Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

August 23, 202196. Get Down With Some Bugs
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords
Kev
https://twitter.com/kevzettler
Quil
Whisper your secret to a snail.
Topics
Ephemeral digital music
Being a guest on a podcast that you normally listen to is a weird experience because it feels like you're not supposed to talk
An update on Bug Mars
Dancing in the Street
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HasaQvHCv4w
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/3O9JRuv3WXA
If you were to meet an adult who has never even heard of video games, what would you give them to demonstrate what they are? You are not allowed to interact with them in any other way
Microtopics:
An awkward silence where you can't decide who goes first.
Having to deliver all the chapters of a book at once.
Kanary.
Cooling it on making internet people mad ever since you had a kid.
Overstepping your own boundaries.
Lending a certain patina to your Twitter thread.
Midis and meedees.
Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than your had as a child.
Listening to a game soundtrack on a different sound engine than the composer used.
Proc-gen game soundtracks.
A kill cam except it's a kill jingle
Your online game detecting when someone draws a penis in the game's graffiti system but not when they draw a penis in the music editor's note grid.
Ways of converting an image to audio.
Deciding it's not worth going into detail but going into detail anyway.
What executables sounds like and why they sound like that.
Spelling the word "minimum" in a spectrograph by singing swooping pitches.
A video game that induces four friends to sing cacophonously together.
Three strangers having a conversation that your don't get to be a part of.
Parasocial relationships.
How to instantly become friends with a famous person you are a fan of.
Two asymmetrical relationships snapping together to become a single symmetrical relationship.
What you could've had if you just picked two friends host your podcast instead of all of them.
A small company named after a throwaway joke.
Spinning up a cricket farm.
The Amazon of cricket protein.
Alternative and synthetic protein.
Receiving a care package of bug protein that you're definitely not going to eat.
Whether a cricket burger is still better for the environment than a beef burger if you have to ship it across the country.
Being grateful that other people will save the world in the ways that you don't.
A brick wall, folks.
SCP or rolled up carpet?
A leprechaun with a mullet.
Wearing a trench coat over a floral print jumpsuit.
Racing In The Street.
Everybody, where "everybody" means two people.
Not being able to afford lighting after renting that crane and asking every crew member to point their car headlights at the dancers.
Whether you still trigger counterfeiting laws by putting realistic money in your movie.
An extended shot of Mick Jagger guzzling a generic can of beer.
Dancing In A Stairwell.
Dancing In The Void.
Freeze frame on a couple of butts.
A derelict flour mill that appears in every Brit-pop music video.
How to tell how well you're doing in a Match Three game.
Choosing to not introduce the mind virus of casual games to an indigenous tribe.
Whether Bejeweled is more market-tested than Pong as an introductory video game.
The invention of the platformer.
Super Mario Bros. 3's budget and development timeline.
The ways that the developers had to make Super Mario Bros. worse to make it viable as an arcade game.
Finding an adult who has never heard of Mario, jumping, video games or television and locking them in a room until they beat Super Mario Bros.
Looking at an image on a flat surface and interpreting it as analogous to a physical scene in the real world.
Synesthesia but for ideas.
Whispering a secret to the snail.
Support Topic Lords
52 min
August 16, 202195. The Florida of Canada
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Maxx
@mechcem on Twitter
Maxx plugs sitting at various angles
Erica
@YerrikTRB on Twitter
Erica plugs Lovage, not the band but the spice
Jim
Jim plugs Big Boy beds, or doesn’t
Topics:
Things I Chewed as a Youth.
In which I beg Jim to use a sharp knife or at least let me teach his child to.
Canadian floating feet: explained.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salish_Sea_human_foot_discoveries
Brad asks "Listening to spoilery discussion of a piece of media because you think you don't care about it, but then being convinced by said discussion that you actually would have liked it."
Do you know off hand the tallest person you've met? And other things I wish we tracked culturally.
At 7 feet 0 inches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Todd_MacCulloch
At 6 feet 9 inches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Bird
Egg the Arts Show
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EGG,_the_Arts_Show
Some of EGG on VIMEO https://vimeo.com/user10049545
Microtopics:
Sitting at various angles.
Toilets with threatening auras.
The butthole being the mind and the poop being the body.
Replacing all your spices with lovage.
How to use white pepper.
Breaking into the kitchen and finding where they keep the peppercorns.
Big boy beds.
Performatively lying on stuffed animals.
Baby MacGyver disassembling his crib from the inside.
One for the baby book.
The side number theory of beds.
Sleeping on a bed shaped like a mobius strip.
Sleeping on a tightrope because your triangular bed had too many sides.
Staying up as late as you can and then falling asleep where you stand.
Hiding inside the circular rack of shirts in JC Penney.
Climbing inside a circular rack of chastity belts at JC Penney and becoming trapped when an employee comes by and locks all the belts.
Collecting pins from the collars of the men's shirts and sticking them all into the calluses of your hands and running around displaying your hands to freak out the grownups.
Chewing all the bones so nobody in your family can play Operation.
An endlessly chewy grape.
The sign up sheet for chewing on the fake plastic grape.
The hierarchy of who in your 4th grade class is allowed to chew on the plastic grape next and for how long.
The copycat endlessly chewy grape that is not as good as the one that Erica refuses to give up.
