Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

April 05, 202176. The Validity of Converting Songs to Buildings
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Lords
Maxx
[email protected]
http://mechcem.itch.io/
Aaron
http://aaronsee.media/
Topics:
The TV Show Russian Doll and emotionally correct magic logic
My favorite captchas
http://www.captchacomics.com/index.php?i=1540
AI-remastered Rick Astley
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ocykBzWDiM
Kegel based video games and sex UI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OYmIexjX8U
Death Stranding, Tenet, and responsible creativity
Microtopics:
The green fuzzy stuff, and how nice it is to touch.
Moss on all sides of a tree.
Moss directionality at various latitudes.
Having a water-borne moss ball instead of a fidget spinner.
Russian Doll.
Whether there is or ought to be another season of Russian Doll.
Restarting from the same point every time you die.
Every episode of a TV series depicting the same four years of high school except the protagonist joins a different club.
The three names of Edge of Tomorrow.
All You Need is Kill: Edge of Tomorrow: Live Die Repeat.
Naming your book like an eBay auction.
Time travel between adjacent panels of a comic.
Characters in a story trying to figure out how the author's mind works.
Successfully fusing world building with a character-driven story.
Designing a game where the game rules change based on choices players make in the story.
Celebrities in Prison.
Any given playthrough of a game being consistent with itself, but not with other playthroughs.
Playing an interactive story on the Wayback Machine, where it's no longer interactive.
Running a MUD and exposing its creative tools to your players.
Matching spiral galaxies to demonstrate your humanity.
Putting pedestrians at risk by giving bad information to CAPTCHAs.
Figuring out who your CAPTCHA buddy is so that you can give the driving AI bad information together.
A CAPTCHA asking you how many instances of the letter i are in the author's name, then after you answer revealing their middle name.
A spammer caring enough to figure out your bespoke commenting system so that they can spam it.
A CAPTCHA saying "if you are human, type the word 'human' into this box" and filtering out the spam bots because they type in "spam bot" instead.
Crook things.
A phrase both too specific and too general to be useful.
Doing divination readings by writing kanji with swinging pendulums.
Using images as the source of randomness in a roguelike's daily run.
Here was a song but now it's a building.
Questioning the validity of converting songs to buildings.
Having a lot of things and needing to create names for them.
An incredible bomble.
Deleting this entire discussion and replacing it with Rick Astley's Never Gonna Give You Up.
Reacting to the gestalt of Rick Astley singing in front of a fence.
Upscaling a music video to 4k and then applying a CRT filter to make it look like it's on an old TV.
Content aware fill but for time instead of space.
Using content aware scale to make videos of hilarious cartoon people.
Lighting the underside of a bridge by reflecting a searchlight off of a pot of water.
A shadow of Rick Astley clapping his hands and his right hand just vanishes.
Finally noticing the bartender in the Rick Astley music video.
Doing a graceful dance nice that most people would wreck themselves trying without even conveying to onlookers that they're trying to dance.
Trying to dragon punch but missing the timing so Ryu just flails uselessly for a few seconds.
Flappy Bird with a kegels controller.
The portable urination games that you see people playing on the subway and wonder if they're winning.
Repeatedly firing a semiautomatic rifle by kegeling as rapidly as possible and then doing a backflip to reload.
Werewolf except you're interrogating everyone to figure out who has just eaten a spicy pepper.
Creative responsibility.
What's good and bad about walking in video games.
Winner vs. Loser.
Spamming the forward button to run.
Tapping the forward button at a certain rate or the protagonist trips and falls.
Just being a capsule and going to zero velocity when you hit a wall.
Filling your AAA hiking simulator with questionable exposition.
Hiking through the United States except it's actually Iceland.
Pressing a button to react to strong winds.
What happens when you try to make games that aren't shooting people.
Really thinking hard about what it means to walk.
Making a AAA walking simulator and breaking down your org chart into the left foot team, the right foot team, the left knee team, &c.
Hiking barefoot on an intensely beautiful mountain and not seeing any of it because you're looking at your footing.
Taking in the beauty of your environment.
Building a hill the size of a large building but painting it to look like a 20,000 foot mountain.
The difficulty of emulating a Windows 95 game.
How to install Windows 95 on a modern computer when modern computers don't have CD-ROM drives.
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1 hr 13 min
March 29, 202175. Just Yawn It Out, Brah
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Lords:
Ryan
https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer
Alicia
https://www.instagram.com/historianraptor/
Topics:
How many throw pillows is too many? Does it depend on number of pillows? Size of furniture? Number of family members? Softness/firmness level?
Why are yawns considered a sign of boredom?
Art packs/music disks
https://16colo.rs/pack/wiz-0296/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZlvsDtevNJ0&feature=youtu.be
Ville asks "Chester Bolingbroke is blogging his attempt to finish every computer RPG ever in chronological order, despite this being clearly impossible. He started at The Dungeon (1975) and is currently up to Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet (1992)."
http://crpgaddict.blogspot.com/
Do you consider listening to an audio book "reading?" What about having a book read to you by someone, live? Could we interpret radio plays or listening to a film with our eyes closed "reading?"
Microtopics:
Getting good enough at English to speak in Instruction Manual.
Back before the content ocean.
A whole slew of trucks that have jobs.
Your two year old wishing you good luck by leaving a cement mixer on your desk.
A lateral career move where you decide to stop releasing games.
Occult and magic in the Greco-Roman world.
Talking the kids out of going to college.
Using Greco-Roman erotic curse tablets and binding spells to examine romantic relationships of the time period.
How nobody calls love potions "curses" any more.
Variable demand for throw pillows over the course of the day.
Needing to get more dogs because your have too many throw pillows for the number of dogs you have.
A bowling pin orientation of ten to twelve pillows that you have to clear out of the way before you can sleep.
A barricade of squish.
A wheezing Darth Vader mask.
