learning how to extract meaning from the things you read.
Triaging the attention paid to your students so your ignore your best students who don't need your help but also ignoring your worst students because what the hell am I gonna do with this guy??
A fun movie depicting a series of events that happen.
Whether hitting people with sticks is fun.
Bastard Operator From Hell.
Sysadmins writing revenge fantasies on Usenet about screwing over their incompetent users.
Indie games from the early aughts that are playable on the Amiga and Commodore 64.
A sysadmin with a rocket launcher.
Pokey the Penguin.
Arctic Circle-Candy.
All the Pokey the Penguin fan games that came from the Pokey the Penguin mailing list.
Prodly the Puffin.
Parchment, the Z-Machine interpreter written in JavaScript.
0-Hour Game Jam.
RPG Maker vs. RPG Maker '99.
Coming on the show and donating of your time and topics.
Indie games starting to exist now that mainstream games are made by dozens of people.
MadMaze.
LadderMan: He's a man! He's a ladder!
Whether the video for Freak on a Leash could be made today and still be western-style animation.
Extremely red coffee.
Whether they're pouring steaming blood into this coffee mug or maybe you just have Flux on.
Playing hopscotch at the precipice of a cliff.
A cop drawing a gun to stop you from jumping off a cliff.
Where's Hopscotch Girl?
The kind of person who would prominently display a cookie jar and never fill it.
A speeding bullet rapidly leaving a party like "this party sucks"
A hundred page forum thread arguing about whether the plane on a treadmill will take off.
Weird creatures that have eyes but no mouth and vice versa.
A bullet bee making bullet honey.
A music video that is just a Ganon fight with two posters firing bullets back and forth at each other.
A bullet intended to pierce someone's ear but it just goes right through their gauge.
A DOS program you can use with your SoundBlaster.
A blanket you can use to increase the strangeness of your dreams.
Whether most people have boring dreams or whether most people are just bad storytellers.
Things happening because of other things.
Dreams where the whole dream is that you know a fact.
How to know whether someone is the president of Nairobi.
Running on the path you used to walk on and seeing way more bugs per minute.
Gauging your mouth so that you can collect even more bugs while running.
Installing a whistle tip in your mouth so you make an incredibly loud whistling noise while running around.
Getting into blood doping just because you want to get high.
The nicest form of Mustard Gas.
Soaking your clothes with essential oil of lavender so passers by are like "I love the smell of lavender" and then they die because all the oxygen has been replaced with lavender.
The new exercise fad where you go running while looking behind you, terrified.
Bubb Rubb lauding Missile Tips. "The missiles go woooo!"
Being super into being witnessed.
Throwing a stumble scramble into your jogging routine and everybody around you panicking as they try to figure out what you're running from.
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1 hr 10 min
October 18, 2021104. Truck Nut, Singular
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Elena
https://www.propinquity.me/
Nova
https://novalinium.com/
Topics:
Things I have learned about myself from being a professional matchmaker
The Mother of All Demos
The wine-dark sea
TWRP - Starlight Brigade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9Q3i5w6-Ug
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/VsFcnzBJlt4
Challenges in scaling community organizing
https://youtu.be/DAN0OCagHzQ
https://thenewinquiry.com/hot-allostatic-load/
Microtopics:
Lack of confidence in your chocolate opinions.
Chocolate naan.
Fruit esters.
Chocolove.
A really mean fruit tart.
Giving the listeners homework.
Being self employed and feeling like you're constantly behind on some imaginary metric you haven't made up yet.
Propinquity.
Receiving an encrypted email asking if you want to work on a secret project and telling everybody about it on this show.
The Scoville scale of tidiness.
Doing an extremely tedious test to see if you have ADHD.
Laminating your ADHD certificate so you can keep it in your wallet in case you have to prove to someone that you have ADHD.
The power differential in relationships where one person is much more attractive than the other.
Retaining a panel of judges to rate all your clients' attractiveness from 1 to 10.
Video chatting someone who refuses to tell you where they work and you say "I'm writing down here that you work at Facebook" and then they immediately tell you where they really work, or if they just hang up then you know they work at Facebook.
Striving to get a good grade on your dating life, something that is normal and possible to achieve.
