Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

June 14, 202186. Dad Boy Prime and the Shadow of Grung
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Gary
http://duckfeed.tv/
https://www.patreon.com/duckfeedtv/
https://twitter.com/garybuh
Brayton
Bogwater convention coming to your town soon!
Topics:
Spirit Halloween's Youtube Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3PL2DxHye4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJIbE6_Lt2w
A drug you never want to try
This list of people's favorite mugs, and how to generalize it
https://twitter.com/AnnaHollinrake/status/1382392715074211849
https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/1385291669801631744
Devo - Theme from Doctor Detroit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_A8Xe9M0NY
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/QIK-ngWWhhs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqnPciNhQXU
Mechanics or features of a game that the game doesn't tell you about
Which undead would you most like to become? Lich? Ghoul? Skeleton? Ghost? Zombie? Wight? Revenant?
Microtopics:
What a .tv TLD indicates.
Brayton's Bubbly Bog Water.
Airdropping incredibly earthy mineral water directly to your house.
Using the wrong musical sting.
The gas station that functions both before and after noon.
Drinking water out of a beer bong.
The algorithm providing a solid recommendation for once.
Going into Spirit Halloween and asking for something in an underfed Michael Myers.
Giving out vaseline for Halloween.
The truth according to vaseline.com.
Whether vaseline meets FDA requirements for human consumption and whether that qualifies it as a foodstuff.
Blooming your own onions at home so you can stop going to Outback every weekend.
All the other things you could bloom with your new onion bloomer.
A good way to go into a fugue state and have something on in the background while you're doing something else.
A redditor who went missing after acquiring some Datura seeds.
A recreational drug for which the lethal dose varies significantly from person to person.
Deciding whether to join a cult based on whether you hallucinated the cult leader high fiving Aquaman or selling celebrity maps under a bridge.
The serial rooster on the box of corn flakes who's roosting every time you see him.
The rooster jumping off of the Corn Flakes box, grabbing the butcher knife, and giving you career advice.
Explaining that cocaine isn't addictive and you would know because you do it every day.
Scrolling through a Twitter thread about people's favorite mugs to see all the great mugs.
Perusing the multivarious ways a person can like a mug.
The East Berlin traffic light man.
A trivet in your grandpa's kitchen that says Joint-S.T.A.R.S. and depicts a star firing a lightning bolt at a tank, and whether your grandpa is secretly an anime villain.
A dragon clutching the world in its hands with an American flag pattern on its spread wings.
The patriotism dragon.
Our favorite mugs.
Going on Twitter to relax.
Whether a big enough knife counts as a sword.
Devo Vevo.
Dan Aykroyd speed walking while people make fun of him for the entire duration of the film.
Mark Mothersbaugh jogging in a sealed garbage bag so he can quickly lose enough weight to qualify for his intended Devo weight class.
The belt from the 1920s that jiggles you.
Recording a commentary on a Dan Aykroyd movie as part of your podcast about Binding of Isaac collectibles.
Replacing every transition wipe in Star Wars with Mark Mothersbaugh floating across the screen.
The illusion of intentionality.
A beat poet playing a bass constructed out of a bass drum
Our favorite fake lap steel guitar solos and what synthesizers they were played on.
The geniuses at genius.com having absolutely nothing to say about Devo's Theme to Doctor Detroit.
The Charmin Bear's mom's opinions on ass wiping.
A Transmissible Toilet Paper Disease That Affects Only Bears.
Rubber Krulwich.
Jogging and Pimps: the Doctor Detroit Story.
One of those Doctor Detroit marriages you always hear about.
The Curse of Doctor Detroit.
Flying out of a still frame of a hot dog.
Mark Mothersbaugh wearing an inflated bodysuit so that his silhouette matches Dan Aykroyd's when they speed walk together.
Going to the area labeled "combat zone" in hopes of finding someone to shoot.
Hiding aliens in your space game and never telling anybody about them.
Hiding a main quest in your space game and never telling anybody about it.
Getting a gamer treat for peeking into corners.
How Portal should've warned you about its unusually high fall damage on the box.
The pros and cons of being a lich.
Whether April would stick around if Jim turned into a lich.
Dying at Chuckie Cheese and being stuck there as a ghost forever.
Whether being a zombie secretly feels awesome.
The tragedy of Quake's wireheading grunts.
Dying on the subway and having to listen to buskers for eternity.
The parable of the good lich and the good billionaire.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 2 min
June 07, 202185. Corsets for Snakes
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Alex is on the Topic Lords Discord.
Shannon is offering vaccines.
Topics:
Human-led gaming over the internet (like escape rooms). How the DM is walking a line of controlling everything vs being completely controlled by the players. How to design games to be played like this over the internet.
Best and worst parts of camping.
Shutting off the PC speaker as a service.
Call Me By Your Name.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6swmTBVI83k
Unedited (syncable) commentary: https://youtu.be/a1u_79xLemA
Is "The Birds" the first genre zombie film?
Microtopics:
Safe and effective vaccines.
The difference between spring rolls and egg rolls.
Teleconferencing an escape room.
All of the items that came out of this drawer.
A room escape game set in outer space where the players on separate ships communicate via semaphore flags.
Running a massively multiplayer tabletop campaign and inventing the middle manager dungeon master.
How Room Escape games have adapted to the pandemic.
Going camping and wondering "Why are we in the woods? Why are we not in our cozy warm house?"
The novelty of not having your luxuries.
Being imprisoned on a cruise ship and only then deigning to be entertained by cruise ship entertainments.
Enjoying a bonfire because the woods doesn't have Netflix.
The novelty of sitting outside in the dark.
Camping as a simulacrum of being an ancient human.