Sleeping in an ominous dark orb next to your wife in bed and she complains that your orb is too hard and it pinches when it closes.
A lacerating throw pillow.
Opening yourself up to the soft life.
A badminton racket in your closet that you haven't used in over a decade.
Edible pillows.
Yawning whenever you see the sun.
Possible origins of the myth that yawning indicates boredom.
A yawn factory to your left.
Trying to change society in the next ten minutes.
A manatee at the zoo giving you a hard time because you yawned at their enclosure.
Oxygenating before you charge an invader.
Hippos yawning in order to fuck you up.
Getting kicked out of the zoo after yawning at the chimpanzees and the admission booth putting up a photo of your gaping mouth saying "don't let these teeth in."
What you get for challenging a peacock.
Living in a bad society and being tired all the time.
Yawning it out.
Sticking a finger in your elderly dog's mouth when they yawn because they don't have enough teeth left to bite you.
What you did with a modem before the internet was a thing.
BBS operators commissioning ANSI art to differentiate their BBS from other BBSes.
Making elaborate works of art within the constraints of IBM PC text mode.
An executable that displays procedural animations on the screen and describes the features of a BBS.
What Minnesota locals think of Bruno Mars' hats.
Minnesota not having any LAN parties but you can get a deep fried floppy disk on a stick at the state fair.
How to fool 2008-YouTube into allocating extra bandwidth to your fluorescent waffle pattern.
A logo that is shimmering so hard that it is impossible to read.
Never reading a video title because you don't want to be biased going into it.
The script you would read on the side of an obelisk on an ancient asteroid.
Whether the sci-fi story you just wrote is just Mass Effect again.
Making art for your friends.
Inventing a podcast because you need an excuse to chat with friends.
Watching your wife's phone ring and asking if she's going to do something about that.
Being on a podcast where you have to do homework.
The LAN party of podcasting.
Creating a box for your podcast so you can put a quote on it.
Legends of Valour: Ragged Chet.
Creating content in order to make friends.
Whether you can play every RPG faster than they are released.
When it's okay to feed Gremlins again.
Setting out on a quest to do something esoteric that nobody has asked for.
Whether the guy in Zelda who said "tenth enemy has the bomb" made sense in Japanese.
Whether Gremlins respect the daylight savings time changeover.
Whether leaving food out on the counter that the Gremlin later eats counts as "feeding" it.
A Bubsy 3D-style Gremlins sequel.
Abandoning the topic to just talk about Gremlins for ten minutes.
Yelling to the sky in impotent rage when an inanimate object rips one of your earbuds out.
Buying a pianist an incredibly sharp kitchen knife.
Cutting your sandwiches with a machine gun.
Getting knife proof gloves for the kitchen and then just wearing them all the time because who knows when your fancy new chef's knife will strike.
Engaging with the story and creating a construct in your imagination.
Whether it's okay to "read" a book on tape.
Calling NES cartridges "tapes" because Nintendo deliberately designed them to resemble VHS tapes.
A sci-fi video game filled with Data Prisms which have identical storage capacity and security properties to Post-It notes but are way more futuristic.
Leaving a note saying "Don't forget to get paper towels at Fred Meyer" for the post-apocalyptic scavenger exploring your kitchen.
Dying together on the toilet in a heartwarming embrace.
A framed Post-It note saying "Ryan's favorite number is 63."
Digging Jim's corpse up and squeezing him like a bagpipe into his CPAP machine to unlock Frog Fractions 3.
How at Taco Bell "supreme" means sour cream and tomatoes but at Pizza Hut "supreme" means sausage and green peppers but at the combination Taco Bell and Pizza Hut it means pouring Baja Blast on your Pizzone.
Choosing your bad handle and owning it.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 10 min
March 22, 202174. The Beef Bar
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Avery might be on Spotify!
https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases
Stevie is at @hryx on Twitter, and hryx.net
Topics:
In my home town of San Jose, CA there is a Statue of the serpent god Quetzalcoatl. It looks like a large piece of perfectly formed dog poop. Everyone calls it "the poop snake." Let's talk about bad public art.
Some paleontologists think that T-Rex used its tiny arms to help it get up after sleeping. I wish I had a pair of tiny arms to help me get up after sleeping.
Doom 1.0's proto-VR mode
John asks "Philosophical questions and concepts you independently discovered as a child regardless of how well-equipped you may or may not have been to explore them in depth."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convolution_reverb
Microtopics:
Putting your album on Spotify.
Demanding your barista debate you and call him a coward.
Reading about the philosopher who owns a coffee shop and debating them about ancient Roman tax codes for hours without buying anything.
Going into a coffee shop just to prove a point.
The hypothesis that the worse someone is at reading, the better they are at hearing and pronunciation.
Inventing a time machine so you can be in the San Jose town square when the sculptor uncovers the obsidian poop snake.
A statue of a ragdoll in a running pose with a realistic baby face superimposed on its stomach.
A bust of Jesus made out of marshmallow Peeps.
Trying to depict a half moon in 3D and ending up with a toenail clipping.
The Pumpkin Fucker.
A statue of a man being hit in the head with a bottle thrown by a babies flying biplanes.
The statue at the border of Berkeley and Oakland they put there to remind everybody that Berkeley is us and Oakland is them.
Being halfway through the Museum of Severed Body Parts when you decide you've had enough.
The Dunning Kruger effect turning out to be fake.
A strange way to find out that you have to stop being smug in this particular way.
A T-rex curled up like a kitten.
A T-rex sleeping hanging upside down like a bat.
Dino Riders.
Getting your wish for an extra pair of arms to help you get out of bed at night, but not being sure where to install them.
The purpose of Grimace's second set of arms.
Hiring a large unhappy looking purple guy to be your chain restaurant spokesperson.
Hearing that the t-rex used his tiny arms to get up after sleeping and stealing t-rex arms from the local Natural History museum so you can use them to get out of bed.