Dipping the chewing sponge in whiskey to refresh its flavor.
Filling the endlessly chewy plastic grape with peanut butter.
Chewing stim toys that are designed for babies but you can totally chew on them as an adult too.
Eating the eyes out of the fish before anybody else gets the chance.
The novelty of eating an identifiable body part.
The Snack That Tastes Back.
Being faced with an ice cream bar shaped like a human and deciding whether to bite off its legs first so it can't run away or bite off its head first so it can't scream.
Not celebrating Easter but knowing about Easter candy because you bought it on sale afterwards.
Whether or not to teach a four year old kitchen knife skills.
Giving a cat a tail knife so that it is pointy on six out of six ends.
The least optimal medium for explaining how to hold a kitchen knife.
Seeing a two year old and needing to arm the two year old.
Teaching a two year old how to wield power responsibly.
Disarticulated feet washing ashore.
Sneakers being more buoyant than sneakers thirty years ago.
Why floating feet like landing in Canada.
Never a single foot.
Salish Sea Human Foot Discoveries.
As It Happens.
Talking to a Canadian man who was near an earthquake.
Cons: loose feet.
Lying about the quality of water.
Turning the amnesia pill like a kitchen timer to specify how much time you want to lose.
Trying to get to Twitter Zero but some people who follow you don't log on any more so you have to find them in real life and annoy them enough that they log in to Twitter to unfollow you, but not enough that they call the police.
Cosplaying a 2013-era Twitter asshole by uploading an egg as your profile photo.
Tweeting nothing but pop culture spoilers and phobia-triggering photos for months to shed as many followers as possible in your quest for Twitter Zero.
A Twitter bot that changes its avatar and username to the last person who tweeted at it and tweets what they said back at them.
Not knowing if anyone has time these days and asking the listeners to write in if they have time, but not reading any of the emails because you don't have time.
A language where disclosing whether you've eaten eggplant today is built into the grammar.
Meeting a basketball player and their suit is yards and yards of tweed going right up to the ceiling, with their head perched on top.
Meeting the basketball player who retired to play pinball at California Extreme.
Learning to spin a ball on your finger at Harlem Globetrotters basketball camp.
All the time you spent at basketball camp and eating avocado toast that you wish you could have back now.
Moving to Detroit and wanting to make neighborhoods more friendly.
Planting cabbages outside of smokestacks to remove heavy metals from the soil.
Emailing the producer of a show you liked twenty years ago to let them know that it's not online anywhere and ending up spearheading the project to archive the show permanently.
Doxing yourself live on the air.
A Twitter account that every Topic Lord can post from.
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1 hr 3 min
August 09, 202194. We're All Pet Shop Boys Now
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
James
https://vulpine.club/@triplefox
https://twitter.com/triplefox
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday/
https://fourbitfriday.itch.io/catacombkids
Topics:
Ravens of Golden Gate Park
Do you also want to destroy the moon? Or: What kind of supervillain are you
Novation Circuit
Domino Dancing
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ik2YF05iX2w
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/u9gcW8sBgQ0
Microtopics:
What exactly qualifies a collection of songs as an album.
A solid Mastodon follow.
Filling an album with songs until the CD is full.
The ravens you pass on your walk every day.
The guy in the brown vest who never does anything.
CORVID-19.
A raven who is extremely surprised that you don't have any food.
The mask everyone has agreed to wear when it's time to go cruising for trouble with the crows.
Wielding a cream pie so if you accidentally hit someone you are guaranteed to do 0 damage.
The Mythbusters episode where they figure out how to drown someone with a pancake.
Whittling down your hit points until you stub your toe and die.
Hit points as a measure of your will to go on, so when someone hits you in the face with a pie it's a serious blow as you reconsider whether you're really cut out to be an adventurer.
Bonus spleen damage.
The half-dozen extra organs Space Marines have surgically grafted in for fighting. (But none for love.)
Hit points representing individual vertebrae so when a high level Final Fantasy character has 999 HP that means they're basically a giraffe now.
Secretly replacing the moon with a hologram of the moon.
Fantasy settings where the moon is destroyed and strewn across the sky like the rings of Saturn.
Whether it'd be less work to steal a moon of Mars or to retrieve Ceres to give our moon a nice sky companion.
Aspirations of both destroying or romancing the moon.
Accidentally pushing the supervillain button to destroy all cereal crops when you meant all cold cereals.
Why they call them Grape Nuts.
Back when it was a big deal that they baked these crackers using electric power.
A tool that is worse at what it does than your laptop but has the advantage that you can't go on Twitter.
Making 80s techno because you're not ready to make a twelve-tone Schoenberg piece.
Wanting to make fun jams but not knowing how to play any instruments.
A smooth sequencer workflow.
Different ways to make a song.
Getting a guitar so you can put guitar sounds in your music and then realizing that now you have to learn to play guitar.
Reasons you might want to leave notes out of a chord.
Leaving the bass notes out because the bass player is taking care of that.
Nine note scales and eleven note scales and everything in between.
Pushing the limits of your instrument beyond what it was intended for.
The lived experience of wanting cool synthesizers in the 90s vs. In the 20s.
Music equipment manufacturers realizing you could make a toy analog synthesizer and sell it for $200 and everyone would buy it because it's a cheap fun music toy.