The sound of wind through the branches.
Symphonies being largely unlistenable unless you're held captive in a nearly entirely quiet room.
The relative ease of paying attention when you're not surrounded by distractions.
The relentless temptation of pulling to refresh.
How bad the flame wars get on the fake Twitter set up just for the attendees of JoCo Cruise.
Waiting to find out whether your cruise ship will be permitted to land.
The dynamics of having a Twitter just for your dorm.
Bringing all 29 volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica because you won't have the Internet on the cruise ship.
Going to a sake bar in Japan to learn how to like booze.
The legality of throwing your drink in a kid's face if they give you sass.
Knowing it's illegal to dance on the street in Japan and deliberately adopting an exaggerated swagger whenever the police are around.
Japanese police's different standards for when white people are dancing.
Whether Japanese police have truncheons or just those flashlights with traffic cones on them.
Getting a job and trying to figure out how to be useful at it.
The PC speaker beeping long after your program has crashed.
Writing a program in the machine language debugger because Windows 98 still comes with programming tools.
A kid swinging over pits.
Commander Keen in: Invasion of the Vorticons.
Back when it was a big deal for the PC to run a game that looked like a NES game.
Eventually realizing that the game you're playing where the cat chases the mouse is actually just a screen saver.
Not being able to convince your dad to buy a CD-ROM drive for the family PC but luckily the N64 uses cartridge technology.
Visiting your friends who own an N64 and playing Mario Kart and Goldeneye and then going home and saying "this is the real shit, check out Pac Man 2."
Being informed that you are in for a treat.
Clouds giving the sun a big hug.
The influence of Spongebob Squarepants on the music video for "Call Me By Your Name" by Lil Nas X.
A snake turning into a cone head.
A very slow jog.
Your under-eye makeup really bringing out your scales.
Corsets for snakes.
Mini-Marge with a smaller version of the same hair.
The denim police taking you to denim jail for fashion crimes.
Wearing clothing with your name on it.
Sequence breaking the endless staircase in Mario 64 by giving the stairs a lapdance.
Nearly having descended the entire stripper pole.
The core strength required to give Satan an extremely slow lap dance.
An extremely entertaining sequence of images.
Exquisitely crafted metaphor that you'll miss entirely if you never look at it.
What zombies were before George Romero invented the modern zombie.
The concept of a zombie as a horde of cannibals.
The fresh ideas that Night of the Living Dead brought to the The Birds genre.
Giving Lovebirds the side-eye.
Night of the Living Dead being progressive regarding its black protagonist but not its woman protagonist.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 10 min
May 31, 202184. Whirling Away Into the Unhearable
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Erica
@YerrikTRB on Twitter
Erica plugs Kitchen! The Musical, and also Micah’s books: https://tinyurl.com/46k5zfnm
Micah
@micahwrites on Twitter
Micah plugs Bermudez Triangle, “Chilling Tales for Dark Nights” https://www.youtube.com/user/chillingtaleswi
Topics:
In praise of bad hidden object games
HOPAs, or Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures, made by studios in Hong Kong and Eastern Europe:
https://www.eipix.com/hopa-games/
http://blueteagames.com/
https://elephant-games.com/games/
https://www.world-loom.com/
HOPA Let’s Plays: https://www.youtube.com/c/YourGibs/playlists
Better designs for the human body
Modularity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modularity_(biology)
CRISPR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR
When you say "excuse me" you're asking forgiveness for doing something rude, such as burping. When you say "excuse me" as a demand that someone move out of the way because you're impatient to get past, the demand is itself the rude thing, so you should have to say it twice.
Brood X: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/22362042/cicada-brood-x-map-2021
Palo Verde beetles
https://www.azfamily.com/weather/phoenix_weather_blog/the-monsoon-monster-beetle/article_bb4bd606-0476-5c0e-ae2a-ddbe1467d9d5.html
https://arizonareport.com/big-black-arizona-beetle-palo-verde/
Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madagascar_hissing_cockroach
Beastie Boys - Sabotage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5rRZdiu1UE
https://youtu.be/-TQgbVk9jss
Deodar Cedars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cedrus_deodara
Ryan Reynolds and the Deadpool Cinematic Universe
Watching Shakespeare
The Hollow Crown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hollow_Crown_(TV_series)
Henry V: https://globeplayer.tv/videos/henry-v
Falstaff, who is actually more in Henry IV than Henry V: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Falstaff
Hamlet in the original Klingon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RF0k4qV1I1Y
Richard II (the one that precedes Henry IV) https://tinyurl.com/344kjjp4
Microtopics:
Kitchen! The Musical.
Inviting the general public to write the musical that exists only in your head.
Introducing the guest who is bad at introducing himself.
Running a white-hat ARG on company servers to research and understand the employees you fired for running an ARG on company servers.
In praise of terrible games.
Procedurally-generated hidden object games.
Organizing your life in a video game when you can't organize shit in real life.
Where the Hidden Object Puzzle Adventure fan communities are congregating online.
Using the block button on the pile of dishes in the sink.
Asking the manliest gamers to play feminine-coded video games and discovering if they become less manly.
Ladies who want to wear big dresses to be fancy ballroom ladies.
Gamers who don't congregate online but instead enjoy video games by themselves.
Where the Russian developers who make games for American women congregate online.
Clicking on something to make it go away.
Improving humans by adding components vs. by replacing components.
The legality of inventing a new organism by adding or deleting genes.
The Modular Human.
Plants undergoing full genome duplication.
The Diploid Human.
Using your hundred tongues to speak a hundred languages at once.
The one line you remember from "Kitchen! The Musical"
Saying "excuse me" in a higher and higher pitched voice until you're only saying "excuse me" to dogs and bats.