Instead of filling out your dating profile, just clicking "I'm feeling lucky."
The On Line System.
Whether smartphones are good.
If Facebook were more like MySpace and you could include Javascript in your status update so your status emits butterflies.
When Twitter didn't sanitize Javascript out of SVG uploads so you could include playable games in your avatar image.
TI calculators as a way to learn to program.
Giving kids these days the uphill-both-ways speech about how much worse TI calculators were in your day.
Tracker music on TI calculators.
From the future or from Xerox PARC?
What Apple did and failed to do with vertical integration.
An opportunity for disruption.
Running Turing-complete PostScript on your font cartridge.
Running Doom on your font cartridge.
The history of color perception.
The history of what color wine is.
Zeus' eyebrow color.
Whether all ancient Greeks were color blind or just Homer.
Greco-Roman poetic studies focusing on light and shadow but totally ignoring hue.
Dark in hue vs. dark in mood.
Stars that don't twinkle.
Catching stars from the sky by spraying them with water first.
A spaceship made of ferrofluid.
Not remembering any anime but remembering all their theme songs.
A genre of TV show that can only exist when there is disparity in the global economy.
First being scared of hyperspeed and then enjoying it and then being angry at it in the space of a few seconds.
Fantasy triangles.
A spaceship with truck nuts.
An ensemble of different animated character archetypes.
Establishing personality via the object the character is holding for their two seconds of screen time.
Trapping the protagonist in a simulation where they have to pretend to be a child chasing a star forever or until they sit up from the chair because it's not a very effective trap.
Banging on the geodesic Epcot sphere to be let inside.
Secret Service Ralph finally being promoted to pilot but insisting that he still be called Secret Service Ralph.
Everybody getting one Truck Nut and knowing you found your soul mate because your Truck Nuts match and you can pair them up.
Doing your best to bring up the arm count average.
Commander Meowch.
Using sentiment analysis to determine whether chat room users are about to be in a fight.
A Fletcher, meaning one who teleports around.
Figuring out which kind of moderator interventions will lead to good outcomes.
The September That Never Ended.
How to grow from a small community into a large community without changing the culture.
Being yelled at by 100 people each of whom aren't having the experience of harassing somebody.
Whether you can get rid of a forum user who is following all the rules but just nobody likes them.
Hot Allostatic Load.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 3 min
October 11, 2021103. The 303 Beethoven Used
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Avery
https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases
Jay
https://twitter.com/jaytholen
Topics:
Kowloon Walled City
Internet communities gaining a reputation and then changing over time as members mature.
The moral cost of the 303 Devilfish clone
Justified and Ancient
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP5oHL3zBDg
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/Peeo6xZqeVs
Cyber Nexus internet cafe in Lakeland Florida and late 1990s internet cafes in general
https://twitter.com/jaytholen/status/1370002162063990786
Microtopics:
Putting all of Spotify on shuffle.
Spotify rejecting your album because you put lyrics on the album cover.
Immersing yourself in a shitty visual aesthetic until you love it and the guy at the record label rejects your album cover.
Renaming your company to Content Distribution Baby now but the logo is still a baby on a CD.
The Godaddy man and the pets dot com sock puppet.
A demon face in the middle of a circuit board.
The part of the show where we look at image search results together.
Visiting Kowloon Walled City for the cheap dentistry.
Going to a nightmare city to get your teeth worked on: an opportunity to die.
One of several problems with working seven days a week and never taking a break.
Blame! or perhaps Blam!
Trying to live in the dystopian future where the construction nanobots run wild and convert all matter on the planet into endless nonsense staircases and ventilation ducts.
The protagonist having a really cool gun.
When the author doesn't know what's interesting about their own setting.
Having to write a novel because nobody's invented D&D source books yet.
Feeling like an outsider because you don't know which Dale Earnhardt crashed into a wall.
An online pixel art isometric place to hang out.
Being a jerk to people in an organized manner.
Audio production subforums.
How internet communities get radicalized and how they mellow out.
Ironically doing outrageous stuff on the internet.
The strange purity of being ahead of the curve.
Memes as a bannable offense.