Putting a cpu in a plastic box and there's your synthesizer and all that's left is to add some buttons.
Synth Lords.
Two shirtless young men sitting by a tree.
Whether conventionally attractive people can work in pet shops.
Back in the 80s before it was legally mandated that musicians be extremely attractive.
Tipping your silver hard hat and saying "milady."
Smash cut to a Pet Shop Boy standing in the doorway and the audience gasps.
How you would identify the Pet Shop Boys if not for the baseball caps saying "boy."
Pet Shop Boyd.
Return of the stripy shirts.
Pet Shop Yinz.
Two shirtless youths fighting in the ocean.
Trying to start a fight while outdoors by saying "Do you want to take this to the beach? We can't take it outside because we're already outside! The beach is the outside of the outside! After that it goes to space! Do you want to take this to space?"
Walking alone on the beach while your suitors wrestle in the ocean suggestively.
Horses getting loose on set while you're filming a music video and getting in every shot.
Error with an f.
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55 min
August 02, 202193. A Medical Advice Podcast
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Mara
https://twitter.com/McaelinL
April
https://twitter.com/aprilsaur/
Topics:
Frog and Toad core
What would you do with a bonus room in your house?
My reptile brain is a cat-loving ninja
If you could submit one thing (a song, a building, a food, an activity, an abstract concept) to the interstellar community of sapient intelligences as your part of The Case For Why The Human Race Is Good And Cool, what would it be?
How earnest lessons you try to teach your children backfire
Murder She Wrote is back on prime
Asafoetida powder
Microtopics:
The Expanse: bigger than before.
A developer's guide to cognitive behavioral therapy.
The various circumstances under which the Frog Fractions DLC hat can be a witch hat.
Cottagecore vs. Frog and Toad core.
Cottagecore merged with an old man.
Embracing Frog and Toad for pride month.
Finding the bodice rippers with people with dark curly hair on the cover because you can imagine those are light-skinned black people.
The relative density of the east coast.
Getting out of California before it's too late.
A complete dearth of natural disasters.
Writing an offer letter for a home you want to buy and mentioning your adorable child who just needs a home several times.
Moving into a space that is twice as big and not knowing what to do with all the space.
An Austenian fantasy you have been cherishing in your bosom.
A perfect cosy library with chairs that trap people.
Installing a ladder on casters so you can ride it around the room every morning in your Belle outfit.
Coming up with excuses to install the ladder on casters even though you can just reach up and grab every book in your library.
One of those booths with a fan at the bottom that you fill by ripping a single page out of every book in your library.
How much extra you can charge for an Airbnb hidden behind a secret bookshelf.
Going into the Library of Congress to check out Bullfrog's Official Guide to Dungeon Keeper.
A room full of music production equipment and no internet connection.
Asking your child to focus at dinner when all the adults at the table have their phones out.
Saving a cat by applying torque to a falling chair.
Doing a thing before you realize you've done it and thinking "wow it's a good thing I agree with those actions."
Deliberately relying on your unconscious mind to do important work.
Whether Jim and his wife need to get checked for ADHD.
A teen who can write a hell of a term paper.
The interstellar community of sapient intelligences.
The case for why the human race is good and cool.
Winnie the Pooh.
Reclaiming the poop.
Taco Bell's cannon firing nacho cheese chalupas at the enemy spaceships.
Trying to convey "hygge" without being willing to try to pronounce it.
Learning about alien cultures by watching Star Trek.
A five year old explaining to you how T-Mobile are leaders in 5G technology.
A perfectly sensible reaction to the story of Noah's Ark.
Learning what fighting is and deciding to fight your mom.
A book about a child who needs to be reprimanded all the time.
Shouting "no" and throwing the phone on the floor whenever an ad plays.
Watching Murder She Wrote every night before bed.
Jessica Fletcher the serial killer and her nephew Grady, also a serial killer.
How good Jessica Fletcher would be at breaking up a loud graduation party.
Predicting when the party next door is going to end by the decade the music is from.
How to recognize a trap remix of the Murder She Wrote theme from just the bass.
Tricking your family into playing the Murder She Wrote board game.
Not needing a wedding ring because your husband got you the Murder She Wrote DVD boxed set.
Discovering what DVDs are and deciding to put them in the shower.
Covering the shower drain with the Wii Sports disc because they're the exact same size.
A bone-dry shower.
Always shirt-cocking it.
Baby poop and onions but also kind of floral but also you hate onions.
Resorch.
Dried latex from the celery family.
Boiling your neti pot water to kill the brain-eating bacteria that might pass through the blood brain barrier.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 2 min
July 26, 202192. Tomb of the Spider-Men
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Abby
https://twitter.com/mizabitha
http://abbydenton.podbean.com/
John B
https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo
Topics:
The 1998 Tips & Tricks Magazine Video Game Codebook, a Larry Flynt publication that is not porn but, in a certain sense, is not unlike porn
Why grease 2 is the best superhero musical; a mild defense of the 60s superman musical
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNXbdLDZLKM
Tower of Druaga
Cibo Matto - Sugar Water
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EN9auBn6Jys
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/qgqxxX_yLfo
https://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/02/17/68-michel-gondry/
Microtopics:
The illustrious Abby Denton.
A shambles.