Running an errand in Tucson and incidentally removing horrifying beetles from multiple strangers’ hair.
True bugs and untrue bugs.
True bugs, with piercing and sucking mouthparts.
A reimagining of the insect phylum that includes small dogs and especially annoying children.
Hissing cockroaches that repeat what they hear like a parrot, so when you walk through the forest all you hear is a chorus of raspy voices saying "agh, get it off of me!"
Brood X, scheduled for this summer!
Brood X: Brood In Space.
OS X: OS In Space.
Which is worse, piercing and sucking mouthparts or sawing and sucking mouthparts?
What color of flashing lights civilians are allowed to use.
Pretending to be police.
The invasive plant species that the Sabotage music video is trying to highlight.
Hypothetical potted plants in the background of Powerman 5000's When Worlds Collide.
Being sentenced to community service and filling your rap punk band's trailer with fresh vegetables.
Nick Cave throwing a chair.
A poolside interrogation to find out if someone has a waterproof phone before you push them into a pool.
A cloth dummy falling off of a bridge.
Whether that cloth dummy had a cloth family.
Whether 1970s porn stars styled themselves after 1970s cops, or vice versa.
Popeye the Sailor Moon.
Everybody at the party dressing up as sexy cops and handing the real police a beer when they show up at the door.
Accidentally bringing up sexy cops every time you're on the show.
Chill dudes in short ties.
Taking a picture of a tree out of your moving car and asking a botanist to identify a blurry mess.
A boss who thinks your name is Marcia.
Meeting somebody with overlapping energies.
Total freedom from all societal expectations.
Setting up a movie streaming service that only streams one movie to promote your new phone company.
Buying every copy you can find of your first movie.
Watching multiple sets of people trapped in the same reality where they play out the same dramas and say the same lines over and over.
The one time Shakespeare wrote a stage direction.
Every time Shakespeare has been adapted into a movie.
Who even likes Falstaff.
The Complete Works of Shakespeare, Abridged.
Re-subtitling your movie using lines from Shakespeare.
The origin of Klingons as Shakespeare characters.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min
May 24, 202183. The Wide World of Pores
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Stevie
https://www.hryx.net/
Avery might be on Spotify.
Topics:
BREAKING NON MAMMALIAN MILK NEWS: the Arapaima, the largest freshwater fish, feeds its young with a milky white substance that has a hormone found in mammal milk.
Boats
https://www.vesselfinder.com/
https://twitter.com/sfships
https://twitter.com/Nature_Grrrl/status/1375168720495075338
Angle Grinder Man
https://wiki.rlsh.net/wiki/Angle_Grinder_Man
https://wiki.rlsh.net/wiki/Bearman
The Safety Dance, by Men Without Hats
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjPau5QYtYs
Unedited (syncable) commentary segment: https://youtu.be/NxucdoBgtSc
Music generated by food
https://twitter.com/simongeist/status/1366072913301037057
Ron Gallagher, who toured small clubs doing his famous brother's act, eventually resulting in a lawsuit and the estrangement of Leo Gallaher (the famous Gallagher) from his family
Microtopics:
The miracle of life on this very special episode of Topic Lords.
Fish milk.
The pigeon milk t-shirt.
Fish lactating out of their heads so the baby fish can swim through the milk cloud to improve their complexion.
Photos of proud fishermen holding fish bigger than they are and drinking milk off of their heads.
The top ten pores.
The defensive pores millipedes use to shoot itchy silk at you like silly string.
How if arachnids couldn't eat they'd die and how that's awesome actually.
Solid state arachnids.
The velvet worm.
Painting so many enormous millipedes that your boyfriend goes to the pet shop to get you an enormous millipede to draw from life and he comes back with no millipedes but he does smell like almonds for a week.
Creating a listener survey to see how many listeners made it past the topic about fish milk.
Not naming the RRS Sir David Attenborough but throwing a bone to the internet by naming its little buddy boat that pops out Boaty McBoatface.
Whether they're actually called pilots.
Losing a whole boatload of rubber duckies so to this day rubber duckies are washing ashore along with disarticulated left feet.
A Twitter bot that just says hello and goodbye to boats entering and leaving the San Francisco Bay.
Tweeting at a boat to say "you're killin' it out there, boat" and being immediately suspended by moderation bots.
Thousands of boat watchers in dinghies all over the ocean watching boat movement through binoculars and sending updates to vesselfinder.com via carrier pigeon.
Birds that are constantly changing their names.
How slough and slough are actually two different words.
The rest of the boat.
How snowplows get their names in Scotland.
The top eight snowplow names in Minnesota.
All the plow names that didn't make the cut.
Plugging a hair dryer into the cigarette lighter and attaching it to your front bumper to melt the ice as you drive.
A cop writing you a fix it ticket because your hair dryer cables are too tangled.
Superheroes who make house calls.
The police being completely unable to apprehend Angle Grinder man when his phone number and web site are totally public.
Construction Luigi.
Angle Grinder man and Wheel Clamp man both having the same publicity shot of doing a split and grinding the concrete.
A mob of masked superheroes descending on you and beating you up while you try to drink a smoothie.
Extreme Elvis.
A superhero named Bear Man whose superpower is that he only eats salmon.
Pouring one out for the Petoskey Batman.
Trying to think of how The Safety Dance goes but all you can think of is the Humpty Dance.
Getting a taste of Youtube's time-stretching algorithm and spitting it right back out.
Really enjoying the tall grass.
How to tell if somebody is running, frolicking or fleeing.
An excellent prop stone wall with a bunch of old looking rocks.
Extreme expressions of joy bursting with love as you walk through town screaming at everyone.
