Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

January 25, 202166. There's No One Way To Suck Glass
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Lords:
Kev Zettler
http://radcade.com/
Xalavier Nelson, Jr.
https://xalaviermakeswords.itch.io/strange-scaffold-comics-vol-1
Topics:
The fine art of professional wrestling
Stealing the declaration of independence to save Nicolas Cage's life
Atari 2600 Adventure's effectiveness as a port of Crowther and Woods Adventure
Larry asks "That one time Taco Bell promised every American a free taco if the Mir space station hit a taco target in the indian Ocean but it missed by an entire hemisphere."
Non-violent communication
The threshold between an object/entity being large, and SO large that your brain can no longer process it effectively and you're no longer impressed
Sucking a glass onto your face
Microtopics:
Still the raddest place to play web games.
An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs.
Interacting with dogs in a whole new way.
Being clean and dirty at the same time.
Dog synergies.
The legal standing of a game downloading a random guitar tab from the internet to make a dog play guitar.
A scope creep game that ships.
Whether professional wrestling is trashy.
Audience-reactive improv theater performed by professional stunt men.
Pro wrestling jargon creeping into your
A work for marks who are smart marks and don't know when they're being worked or if they're not.
Stealing vocabulary from Victorian urchins.
Whether women's wrestling is still about macho posturing.
Meme warfare thought devices.
Muscled theatrical performers doing their dangedest
Whether GDC is ever going to happen again.
Whether GDC will be the same without Simon Carless.
Whether Lost Levels can exist without GDC bringing everyone physically together and secretly reserving the physical venue.
Every D-level game dev celebrity entering an arena and only one D-level game dev celebrity leaving.
A contract sealed in blood that is a matter of public record.
Having an hour and 45 minutes to save Nicholas Cage's life by stealing the Declaration of Independence.
Finding out that Nicholas Cage was injured in a bear fighting accident and realizing that now's your time to shine.
Finding out that isnicholascagenexttoabear.com isn't based on geolocation technology, it just scrapes TMZ for headlines that contain both "cage" and "bear."
Why we still have to steal the Declaration of Independence if everyone is aware of the Nicholas Cage situation.
Conspicuously walking down the street with the Declaration of Independence rolled up under your arm like a newspaper so that an urchin can snatch it away from you and you can pretend to be incensed.
Finding out what Habeas Corpus means.
Atari 2600 Adventure vs. Crowther and Woods Adventure.
Adapting a text adventure to computer system that can't render text.
Making a game where you explore until you find an ending in a context where all anyone's ever seen is games where you play for a high score.
Remakes changing the meaning of the original.
Inventing a 4D game platform to port Demon's Souls to.
Hitting a taco target in the Indian ocean.
Whether 40'x40' is a big taco or a small target for a space station.
All of America having a taco-in-the-streets party.
Dipping your girlfriend and smooching her as taco cheese falls from the sky.
Mir falling from the sky every day being a small price to pay to solve world hunger.
Taco Bell beginning to sweat as they realize the revolution is about to start.
Alternate history fiction where the branch point is that Taco Bell gave every American a free taco after Mir hit their taco target.
Non-Violent Communication.
Communicating your lived experience backed with justification and couched in empathy.
Instead of saying "you're annoying me," saying "I am annoyed because of you."
The HALT principle.
Big things making your brain go "ooh!"
Being terrified of the scale of Jupiter but the sun being like "meh"
Being terrified by an enormous mammoth but less terrified of the Earth when the Earth is bigger and closer than the mammoth.
Being unable to process the scale of a large city but eventually becoming desensitized to it.
Deciding whether to be impressed by something's size based on whether it's horizontal or vertical.
The relief and comfort of realizing that humans don't make any fricking sense.
Making New Year's Resolution of finally making sense of yourself and of the world.
Different goals emerging from the same root: hubris.
Not being able to form a seal on your face because you have a beard.
Normalizing shaving a hole in your beard sized and situated to suck a drinking glass onto your face.
Putting a drinking glass on your face in various configurations until one feels right.
A drinking glass size rooted in a human arrogance that you can appreciate but that you can't encourage.
Learning to suck a glass onto your face from the kid next to you at Applebee's.
Support Topic Lords
59 min
January 18, 202165. Love in the Time of Beavis and Butthead
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Lords:
April
https://twitter.com/aprilsaur
John
https://ostparty.podbean.com/
https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo
https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/pooplers-switch/
https://twitter.com/lizardengland/status/1333825611144556547/photo/1
Topics:
Woodworking
Mentors and mentorship in general
Advent calendar dice
Scott asks "Please discuss Rax and Mr. Delicious"
https://boingboing.net/2020/10/09/meet-mr-delicious-the-weirdest-fast-food-spokesperson-ever.html
Mariko Aoki Phenomenon. The phenomenon of having to poop when entering a bookstore. Named after the woman who experienced it and brought it to wider attention. If you wish to elaborate further, what's an inexplicable condition that you've experienced and suspect is shared with some portion of the populace? Would you want it named after you?
Microtopics:
Using your work name on the internet for a thing you don't want work to see.
Neither of the guests plugging Topic Lords, for the 65th time in a row.
Trying to guess the channel The Expanse used to be on.
How movies used to be teal and orange but now they're just green.