Getting a Something Awful forum account for your birthday and never looking at it because you don't like awful things.
A synthesizer for the singer songwriter who doesn't have a bass player.
Discovering the future of techno in the bargain bin.
The history of the TB-303.
The Prophet-5 vs. the Prophet-6.
A drum pad that is the first of its kind.
The thing with the egg breaking against a wall and how you always side with the egg.
Creating reproductions of saught after out of print old stuff.
Having two guitars, one tuned in fifths and one tuned like a ukulele.
Writing music that could never be played.
Making games because you want to get your music in front of people.
Jim Stormdancer and the Frog Fractions Players.
Finally receiving the obscurity you've been craving.
Writing a book about the KLF as a lens into your particular moral philosophy.
Drum or Brown?
Doom Demon Invisible.
5 times voted CMA female vocalist Tammy Wynette.
Trying to gesture at Discordianism or other forms of alternative mysticism.
Making a new game in character as a character from your last game.
The Burning Man man.
Presented with the Most Coveted Living Legend Award Sponsored By TNN.
Hiring randos to sing and play instruments on your album and hiring entirely different randos to be in your music video.
King Boy D and the other guy.
Burning a million quid and then going around asking people why you burned a million quid.
Good names for internet cafes.
A square of computers.
Not recognizing Stargate decor and assuming it's just sci fi Egypt themed.
Losing at Quake for your birthday while your parents watch a Pink Floyd DVD with the owner of the Internet cafe.
Which one is Cyber and which one is Nexus?
Not remembering why your band was invited to play a set at the Interface of Language and Technology.
That's a level 12 mage, get off of that!
Whether an internet cafe is the same thing as a cyber cafe.
The regular at your coffee shop who scalps tickets for a living.
Whipping out a 61 key MIDI controller to write tracks at Starbucks.
Trying to avoid situations where you'd accidentally give a philosophy lecture.
What is an organism and what organisms do.
Whether Aristotle knows that whales are mammals.
A category of things that have an effect.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 14 min
October 04, 2021102. I Wouldn't Touch That With a 3.048 Meter Pole
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Nathan
https://twitter.com/MommysBestGames/
http://www.mommysbestgames.com/
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday/
https://www.ckgame.net/
Topics:
The length of poles with which to not touch things as a measure of repulsion
Weezer just released a new album. You can already listen to it, on demand, for free on youtube. How do they, or any band make money today?
Why is the Doom Plasma Rifle like that
Yeasayer - Ambling Alp
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JyBl5ZgnEr4
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/avmEL1T03qA
Why does the Metaverse look so bland?
Microtopics:
Getting feedback and becoming insecure.
Entertaining each other.
400 Microsoft points.
What you would do if you were lame.
Whatever you call the boy version of Lisa Frank.
Pillboxing.
The consequences of an extremely wide screen.
The Big Steel Battalion Box.
Various pole lengths, esp. the one from How The Grinch Stole Christmas.
The length of the pole with which you don't want to touch continue.
A ten foot pole with haptic feedback so you can touch things with it.
Poking something with a stick to discover how gross it is.
Whether pole vaulting is ridiculous.
Whether pole vaulting is real or just exists in Tremors and The Last Jedi.
That Dutch town where everybody uses communal poles to vault across the river, and how it's all Uber poles now and you have to pay rental fees.
Nobody being trained for pole vaulting but the coach is like "does anyone want to just try it so we don't lose this pole vaulting event by default" and everyone looks at you.
The most salient thing about pole vaulting.
How a band might still make money if some rando uploads their album to Youtube.
Content-ID's failure modes.
Living in a world where piracy won over paying for things.
Trying to watch a movie, where piracy is easier than figuring out how to pay, vs. trying to play a video game where paying is easier than figuring out how to pirate it
All the ways you can support a band financially other than paying for the music, because everyone just listens for free.
The most American gun ever made.
Whether the Doom plasma rifle overheats after it runs out of ammo.
Punishing the player for being careful.
What Tom Hall would've written in the Doom Bible about the plasma rifle if he still worked at id.
A geodesic dome with two of the triangles painted red.
A guy with a mirror for a face.
Someone who lives in the cheese.
Reverse nachos, where things come out of the cheese and eat you.