Locking your Twitter so nobody knows what you're doing in there.
Making a whole video game magazine out of just the good parts of video game magazines.
Publishing a series of short stories by formatting them like cheat codes and then submitting them to Tips & Tricks magazine.
Nostalgia for when most of your perception of the gaming world came from tiny screenshots in magazines.
A book that is a bunch of fake games and paragraphs about them.
A duck riding a skateboard.
Making a book out of a Twitter thread.
Reading about video games in magazines probably being the optimal experience actually because most games were terrible.
Game Master Anthony's birthday party.
Street Fighter 2, the last game in the Street Fighter series.
NBA Jam arcade as proof that cheat codes are compatible with microtransactions.
Renting a game just to prove to your friend that the cheat code they heard about doesn't actually work.
WWF Attitude.
Enjoying the bouquet of Uniracers.
A certain quality of gibberish.
Publishing a fake cheat code in the annual Tips and Tricks monster issue to convey the location of your drug drop.
Putting Roll back in the Marvel vs. Capcom series.
A very mild defense.
Superman fighting a gang of Chinese acrobats portrayed by white heroin addicts.
Mafiosos cha-cha-ing around the room and chanting "Curtains for Superman!"
The only Superman story where kryptonite never appears.
An evil psychoanalyst defeating Superman by convincing him he's just a regular guy.
Why can't the strongest man in the world be the happiest man in the world?
Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark.
Dorky British guys trying to impress Michelle Pfeiffer.
Giving a three year old a DVD of Grease 2 for her birthday.
Everything are an opera.
Just barely losing the Nobel Prize for thirty years in a row.
Japanese arcade note-sharing culture.
If Atari 2600 Adventure has a dozen Easter eggs as obscure as its hidden room, and they were all necessary to finish the game.
One thing the NES is good at.
The Gilligan's Island game for NES.
Gilligan's Island for NES being rated only .1 star out of five less than Sonic CD.
Game Center CX.
The time you could explore Namco Museum.
Bubble Bobble.
Hiding a bunch of stuff in your indie game inspired by Frog Fractions but nobody ever finds it because nobody cared enough about your game.
Spelunky 2.
Your stuff per second rate.
Nightmare of Druaga.
How to know if you have a friend.
A Brian De Palma split screen dream.
Waking up with sugar on your head.
Michel Gondry's music video ouevre.
I, Palindrome, I.
A team of compositors working for six months to bring your one-second idea to fruition.
Hitting someone with your car and then following them down the street yelling at them.
A reverse strip club where the performers are moving backwards in time.
Practicing how to put a reverse-causality shirt on.
A complete understanding of why Miho Hatori is going to bed with a sugar head.
Teaching your son how to yawn.
Playing Doctor Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine with your tiny, tiny feet.
Jerks welcome!
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 1 min
July 19, 202191. Careening Towards the Poop Dreads Barrier
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Xalavier
https://twitter.com/WritNelson
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1246250/An_Airport_for_Aliens_Currently_Run_by_Dogs/
Tom
https://twitter.com/tv_neato
https://www.patreon.com/StrangeScaffold
Topics:
Shaped CDs and other data formats too cool to live in 2021
https://vgmdb.net/album/819
The Steve Jackson RPG you called on the telephone in 1988
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasy_Interactive_Scenarios_by_Telephone
Opposites Attract
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xweiQukBM_k
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/Jnkc7diIpdo
Let's brainstorm ideas for how to make the next Sonic game so bad that it kills the sonic franchise once and for all
Double-sided pizza
http://www.thenibble.com/zine/archives/yanni-grilling-cheese.asp
Poop dreads
Microtopics:
Waiting for three months to buy the fancy new LIDAR eyes for your Clydesdale.
Whether Microsoft would eat horseflesh, and whether that would be a bad thing.
Whether the hippo is a bigger threat to humanity than the Tsetse fly.
The only animal in the history of the planet to be equipped with a Gatling gun.
Whether anyone has beaten the bucket.
A white man in tech who has never been on a podcast.
An Airport for Aliens Currently Run by Dogs.
Having horseflesh on the mind.
Whether the horse runs an airport or its own dimension.
A bright line in the sand between the listeners and Poop Dreads.
Finding a CD-ROM shaped like a polyhedron at the bottom of the cereal box.
Filling a CD with 4k resolution dog photographs.
Shipping a modern game on 100 novelty shaped CDs and also shipping an enormous disc changer add-on to the PS5, called the "DataLathe."
Contract negotiations where you're not allowed to remove any text from the contract but you can add as much as you want to the end.
Your DataLathe™ exploding, covering everyone in the room with Lathecerations™.
Campaigning for months to get the foam disc gun from the dollar store.
How many dogs you could fit in a mid-sized Subaru.
Ordering a free starter pack for this play-by-phone RPG by sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to the company running it.
Sending a self-addressed stamped envelope to get a free trial of a defunct play-by-phone RPG and receiving a Moons Over My Hammy from the Denny's currently occupying that building.
A coked-up American businessman in 1988 making an overseas phone call and paying 38 pence a minute so he can press 3 to cast fireball.
A kid reading about a 900 number in the back of a magazine and just calling it and later their parents receive a phone bill and there's no regulatory oversight because the industry was replaced by the internet more quickly than lawmakers could act.