Letting all the cats into the room to purr into the microphones.
Things people expect you to be good at when you're a park ranger.
Woodworking.
Protecting your food from raccoons and turkeys.
The peace of bringing a physical object to fruition.
Making a napkin holder in middle school wood shop.
How it's ok to make fun of someone's face as long as you've never seen their face.
Building a bridge out of popsicle sticks.
Building a bridge out of sentient goo-balls.
The first sense you use to consume a meal.
How pleased everyone is with Jim's new hobby.
A knock knock joke if the punch line was playing peek-a-boo.
Eating cold pizza right out of the freezer.
Growing into a preference for being around people who aren't assholes.
Looking up to people in your field.
Only realizing that your mentors were mentors in retrospect.
A recurring topic on this show.
Knowing several librarians independent of the time you worked in the library.
Playing Zork on your uncle's laptop.
Printing your nephew's MS Paint art rather than just using your printer for taxes.
An Advent calendar except instead of being laid out in the grid the candy goes in a 25 sided die.
Forgetting about your Advent calendar after a few days and having extra candy next year.
An Advent calendar where behind each numbered door is a die with that number of faces.
Extruding a coin and inventing the three sided die.
Putting stickers in your Advent calendar instead of candy, because you hate your child.
Question asking games.
Rolling a natural 1 on your Advent calendar dice and having to throw all your presents in the garbage.
Games where even if you're bad at games you still have a chance to win.
The importance of being bored.
The growing ubiquitousness of video games.
An epidemic that demands everybody spend a full year at the DMV.
Desperately trying to change your last name before your child is born so that your names will match.
Whether gestational diabetes counts for your diabetes threepeat.
Derailing the conversation about fast food advertising with your top two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
Mythical roast beef venue RAX.
Opening your trench coat to reveal one of those silver food domes that you lift up.
Talking about your vasectomy in an advertisement for roast beef sandwiches.
Fast food for adults advertised with Ronald McDonald holding a briefcase.
The luxury of two leaves of iceberg lettuce.
Charles Nelson Reilly, recurring guest on Match Game.
That time you wanted to watch American Gladiators and there was exactly one episode on YouTube.
Asking a kid if they know what Kumon is and they make the sad face.
The tutoring place you take your kid to if you want them to know math instead of being happy.
Whether you're allowed to have impostor syndrome about something you do professionally.
Reframing your impostor syndrome as being about how good you are at fooling people into thinking you have worth.
Getting rid of the clown.
Bringing the clown man back.
Love in the time of Beavis and Butthead.
The content that our listeners crave.
Our frothing demand to find a bathroom increases.
How bookstores and toilets smell the same in Japan.
The full body sensation you get right before you're about to do cocaine.
Training your toddler to pee at a whistle tone and then making them wet their pants on all their first dates.
The mental link between books and pooping.
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1 hr 4 min
January 11, 202164. Going Out for Tacos In Germany
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
John of the Maryland Johns
Jay of Hypnospace
http://www.hypnospace.net/
Topics:
When you're more interested in following news about things than the things themselves: When will the rumored The Cure albums come out? No Man's Sky updates. What is Josh Sawyer working on?
Realizing that your funny friend as a child was just repeating lines from HBO comedy specials that you weren't allowed to watch.
The Terminator 2 soundtrack and the Fairlight CMI 3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnpYowxlwsU
I couldn't find a source for the analog modeling synth running on a 60s mainframe, but I did find this example of early digital synthesis from 1961: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41U78QP8nBk
Fairlight is the name of a village in East Sussex, England. I could've sworn it was one of Santa's reindeer or something like that.
Kevin asks "The diminishing returns technologically with each passing console generation. For instance, NES to SNES was a massive leap, whereas you can barely distinguish ps4 games from ps5 games."
Adventures in cooking: share tales of delicious things you have made recently
Microtopics:
A game about the old internet.
Figuring out who DMed John.
Doing better at a game than all the people who don't know that the game exists.
Searching things a lot when you're on the toilet.
Being more interested in news about the cure for COVID than about the cure itself.
The three rumored The Cure albums that have been teased for the past four years.
Identifying as someone who cares about video games long after you no longer have time to play video games.
The cultural event of Blaseball.
Whether you are less interested in things as you get older or if you just have less time.
Not buying a Raspberry Pi because you definitely don't have time to play with it.
Sitting two feet away from a 50 inch television and trying to get RetroArch working.
Buying a NES and SNES Classic but never actually playing the games.
Whether Bonk's Adventure is good in 2020.
Kanye West naming an album Turbo Grafx 16.
Naming your The Beatles tribute band The Beatles.
Being exposed to Monty Python primarily by your friends who constantly quote lines out of context.
Finally watching Monty Python and realizing your funny friend has never made an original joke in his life.
Friends who communicate solely in movie one liners.
Making friends with a kid who always says lines from Duke Nukem 3D and learning to say them yourself even though you've never heard of Duke Nukem.
Whether anyone actually knew what Cornholio actually was.
The abject cultural domination of Beavis and Butthead.
Whether or not the listeners will want to know what a ROMpler is.
A $60,000 industrial-strength sampler/synthesizer in your garage.
Playing naturalistic orchestral samples at unnaturally low playback speeds.