If the Grim Reaper had a mirror instead of a skull.
This Squishing Face.
Not being allowed to punch the mirror-faced boxer above the neck.
Trying to sing while people pull on your lips.
Getting drenched in VHS fluid.
Homer Simpson in hell taking and spitting out one bite each of infinite burgers.
Whether they are mustard men or cheese men.
Peeling off the cheese and realizing there is a dude in your cheese.
Taking a bite out of a chocolate Easter bunny and the live bunny inside wriggles out and hops away.
Mole.
The music video continuing to be weird while you talk about food.
All the naked people in the desert lying on astronaut blankets and closing their legs relative to the camera.
Making s'mores in a solar oven.
Extremely white flesh in the bright, bright sun.
Facebook giving the Olive Garden treatment to Second Life.
Making the Metaverse as uncool as possible.
Shipping a half dozen telepresence robots to every employee's house so they can have a conference call.
Gravitating towards whatever process or technology has the least friction.
Spelling it as if you are giving a gift to Bit Friday.
Possessivemommysbestgames.com
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 3 min
September 27, 2021101. Flatty the Flat Globe
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Nick
https://twitter.com/NickPancakes
Greg
https://twitter.com/simgreed
https://store.steampowered.com/app/945490/Little_Square_Things/
Topics:
Anthropomorphized inanimate objects
Quaker Names
https://zeugmalitotes.tumblr.com/post/656465316855119872/fishpilled-these-guys-were-onto-something-i-think
Why do car doors get Shitty Shut
Go West - Call Me
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AV0ugZumyJU
What's on the grill if you're "grillin up some 'good boys'"
Overly complicated navel-gazing plots in video games, especially those that absolutely do not need plots
Microtopics:
Completing the set of Duckfeed guests.
Health care simulation.
The moth having himself a journey.
Hydrodynamics of the bloodstream.
Little Square Things.
Filling your life with media about anthropomorphized inanimate objects.
Whether Data needs hair.
Giving your shiny yellow skin for legal reasons.
A talking garage that is hungry for cars.
Does that anthropomorphic talking chair even eat ass?
A talking map of the United States.
Whether someone already mentioned the talking photo booth.
Clocky the talking map.
The "marry it" joke.
Cortana receiving your one-star review of trying to rename this folder.
Preserved Fish.
Morris Morris, Jr.
Experience Burt Merrick.
Preserved Fish writing his own Wikipedia page.
Signing in to leave a flower.
Leaving a Blingee on your ancestor's grave.
A door that is shut but it's not flush with the doorway and the "door ajar" alarm goes off.
A car upgrade where if you partially close the door it closes it the rest of the way for you.
Why don't they make two planes out of the black box material, one on top of the other.
A car door that is in many respects shut.
Go back to sleep and wake up properly, dipshit.
Trying to make Shitty Shut happen with Gen Z by getting on TikTok and using a filter that makes you look young and doing meme dances.
Teaching your three year old to call it "shitty shut" and when grownups tell him he shouldn't use the word "shitty," whispering from the bushes "yes you should!"
Euphemism withdrawal.
Steadfastly refusing to swear but still calling it a shitpost because that's what you call it.
The clip art dude sailing across the screen.
Doing one dance and your shadow doing a slightly different dance.
Reshooting a scene but keeping the same shadows as before.
Pop quiz: sideburn on only one side of the face, or slept on a greasy bench?
An entertaining slow watch.
A fire hydrant made of a pie tin and aluminum foil.
Singing into a fan.
Everybody realizing that there is someone on the ceiling.
The Gentle Exorcist.
A sheriff labeled "boy."
A drug store full of a band.
The additional challenge of a mechanical bull mounted upside down on the ceiling.
Figuring out how to do a special effects shot for a story moment and then deciding to put the effect in every other shot regardless of whether it makes sense.
Watching a 40 year old music video and then tracking down the director and asking if you win a prize for being the first to notice a specific joke.
The falling yellow liquid spilling forth within the billiards bar.
Go low, Ken and sons.
Whether people say that they have some "bad" "boys" on the "grill," why don't you "pop" on "over."
The thing where you carve a hot dog into an octopus shape.