Tricking children into calling a phone number that bills their parents for a percentage of their net worth and inventing taxes.
Approaching the Poop Dreads barrier and being shot out of the sky.
A puff of chimney smoke that makes it look like a cat is farting.
Giving a cat a flat top and a goatee.
Ripping out the back seat of a Toyota Camry and throwing it in an alley to contrast with the relentless glamour of Paula Abdul.
Disco Ball earrings.
Whether Silent Hill 2 would've been better starring M.C. Skat Kat.
A funny cartoon cat man in a music video.
Learning about what people thought was okay in the 80s.
M.C. Skat Kat blaming the alley he lives in for his lack of hygiene when cats can just lick themselves to take a bath.
The Oral History of M.C. Skat Kat in Opposites Attract.
Hanging like a spider from an unseen perch.
Paula Abdul trying to Mario Kart dash but whiffing it.
A clock on the edge of the rooftop facing inwards so that the cool teens hanging out on the roof can head home before the purge starts.
M.C. Skat Kat's ballerina training.
Looking at two people whose names start with "Xa" and assuming that they're the same person.
The Sonic Cycle.
Ending the Sonic Cycle so that Sega can just focus on making Yakuza games.
What it would take to kill the Sonic franchise.
The Sonic game where players go back in time to kill Yuji Naka and destroy the timeline.
Sending an assassin back in time to kill Yuji Naka before he invents Sonic the Hedgehog and coming back to the present to find our cultural landscape dominated by M.C. Skat Kat.
Goro Majima featuring in the next Sonic the Hedgehog game.
Putting the toppings as far away as possible from the organ you enjoy food with.
Inventing double sided pizza by folding your pizza the other way.
Biting into the Hot Pocket before making sure it's cool enough to safely consume because they're not called Cool Enough To Safely Consume Pockets.
An inverted calzone.
A beautiful world in which you ask a street vendor for "one pepperoni please" and he hands you a balloon and the balloon is pizza filled with helium.
Every pizza balloon coming with a q-tip inside in case you need to clean your ears after eating.
Arranging litterboxes in a geodesic dome so your cat goes "finally an arrangement I respect enough to poop in."
Putting chicken wire around your bed but it doesn't keep the cat out because it's not cat wire.
The difference between polite and clean.
A cat who is afraid of its own hair.
Support Topic Lords
58 min
July 12, 202190. That's My Glass Petard!
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Jenni
[email protected]
Kole
https://duckfeed.tv/
https://twitter.com/koleross
Topics:
Whether or not you should stop animals who are thieves.
We're gonna reach a point where Americans know about Eurovision pretty soon, so prepare for that
"CRL couldn't afford the movie license for their video game adaptation of Blade Runner, so they just licensed the soundtrack.
http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/blade-runner-1985/
I Did It by Dave Matthews Band
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRXZkdEj7YI
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/gN_7KtRoZWU
Showing your kid the Sonic the Hedgehog cartoon & him immediately adopting Sonic's attitudey idle animation
Fixing every plot hole in media by writing a "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead"-like work where minor characters directly address them.
The "I won't eat the cheese" joke
Adventure 500: https://bluerenga.blog/tag/adventure-500/?order=ASC
Microtopics:
An entire crowd of Jennis all expressing their preferences at once.
Creative choices that make editing this show take even longer.
Feeling some topics right now.
Helping a seagull looter escape.
Just assuming that the seagull didn't pay for that bag of chips.
Sending a penguin to the market to buy fish.
The Keystone Kops of stopping this bird from having a cheese sandwich.
How nobody can get mad if you train your dog to steal from shops.
An adorable seagull stealing somebody's insulin.
Activating the motion-sensing doors to help a seagull steal the Hope Diamond.
Encountering a seagull smoking a tiny crack pipe and deciding whether to post a video on social media or send it to rehab.
How to monetize the rat trying to go up the down escalator.
When you post a viral video of a rat trying to go up the down escalator and monetize it by replying with an ad for mail order brides but don't give the rat a cut off the income.
Whether Americans know about Eurovision.
Pretending the listeners don't know what Eurovision is and really lording it over them.
Having to adjust for the altitude when you bake a souffle on your high horse.
If every state in the USA got to perform one song at the Super Bowl halftime show.
Mr. Lordy.
Soccer except it's singing.
Looking up what girding your loins means.
Stocking up on batteries in advance of when Americans find out about Eurovision.
Power-washed Cheetos.
A bag of bad corn snacks impaled on both a pike and a spike.
Cat Is How Much.
The specific ways in which Wikidiff is broken.
Retiring replidroids.
Knife Hopper with Boy Ratty and Dick Reckard.
An extremely composed and photogenic dumpster.
Getting ready for some very uncomfortable mugging.
Identifying wizards by their extremely shiny outfits.
Why is this man so big?
Smoke tentacles that are just trying to turn the TV on.
How badly the red wizard needs food.
Sugar Ray Charles playing guitar with one hand and holding champagne in the other.
A dojo with sauna vibes.
Dripping your dumpster water onto the hookah rip enjoyer.
Dave-- that's what his fans call him: Dave.
Dave Matthews's flying kick fizzling out because his bribe to the VFX artist wasn't big enough.
Scaring the fish with your pec shimmy.