A terrifying grindy klaxon sound.
An unstoppable liquid metal monster with a jaunty soundtrack.
Supercomputers producing digital audio in not real time.
The Mellotron.
The brass hit sample used in Owner of a Lonely Heart.
Whether Fairlight the warez group has any relation to Fairlight the synthesizer company.
Emulating the crustiness of the Fairlight CMI.
Where to find all the samples that came built-in to the Fairlight CMI.
Audible frowns.
Just throwing polygons at the rasterizer.
Being clever and squeezing every last drop of performance out of the new consoles and it still doesn't look that much better.
The visual quality of a console you grew up playing being acceptable forever.
Noticing the hottest new game graphics for fifteen minutes and after that you're just playing a video game again.
How we could be up to the NES 6 or the Wii U by now.
Playing Wii Sports and not noticing or caring that the Wii can play other games.
Completely ignoring F2P games until one of your relatives turns out to be susceptible to gambling addiction.
How Nintendo spent the Breath of the Wild budget.
Shielding your eyes when you see a map because you don't want to know too much about the world.
Which Breath of the Wild HUD modes include a compass.
Stuffed mushrooms.
The only recipe that your family makes literally every Thanksgiving.
Making a tray of stuffed mushrooms where the seasoning is different on every mushroom.
A Delicious Chore.
Eggs on toast with remoulade.
The default thing you put on a sandwich.
Espresso machine eggs.
The hypothetical standalone steamer arm.
Promising to not promote anyone's Kickstarter.
What Jim will do with a sharp knife if he gets one for Christmas.
Putting a salmon in the fridge until it desiccates.
Whether scales are a kind of skin.
Knowing you really ought to eat fish.
Putting cabbage in the oven until it's melted cabbage.
Two people who are the same height but one looks taller because their legs are longer.
Dog content on this podcast.
Allowing both pronunciations of Jay's name.
Katie content on this podcast.
A baby becoming a person after basically being a potato for a while.
John's one (1) tweet.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
January 04, 202163. How To Travel With a Dishwasher Salmon
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Chris
https://imgur.com/a/7dFeaa8
Mitch
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJOh5FKisc0hUlEeWFBlD-w
https://twitter.com/hbmmaster
https://www.patreon.com/hbmmaster
Topics:
Why the game Hades is great
People who get upset about the use of the word "literally" often say stuff like "you don't mean literally, you mean figuratively!", even though the use they're complaining about very obviously does not mean figuratively
Gasoline toast
HORG: http://www.horg.com/horg/
Dishwasher salmon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N8q2xkirCQ
Ville asks "Oxford University was founded 200 years before the Aztec Empire and the subway in London began operation during the American Civil War. Either someone's messing with the timeline or we all have a very askew picture of how history's supposed to be laid out."
The Game (the one Wikipedia helpfully disambiguates as "The Game (mind game)") is not very well designed
The Best Five Plants
Multiocular O: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiocular_O
W: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg2j7mZ9-2Y
Microtopics:
Writing your title in lowercase so that you know it's not part of your name.
Taking one look at a game and saying "this is a Chris game."
Hades.
A video game set in a Mike Mignola painting.
Game development legerdemain.
Pressing left trigger to pet Cerberus.
Voice acting in video games.
Needing to change a voice line and having to splice together existing lines because you're never going to see the actor again.
Needing to generalize a voice acted tutorial saying "press the A button" and just cutting out the word A.
Doing your best impression of the Afro Samurai and Samuel L Jackson angrily knocks at the door dressed as the Afro Samurai.
Knowing enough Greek mythology to appreciate these Greek mythology gags.
Describing your backstory to the bard.
Fishing minigames.
Getting the voice actor to learn Blender so you can finally pet the other two heads.
How people use "literally" these days.
How "really" used to mean "actually" and "very" meant "truly" but people started using them in hyperbole and now it's just an intensifier.
Sarcasm as a driver of linguistic change.
Covering food with gasoline and setting it on fire.
How the little plastic clip influences the bread's flavor.
Gasoline clams.
Covering a bagged loaf of bread in gasoline and setting it on fire and a loaf of perfect toast emerges.
Remembering that you were going to say something about the bag clip thing.
Making gasoline toast when gas prices were negative and getting your toast for free.
The Holotypic Occlupanid Research Group.
Going to a web site about bag clips and not seeing anything with a spring in it.
Soaking your fish in lye until it becomes a delicacy.
Dishwasher salmon.
How every dishwasher is at the perfect temperature to cook salmon.
Trying to cook salmon in your dishwasher because you're not a serious dude yet.
Cooking a salmon in dishwashers around the world.
Going on the internet and telling lies about salmon preparation.
Lutefisk, and specifically how somebody invented Lutefisk.
The gravest of apologies to anyone currently eating dishwasher salmon.
The third time Jim went to jail for an idea originating on this podcast.
Cleopatra's temporal proximity to Pizza Hut.
Time and pizza being flat circles.
A quote-shaped hole in this conversation that you have the chance to fill.
Whether a hole in the ground that a wheelbarrow goes through counts as a subway.
Impressing your Corgi with facts about London.
The Game (mind game)
A game you can't stop playing, according to the rules.