A hot dog that is too polite to burst if you put it in the microwave.
Why every dog is a "good boy" but none of them are great.
The Go West Music Video Cinematic Universe.
Bad boys who are also bad dancers.
The Ultimate Good Boy.
Running out the time rewind potion.
A puzzle game with story except for the enormous lore dump at the end.
Bob's Game.
Being really into the story of the development of Bob's Game except for all the pain and human suffering.
ARGeez.
Renaming your game to "OK" so nobody can search for it.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
September 20, 2021100. Cold Brew Ham
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Jenni
https://twitter.com/horsewizrd/
Chris
Topics:
Lord Chumley
Topic Lords editor Esper Quinn weighs in on Transformer lore: "The second ever podcast I really worked on was called Sound.wav, a read-along Transformers comics podcast. I knew nothing about Transformers, and my friend Nell knew everything about them. We stuck to the IDW canon, but my understanding is, Transformers show up as naturally occurring "sparks" (a sort of semi-magical soul-piece) on the surface of the planet Cybertron, which if left to incubate will form a liquidmetal shell, which eventually becomes a full-on Transformer. (There's also something called Cold Construction which takes raw sparks and puts them in purpose built bodies, but whatever.) All of this means Transformers, in my mind, DO NOT qualify as actual robots. To me, a robot has to be built by somebody, but Transformers are just a metallic alien entity. On the podcast, we eventually had James Roberts, writer of the IDW comics series, and I confronted him with this: he agreed that Transformers are not technically robots. Felt pretty smart that day."
"Also, again I can only speak for the IDW canon, but Transformers on Cybertron don't have much of a concept of gender at all. Indeed, Transformers who were disconnected from society for millions of years and developed their own culture are the ones who sort of pioneered gender, purely as a cultural signifier. There's even explicitly trans transformers, who were known as one gender and switched to the other, and the storylines are handled pretty well in my opinion! (Other storylines, like the one explaining Arcee is a woman because she was experimented on by a mad Cybertronian scientist, are handled far less well.)"
"Transformers in IDW do have romance, and have officially recognized ceremonies for both 'amica endura' (equivalent to marriage), and 'conjunx endura' which is like eternal friendship."
"While you stepped out, there was brief discussion of Ultra Magnus and Minimus Ambus: Minimus Ambus is a tiny dude who wears the 'Ultra Magnus Armor,' Ultra Magnus being a sort of Dread Pirate Roberts semimythical figure of the universe. Good character, who has a good romance arc with Megatron!"
Is an edgelord phase a standard part of being a teen or what
Lordosis behavior
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lordosis_behavior
Lordi - The Riff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zr9AattFkqo
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/6qwGyZw_DNI
Lord Dunsany the metalhead lord rewilding his estate
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/07/people-think-youre-an-idiot-death-metal-irish-baron-rewilds-his-estate
Time Lords
Microtopics:
Taking a picture of a dog.
140 strawberries.
Jim Not Knowing About Video Games Day.
Starting with how Smurfs fuck and then moving on to how Transformers fuck.
Transformers hanging out with humans because the humans can wipe them in places they can't reach.
Where Transformers come from in the various Transformers cosmologies.
How Grimlock built the Dinobots.
Sitting down with a screwdriver to make some buddies.
The hypothetical 1980s girl-child who might buy an Optimus Prime toy if it was wearing a pink bow on its head.
R.C., the hyper-pink Transformer with the wide, child-bearing hips.
Finally getting to the topic at hand.
Whether all Transformers are aromantic.
What kind of god would make a car in space where there's nothing to drive on.
The canonical term for when two Transformers are in a relationship.
Rarified Energon.
Prime's Rib, in which Future Feminists complain that there are no female Transformers so Optimus Prime constructs one from his own body parts.
The Wild 80s.
The British big game hunter who wanted to hunt the most dangerous game, Optimus Prime.
Mounting the nose of the plane you shot down as a trophy in your den. (The plane was actually grounded when you shot it.)
Whether teen edgelords are still a thing or whether teens are now performatively wholesome to freak out the olds.
The Alpha Teen.
The two genders of edgelord.
Toddlers hurting you so they can practice having empathy.