Deciding not move to the countryside and not heist any more after reading that paleontologists no longer think the t-rex uses its arms to get up from sleeping.
The movie ending when the protagonists decide to cancel the movie's production.
A topic you didn't write down.
A reference to the lord because he's the lord.
The Keck Cave.
Some people paying thousands of dollars for a VR setup when these lab mice get it for free.
Going to a mall in the early 90s and putting on a terrible VR headset that's guaranteed to make you throw up or your money back.
The two independent promises of early 90s VR, one of which came to fruition decades ago.
Connecting three monitors over an ipecac network.
Accidentally saturating the network with packets so that nobody else can use it.
A networked video game interpreting any incoming packets as a new game state regardless of their provenance.
VR coming to prominence in the 90s after the Garbage Pail Kids made puking mainstream.
The R-Zone.
A VR setup that only shows images to one eye.
The R-Zone chip tune rendition of the Daytona USA theme.
Writing a program to convert MIDI music into a monophonic square wave and just accepting its output as the best possible result.
Asking your parents for Marble Madness and they buy you the Tiger Electronics version of Marble Madness.
A d-pad dressed up to look like a trackball, to fool your mom.
Well-designed games that fit within the constraints of the medium.
A Game and Watch game revealing its final boss by unlocking the hinge that lets you fold the LCD screen together like a Mad Fold-In.
Barcode Battler.
A slot to swipe cards.
Trying to find the best barcode to swipe to create the swolest Barcode Battler.
Doctoring barcodes with a sharpie by making the Beef Bar thicker.
Learning to read barcodes by sight.
Bleeping out a story with the R-Zone Daytona USA theme if it turns out you've already heard the story before.
Convincing a barista to sign up for your Bitcoin wallet software so you can pay for your coffee in Bitcoin.
Putting up QR codes of your coffee shop's menu all around the city so curious people can scan your QR code and be like "oh, luckily I was looking for a coffee shop, I wonder if this one is nearby."
Tattooing a QR code of your coffee menu on your arm.
Inventing the philosophical concept of the toothbrush and thinking "nah, that'd never work."
Staring at the bathroom tiles while you invent the Pythagorean Theorem.
Independently inventing the philosophical concept of Alf.
Alf's real name in the Alf lore.
Seeing Alf mourn the destruction of his home planet and realizing that one day everyone you know will die.
A real rip-the-bandaid-off approach to introducing the concept of mortality.
Alf Clausen, the composer of the ALF theme song.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 3 min
March 15, 202173. 100 Free Pulls for Your Left Kidney
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Max
https://twitter.com/MaxKriegerVG
https://twitter.com/nonstandardmcd
Ryan
https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer
Topics:
What do you think is behind the human fascination with miniature things?
What are things people assume about you, based on your profession, look, or general vibe, that are always untrue?
How to fix speed runs
https://twitter.com/RavenWorks/status/1214615137056899072
Yuri asks "Games you love, but really wish you did not. Maybe even games you really don't like much, but keep playing anyway, like a terrible reality tv show you can't look away from."
Does anyone actually like Frame Interpolation? Am I the only one who always turns it off?
There seems to be a zoological consensus that hippos share a unique, communal, organized hatred of humankind for reasons that cannot be explained through typical animal behavioral reasoning.
A restaurant where all the glasses are the same size but if you order a large it gets poured out of a 55 gallon drum and if you order a small it gets filled with an eye dropper.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3YGtQ40Qvs
Microtopics:
Running a novelty Twitter account about Nonstandard McDonalds.
Grabbing every flashlight on your house to light your live TV news appearance.
Running a novelty Twitter account about the mundane business details of running a Long John Silver's.
White Castle except even stinkier somehow.
Making tiny novelty hamburgers out of gelatin and cornstarch.
Miniature things which are their normal size but are smaller than you.
Sneaking a secret, more interesting topic in after your overt one.
Elixirs in a JRPG having expiration dates so you don't end the game with 80 of them, never having used a single one.
Holding a Lego minifig in your hands and thinking "I could pop your head off any time I feel like it."
Converting inches of height to thousands of dollars per year in salary, and how that works differently for men and women.
Taking a knife edge turn into the patriarchy.
Knowing you could mash the person you're talking to like a paper bird, but reassuring them that of course you would never do that.
Mixing powders into paste and then pressing the paste into a mold.
Going down the rabbit hole on slurry-based miniature food construction.
The sad sashimi special you get at a shitty bar after work.
New shapes of ennui that you've never known as a human being.
Biting the brick of instant ramen and then washing it down with a bite of the brick of Golden Curry.
Wanting to produce high quality audio but not really caring much about the quality of audio you listen to.
Mostly playing video games on consoles that are at least ten years old.
Tech workers wanting the least internet-connected kitchen appliances available.
Growing up with hair that makes you look like you do a lot of drugs.
Getting tossed into camp dirtbag.
Trading McDonald's jokes with your novelty McDonald's account followers.
Thinking about long hamburgers every day.
A tablet you would etch your name into in ancient Egypt, on a hoagie bun.
Getting a hoagie delivered from a pizza place like some kind of maniac.
Resetting a game until you get a favorable result.
Oops All Marathon Strats.
Why Speedrun?
Speedrunning as a way to share a game you love with the audience.
The Timic Skip.
The changes Jim made to Frog Fractions: Game of the Decade Edition to make speedrunning it more fun.
Designing your game to be interesting to reverse engineer.
Tetris: The Grand Master.
Cranking the skill ceiling on every aspect of Tetris to the absolute maximum.
Stretching the rules of Tetris so much that the Tetris Company says "this has gone too far" and revokes your Tetris license.
Designing a game with the assumption of fervent frame by frame analysis by the player base.
Returning again and again to a game that doesn't respect your time.
BeamNG.drive
Gran Turismo Meets Garry's Mod.
The most satisfying car crash simulator.