How to win The Game (mind game)
Whether it's a game if you can't choose not to play.
People explaining The Game to you over and over again in hopes that you'll become as angry as they are that you just lost the game.
The sort of thing that passed for cool in board games from before 1990.
Video games with hexagons in them.
Arguing about the best five of something.
The worst five forbs.
Coating the hillside with six inch hemispheres of itching hairs.
A forb that is always full of doves, which is bad somehow.
The Angry Video Game Nerd except it's a plant nerd being angry about plants.
The bottom five letters of the alphabet.
The sequel to lowercase b.
Taking the q out of queen so it's spelled ueen. (But still pronounced "queen.")
Updating the alphabet to get rid of c k s w and q.
British people always dropping the t even though they supposedly love it.
Revising English spelling so that every word is just spelled "a" but each word has a unique font size.
Registering google.com except instead of two os it's the "oo" ligature.
The origin of uppercase.
Explaining to the clerk at the DMV that your name is Chris except the C is illuminated.
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1 hr 6 min
December 28, 202062. A Real Egg Hobbyist
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Mark plugs Ravening Iron
Shirley plugs a silicone reusable popcorn maker
Topics:
The trend of positive media (Great British Baking Show, etc.)
What is your favorite magic paradigm? Related: Space Wizards: What happened??
Transitioning from being able to cook a dish to being able to cook a meal
Larry asks "Yearbooks. Do you still have them? Have you ever actually used one? Is it full of signatures and stuff like that?"
"Dude, maybe Jim can give us parenting advice" is what I just said out loud, what do you think of that, Jim?
Microtopics:
Whether Ravening Iron slaps.
The life-changing silicone popcorn maker.
A cup that says "tea" on it that's filled with bourbon.
Dirty Harry except he's shooting the mishandling of evidence in the face.
Dirty Harry except instead of shooting perps in the face he takes a bath.
Watching Joker (2019) and thinking "finally, the IPs of my youth are real art now"
A slow motion replay of a lady forgetting to put ice cream back in the fridge.
Choosing the biggest burliest man you can find who is moved to tears at the drop of a hat to judge your reality show.
Being moved to tears because a jug is unexpectedly light.
A manual of non-toxic masculinity.
Men Feeling Feelings.
Collecting magic paradigms.
Staying up all night studying your book of magic and then the next day you can cast one (1) fireball.
Studying magic for years and then having spells in your head that you never cast.
All the spells in a wizard's head going off at once when the wizard dies, like that fireworks show in San Diego.
Accidentally learning the spell that will unmake reality.
Learning the magic words and swizzling a wand.
Teaching children that magic is an inherent ability that you either have or don't have.
Why there are so few space wizards.
Waking up in the middle of a night with a great story idea and in the morning you realize it's Star Wars.
Doctor Who explaining the science behind space vampires.
What if Marty McFly's photo of his brother was an actual person and his body parts started to vanish.
Battle mages carrying around notepads and calligraphy pens and battling by writing notes at each other.
Magical inscriptions all over your body rendering you invulnerable to physical harm everywhere except your face because your retail job doesn't allow face tattoos.
Recognizing Rise of the Skywalker as bad but still basically enjoying it because you just don't care that much any more.
The plot of a long running movie franchise suddenly hinging on the protagonist needing to find a bathroom when they've never been depicted as pooping even once.
Growing out of hating art.
Loving this topic.
Breakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it's okay to just make one dish and call it breakfast.
Breakfast being easier to cook than other meals because it uses a smaller set of potential ingredients.
Learning to look at a set of available ingredients and plan a meal out of them.
Learning how to cook to learn about process and flexibility.
Following a recipe but ultimately having to make the decision yourself that the food you're making is ready to be taken off the heat and served.
Skimming a recipe to get the gist and then just being able to make the thing because you know how food works.
The canonical flavor pairings of breakfast.
Figuring out your flavor profile and then your main protein and working outwards to the sides.
Learning to make scrambled eggs and realizing now you can just have scrambled eggs any time.
A Real Egg Hobbyist
Leaving behind audio logs for future civilizations.
A paint pigment made out of mummies, and more generally how every pigment is made from some different weird thing.
Every ingredient in your kitchen coming from a different weird and often horrifying animal or plant process.
Humans possibly developing larger brains because we invented cooking.
Raw food enthusiasts just enjoying digesting harder than the rest of us.
Measuring the calories in a food by making the food explode.
The millennia-long development of corn as a staple crop.
Posing with a crazy hat because your yearbook editors didn't have enough photos of Crazy Hat Day.
Falsifying the historical record.
Seeing a yearbook on a friend's bookshelf and offering to sign it.
Paying extra to get your high school yearbook pre-signed.
Seeing your parent's yearbook and realizing for the first time that they had hobbies once.
A nice kid who is always doing their best.
Seeing your high school teacher in street clothes at the grocery store and realizing that he is just a few years older than you.
How a task seems impossible until you have a strong enough incentive to do it.
The switch that flips in your brain once you have a kid where it becomes unthinkable to not have a kid or want to have a kid.
Childbirth lawyers.
Having an extra plug.
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1 hr 6 min
December 21, 202061. NHS Surveillance Elves
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Alex is on the Topic Lords discord.