Continuously jumping and smiling and not being sure which will tire you out first.
S for safety.
Putting a lute in the music video when there's no lute in the song.
A split second of trenchant-seeming serious political commentary at the very end of this lighthearted music video.
Chumbawumba turning out to be serious political artists.
Going to genius.com to find out what The Safety Dance is really about.
Claiming that The Safety Dance is not a nuclear protest song per se even though you don't really know what "per se" means.
Drum hits triggered by popcorn pooping.
The popcorn vessel.
How all music is food-based if you think about it.
How humans have been singing since they had mouths.
Using popcorn as both a source of entropy and a tasty snack.
Tracking down the source of experimental saxophone music in the subway so you can give them money and it turns out to be a squeaky belt in the escalator.
The vegetable orchestra.
Powering your synth rock band using a bank of potatoes.
How potato-covered audio cables don't sound better than regular audio cables even though they are more delicious.
The Gallagher Prime story.
The Greek Tragedy of the Gallagher Bros.
Hashtag let Leo work.
Gallagher and Alf both being popular before we discovered what entertainment was.
All the paperwork you need to fill out to put music on Spotify.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 2 min
May 17, 202182. Breadless French Toast a la Dig Dug
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Hallie
@hallie_9000
Chris will find you.
Topics:
The Pokemon Sylveon is supposed to be cute but it freaks me out and let me tell you why
Savory french toast.
Remember briefcases? People would just bring paperwork home with them. To work more, at home, for free. Fucked up, if you think about it.
Everytime we touch Detective Pikachu
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQyM2AU7nZo
https://youtu.be/YUWq_aBiE_s
The ethics of making a robot daughter
https://www.etsy.com/listing/955388068/long-furby-custom-plush
https://www.etsy.com/listing/912086346/3-ft-long-furby-purple-fur-customizable
https://www.google.com/search?q=furby+sylveon&tbm=isch
https://www.etsy.com/listing/951517045/custom-furby-oddbody-long-furby-alien
Microtopics:
Whether it's possible to do Soupertasters remotely.
What show this even is.
Never watching the best episode of a show because if you do the rest will be worse than that.
A game where you explore a tavern and then the game ends.
History littered with the corpses of couch-co-op-only games.
A hypothetical podcast about the dark history of cribbage.
The best vertically scrolling shooter set on British colonial Mars.
Adding faeries to rebalance the meta which has been overrun by dragons.
A little quadruped with features.
Ribbon-like feelers that make you drop your guard.
OG European fairies who steal children and leave rusty nails in their place.
A cute fairy dog that will fuck your shit up when you're not looking vibe.
The mortifying ordeal of realizing that all the Pokemon who look like they're wearing clothes? That's actually their skin.
A Syveon swinging around Viridian City like Spider-Man, eating birds and avoiding cold iron.
Turkey-flavored bread.
Making a Monte Cristo with savory French toast.
A sweet omelette with a lot more bread than egg.
Breadless French toast.
Omelette a la Dig Dug.
Filling crepes.
Using eggs as glue for putting a bunch of yummies together.
Lobster burritos.
What briefcases are for.
A game where you've got a corgi and you've gotta get her somewhere to do stuff.
Bringing a knife to a briefcase fight.
Using briefcases to store underwear.
Whether you want to sit in the briefcase or boxercase section.
Asking president Clinton "boxers or briefs?" on a live Q&A.
An adorable chonky Pikachu.
Detective Pikachu turning out way better than it had any right to be.
Two and a half hours of Pikachu jazzercising.
Whether Pikachu is made of shiny plastic like in Pokemon Go or is furry like a mouse like in Detective Pikachu.
Hiring internet meme people to do concept art for your movie.
Pokemon MC Hammer's extremely baggy purple leg skin.
Realistic Homer Simpson and realistic Mario.
Diving straight into your uncanny valley reflex and poking it with a stick.
Doing an image search for "realistic Mr. Mime" and regretting it immediately.
Psychic stigmata.
Star Trek: The Next Generation and Frankenstein's conflicting takes on whether it's a good idea to construct an artificial person.
Trying to make a robot daughter but accidently making a murder bot.
Committing your kid to Git so you can roll back when they find out about the time you spent on 4chan.
Best practices for doing AI research without committing murder all the time.
The "bunch of delicious stuff in a pan plus eggs" approach to AI research vs. the "frittata" approach to AI research.
Observing and understanding the outcome of training a neural network and writing an ordinary program to do the same thing.
Agreement.
The alternate ending of Frankenstein where Dr. Frankenstein accidentally installs a baker's hand on the monster and it goes on a baking rampage using up all the flour in town.
To what degree parents can be held responsible for what their children do.
How it's okay to disown your parents but not your children.
A chatbot with servomotors in it.
A Furby molar.
A burden too great to bear alone.
A Furby living in a hollowed out tooth filled with corks.
Waking up next to a ceramic tooth with a face every morning.
Whether MAME has Furby support.
Douglas.
A Furby with baked beans instead of skin.
A Furby with teeth in the middle and it's not okay.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr
May 10, 202181. The Pianist-Oboist War
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Alexander
Amanda
Topics:
The disappointment of sci-fi stories that are just reskins of stuff that happens on Earth.
My bitcoin.
https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/543952090800734209
I can't decide whether I'm more annoyed that Wienerschnitzel doesn't serve schnitzel, or that they did for three months in 2017 as a gag.
Jesse asks "First encountering a song through parody."
Bad habits that adventure games teach you.
Microtopics:
Shrinking your pony until it's really small.
Pulling down the console and typing +mlook.
Skyrim modding as a more convincing representation of magic than the spell system in the game itself.
A very cryptic twitter account that just posts numbers.