Sitting in a sandbox and smashing Micro Machines together.
A soft-body physics engine that is supposed to be for gearhead nerds but that you use to crash cars into each other and giggle.
The cynicism setting in long before the dopamine cycle wears off.
Deliberately avoiding gacha games because you might start paying for spins.
Discreetly turning motion smoothing off on your parents' TV.
Screening your roommates for whether or not they like motion smoothing.
Looking at a 4k TV and not really noticing a difference.
The hypothetical audience for motion smoothing.
Whether Best Buy is your Best Bud.
Stretching a 4:3 image to cover your 16:9 TV.
The consumer paying for the chocolate company advertising on the chocolate bar.
Negotiating with the car dealership by threatening to remove the license plate frame with the dealership's name on it from your car.
The raw power of a hippopotamus.
The hippo as a reification of mother earth's desire to cleanse the earth of humanity.
Hippo Accelerationism.
Importing hippos into every continent so they can kill even more people even faster.
The fried banana stand at the San Diego Zoo.
Why toucans don't swarm and devour humans.
An abominably fat crow forging relationships left and right.
Liking someone so much that you leave a big chunk of drywall on their doorstep.
A forklift robot that can pour a beverage directly out of a 55 gallon drum.
A chemical you can pour on any part of the pizza to form a crust there.
A pizza fractal and it never stops, baby.
Walking into a Sizzler and asking for the fruit lasagna.
The buffet boom of the 80s.
Sizzler representing choice in a country about freedom of choice.
A four minute indoctrination video shown to new Sizzler employees.
The thickest glasses known to man.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 12 min
March 08, 202172. Gaseous Iron and the Hot Jupiters
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Ben
https://twitter.com/AussieBen
Michelle
https://twitter.com/riding_red
https://www.sciencealert.com/
Topics:
Dora the Explorer and the City of Gold was a delightful surprise
We're about to land another rover on Mars and that is super way cool
Michelle: "Just clarifying that most discarded rocket stages don't end up in low-Earth orbit forever, they're designed to deorbit and burn up on atmospheric reentry. Sometimes things just go a bit awry."
Scratch-off Donkey Kong
http://catfish.it.cx/trsrockin/trsrockin.com/dkcards.html
Ville asks "Tangential to dishwasher salmon, there are multiple coffee maker cookbooks, including a Finnish one that includes recipes like lamb and carrots in balsamic dressing, and wild mushroom risotto."
Do you want to ask me stuff about exoplanets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eyeball_planet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hot_Jupiter
Microtopics:
Growing your own mushrooms.
Aliens growing out of your mycelium.
Growing your own toxic mushrooms from murder mushroom kits.
The incredible mushroom picking season that COVID facilitated.
One of those styrofoam boxes from the fruit shop.
When a teenager says "ok boomer" to you and you're like "dude I'm thirty."
Signing up for the free trial of Amazon Prime so you can watch the live action Dora the Explorer movie.
Looking at the camera and asking the viewer "Can you say 'deadly neurotoxin?'"
Accidentally getting boxed in a crate and sent to the jungle.
A CG animated fox voiced by Benicio del Toro.
The nerd character getting beaten up in the background as the protagonist walks away.
Singing the poo song and burying your poo with the poo shovel while everybody else is fleeing from the hail of arrows.
Why Diego exists. (Because American audiences couldn't handle boys watching a show about a girl.)
How to stop Swyper from swiping.
ABC, the Australian analog of the BBC.
Percy the Perseverance Robot.
Whether it would be more exciting for the Mars Rover to land safely or explode in a fireball.
How to transfer between two different orbits.
Making a beeline for Mars.
Attaching a broom to Perseverance to sweep the dust off of Opportunity's solar panels.
Returning a soil sample from Mars.
Returning a rock sample from an asteroid.
Not being able to tell the difference between water and just a different colored dirt.
Signs of ancient microbes.
Choosing which way you want Mario to go and then scratching off a silver oval to see what happens.
Choosable Path Adventures.
ChooseCo is preparing to sue you right now.
Writing the novelization of Super Mario Bros. when all you have for reference is the instruction manual.
Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf.
A story from Jim's youth.
A little cardboard door that you open to see if you won a prize.
How children were so starved for entertainment in the 80s that scratch off Donkey Kong seemed cool.
Shrinking down a full size comic to fit in a cereal box so you need to read it with a microscope.
Magazines that are printed with that red/blue 3D effect that doesn't quite work.
A sponge pen with reactive ink in it that you brush against the seemingly blank page to reveal clues.
How the "Yes & Know" invisible ink puzzle books have a completely different atrocious pun for a title in Australia, "Mr. Mystery."
Knowing your parents really like you if you get a Scrooge McDuck comic.
How to find a drip coffee maker in Australia.
Going to a McDonald's in the 1980s to try out your novelty lamb and carrots in the drip coffee maker recipe, because there's nowhere else to find a drip coffee maker in Australia.
Someone giving you a drip coffee machine as a gift and you're like "what the hell am I gonna do with this" and then you remember that wild mushroom risotto coffee machine recipe.
Comparing your "no and" current guest to the guest who tried microwaving Coca Cola during the episode.
An American lady on TikTok showing you all the wrong ways to make common British food.
The best exoplanet.
Eyeball planets.
Tidally locked planets possibly being habitable at The Terminator.
Using our scientific expertise to turn the moon into an eyeball.
Detecting exoplanets via periodic dimming of stars.
A weird little ice world.
An exoplanet named "Steve" that has wronged you in some way.
Exoplanet naming conventions.
Tasking Reddit with naming all 4,300 known exoplanets.
Hundreds of hypothetical dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt.
Taking a two year break from Twitter and feeling much better.
Rescuing greyhounds.