Shannon
https://www.etsy.com/shop/NaturalStitchery
https://whistletown.tumblr.com/
Topics:
Discovered any cool new youtube channels lately?
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLy1Z3yawOIkZCWf92DPThdC0H8ESbXxnn
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGjs772Xkfnr8tSwkjw2vkg
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGPT1t4CqpfhCpZH56JQfJuF6SvxCMrHL
How to use ice witch powers for the good of mankind
Why do fish have up and down
Brandon asks: "Have you talked about all the video games with the word 'lords' in them? And you can change the title of the show to be Topic: Lords for that episode"
Lying to kids about Santa
If you had a big front yard with lots of fresh snow and a free afternoon, what would you build?
Microtopics:
Which came first, the beer or the bread?
What Big Bread doesn't want you to know.
Accidentally setting up your Etsy store in Canada.
Selling pixel art with instructions on how to turn it into cross stitch.
A cool guy and his cool microscope.
Finding cool organisms to stream on your Twitch Plays Microscope channel.
Your grandma's room full of jars of pond scum and microscopes.
Making dinner wearing a GoPro.
Burning out on making your extremely overproduced podcast.
Getting in a knock down drag out fight on Twitter with the guy trying to convince you playing video games isn't a waste of time.
Cutting your video only when the GoPro is about to overheat.
The delight of somebody who is really excited about stuff.
Filling your house with ants and realizing you need a new house and building a new house and now you have two houses filled with ants.
You won't believe what happens next: ants.
Ruining your whole country real bad with your ice witch powers.
Using your ice witch powers for fire suppression.
Making beverages cold with your ice witch powers.
Harnessing the powers of Elsa and a Charizard to run a Stirling engine to solve the energy crisis.
Finding the Frozen lore bible to find out if Elsa can help cool superconductors.
Principles of homeopathic medicine factoring into the plot of Frozen 2.
Sating your hunger for topics.
Why fish only pitch and yaw and never roll.
Interviewing a guy named "Fish" for an article about fish but never mentioning his name once.
Countershading.
Having predators both above and below you at all times.
The boring answer to every question about evolution.
Being banned from Yellowstone for trying to fry a chicken in a geyser because you can only boil a chicken in a geyser.
Fish always swimming in the same orientation because they haven't read Ender's Game.
No Spine Don't Care.
The sh-sounding thing that looks like a capital B.
Whether you can read about the House of Lords on Mobygames.
Crusader Kings 2: Horse Lords
Making your own horse dynasty.
Thinking about an entirely different unicorn-based game from the other Lord.
Putting "re" in front of stuff to indicate a sequel.
Might of the Slither Lords.
What the Slither Lords eat and how often they use the bathroom.
Believing the lie about Santa Claus as practice for believing bigger lies later in life, such as "life has meaning."
Demonstrating to your children that authority figures will lie to you and laugh about it.
Baby's First Critical Thinking Exercise.
Santa Claus as a test run for evaluating beliefs based on the evidence rather than blindly believing what authority figures tell you.
Learning to pretend to believe in all the lies that form the foundation of society, like that you want to talk to the person next to you or that alcohol tastes good.
Not being allowed to tell dad that the Easter Bunny isn't real.
All the older kids getting to be part of perpetuating the Santa lie once they figure it out, but the youngest kid just getting to be sad.
Doing wholesome activities in a sneaky anonymous way.
Pirate Santa Works Twice As Hard.
The real joy of Christmas being that Santa will never learn your name properly.
Putting a barcode on your child's neck so Santa knows which present to give them.
A period of heightened observation of children.
All the elves working for the NHS.
Not being willing to lie to your child so you hire a Santa Lecturer to give a seminar at your house.
Whether five is a young age.
Setting up a dope haunted house that nobody can visit because there's a pandemic on.
Home Alone except instead of defending your house, you're breaking into people's houses to do nice things.
The laws of physics and the laws of man not applying to Santa but still applying to your five year old child.
The moment you need to explain criminal statutes to your five year old.
Permanently ruining your back by building snow forts in a winter wonderland.
Making igloos.
Starting to carve Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's name in the snow in front of your house during an election year and realizing you need a longer house.
Making giant ice buildings by spraying fire hoses everywhere.
Providing structural support to your ice building using ice I-beams made out of heavy water.
Making a snow maze for your tiny dog.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 6 min
December 14, 202060. Pachinko Lava Lamp
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Chris
https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm
James
https://triplefox.itch.io/
https://youtu.be/I8uStVXNf0M
Topics:
An adopted microwave which is too small for popcorn, begging the question: what is it for?
https://compassandquill.com/2012/03/12/how-to-cook-microwave-popcorn-on-the-stove/
What happened to Galapagos? (And recreating pinball in software.)
https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tmg5WOvPKpU
The trade-off between customer satisfaction and worker safety
John asks "Skipping over links to music when your friends post them, and in turn posting links to music without a shred of self-awareness/the mental barrier to recommending or sharing music."
Relearning how to run
Microtopics:
A shoelace knot that you are amazed by.
Whether somebody knows good ways of tying knots.
Not having any ads on the show but the same shoelace knot being independently plugged by three separate guests.
Looking outside and seeing someone furtively deposit the world's smallest microwave on the sidewalk.
A microwave that is awesome until you try to put popcorn in it.