What @math_ebooks did to be suspended.
Wanting to land on a planet and look for Bob but a different planet gets in your way first.
Sci-fi as a safe lens for exploring our culture without getting people's defenses up.
Reverse mystery stories.
Starfish people who communicate through music.
Watching Solaris because you're really into boring sci-fi.
An alien invasion movie without the invasion.
Final Jeopardy asking you to identify the Close Encounters of the Third Kind melody from the interval names.
The fires of Musical Jeopardy.
The correlation between how tightly strung your instrument is vs. how tightly strung you are.
The Star Trek episode where the Enterprise discovers a musician planet where there's a war between the pianists and the oboists.
Edmonton, the early Bitcoin hub.
SETI@home never finding anything interesting.
Losing your Bitcoin wallet.
Buying a $40,000 coffee with Bitcoin in 2013.
Giving your college hard drive to a friend to ask them to try to find your Bitcoin wallet without first scouring it for incriminating evidence.
Deciding you no longer need a memes folder on your hard drive because you can easily find as many memes as you need on the Internet.
Dressing up as the Murder She Wrote theme song for Meme Day.
Whether the Murder She Wrote theme song is a meme.
The barbecue joint that accepts Dogecoin.
Going to Remedy Chai in Edmonton and getting a butter chicken wrap and a $40,000 chai.
Liking both hot dogs and schnitzel but hating Wienerschnitzel.
A joke that most people won't get or notice, and the people who do will be annoyed by it.
My First Book of Space.
Hating potatoes until you discover that they are delicious and then hating them even more.
Your refusal to admit that actually you like potatoes as foreshadowing to every argument you ever have on the Internet.
The Wienerschnitzel chili cheese dog burrito skipping right from marketing's brain to consumer's mouths without ever being taste-tested by anyone.
The Brain to Mouth social movement.
The culinary dimensional space of meat product folded into bread product.
A hybrid chef/engineer who has an understanding of both fast food pipelines and how to prepare a tasty meal.
Hearing every Weird Al version of a song before you hear the originals.
Mathnet.
Bible versions of pop culture songs so you can sing along to the radio without being full of sin.
The guy at Bible Camp who rewrote the lyrics of pop music to be about God, who retired back when Christianity was groovy, so the most recent pop music you're allowed to sing is from the 1970s.
It's getting cold in here, so put on all your coats.
Sherlock Hemlock.
Vincent Twice Vincent Twice.
Monty Python's popularity among Americans who are completely oblivious to what it's satirizing, so a whole generation of American nerds grew up thinking inscrutable nonsense is the pinnacle of comedy. (Which it is.)
A combination of things you usually don't see tickling your neurons in a novel way.
The scene in the Hitchhiker's Guide radio show where Douglas Adams is making fun of disco.
The missing album that the Backstreet Boys only released in Canada so they could practice being famous.
Time traveling to past and future Space Quests.
Doing ridiculous adventure game shit to get a book of matches when you could just go to a store and buy a gosh darned book of matches.
An adventure game where you can do what makes sense.
How the Infocom hard boiled detective text adventures were structured differently from traditional text adventures.
Wanting Roberta Williams to adopt you and now you've blown it.
The Seattle of Mexico.
San Francisco, The Everbrown State.
Roberta Williams tracking you down and adopting you against your will.
Luring Roberta Williams to your house with promises of trained chickens jumping through hula hoops.
Support Topic Lords
51 min
May 03, 202180. Xenogears Disc 3 for Smash
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Styger
JP
http://vectorpoem.com/
Topics:
Comestibles as fan fiction
The most unexpected CD to be launched from the face of the Cenobite from Hellraiser 3 that launches CDs out of his face.
https://cenobite.fandom.com/wiki/CD
I got a mandolin slicer for Christmas from someone who was afraid to use it, and I am also afraid to use it.
Ghostbusters, by Ray Parker Jr.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fe93CLbHjxQ
Bustin'. https://youtu.be/0tdyU_gW6WE
You Could Stop at Five or Six Stores https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T1OHha9agg
Jeffrey Tambor Is NOT the Guy From "Ghost" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVLWybF_pwo
JoJo: Trick with cigarettes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJwD8q-OXLQ
Oldest food you've eaten. ie oldest substance or object you've consumed.
https://youtu.be/Ga5JrN9DrVI
Do pigeons love nacho cheese?
Here's an alphabetical list of every move in every Mario game, from "1,000-Fold Arms – Paper Mario: The Origami King" to "Zero Laser – Super Smash Bros. Brawl."
https://www.mariowiki.com/List_of_special_moves
A. How would you fix this list?
B. Who wants to do a podcast series where we rank them all?
Microtopics:
Attack the Block.
Movies where a delineated area is involved in some kind of fight.
Lord quality: trying to keep it high.
Cooking dinner as a fusion of the cuisines of the two countries that you are about to watch play a sport.
White game designers in the 70s deciding that there isn't anything spicier than paprika in this astonishing fantasy world.
Doing some home cooking and inventing a new sandwich in the style of the McDonald's fish fillet.
The $100 cheese steak.
A chef getting famous by serving incredibly high end Big Macs to rich people.
Each bottle of Tabasco tasting uniform even though they're all composed of peppers grown in many different countries.
How to explain cenobites to Thomas Jefferson.
A transporter accident aesthetic.
Not liking the music in the club so you turn the DJ into a cenobite with a CD drive for a mouth.
Supertramp's Breakfast in America.
All known AOL installer CD-ROMs originating with the cenobite who launches CDs out of his face.
A CD that was killed by Mountain Dew.
The cenobite with a CD drive for a face launching Xenogears disc 3 at you.
Xenogears disc 3 for Super Smash Bros.