Accidentally promising a cat sexual favors.
The cat sticking its butt in your face so you'll lick it clean, because that's what the cat's mom did.
The innie arch vs the outie arch.
Bears playing 20 questions with themselves to determine whether you are also a bear.
The scientific term for scritches.
Sitting vs. standing up to wipe.
The various orders in which you could wipe, stand up, and flush.
Pushing vs. dragging.
Tai-chi vs. chai tea.
A picture of Lordi getting a vaccine.
A toilet in the shower.
The scene in Mad Max Fury Road where the guy with all the water hoses down the adulant throng below, except it's toilet paper instead of water.
Bringing the ugliest people you know on dates with you so you seem more attractive by comparison.
Whether it's still a cold cut if you heat it up.
Zombo Cop.
Making Video Content during the zombie apocalypse by putting GoPros on all the zombies.
Live streaming a zombie trying to walk into a brick wall.
Looking out on the zombie apocalypse and saying "time to finally eat the rich!"
The flashback explaining the origin story of the huge pile of bloody toilet paper.
Whether David Lynch explained something once.
The Lobster as a benchmark for bad date movies.
Pokemon that are weak to Basket.
Scientists studying the guillotine and determining that it's actually that basket your head lands in that kills you.
The worst part of the zombie apocalypse: when the self checkout tells you to wait for assistance, nobody ever comes.
The lordiest lord of them all.
A cool young lord.
A Jack Russell terrier named Beavis and Butt-Head.
Two dogs, one named Sneezy, Grumpy, Dopey, Happy, Sleepy, Bashful and Doc, and the other one named The Seven Dwarfs.
Hearing bird song you don't recognize, going to google and typing "Weee weee wha weee what's bird is this"
Shazam for bird call.
How to identify a bird that ages backwards.
An app that can take photos of an object and tell you whether it's a wizard in disguise.
Turning 25 and realizing that most movies are no longer about you at age 20.
Whether Doctor Who was based on Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Gene Roddenberry playing Willy Wonka.
The Gum Chewer.
Deleting a tweet in which you are cranky about Doctor Who.
Doctor Who showrunner Stephen Wolfram.
The vicar turning out the be a giant wasp and the author turning out to be a transphobe.
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1 hr
September 13, 202199. I Want You to Never Show Me This
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Mitch
https://twitter.com/hbmmaster/
https://www.youtube.com/user/HBMmaster8472
Xander
Topics:
The title "Super Smash Brothers for Nintendo 3DS" is the first two lines of a haiku
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XejJ6PzPtEw
Spectrum of porcupine tunings by eigenmonzos
The Letter C
Finding the light switch in this bed and breakfast
https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1419337769386536964
The bizarre CD-ROM game Monty Python made in the 90s
Tumblr would be a good website if it wasn't such a bad website
Microtopics:
Starting to meet up just in time for the Delta variant to show up.
jan Misali of the Youtube channel jan Misali.
Using Bing to google things.
A recent video you will have made.
How many games are in the Super Mario series.
Super Smash Bros / For Nintendo 3DS / It's Coming This Fall
Super Mario 64DS HD For Nintendo Switch.
The only three games that everyone can agree are Super Mario games.
Super Mario's Wacky Worlds for the Phillips CD-i.
Not knowing who to vote for comptroller so googling each candidate's name with "is good" and picking the one with the most results.
Whether Super Mario Run is a platformer.
The bare minimum of procgen required for a game to count as an endless runner.
When there's no consensus, there's no communication.
The Super Mario Artist series.
Any game you can look at counting as a "video game* because video is Latin for "I see."
Xenharmonics and microtonal music.
Subdividing the octave into 19 psychoacoustically equal segments.
The Venn diagram between people interested in microtonal music and people who understand singular value decomposition.
Enjoying 17-TET music but only the parts that would've sounded better in 12-TET.
Learning enough about Super Mario Bros. Special to decide whether it's a game.
All the different ways you could count things.
The only nontrivial solution to the cannonball problem.
Finding the center of a shape by cutting it out of cardboard and balancing it on your finger.
The Encyclopedia of Triangle Centers.
39,474 different ways to find the center of a triangle.