A dollhouse microwave that can microwave popcorn one kernel at a time.
The Easy Bake Microwave.
That one kid you knew whose family was rich enough that he had a microwave in his bedroom.
The Easy Bake TV which is just a light bulb that you stare into.
Downsizing your lifestyle.
Ultra-miniaturized microwaves that are just big enough for a can of Coca Cola.
Hot Coke.
Deciding to try Hot Coke after the show because your microwave is too small to fit anything bigger than a mug of Coca Cola.
A hot tub with a volume of half a cubic foot.
Whether the Whirlpool hot tub actually spins.
Recording an entire additional episode of Topic Lords after this, that only we get to hear.
Deciding that your fantasy console should be linear without knowing what linear means.
Making software last a long time by targeting an emulator.
Deciding that your entire approach to your current project is wrong and inverting its structure and then deciding to make a pinball game instead.
Having to fake the physical pinball interactions because physics engines still aren't precise enough.
Not having a ball bearing bouncing around inside of your phone.
Applying an impulse when the ball hits a collision volume.
The actual electromechanical mechanism of those triangles near the flippers that push the ball back.
A physics solver that does mixed rigid and soft body deformation.
Ordering pinball flippers online so you can measure them because you can't find specs describing their exact shape and size anywhere.
How pop bumpers work.
The ball rolling over the skirt and triggering the thrusters.
Modeling an invisible cone that drives itself down.
Buying a nice plastic skirt and an extremely high-current solenoid.
Making a functional pinball table out of cardboard.
A pinball table inside of a wine bottle.
Pinball tables all having the common constraint that they need to fit through the door.
"Hercules," the pinball table where the gimmick is that it's too big to fit through the door.
How to draw the rest of the owl.
Pinball except instead of a ball it's water.
A PSP except instead of a portable video game system it's one of those games where you squeeze water to get rings onto posts.
Christmas except every present is just a box of avocados.
Pachinko except it's an oil timer.
Physically impossible but physically accurate pinball machines.
Pachinko except there's fire everywhere and what's falling through the pins is your dead body and all your individual bones.
Getting licensed to make scrambled eggs with an espresso machine.
A Big Black Egg Gauntlet.
A big black glove that smells but doesn't look like rotten eggs.
The pressure of an egg.
Whether an egg could be held aloft by a shop vac.
The video of an egg being sucked into a bottle that google shows you when it doesn't have any good results, because you can't stay mad when you get to see an egg sucked into a bottle.
The ethics of asking your wife to take a video of cafe workers making scrambled eggs.
The violence of recommendations.
Whether or not you can get mad about your time being wasted for twenty seconds.
Doing everything in your power to like your favorite band's new album.
Your first "Hero's Journey" vs. your hundredth.
The kind of media you consume while doing other things vs. the kind you actively study.
Mentoring teenagers and exhorting that they listen to as much music as possible before they get old like you, and handing them some Linkin Park CDs.
Getting better at stuff.
Each sport having a different set of recommended vitamin supplements.
Lurching forward on your ankles.
Looking up how runners run on Youtube and immediately realizing how you can run way faster.
Getting running shoes that force you to spring around on your toes rather than landing on your heel.
Getting it but not liking it.
Studying Full Tilt.
Taking your kick scooter on the freeway.
Pre-Stormdancer problems.
Googling your own name and finding erotic short fiction starring a gay lumberjack with your name.
The sound of probably not being able to hear anything
Whether a beverage can be both hot and carbonated.
Sadness when you can't carbonate soup.
The audio signature of Coke being microwaved.
A microwave% run of Super Mario 64 where you need to turn on the microwave next to the Nintendo 64 at the exact right frame.
Honey refusing to dissolve in tea no matter how much you stir.
Putting your mug of flat microwaved Coke in the Sodastream to recarbonate it.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 6 min
December 07, 202059. 1-800-Ask-a-Harpsichord.com
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Amanda
[email protected]
Alexander is still a math professor
Topics:
Harpsichord music in public domain for spooky chiptune soundtracks
The elements of chip music. https://www.linusakesson.net/music/elements/index.php
Shareware floppies! Remember those?
Skunny the Squirrel: Save Our Pizzas https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tceqj1x_Q8Q
Skunny Kart https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j0JzpjINeE0
The outlandish economic world of Neopets
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1297485937384001537.html
Running a Beanie Baby arbitrage empire.
Microtopics:
Programming industrial robots to lift really heavy things.
Trying teach kids Python when you don't know Python, but it's okay because knowing how for loops work gets you 90% of the way there.
The consequences of buggy code when the robot is lifting a test tube vs. a car.
Whether three rotary axes mounted on a big linear slide counts as a robot or is just a fancy conveyer belt.
A failed branch on the evolutionary tree of keyboard instruments.
Having to retune your harpsichord multiple times a day if not multiple times per song.
A harpsichord jumping into organ territory.
A medieval troubador who is not playing power chords.
The Famichord.
Omitting the note that is most heavily implied by the other three notes.
Conflating Super Mario World and Link to the Past because they both use spooky harpsichord music.
The difficulty of synthesizing a piano sound.
A really slow early version of machine learning.
Conveying musical intensity when you have no volume control.