Support Topic Lords
53 min
March 01, 202171. There's No Chicken Nine Because Chicken Six Seven Ate Nine
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Elena
Quil
Topics:
Some people put on music and then just talk over it instead of singing along?? Why
Being the only person in a movie theater/concert
A Spirograph but for your butt
Daniel asks "Legacy board games such as Pandemic Legacy or Gloomhaven."
Weird sleeping apparatuses
"House Special Live Frog in Hot Stone Pot" on the delivery menu
Microtopics:
A girl who is raised as a boy in pre-revolutionary France and becomes Marie Antoinette's guard.
Turn of the millennium club music.
Finding out that Itsy Bitsy Spider has been about perseverance all this time.
Having to restrain yourself from singing along when you're at the opera.
Trying to eat dinner but you can't eat because you need to sing along to your sea shanty playlist.
Trying to eat bites of dinner during the verses because you keep having to sing along to the choruses.
Properties of sea shanties.
Having a different song for every task.
Everybody performing music before recorded music was a thing, because that was how you had music in your life.
The horrible historical handwriting that historians never show you.
Celebrating the new decade with Cats (2019) and when you walk out of the theater you're the only person in the building.
Seeing Pitch Perfect 3 at 10pm on Christmas Eve and probably ruining a bunch of theater employees plans to have a party in that empty theater.
When you're the only person in the theater, asking the projectionist to pause the movie while you go to the bathroom.
Being the last person seeing an awful live band because everyone else walked out, and realizing that if you too walk out, they'll be playing to an empty room.
A drummer and a guitarist who are both playing too loud to hear each other.
The only live performance you've ever walked out on.
Pooping in a spiral.
Nature's sharpie.
The origin of topics.
A disc that you sit on.
A combination nausea inducer and butt spirograph.
Cake icing videos.
Asking your son what his life is a commentary on.
A shark embedded in a formaldehyde solution.
Work that aggressively annoys the art community.
Ironic cocaine.
Sneaking into the museum to hang up your own work.
Taking photos of a painting and then destroying the original and then taking photos of the photos and destroying the original artist.
Modifying the rules as you play the game.
Opening up more and more of your board game every time you play, like an Advent calendar.
A board game that you learn like a video game.
Memorizing a dozen page book before you can start playing a game.
Copyrighting the concept of a legacy.
Proposing to your wife by intentionally losing a board game over and over again.
The thing you were working towards screwing you over and now you have to undo it.
Trying to think of a board game you've played more than a few times.
Really looking forward to a board game and finally getting it and deciding to just watch your friends play.
Whether it's apparati or apparatodes.
The doublet of apparat.
Wanting to be hyper correct in everything you do.
Buying a tent to go over your bed because your blackout curtains aren't cutting it.
Buying a bunch of weird pillows to compensate for the position your arms automatically get into when you sleep.
How CPAP machines all have a SIM card and phone home with your sleep behavior and there's no way to turn it off.
Nasal pillows.
Sleeping with a weird contraption blowing air into your face constantly.
Discovering that it is much easier to fall asleep when you are very tired at the end of the day.
Ranking your morningness and eveningness.
Sleeping in a hammock.
Making a nest of pillows around you.
Putting on your velcro pajamas and jumping onto the velcro wall to fall asleep.
Your velcro bed waking you up with a loud ripping sound every time you switch positions.
Time-release velcro.
Ice velcro.
Making a salt igloo at the salt flats.
A weighted blanket that is so heavy you can't get up until a crane rescues you.
Sleeping under a chainmail sheet.
A quilt made out of beanbags.
The first thing you searched for when you got on the internet.
Youtube videos about your idealized farm life.
Ordering a pet frog from your Szechuan delivery menu.
Getting Hot Pot delivered and the Pot arrives cold.
Ordering Chicken 65 because there are no other numbered items on the menu.
Not wanting to eat animals whole because there's poop in there.
Frog Fractions 65.
If Chicken 6 was so good, why isn't there a Chicken 6 5?
A Kidz Bop version of Ocean's 11.
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1 hr 8 min
February 22, 202170. The Cow Tools Experience
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
James is on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Triplefox
Jesse is on Twitter.
Topics:
One of the last "most wanted" Nazi war criminals lives in my town.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Oberlander
What's Michael?, the other cartoon fat cat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What%27s_Michael%3F
There are several What's Michael anime series, one of them has a particularly amazing music video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWZLz1LQRnY&t=116s
The opening of the Heathcliff Cartoon uses one of the numerous Shuki Levy 80's cartoon themes. It rhymes "jubilee" with "superiority"! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LLb8EBU9nQ
He’s Wearing The Gravy Helmet, Again : The Greatest Single Panel in Modern American Comics: https://medium.com/@videocrime/hes-wearing-the-gravy-helmet-again-the-greatest-single-panel-in-modern-american-comics-10c269ca4102
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_cats_in_comics
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_cats_in_animation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cow_Tools
In the patent for Tapper, the developers admit that it's just Space Invaders turned on its side
https://www.kmjn.org/notes/tapper_videogame_patent.html
"Upon an advancing patron such as the cowboy 54e in FIG. 2 receiving a filled mug 58b, the receiving patron will be moved or repelled back toward the door end of the bar a predetermined incremental distance. If the patron is moved to the boundary at the door image 52, the patron goes off screen for a predetermined time interval and then reenters the same bar at the door 52. However, if the repelled thirsty patron remains on screen, the patron will then be shown in a drinking pose 54f as in FIG. 3. When the patron, after a predetermined delay, finishes drinking the beverage, the empty mug 58c, is slid back toward the supply or keg end of the bar."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_Cold_Beer
Ice Cold Beer has an official digitization in "Zeke's Peak" https://store.steampowered.com/app/1093800/Zekes_Peak/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/457890/TumbleSeed/
http://isoraqathedh.github.io/Orsaibts/anticharacterism.html
Shogun Assassin (1980) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0081506/
Brad asks "Hummingbirds have to consume twice their body weight in a day to survive. If you had to do this, what would your strategy be?"