Being wrong about the letter C.
Spelling it SD-ROM but still pronouncing it CD-ROM.
The fault of vulgar Latin.
Proto-Western Romance.
What Q means to us.
Slicing up a house into apartments by roping off a stairway.
Things depicted as normal in Hollywood movies that can't possibly be normal, such as flipping a switch to activate spinning blades in your sink.
Dedicated garbage knives that are just for cutting up garbage, that you keep next to the regular kitchen knives and they look the same but you know which ones are which.
The part of the infomercial for the Sink Knife Gun that's black and white where the lady is struggling to cut up her sink drain trash by sticking knives down there and wiggling them around.
Making a smoothie with a mortar and pestle.
Whether the Sarlacc Pit inspired garbage disposals or vice versa.
A Taco Bell built into a striking, memorable building.
A game you could check out at the local video store.
Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time.
CD-ROM experiences.
Minigames that mess with your interface.
The outer space labyrinth mine cart puzzle tying together all the unrelated Monty Python sketches.
Completing a game and it changes your desktop wallpaper to a congratulations screen.
Completing a level and unlocking audio you can set as your answering machine message.
Solving the secret for intergalactic success.
Topics you might like: food.
The quintessential Tumblr story.
The Tale of John Green's Favorite Taste.
Reblogging a post and then editing it so it looks like the person you were reblogging said something else.
John Green as in "The Bum Bum Song" John Green.
What it took to convince Tumblr to finally make it so you can't edit other people's posts.
Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra discussing John Green's Favorite Taste.
The Insane Clown Posse's web master writing a web chat server with no security whatsoever.
Feeling cool because you ruined it for everybody else.
Googling just the letter W.
Dueling George W. Bush to the death over ownership of the letter W.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 2 min
September 06, 202198. That's Content, Baby!
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Hallie
https://twitter.com/hallie_9000
Christine
http://thechrischerry.com
https://twitter.com/chriscereza
Topics:
Where are my glasses?
Nighttime is the time of abstract possibility and imagination because the world is gone.
This huge tub of homemade toum
Turn Down For What
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMUDVMiITOU
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/Q9oXE3ibmmM
Modern TV re-discovering the episodic format
Microtopics:
Mining the pre-show banter for a clip.
Dreaming of producing content every second of your life.
Getting hooked up to the content matrix and spewing content out of every orifice.
Burnt Notice.
Watercresstine.
Looking upon Burn Notice as your weird uncle who lives in your basement.
A podcast about discussing episodes of a podcast discussing episodes of Burn Notice.
Recording a song in the style of We Are The World except instead of the proceeds going to help children in Africa you keep the money.
Recording a song in the style of We Are The World except instead of the proceeds going to help children in Africa, it goes to getting Doctor Who back on the air.
We Are The Timelords.
Doctor In Distress.
Needing to stop making a podcast before your listeners can beg you to come back.
How locals pronounce "Los Angeles."
Not knowing how to look for your glasses in an apartment because your normally live in a farmhouse.
How nobody in LA owns more than one chair.
Whether Hallie's glasses were in the fridge.
Posting photos of your apartment to the internet so people can help you find your glasses.
Whether Winston answers the phone at a Korean BBQ restaurant in LA.
Being awake during the day: terrible.
The most concrete time of day.
Going to preschool and answering phones for a Korean barbecue restaurant until daddy picks you up at 4.
Loving 2am but being in bed by 9:30pm.
Like a tree but shorter, louder with stickier hands.
No responsibility except what you make for yourself.
An emulsion like mayonnaise except instead of tasting like mayonnaise it tastes like garlic.
Vampires hating garlic because they don't like the taste.
Whether you can have the vampire gene but not be a vampire.
Vampirism as a collection of traits that often manifest together, and you're only diagnosed with vampirism if these traits interfere with your ability to do your job.
How many marshmallows go in fudge.
Converting from marshmallows when the recipe calls for mini marshmallows.
Using marshmallows as bait to catch God when everyone knows God hates marshmallows.
Videos that love to start with a black screen that goes on a little too long when you're watching at one quarter speed.
A man in a blue hoodie jiggling as something is taking him over.
Shattering furniture with the power of your raw sexuality.