Sharpening your own crow quills to maintain your piano.
Sneaking broken harpsichords into somebody's house while they're sleeping.
Rompler rock.
Recognizing a Bach piece because once you typed it into your Commodore 128 as a PLAY statement.
A floppy disk that you bought in a grocery store when you were six.
Whether Sir Mix A Lot is actually dead or just represents a dead person in this analogy.
The internals of the Quake engine.
A C-like language with no arrays so you need to do everything with linked lists.
How long humans have been taking square roots for.
Real-time operating systems.
Putting your audio code in the same thread as your game code so the audio breaks up if you frame rate dips too low.
Sending Jim a sample of moustache man.
A pinball game that plays sound effects at significantly different rates depending on the version of the sound chip.
Buying a shareware game on a floppy disk at a grocery store for the same price as a blank floppy disk.
Playing the shareware episode of Doom and being like "I played Doom already, I don't need to pay for it."
Getting a call from your harpsichord landlord because you haven't paid your harpsichord loans and he refuses to take the harpsichord back.
Harpsichords requiring daily maintenance or they break down over the span of months.
Putting your harpsichord in a sauna to keep it moisturized.
A squirrel in ancient Rome fighting with gladiators over pizza.
A folder hidden by your mom's inability to do a recursive directory listing.
Deciding, as a culture, that the way to advance the 2D platformer as a genre is to make it as hard as possible.
Getting perforated printer paper at the library and drawing your own Prince of Persia levels.
Writing your opus with fire flowers and station wagons.
Whether or not it's cool that Mario Paint Composer graduated to twelve tones.
Back when there was a point to writing songs in different keys.
1-800-harpsichord-facts.com
Delving into Neopets as an outsider and seeing real life principles of economics mirrored in a distorted reflection.
Making a bad search engine for the player shops so non-competitive shops run by inexperienced players get as much shop traffic as the competitive ones, and so finding a particular item feels like a discovery rather than a given.
Exploring the outcomes of a search engine that is bad in an interesting way.
Neopets voter fraud.
Designing daily quests to keep player shop prices high.
Writing gradient descent optimized algorithms to optimize your Neopets casino strategy.
Learning to code because you want the nicest Neopets shop.
Pushing HTML5 to its limits to get a really big sparkling snowflake in the middle of your ice themed Neopets shop.
Intentionally broken search bringing back the art of gift giving in the digital age.
Intentionally not buying something for yourself so someone can give it to you for your birthday.
Winning a trophy for reading books to your Neopet.
Reading 140 of the 150 possible space themed books to your Neopet to get that Neopet on the space themed books high score table.
A nine year old running a Neopets crime syndicate.
Pre-PayPal digital currencies.
Convincing your grandma to get you a PO Box and bank account so you can run an underground Beanie Babies empire.
The minimum and maximum permitted age for legal Beanie Baby arbitrage.
Editing a magazine and asking them to pay you in online gift cards so they won't figure out you're ten years old and not a 55 year old graduate of the University of Vermont.
The responsible young scammer who takes the profits from their Beanie Baby arbitrage and uses it to pay for less than their first semester of college tuition.
Getting an insider tip that Ty is going to retire every Beanie Baby at the end of 1999 and the market is going to tank but not being able to act on it because eBay kicked you off because you're 12 years old.
Going to juvie for insider trading.
Living off of Wonder Bread for four months after you get out of your oppressive parents no-wheat household.
Asking your dad what the internet is and the next day he prints the W3 consortium HTML spec at work and comes home and hands it to you.
Meeting your best friend in college because you both learned a variant of C++ that will only compile in Microsoft's compiler.
Making your own podcast, "Ask a Harpsichord," to put all the remaining harpsichord facts that didn't fit in this episode.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 12 min
November 30, 202058. Sparkles on Top of the Brain
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Elena is on the Topic Lords discord
Tyriq is FourbitFriday everywhere
https://www.ckgame.net/
Topics:
What's the youngest age at which you can become the kind of old person you want to be
Reborrowings: https://starkeycomics.com/2020/06/06/reborrowings/
https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/624028907162566657/724080214128197672/etymologies-_1.png
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D1%81%D0%BB%D0%B0%D0%B2%D0%B0"
I made pork katsu for dinner and Winston pronounced it "pork costume" and I'm pretty sure that's it, that's peak dad experience and it's all downhill from here
Stephen asks "Textual dialects. Range of timbre and tools available in punctuation, capitalization, emphasis and emojis. Apparently periods come off as assertive/rude to younger folks."
The tone deafness test
https://www.themusiclab.org/quizzes/td
Microtopics:
Whether complice is the opposite of accomplice.
Intending to clean the fridge.
A short but sweet plug that you manage to drag out of your guest.
Thinking an early access game is dead when the developer is right there in your kitchen streaming making breakfast.
Feeling too young to just go around handing out Werther's Originals.
Whether at some age all your teeth fall out or whether they just decided once, in the 1950s maybe, that it's time to pull everyone's teeth.
Whether the lady with twenty cats accrued the cats over the course of your life or just adopted twenty cats at once.
Learning to regrow your teeth so you can change your teeth style every few months, like you can your hair.
Transhuman augmentation of the teeth.
Being sure that a pop culture concept doesn't exist in Japan because you didn't see it in that one Yakuza game you played.