Realizing pop cans are 355 mL because that's 12 US fluid ounces.
The ounce is a unit of mass and the dry ounce of volume, but the pint and the dry pint are both units of volume.
https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/mc-mc.nsf/eng/h_lm00007.html
Soda vs Pop vs. Coke: Who Says What, And Where? https://www.huffpost.com/entry/soda-vs-pop_n_2103764
Plastic Recycling is an Actual Scam https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJnJ8mK3Q3g
How China Broke the World's Recycling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXRtNwUju5g
Is macaroni and cheese known outside of America? Or, if you were opening a restaurant in a foreign country, what cuisine would it be?
How Thai food took over America https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2019/01/10/how-thai-food-took-over-america
What Color Is a Tennis Ball? https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/what-color-tennis-ball-green-yellow/523521/
https://www.pizzapizza.ca/catalog/config/dipping-sauce-product_1919/store/1/delivery
Wikipedia lists these other related dishes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonara
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_mac
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filipino_spaghetti
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C3%A4sesp%C3%A4tzle
Microtopics:
An oddly temperate day in the park in the middle of January.
Not necessarily recognizing the war criminal who lives in your town.
Checking the box that says "I did not do the Holocaust" on the immigration form.
How it takes 50 years to deport a Nazi from Canada.
Berlin, Canada.
Getting a steak and a beer with the 110 year old who works with you at the grocery store.
Where you go if you're really young and you want to become a war criminal.
A thing that is strange but also very ordinary.
Explaining Garfield.
Heathcliff, the other other fat orange cartoon cat.
Explaining cow tools.
Tools that don't really look like anything but it's the best a cow can do.
What it means when Heathcliff wears the gravy helmet.
When an ancient comic strip gets funny again because the original artist finally retired and got replaced by a Tumblr user.
Stealing all the fish from the fish counter and the vendor can't do anything about it because you're wearing a helmet that says "fish."
Scrolling a web page and discovering how many helmets Heathcliff has.
Managing the flow of mugs in this Space Invaders clone.
The best electromechanical bar game that triggers your trypophobia.
A story-heavy RPG adaptation of an electromechanical bar game.
Playing a story heavy game and wishing the story and the game parts were separable.
How magical girl shows and JRPGs both presentationally separate story from combat.
Taking the fight scenes from a robot combat show and writing new scenes where the robots are going to high school.
Learning to fly in place.
Becoming a hummingbird and learning to do what hummingbirds do.
Consuming the densest possible foods such as lead.
Assuming that iron is the densest element because it's at the Earth's core and must have sunk there.
Searching for densest foods and Google gives you the most nutrient dense foods, which is definitively not what you asked for.
Arctic explorers bringing sleds full of frozen butter to eat.
Eating your weight in salt every day.
Whether 1 milliliter of water weighs exactly one gram everywhere, or just in that locked vault in Paris.
The Canadian hotline you can call to report bars that serve you an American pint of beer.
The metric pint.
Ounces per ounce.
Writing to Stephen Wolfram to complain about the dry ounce.
That double gotcha bar trivia question about whether an ounce of feathers is lighter than an ounce of gold.
Europeans getting confused when Americans talk about calories when they mean kilocalories.
Using more significant digits than the speaker intended when doing unit conversion.
Whether someone saying "a thousand" to mean "a lot" is one significant digit or zero.
Whether in the Bible "forty" is used colloquially to mean "a lot."
Taking a dialect quiz that tries to guess where you're from but it doesn't know about Canada so it guesses you're from the American Midwest.
Whether recycling is still a thing or in fact ever was.
Keeping people employed at a factory sorting plastic for no particular reason.
Pasta and cheese being popular all over the world.
How Canadians have Kraft macaroni and cheese for dinner all the time.
The biscuit you eat!
How Pad Thai is a psyop.
Putting fish in a bucket and waiting until it becomes fish sauce.
Fear of discovering the fish flavor in fish sauce and ruining Thai food forever.
Putting fish sauce on pizza yourself because Domino's doesn't offer it as a topping.
Opening a Taco Bell in Mexico.
Asking not for whom the Baja Blasts.
A can of cream of mushroom soup inside of a Shepherd's Pie.
Another salty MSG flavored brown liquid.
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58 min
February 15, 202169. Wave-Cat Duality
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Hallie
https://twitter.com/Hallie_9000
Jenni
[email protected]
Riff and Jenni play Policenauts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dnaryt7Vd-U&list=PLQqC_GkS4_4ZgJEvjj31kQpY75-Pnmbul
Topics:
Tarot readings using meme templates
In the musical Cats, jellicle cats ascend to the Heaviside Layer & come back reborn, therefore cats are radio waves, discuss
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1382102/Now-Lloyd-Webber-puts-Eliots-dogs-to-music.html
Original twitter thread about platonic cats: https://twitter.com/chriscereza/status/1316118239785574400
Why the Music In Cats Is Worse Than You Thought https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3aK-EK5V2k
Disney attending your funeral
http://magicalpassings.com/
John asks "Country Time Lemonade lent their brand name to the best lemon candy I ever had which I discovered right about the time it was discontinued"
Why are you not supposed to let a moose lick your car, is it because their tongues will get stuck, how do you stop them
Jokes as motivation to learn
Unkomario and kintamario
https://i.imgur.com/83LapJQ.png
https://i.imgur.com/Vj3nsyW.png
18-Volt squatting on a coin: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJKFZVEKHYY
Microtopics:
Whether this is going to be a fun episode or if it's going to crash and burn after two minutes.
Trying to eat a watermelon in December and nature punishing you for your hubris.
A tarot deck of memes.
Describing memes in an audio medium.
Arby's.
Getting ASMR live on the podcast.
The Deck of Old Memes.
Where the horsey sauce comes out.
Your Arby's cups with a radioactive ghost.
The Loss Spread.