The Scully stand-in who is extremely skeptical about how horny this guy is.
St. Vitus' Dry Hump.
Could I be a fish doing push-ups?
Whether there is a Hitmonchan in this bra, and whether it's evolving, and whether we should push B.
The relief of consuming media and not feeling the need to form any reaction whatsoever.
Spiking the punch with LSD.
A cop whose face melts because he doesn't know what you'd turn down for.
Contracting a bad case of Original Sin and being very angry about it.
A straight man who stole Elton John's sunglasses.
Whether DJ Snake looks like a douchebag or just looks French.
Characters who grow hornier and hornier as over the course of eight seasons.
The 1943 Watchmen TV series.
The Veronica Mars model of serialization.
Whether the Columbo renaissance implies a Murder She Wrote renaissance.
Whether that's content, baby.
A character in a romantic comedy who makes web sites for everyone but who can't make a web site for herself.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 3 min
August 30, 202197. A Clearly Marked Hellhole
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Tina
https://twitter.com/Teanah/
Slothy
https://twitter.com/jonshiring
Topics:
What do Indie devs imagine AAA is like
My cousin is an astronaut
Finding an ad for a medicare scam in my drafts folder
Brad asks "The '30 days hath...' rhyme sucks as a mnemonic because so many months rhyme. Everyone should just use the knuckle mnemonic instead."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuckle_mnemonic
Ted Lasso
My post-burnout solo European vacation with a guy who had illicit keys to Notre Dame
Microtopics:
Having one name like Cher but also having more names too.
Giving yourself a nickname because there are too many people with just your name.
Creating personal boundaries in an office setting and making it clear when people cross them.
Working on a regimented team where everyone has specific roles and the programmers can't just say "I feel like doing sound design today."
How to motivate yourself to work.
Cultural things that can go wrong with code reviews.
Wondering if a feature is a good idea and implementing it in a day and putting it in front of testers to find out.
How long before you ship a game is good.
How to get a team of 300 people to change direction.
How to be invested enough to do a good job but not invested enough that you'll freak out if your work doesn't make it into the final product.
Reasons to go to GDC.
My Cousin The Astronaut.
Sitting in the bleachers to watch the space shuttle launch.
A building that they don't tear down because it contains things
Building the international space station by sending up one piece per shuttle launch.
Whether Buzz Aldrin is still an astronaut.
Deciding as a child that you want to be an astronaut and from that point on making every decision in your live based on that goal.
Watching your daughter carry part of the international space station across a busy freeway.
Space shuttles exploding and driving up NASA's insurance rates.
The pros and cons of relentlessly chasing your dreams.
Self-esteem vs. self-compassion.
Living in LA and having to remind your kids that not everyone works in movies.
Different definitions of success.
The least-driven game developer.
Enjoying the process of making art vs. enjoying the result.
People enjoying what you've worked on.
Boosting your social security check by up to $1782 per year.
A Special Medicare Advantage Part B Premium "Giveback" Rebate Benefit.
Your pocket writing an email about Medicare.
Having a dream about Medicare and waking up and deciding to become a spam magnate.
Whether the mailto: protocol can specify a subject and a body.
Making a pact to change your email password.
Mnemonics for remembering how long each month is.
The Knuckle Mnemonic.
Whether it was aliens or the pope who stole the two months we used to have after December.
A show about nerding out. (It's this one.)
How wifi works in space when planets can get in the way.
The first moment of freedom on Mars.
Living on the Grand Canyon except you have to keep your eyes closed.
Thanking Brad.
Choosing a topic for nefarious reasons.
The least skeptical TV show.
Trying to remember to give people the benefit of the doubt.
Buying a plane ticket to Europe without knowing what you're going to do there.
Your friend in Paris who has a keyring with keys to every church in the city.
Breaking into Notre Dame during the COVID lockdown and checking out the view from the roof.
The listening tower that the NSA used to spy on East Germany.
Using a variety of methods to get the keys to every church in Paris.
A wig for people who have a mohawk that is just mostly one of the sides of your head.
The Santa Cruz Hell Hole.
Building the Paris tunnels to get partying teens off the streets and underground.
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59 min