Doing community service with the purple wizard who is now the orange wizard.
Your two most attitudey friends getting married and having a kid.
Deciding that Sonic the Hedgehog's "I'm waiting" idle animation from Sonic 1 is so central to the character that you decide you need to invent reasons for Sonic to be bored in every episode of the Sonic cartoon.
Looking at your old yearbook photos and realizing that your smirk is the same as Sonic the Hedgehog's.
Kids getting sucked into Sonic the Hedgehog's engorged monopupil younger and younger every year.
The helicopter but it gets you lift.
Mario's idle animation in Super Mario 64 where he just starts naming Italian foods.
Whether someone at Nintendo of America heard Charles Martinet's Mario audition tape and thought "Martinet's an Italian name, right? That means it can't be racist!"
The alternate reality where Charles Martinet does a cartoonish French accent to voice Nintendo's platformer mascot.
Getting offended on behalf of the French.
Whether we should give Shamus O'Leary a hard time for having a racist name.
Shamus O'Leary finding the video on Instagram where you did a cartoon Irish accent in his store's bathroom and being like "is that our choking poster??"
Hearing that Andy Dufresne makes a hole in a cell wall and assuming Shawshank Redemption is a sequel to Fantastic Voyage.
Writing a short story about a friendly rat who explains how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him.
Making it a life goal to transform every goof on IMDB into an "error made by character" by writing fan sequels on AO3.
Explaining how Marty McFly's parents didn't recognize him by pointing out that it was actually a movie the whole time.
The stage play of Super Mario Bros 2 where the audience just watches Mario snore for two hours while listening to jaunty ragtime.
A joke striking you loudly enough that it's still ringing in your head twenty years later.
Paris Syndrome.
Jerusalem Syndrome.
Planting a palm tree under the Eiffel Tower.
Adventure 500.
A game jam where you recreate a game you haven't played in years from memory.
Lou's voice just being a bad Sylvester Stallone accent.
Jenni probably appreciating your email unless it's a bad email.
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1 hr 14 min
July 05, 202189. Pope Hat Guy Covers You With a Towel
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Nathan
https://twitter.com/NathanShorts
Chris
https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall/
Topics:
Are mysteries actually better when you know who dun it?
Renting apartments that come with weird artifacts
Monster Island was a play-by-mail MMO written in QuickBasic that ran from 1989 to 2017.
https://if50.substack.com/p/1989-monster-island
https://if50.substack.com/
No Tengo Dinero by Righeira
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwxIGe1oOJQ
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/raj5mJ1sma4
Procrastinating because if I do anything I'll feel like I have to do everything
Microtopics:
The symmetry of USB-C.
The edibility of USB-C.
The months-long argument at Nintendo over which version of the Flag Gordon song to play when you plug USB-C headphones into the charging port.
Which version of the Flash Gordon theme is more likely to get you pulled over for speeding.
Columbo.
Whether a mystery story functions as both a good story and a good puzzle.
Revealing the identity of the murderer in the first ten minutes of every episode of your murder mystery series.
The inherent mystery provided by the horror genre's willingness to deliver the bad ending.
Murder mysteries that are mysteries to the characters but not the audience.
Whether it can still be a horror movie if the audience understands the rules.
Knives Out.
Enjoying a story twice because there is pleasure in seeing a well-constructed story play out.
Mental air conditioning.
Watching a movie before you watch it, so you know what's going to happen.
A huge wooden ankh in the bushes right outside your front door.
Renting a furnished apartment and it comes with a painting called "Bad Pope Hat Guy" right above your bed.
Covering the painting of Lucius the Bad Pope with a towel before going to sleep on the bed underneath the painting and waking up with the towel covering your head and realizing Lucius the Bad Pope just covered you with a towel.
Finding a knob of unknown purpose sticking out of the wall and deciding to pull it as hard as you can.
Fold-out wall stools.
A porcelain hand that came with the apartment.
Storing your porcelain hand in the toilet tank.
Everyone having that one friend who owns a jar of mercury and does the party trick where they float a penny on top of the mercury.
Your new girlfriend getting upset that you own a jar of mercury so you leave it in the common area of your apartment building and the next day it's gone.
Whether your jar of mercury contains any of the atoms of mercury that Hitler breathed.
Playing an MMO by mail.
How many frames per second a play by mail game runs at
Yelling "hey!" into the abyss.
Non-player monsters.
Crossing the Crystal Hills barrier.
Issuing weekly patches into your Netflix original movie until none of the original story or actors remain.
Checking the patch notes before you watch version 2.4 of your favorite movie.
Where to put the new material when you add to your branching path story.
Inventing the t-remover so you can patch a movie starring Brad Pitt to instead star Brad Pit.
Whether a music video is hand animated or early CG.
Video Toaster.
A 3D animated prism that's actually a 2D animation cel that someone is rotating by hand.
The significance of the orange ball with sevens coming out.
Inventing the circuit board to be the background in your cool music video and then realizing you can use it to design electronics.
One tiny tank having to bear witness and the other tiny tank refusing to.
The same music video being the origin of circuit boards, Macromedia Flash, and the Toejam and Earl loading screens.
Basing your squad of teen crime solvers on a 90s fad like Magic Eye.
Seeing ending credits at the end of a music video and realizing you were watching a short film this whole time.