Literary analysis of a work of art, except it's a roguelike.
Jellicle cats.
Making noises even if you have nothing to say.
Loving Cats unironically except for the fatphobic one.
Advertisements for the stage musical Cats making it seem like Les Miserables, a show you go to to cry for three hours.
Skimbleshanks the Railway Cat.
Fantasizing that the hipster guy at the moustache wax store is your boyfriend.
Platonic forms that have been banished to earth and must prove themselves sufficiently perfect to return to the realm of ideas.
Whether pollicle is a back formation from jellicle.
Never having met a pollicle dog, nor watched a fever dream of a movie where they sing to you.
The good content that you can't keep it together through.
Reinforcing Goofy's head so that it doesn't fall into the casket when he kisses the body.
Burying you with a solar powered mp3 player so that you can hear "It's A Small World" on loop for eternity.
Hiring someone to be you from the past so they can have it out with Goofy dressed as the Ghost of Christmas Future at your funeral.
Planning the Best Funeral Ever.
Whether Disney is willing to DMCA takedown your novelty Disney funeral.
Our Cyberpunk Future being cool as heck and also unimaginably awful, like Lovecraft.
Our Cool Cyberpunk Future, where there are cool things and terrible things, and the rich people have the cool things, and you can try to steal them from them.
To what degree we got our Dystopian Cyberpunk Future because Jeff Bezos loved Neuromancer and wanted to make it happen for real.
Hiring Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash to come to your funeral and kiss you on the lips, and getting a Meme Virus that persists through your death.
Hiring Tron Guy to come to your funeral and kiss you on the list.
Refusing to let Tron Guy see Tron Legacy at your movie theater because Ernest Cline would just buy the theater immediately.
Pickle brine that tastes a lot like peppery lemonade.
The hierarchy of sour candies.
Sour candy marketing in the 90s proclaiming that "your mom hates these!"
The difference between macaroons and macarons, and whether it exists.
The difference between pies and tarts, and whether it exists.
Graham cracker crust quiche.
The same podcast episode but you keep editing new guest commentary in so that gets longer and longer.
Not letting a moose lick your car, because their tongue might get stuck.
Driving away after the moose's tongue gets stuck to your bumper and the moose flies behind you like a kite.
Driving in bemoosed roads.
Driving away when a moose tries to lick your car.
Moose seeing a car and thinking "oh good a source of salt."
The hippos of the West.
Telling your child that every animal is imaginary so they can have the magical moment of discovering the truth over and over again.
Frightening a bear away by putting moose antlers on it and showing it a mirror.
Inventing and testing sour honey live on this podcast.
The patron saint of standing on your head.
A sour honey update: it's fine.
The new sour salty honey candy, "Are They Gonna Give Me That Sour Salty Honey?"
People and learning and why they do it.
The thing about jokes.
Putting a bunch of bad programming means on the classroom wall because students will want to understand the joke.
Learning a little about many things and becoming a generalist.
The only STEM person in this anatomy and physiology class making jokes about how the kidneys are a linked list.
A meme in the sense of making your calculator say "BOOBIES"
An extremely elaborate process for making it kinda look like Mario is pooping.
Duolingo finally paying off when you can discern which Mario is pooping and which Mario has testicles.
An official Nintendo product acknowledging the schoolyard meme where it looks like Mario is pooping.
Inventing new things to do with video games.
The Green Demon.
The essence of swag.
Memes with good cinematography.
Inventing rules to apply to yourself to make video games harder.
Beating Pokemon with all Woopers.
A problematic Kojima game?!
Opting out of having an adult name.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 6 min
February 08, 202168. Unprotected Left in a Hard Vacuum
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Mara plugs Libby. https://libbyapp.com/welcome
[email protected]
Derek plugs LibriVox. https://librivox.org/
https://twitter.com/derekcaelin
https://mastodon.technology/@argus
Topics:
Should we spare our children from our own game nostalgia?
Working libraries of famous people getting acquired by institutions
Winston's latest thing is that before peeing in the potty he'll find a hairball on the floor and put it in the potty so he can pee on it
John asks "In watching my 3 year old develop her own sense of comedy I have realized that comedy might actually be a kind of innate human reaction to interesting incongruity. She likes toilet humor quite a lot despite my partner and I never liking those kinds of jokes. However, I think she likes it because it's very easy for her to understand something like singing 'Happy Birthday to Poop!' whereas other subtler kinds of humor are out of her reach right now."
Toddlers who secretly compete in pro-gaming tournaments
Microtopics:
Libby.
A really good way to use your public library without leaving your house.
Getting one of those hollowed out books from a Poirot novel where the vial of poison goes except you put your phone in there so people think you're reading books rather than looking at your phone.
Librivox.
Listening to some randos reading public domain books.
Square jawed scientists taking on the world and neither the government nor their frail wives can hold them back.
Trying to show your four year old Wind Waker and he's annoyed that it's not the Wind Waker remaster for Wii U.
Subtly guiding your child away from games that prey on gambling addiction.
Planning a closed environment where you can introduce the history of video games to your child in chronological order, and then realizing that that's how we got modern gamers.
How to revisit your nostalgia when it's locked inside early Macintosh educational games with bad emulation support.
Wandering isolated in a sad soundscape.
Whether World of Warcraft caused your depression or whether losing your job (because of World of Warcraft) caused your depression.
Eve Online.
Going into nullsec where there is no sec.
Forgetting about Eve Online for ten years and coming back to find that your avatar has been practicing whittling cedar this entire time and is now a grandmaster cedar whittler.
Going to turning left school for five years.
Collecting all the books in a famous author's working library so scholars can catalogue all the Cheeto fingerprints.
Studying the working library of the greatest American novelist of all time and it's just autographed copies of all the Twilight novels and the board game "Wits and Wagers."
Filling your working library with books to impress the scholars studying your life in a hundred years.