Sympathy for the developers of Xenogears and in fact of any video game.
Novelty CD shapes.
CD-ROMs cut to the size of business cards with your portfolio on them.
Destroying a slot loading CD drive by putting a small or oddly shaped CD in it.
Learning to trust yourself to be around sharp knives.
Strapping a mandolin slicer to yourself like a keytar.
A great spooky house under the freeway.
A house made of neon tubing like the ghost ship at the end of Monkey Island.
Telekinesing the furniture.
Being haunted by ghosts that are clearly just a couple dudes in t-shirts.
Getting a bunch of B-list celebrities to shout "Ghostbusters" and act scared.
Getting movie footage for your music video by pointing a video camera at the movie screen.
Finding synergies between disparate elements of pop culture.
Bleh hands.
Slimer with a dozen cocktail weenies in his craw.
Reaching a compromise that will allow Ray Parker Jr. to haunt your home in peace.
The Ghostbusters hiring spectral Ray Parker Jr. to haunt folks and drum up business.
Vincent Schiavelli's filmography.
A Ghostbusters/Columbo crossover episode.
The trick where Chevy Chase eats a cigarette.
Slimer always believing that he ate the whole thing.
Food age.
Eating extremely old cough drops.
Not being able to tell if cough drops have gone bad because they always taste like that.
Asking someone with a philosophy degree whether cough drops are a food.
Accidentally taking enough philosophy classes to qualify for a degree and someone tracks you down to hand you your philosophy degree like a subpoena.
Bog cheese.
Whether anyone has successfully eaten millennia-old frozen mammoth meat or if it all turned into black goo.
Several thousand year old tomb honey.
Unboxing and eating military rations on video.
Eating hardtack from the American civil war in 2016.
Being extremely upbeat about rancid meat.
How to tell if vacuum sealed food has botulism.
Having the vocabulary to describe all the different ways food can go bad.
Trying to buy civil war hardtack on eBay and bidding on a pile of rocks.
The most pigeon-dense place you've lived.
Taking incredible risks for a single cheeto.
Whether nacho cheese is incredibly beautiful to a tetrachromat.
Nacho cheese as a nest building materials.
Global incidence of human tetrachromacy.
Space photos recolored into the visible spectrum so humans can look at them.
Pointing a spectroscope at nacho cheese to figure out what pigeons see.
The world's tiniest superpower.
How to grow up in America without having played a bunch of Mario games.
List of soups.
Sitting at your Wizard's Desk for too long and getting Wizard's Foot.
Fan wikis taking the shape of fan patience.
Begging the wiki editors to turn this list into a normalized database table.
An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can jump.
An exhaustive list of games in which Mario can't jump.
Mario visiting San Francisco.
The Golden Gate Bridge existing in the Mario multiverse.
Japan fitting perfectly in the Super Mario Bros. 3 universe, because Japan is also a magical foreign land I've never visited.
The alternate reality where Mario Odyssey depicted world tourism in a hyper-realistic fashion.
Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games Tokyo 2020 as a fictionalized depiction of an Olympics that never happened.
ESPN broadcasting CPU vs. CPU basketball matches in NBA 2K.
Linking to a web site but not encouraging people to go there.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
April 26, 202179. Loose Meat Krispie Treats
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
John Bettonville
https://twitter.com/robohunkx
Alex Diener
https://twitter.com/ThemsAllTook
Topics:
Blaseball: the Musical
https://blaseballthemusical.com
https://blaseballpodcast.com
https://catacalypto.substack.com
https://blandcamp.com
https://medium.com/the-game-bland/shell-your-idols-blaseball-and-the-attention-economy-74037293776e
Keeping the spirit of invention alive
A couple weeks ago I made turkey burgers with shredded zucchini mixed in and it was great. Today I mixed in shredded cheese too, and now I'm convinced I could mix anything in and it'd be great.
https://imgur.com/Q7B5JkS
Miko asks "do you know about As Slow As Possible or should I put it in the Topic Bucket"
As Slow as Possible as Fast as Possible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5-Yo328Rp4
Indeterminacy: https://youtu.be/_lOMHUrgM_s
Existing completely outside the school system
Peter Gray on How Our Schools Thwart Passions: https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_gray_how_our_schools_thwart_passions
Glasses: getting them for the first time as an adult vs when you were younger
Microtopics:
A modern take on Lunar Lander.
Flying a rocket ship underwater.
John Mystery's true identity.
The true identity of the investigator who uncovered John Mystery's true identity.
Blaseball: the Musical: the Deaths of Sebastian Telephone.
Whether it's okay to not be the most obsessed participant in your chosen fandom.
Take Me Out to the Blall Game.
Writing, recording and editing a musical in 72 hours.
Screaming about how Jessica Telephone looked at you.
The pros and cons of being cagey about your identity.
The ten most interesting things that happened in Blaseball this week.
Newsletters: the podcast that comes into your email.
The pros and cons of reinventing the wheel.
A non-destructive audio synthesizer that integrates into your makefile.
Writing the simplest version of a program that's exactly what you need vs. learning how to use someone else's complicated program that does all the things anyone could want.
Reinventing the wheel to learn how a wheel works.
Passing variously aggregated files back and forth between R and Python scripts.
NPM as exhibit A in the argument that maybe it's a good idea to reinvent the wheel sometimes.
Relying on a thousand strangers not breaking their NPM module so that your commercial web site can keep running.
Perpetually living in fear of the enormous arcane machine you've created.
Rice Krispie Treat Burgers.
The hidden dangers of putting diced onion in your meat loaf.
Ingredients blending into a homogenous mass.
Sweet Sundae Ramen.
Homemade fudge vs hot fudge.