Being inspired to speak by images in front of your eyes.
Seeing a galaxy brain meme in your mind's ear.
An outline of an abbreviation.
Bragging about your photogenic memory.
Where your mind's ear lives.
Your Bluetooth headphones glitching out in a way that is both cool and nauseating.
Needing to flip a switch in your mind and having to be careful not to touch the mind mouse trap next to it.
Being productive all day and then realizing you didn't do anything fun all day.
Moving to Minneapolis and realizing just how much you own.
A two year old who draws perfect circles.
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1 hr 7 min
June 28, 202188. The Horned Lizard's Final Defense
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday/
https://frror.bandcamp.com/releases
Ryan
https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer
https://www.instagram.com/ryanikeaudio/
Topics:
What do animals know? Do they know things? How do we find out?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat%3F
Can we all just be adults and admit that invisibility sucks as a superpower?
Where is the machine learning startup promising to fix the concert videos where the audience claps on 1 and 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UinRq_29jPk
Toxic by Britney Spears
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZuxwVk7TU
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/x3eUVHdw54k
What mundane tool/item/technology do you wish were irrelevant, and what would you replace it with?
Microtopics:
Doing a perfect ollie your first time on a skateboard and then never skating again because you'll never top that.
Cooking every single dish in the human culinary encyclopedia and then starving to death because you refuse to repeat yourself.
Honor system rock paper scissors.
Making video games, one of which is called Catacomb Kids.
Naming your band one letter away from a common word so that your band is impossible to google.
An extremely austere and dour change log, like in Great Expectations.
Changing the "dragon breath" spell to "bear breath" because dragons aren't real but bears breathe fire.
A grim window into the world in which we live, dragonless and dragon breath -less.
A delicious treat for anyone who likes anise flavoring and salt.
A giant human sized licorice in a wedding gown.
Competing with nearby deer for the affections of the extremely salty licorice you're marrying.
Spendinga lot of your mental energy trying to figure out animal cognition.
Whether elephants worship the moon or in fact anything.
Dogs doing the things dogs do even if they've never been taught by another dog.
Where babies learn the things that their parents don't teach them.
Babies smiling when they see a face even though they're not happy to see you.
Baby reflexes that help parents bond with them during the time when they are hardest to love.
How to be sure that animals think and feel and have memory when we can't even be sure for other humans.
P-zombies.
A dog's mental model of the world.
The Far Side cartoon depicting a machine that translates dog barks into human speech.
Whether animals have to know stuff.
Meerkat accents.
The mantis shrimp having an innate ability to see ghosts, and learning our language to tell us that we're stepping on ghosts all the time and we're covered in ectoplasm.
A superpower that turns you invisible except for your eyes, so you're just a floating pair of eyeballs, not invisible at all, so you have to buy a pair of sunglasses to hide your eyes.
Putting two of the lamest possible superpowers together in the same married couple.
The lamest superpower that you would settle for.
The superpower of getting up when the alarm rings and not having to hit snooze even once.
The superpower of lactose tolerance.
The superpower of having practiced a lot.
Cutting a cantaloupe in half and the six of clubs is in there and the guy's like "yeah that's my card, but that cantaloupe was $9 at Whole Foods, thanks a lot."
How to convince general audiences that they should care when in the measure to clap.
Just assuming that audiences will be clapping in the wrong place so you add a single measure in 5/4 to your 4/4 composition to fix it.
Playing a concert video where the video and audio are desynchronized by exactly half a measure.
Inventing a snare drum that looks like a bass drum and vice versa, and filming a prank show where unsuspecting drummers play concerts with the inverted drum kit.
Going to fiver and asking someone to build you a drum kit that defies science and logic.
The one company that Topic Lords would accept sponsorship from.
Stopping the concert when the audience starts clapping on 1 and 3 and asking them "come on, did you spend $126 to get it wrong?"
Not finding out how low-poly these birds are until the quarter speed viewing.
Which side Britney's nails look most amazing from.
The outfit flight attendants had to wear in the 1950s, before they had the right to vote.
A flight attendant with pauldrons.
A loser with a sandwich that Britney wants to make out with in the bathroom.
Seeing someone's ass and wondering what the Blippi subreddit would think of it.
A dude who is a motorcycle.
Biketaurs.
Having the same facial expression as the motorcycle you're riding.
A sparkly Jackson Pollock that you wrap around yourself.
Stepping right in the laser.
Warning the janitor that you're turning on the office's death ladder so he's not surprised when he shows up that weekend to find 15 corpses on the floor.
A music video that is secretly the prequel to Jupiter Ascending.
Whether this hot Scandinavian guy is the same guy as the last hot Scandinavian guy.
Saving time shaving by dyeing your facial hair the same color as your skin.
Whether a stiff iron bar jabbing into your back would improve a bed or a chair.
Whether Britney Spears hallucinated the events of the Toxic video, and she's just an ordinary flight attendant.
How to fix bread closures.
Filling the moon with bread closures.
Getting a bread box so people stop having to manufacture bread closures.
How massive a bread is required to spin the bag at sufficient velocity to apply the bread closures.
Solving your headphone cord problem by never listening to audio of any kind.
Installing an ink sac in your fingernail so that you never have to look around for a pen.