Giving your source code to the Video Game History Foundation for safe keeping.
The difficulty of preserving the history of online video games.
Whether an economy based on trading nudes can sustain your video game preservation endowment.
That time of year when Wikipedia is begging for the nudes again.
Toilet Mimics
Whether you have to pee on Cheerios or whether any cereal will do.
A man's irrepressible need to piss on a fly.
Monetizing urination.
The alternate reality where all video games are controlled by a stream of urine, and some fringe developers are making games you control with your hands, and people are like "Is that even a game? You don't even piss on it!"
Being cornered at a party by an inventor describing his idea for a toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.
The brown note as a consent issue.
All-singing, all-dancing, all-peeing.
Calling your mom on the toilet phone so she can whistle at the frequency that makes you pee.
Two-factor authentication for pooping.
When you can't poop because your smart toilet can't connect to the wifi.
Toilet uptime.
Every child independently inventing the "happy birthday to poop" song.
Singing "happy birthday to poop" when the poop has no way to blow out the candles.
The fecal stage of the Freudian theory of child development.
The calculus of why we don't find the same joke funny again.
A gingerbread house that is an architect's nightmare.
Adults and children making jokes past each other.
Pete of the Chickens.
Four year olds who are incredibly good at Rocket League.
Swearing that you are only four years old so Epic doesn't kick you out of the Rocket League League.
How physics-driven video games are the perfect constrained environment for a child to excel in.
Whether your Rocket League skills translate to any other aspect of your life.
A four year old gamer complaining about noobs.
Saying "don't forget to like comment and subscribe" instead of "goodbye."
Being leery of playing video games because every time you touch a controller the truck video stops.
Texting your grandmother a thousand emojis.
An app that lets your four year old pretend to text his grandma a thousand emojis.
Your true self on the Fediverse.
The realest person on Mastodon.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
February 01, 202167. Immersion Blended Lasagna
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Tim
https://giantsquidstudios.com/
Nathan
https://twitter.com/MommysBestGames
http://mommysbestgames.com/website_store/index.html
Topics:
Are there any negatives to having an easy mode that takes the player through the entire game? Should the "best ending" be locked somehow in easy mode?
Why are we drawn to art that updisturbs, depresses, or scares? (And yes, "catharsis" is a weak answer!)
How Super Mario 35 (and maybe battle royales in general) solved the worst unsolvable problem of multiplayer
John asks: "Licensing issues and content guidelines have led to a homogenized aesthetic on YouTube that leads to all produced-in-bulk videos for children having the same sound effects and music."
What's different (better or worse) about playing games with kids? Do you play games with your kids?
What sports would be more interesting with low/0 gravity? Or with higher gravity?
Tim's vegan commune cooking disaster stories
Microtopics:
Shoot 1-Up.
Controlling all your spaceships at the same time.
The big thing about Galaga.
The forever scrolling timeline of new content that you're fed all the time.
The funniest Boris Vallejo painting.
Being bummed to find out that Boris Vallejo was looking at people and painting them rather than just imagining them.
Name-dropping Tom of Finland.
Staring at pink blobs all the time.
Making sure you're not wearing your good socks because they're about to be blown off.
Looping the game twice with no deaths and no bombs.
Jamestown.
Being forced to do something unpleasant to feel a sense of satisfaction when you are given what you want.
Not supporting an easy mode as well as you should have because you assumed those people could just play co-op.
Bringing in a playtester who has never used a mouse before.
Not valuing your own fake accomplishments as much because other people accomplished the same fake accomplishments more easily.
Save the Date, by Chris Cornell.
Having to wake up to play Super Hard mode.
The necessity of hand-tuning all the enemy AI in shoot em up difficulty levels.
Psychoanalyzing the entire human race at once.
People turning to media to experience strong emotions.
Whether it's easier to elicit good or bad emotions in the viewer.
The safety of seeing a horrible thing that will definitely never happen to you.
Being unusually upset by the Boston Marathon bombing because you recently ran a marathon.
Knowing that an album is going to fuck you up because it is too proximate, and choosing not to listen.
A scary movie taking months to purge from your brain.
The relief of when the demons show up.
People lining up at a party to play That Dragon Cancer.
How movies basically never hurt children.
Wanting to know what's in the box but also knowing that what's in the box will ruin your life for months.
How you lose half the time in multiplayer games.
Super Mario 35.
The various ways video games can make you feel like you're winning harder.
Taking turns feeling good at video games.
We Didn't Playtest This At All
Everybody choosing a number and everybody who chose 5 being the winner.
Trying to win at Scrabble based on style points.
Coming up with as many secondary win conditions as possible so that everybody can win even if they lost.
Choosing a safeword to indicate that it's time to switch topics.
Making all your own opulently animated scenes.
Playing games as a way to develop social relationships.
Empowering your son to express himself even though he's making a shitty Pokemon deck.
Finding non-combat activities to do with the Pokemon that are not very good at combat.
Buying SNES Classic to play games with your son and then realizing that there are more worthwhile games to play than those that merely entertain.
Games which give you value that you can take out into the world.
Wanting to show your kid the good stuff so that they can have a better life than you did.
Learning music theory by listening to Justin Bieber.
Worrying that you'll pollute your kid's natural interests with your taste in video games.
A very nice video game world for other people to explore.
Staring at people and saying "papaya" until they're like "why do you keep saying papaya"
Skateboarding in low gravity.
Full contact basketball with trampolines.
Immersion Blender Night.
Immersion blended salad.
Immersion blended vegan lasagna.
Learning the hard way that flambe does not burn off that much of the alcohol.
A gargantuan stock pot of chocolatey oatmeal that is far too salty for human consumption.
Improvising around your cooking mistakes.
Promising to talk about Paddington 2 next episode.
Going to the Giant Squid web page and checking out Tim's bio.
Barf-sealed copies of Pig Eat Ball.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 9 min