A food dish that looks like something tasty.
A brown sludge at the end.
Whether this noodley carb would look more appetizing if it weren't dyed blue.
Adapting a 4chan cooking thread into a Youtube channel with MST3K style silhouettes heckling the whole time.
Shipping your symphony with instructions on how to remix it.
Indeterminacy.
Observing someone across the street when cars are passing by.
As Slow as Possible As Fast as Possible.
Basing the tempo of your performance on the wavelength of the shortest note in the piece.
Not knowing what to expect but being thoroughly satisfied by what you got.
Homeschooling vs. Unschooling.
A very positive thing for you that might not be great for other people.
Wanting to be a baker when you grow up but not knowing how to proceed because you already are a baker.
Learning by doing.
The correlation between people who like the structure of school and who people learn best by reading rather than doing.
The first person in your family to not be homeschooled.
Learning to play music because there are instruments in your house.
Growing up outside the school system and encountering the Pledge of Allegiance for the first time in your thirties.
Sending your homeschooled kids to high school so all their little personality quirks get beaten out of them by their peers.
Everyone American diagnosed with PTSD actually having PTSD twice, because they also went to middle school.
Learning how to deal with other humans once you're mature enough to have a little bit of emotional intelligence.
Embarrassment of your past self as a sign of growth.
A topic asking for the perspective of someone who is not on the podcast.
Getting glasses that make objects in your left eye look farther away than in your right eye.
Radially-oriented bifocals.
Finally achieving everyone else's normal.
Putting up with blurry vision for most of your life but wearing glasses when you hike because you want to see all the pretty leaves.
Putting on someone else's glasses as a joke but things do actually look a little bit sharper but assuming it's just an illusion.
Thinking you have normal vision until someone actually measures your corneas.
Swimming at the edges of your vision because lenses work best in the middle.
Wearing glasses that flip your vision vertically and your brain eventually learning to correct for it, and then taking the glasses off and your brain is like "oh shit it's this again!"
The thing where you put a mirror under your chin and walk around and the popcorn on the ceiling looks like the surface of the moon.
Objects shrinking every time you get new glasses.
Objectively measuring your perception by sticking a tape measure into your brain.
Writing one really excellent tweet and then hiding it behind a bunch of tweets promoting the musical you were in.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 17 min
April 19, 202178. Uvula Hadouken
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Laura
https://twitter.com/lmichet
Brendon
https://twitter.com/BlendoGames
April
https://twitter.com/aprilsaur
Topics:
If you were locked in a Home Depot overnight with 19 other people and you wouldn’t be let out until only one person survived, and also all the lights were turned off, what would you do?
What's up with teeth. They seem designed to be tedious to brush and floss and maintain. Is this really the best version of mandible?
Help me workshop this joke: Eve/eave
Chickens turn into crocodiles
https://youtu.be/vTic1y37ueY
https://youtu.be/zQOkwoUPNgQ
If you make an IRL Westworld theme park, how do you prevent having two dozen people on the same quest to have a showdown duel with the bad guy. Do you just have 24 people draw their gun and shoot the bad guy at the same time? Or is this even a problem in the first place?
New skills learned during the pandemic--what skills have you learned? Was it worth it?
Microtopics:
The Skin Deep Beacon.
The voice of maintenance.
Reviewing the bucket.
Confronting the darkness within yourself at Home Depot.
Murdering your competitors on a soft pile of dog beds.
A chainsaw's efficacy as a murder weapon.
Tying a chainsaw to the top of your head to foil air assassinations.
Hot dog beds.
The bow rack at Home Depot that holds three bows with four arrows each so you can fire twelve arrows at once.
Trying to opt out of the Battle Royale.
Using night vision binoculars to observe the burglar from across your bedroom.
Buying a varmint-proof AT-AT in the hunting aisle of Home Depot.
Pushing the shelves over like dominos and killing all your Home Depot Battle Royale competitors at once.
A very specific thing that happens in shonen.
Being spirited away to this Home Depot with no warning.
Not having night vision googled so you superglue these night vision binoculars to your face.
The people horrible enough to survive the Home Depot murder game.
A Chippendale dancer removing their tearaway pants revealing their pants gun and killing everyone in the room.
Hitman always introducing himself using the same pseudonym, xXx_69_KillerMan.
The necessity of inventing pulling teeth.
Instead of having teeth, having a single non-sectional chomper that grows continuously like a goat horn.
A human's astounding ability to only occasionally bite their own cheeks and tongue.
Instead of having to chew, your uvula throws a hadouken, incinerating the food.
Instead of chewing, simply increasing the pressure in your mouth until the food becomes a diamond.
How Neanderthals all had perfectly straight teeth like a pop star.
Humans evolving smaller heads so they could fit through the neck of a t-shirt.
The first humans in history to regularly eat refined sugars.
The advantages of rotating your jaw 90 degrees.
Finding a partner whose nose is oriented opposite yours, so instead of tilting your face to kiss, you just breathe back and forth forever.
How humans would eat soup and sandwiches if their mouth orientation changed.
Why eaves exist.
Lowering energy bills using your cat.
A very sharp quadruped.
Figuring out how to make fun of a cat.
Misspelling your cat's name as "Eave" when the census taker comes around and your property taxes go up by millions of dollars.
Four chickens covered in colored vinyl.
Chickens walking into a jello mold.
An algorithmically created video for children.
Every permutation of every animal walking through every liquid and turning into every other animal.
The fashion trajectory of the designer of Super Monkey Ball.
Walking through the fountain portal and losing one of your beards.
Coolest video I ever seen: Adult.
Spanish Cat in the Sky.
More of the same, but this time there's a cat saying it.