A tattoo of a squid that you can squeeze to spurt ink into the eyes of your enemies, but the tattoo gets more and more faded as the ink depletes.
An awful thing that your ducks can do.
What's going on in that biome?
The horned lizard's final defense.
Dropping a tail if you need to escape.
A super ethical meat factory that spends all day terrifying the tails off of lizards.
An avocado-like spread made out of frightened lizard tail.
Nothing but adrenaline flavor in this tail.
How to live as a freelancer without being drained of all your bodily fluids.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 13 min
June 21, 202187. Fraudl With an Umlaut
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Sam
@SamJ314 on Twitter.
Chris
[email protected]
Topics:
We can't even describe spacetime because of our faulty perception of time, and how it relates to optical illusions.
Optical illusion: https://imgur.com/t6YdyVr
Flatland: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flatland
3 guys with non-transitive dice and a non-reproducing animal.
https://trick-dice.com/product/nontransitive-dice-set-of-3/
https://imgur.com/Rh3ubda
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/646004/do-cat-buttholes-touch-all-surfaces
In 2003, a judge ruled that the X-Men aren't human.
https://www.polygon.com/comics/2019/9/12/20862474/x-men-series-toys-human-legal-issue-marvel-comics
The Hustle, Rebel's arbitration deposition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8yD4dVrzZY
"I have a bad case of diarrhea - Japanese learning English"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CKjaFG4YN6g
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/UQmuZui_ajM
Zuiikin' English https://youtube.com/user/satisfyinglife
How concepts across languages differ but when we learn words as children we form this concept of a thing that the word represents.
Fun German words for English speakers: https://www.thelocal.at/20150806/ten-wonderfully-literal-german-words/
Splagchnizomai https://www.bibletools.org/index.cfm/fuseaction/Topical.show/RTD/cgg/ID/7650/Splagchnizomai.htm
Aspie couple in the world, running our approaches with normies for evaluation with each other.
https://musingsofanaspie.com/2012/10/19/rules-to-live-by/
Interesting fiction read for Aspies: The Rosie Project https://g.co/kgs/RUwYG3
Cockney rhyming slang https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhyming_slang
Microtopics:
Being unable to describe time without using time words like "before" and "now" and "always"
The "media player with a scrub bar" model of space time.
Why time only moves forward and why we only perceive any instant of it at any given time.
Taking time away from spacetime and just having a frozen sculpture of an instant.
Michaelangelo's David being the most famous space-without-time.
Optical illusions as a lens into the sorts of perceptions and abilities that evolution deemed entirely unnecessary to our propagation as a species.
Spoilers for Arrival.
Whether it was physically possible for life on Earth to have developed the ability to perceive additional times and/or spaces.
Whether early humans transgressed somehow and their punishment was to wonder about everything all the goddamn time.
Whether or not we get to eat pizza after we die.
Being so annoyed by an optical illusion that you invent a machine to help you unsee it.
A non reproductive animal rolling a non-transitive die.
Mules vs. hinnies.
Mules being unable to reproduce because they're too unattractive to find a mate.
Putting lipstick on a cat's butt in order to measure what furniture the cat rubs its butt on, and the butt runs out of lipstick after two chairs.
Being too lazy to make a new line on the spreadsheet so you just append your new topic onto an existing topic.
Google alerting you to an imaginary 6.0 earthquake near Lake Tahoe.
Just sitting here waiting for the earthquake Google promised you.
Moving from New Jersey to California and discovering earthquakes.
Whether you should add 27 and 2.
The legal difference between a doll and a toy.
Having a fun time in the courtroom.
Getting your movie's rating changed by counting up the number of times female genitalia were mentioned.
Numinous dice.
A soundstage with a bench and a plant that are supposed to indicate that this scene takes place outside.
Referring to a scene transition as a wipe but everybody thinks you mean wiping your butt.
P-Low The Skillful Abbot.
Really enjoying your bad case of diarrhea.
Doing aerobics and chanting about having a bad case of diarrhea.
A classful of language learners each repping a different language on their shirts.
Different cultures discretizing the world differently.
A hypothetical culture that considers a "person" to include the hat they're wearing but not their left foot.
Whether the horseshoe is part of a horse.
Pointing at some clothes and saying "there's a person inside those clothes."
Pointing at a human head and saying "there's a person inside that skull."
Different places a person can exist within their corporeal body.
Feeling emotions in your gut because you have neurons in there.
Hanging out with dinosaurs and having to do brain surgery on their butts.
Finding out that your brain surgeon is a dinosaur and putting a post-it note on your butt saying "brain not in here."
Finding out that you are on the autism spectrum after you have your 10th concussion and aren't allowed to think hard for two years.
Wearing a bumper sticker on your forehead that says "How's my talking? Call 1-800-EAT-SHIT"
Struggling to understand why someone would use words non-literally.
Feeling very refrigerator about this explanation of Cockney Rhyming Slang.
How to apply the principles of running a playtest to human conversation.
Wondering about the thing you've got rattling around in your skull.
Conversational strategies that only work when you're talking to other autistic people.
Going through life assuming everybody has had a bunch of concussions.
Putting on Frasier to take enough of your attention that you're not thinking about anything else, but also Frasier not being worth thinking about so you don't think about that either.
Whether you want this show's listeners friending you on Facebook.
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53 min