The black hat cowboy wearing an additional bulletproof vest for every member of your assassination party.
Making sure there's only one serial killer at a time in your theme park.
Teaming up to hug this enormous mechanical cowboy.
The MMO version of David Fincher's The Game where twenty people show up on the rooftop at once so they have to take turns accidentally shooting their brother, having an emotional breakdown, and jumping off the roof to find their personal banquet.
Going to a series of weird interactive theater events after you move to LA.
Being diverted into a room where you swing in a wicker basket hanging from the ceiling.
Paying $30 for a bunch of weird people to wave their fingers at you and draw on you with a sharpie and lock you in a freight elevator.
Employing both kinds of maze construction materials: bedsheets and garbage bags.
Sleep No More.
Wanting to get into a hobby but not being sure how to learn to love the actual process of performing the hobby.
Access to a wider variety of flavors in your life.
Making Ants on a Log with Thai peanut sauce.
Getting children to eat celery by making it unhealthy.
Getting the quick dopamine hit of the early stages of learning a hobby, then quitting.
Taking screenshots of a web site and reading the screenshots so the web site can't pop up any more ads.
Just who is responsible for the state of web media.
Scrolling past twelve life stories to figure out how to make dinner.
Writing an angry letter to a corporation and getting a response from a minimum wage employee whose entire job is doing emotional labor to assuage angry customers.
Not knowing how to advance in an adventure game and writing to the developers to tell them their game is broken.
Goading game developers into revealing their puzzle solutions rather than calling the hint line.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
April 12, 202177. A Vocal Quirk of Your Mind (For Other People)
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Tyriq
https://twitter.com/FourbitFriday
Chris
https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall
Topics:
Revisiting Game Maker after 10 years, and getting right back into it
What's your jrpg/anime vocal quirk?
Electric showers
Weval - Someday
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-wEvzqdDZg
UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Lists
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_Heritage_Lists
Microtopics:
A game that has been in early access for 7,000 years.
Coming back to software you last used a decade ago and finding that it has a night theme now.
Old vs. new Game Maker.
Knowing the context a word is borrowed from and assuming more meaning carried over than actually did.
Terms that programming borrowed from philosophy, like "monad" and "blockchain."
Function-shaped functions.
Seeing people misuse a tool and trying to decide whether it'd be better to teach them how to use the tool, or make a new tool that works how they expect.
That time someone tried to port Catacomb Kids to C++ before realizing that someone had been adding features to this game for ten years.
The Dark Theme era.
Jim just happening to know how many lines of code the Frog Fractions remaster is.
How many lines of code is reasonable for an action roguelike that one person has worked on for ten years.
Measuring code complexity by zipping it and looking at the file size.
Designing the rules of a game to stop people from ruining it for themselves.
How your laugh maps to your blood type.
Deciding that when a character says "..." that means that they farted, and suddenly being able to enjoy Visual Novels.
Whether Jay Gatsby saying "old sport" all the time is the same phenomenon as Moogles always saying "kupo."
Typing in a swear word when an Animal Crossing character asks you for a new catchphrase and returning the cartridge to GameStop who will sell it to a small child and it'll end up on the local news.
Incorporating goat noises into your speech in a subtle enough way that people aren't sure if you just made a goat noise.
Everybody having their own weird noise that they made repeatedly instead of just having a face.
Deciding that your signature isn't cool enough and hiring a signature designer to help you out.
Whether "signature designer" is a real job you can make a living doing.
Designing a different unique fart for every character in your JRPG so they each have a fart that fits your personality.
Why making a fart noise with your tongue is called a "raspberry."
How nobody can tell you've got a duck call under your COVID mask until it's too late.
A showerhead plugged into a wall outlet.
Heating water as it passes through the showerhead.
Reassuring onlookers that you've been showering in an electric shower for decades and you've only been shocked a few times and you just have to not touch the metal plumbing.
Wearing rubber shoes in the shower so the electric showerhead doesn't electrocute you.
How nobody posting in the thread about electric showers has died.
Electric showers waking you up even more effectively than regular showers.
Not knowing what people want from things.
Nuclear pacemakers.
The number of nuclear pacemakers still in use today.
Your nuclear pacemaker keeping your heart beating long after the rest of you has died.
The Council of the Nuclear Hearts.
Plugging your electric shower right into your nuclear heart.
Electric flamethrowers.
Lighting your cigarette with a tiny taser.
24 seconds of zooming in on the forest canopy.
A video which is very dense with frames.
A video which is exactly the kind of video that video codecs are be bad at encoding.
Star Turns.
A web site where people can repost your content uncredited and go viral.
A guest accidentally unplugging their headphones followed by thirty seconds of "can you hear me? I can hear you."
Standing on a floor that is painted to give you vertigo.
Buildings that are cool in this video.
Getting really excited every time you see aerial photography.
Freeways.
Starting with macro shots of urban environments and transitioning to wider shots of rural environments.
Canopy shyness.
Voronoi diagrams.
Preserving aspects of human culture that don't take the form of a physical object.
Intangible cultural heritage in need of urgent safeguarding.
Intangible culture lost in the natural process of human becomingness.
Whether history is worth knowing.
A series of Duke Nukem strategy guides collected in the Library of Congress, rebound to look like a hardcover from the 1950s.
What it takes to preserve a skill that a community of people practices over the course of their lives.
Dance notation for very constrained types of dance.
Tugging rituals.
Avalanche risk management.
Notation for bee dances.
Dance notation which is just a list of where all the ping pong balls were.
How every culture agrees that Kiki is the spiky one and Bouba is the round one.
Wine horses.
A very Western centric view of how many instruments have ever existed.
How to make the number four out of only letters.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 9 min