Sharpening your teeth to look like a cat.
The world record for most permanent transformations to look like an animal.
Whether dead people can still be the fastest person in the world.
The world record for most permanent transformations to look like something other than an animal.
How Stalking Cat decided to become a cat.
Wanting to be more like a tiger and having your ears transplanted to the top of your head.
Getting a job as a programmer to fund your body modification plans so you can be the old person you dream about being.
Running plastic tubes from the fake ears on top of your head down to the place your ears used to be.
The major themes of Stalking Cat's LiveJournal.
Seeing someone's LiveJournal post saying just "I start shooting today" and wondering if you should be worried.
Getting back to being old.
Cultivating the witchy vibe when you're not really a witch.
Not having any enormous flowing skirts any more because you moved across the country and they all caught the wind and flew out of the back of the car.
Making a skirt out of chainmail and refusing to twirl it because a four year old lives in your house.
Asking the manufacturer of your favorite towel whether they make bathrobes and they send back a one word email saying "no."
Wanting to look like a dapper old man but hating fashion norms.
Appropriating the parts of fashion that you like while subverting the idea that you're participating in the fashion hierarchy.
Wanting to eventually look like a dapper old man and starting by buying one dapper sock.
Codpieces.
Wearing full plate armor to church or to court.
Stalking Cat's profile page on wikifur.com
The Romans enslaving so many Slavs that Slav becomes their word for it.
All the different times that nature has evolved a tree.
Palm trees not really being trees and just being weird grass.
A plant deciding to get tall where the sun is and reinventing wood.
Languages borrowing words from other languages and then giving them back after completely changing the meaning.
Whether Italy has any Pizza Huts.
Trying to cover a song by a singer with a weird accent and discovering that you need that weird accent for the song to work and deciding if you're willing to adopt the weird accent for your cover.
English poetry that is too old.
A two year old pronouncing pork katsu as "pork costume."
Dressing your two year old in pork for Halloween like the tiny ham he is.
Really giving somebody the pork costume.
Realizing your best work is behind you when you haven't done anything notable.
An entirely sideways mouth that has fallen off your face.
Chekov's Book.
A throne but you can poop in it.
Hiding a piece of matzo somewhere in your house on Passover and eventually your house fills up with matzo.
Yelling at your coworker for only using the "slight smile" emoji because they weren't happy enough.
Image searching for the Unicode character "slight smile" and seeing a field of smiley faces that are just the classic yellow smiley, but then there's one that's this smirking douchebag.
How autocorrect ought to be able to code switch based on who you're talking to and what you're talking about.
Walking around the house and discovering that you can't use the word "okay" in the kitchen.
Putting the sparkles on top of the brain.
Trying to talk about bringing your head below something and autocorrect is like "did you mean: fucking"
Youtube's automatic captioning now censoring swear words.
Censoring swear words by replacing the word "shit" with a picture of shit.
Whether the eggplant emoji would ejaculate from the stem end or the bulb end.
Squeezing mayonnaise out of the stem end of an eggplant emoji squeeze bottle.
The tone deaf and the tone hearing.
Being surprised to meet people who can't sing at all, even though you just met someone like that a couple days ago.
Hearing a pitch and having no idea whether it's higher or lower than what you're singing.
Not letting anyone into your painting club who can't distinguish red and green.
Greyie Pie.
Applying a deuteranopic filter to a My Little Pony episode and instantly being incredibly depressed.
Not knowing the right answer but the person in your head heckling you does.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 14 min
November 23, 202057. A Rationale for Mountains
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Jonah
https://works.rip/
Aaron
https://aaronsee.media/ku.html
Topics:
Graffitti based arguments
Unphysical physically-motivated procedural content generation
Mandelbulb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTpbP5BVtiA
The inventor of "None Pizza With Left Beef" went on to create "Young Sheldon"
The 10th anniversary of None Pizza Left Beef: https://gizmodo.com/reflections-on-the-10th-anniversary-of-none-pizza-with-1819692097
Jesse asks: "Hobo code"
https://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/a25174860/hobo-code/
Designing a game around semantic prime theory
Microtopics:
A game that is not about toppling governments.
Seeing a political message spray painted on the wall and painting a reasoned response beneath it.
Going around Athens and restenciling graffiti to be more legible.
Going to the bathroom to catch up on the latest stall graffiti.
Graffiti as art versus graffiti as a forum for communication.
Seeing that there is no graffiti on the bathroom walls at your new office job and bringing a mechanical pencil to work in order to get the party started.
Sticker bombing your school with stickers saying "good source of fiber" and "for rectal use only."
The potential of industrial glues.
Waiting for a telephone pole to be covered with posters thick enough that you can carve a room out of the posters to have your band practice in.
A city on a massive hill where the hill is made of all the previous cities that were conquered in that place.
The best edible band flyer glues.
Generating Perlin noise and picking an elevation for the water level to generate your video game world.
Simulating tectonic plates to generate your video game world.
Exploring the Mandelbulb.
A rationale for mountains.
Making an apple pie from scratch and having to invent the universe, except it's not an apple pie, it's an alien planetary body.
Attempting to solve a problem with no reasonable way to validate your solution.
Doing world building but it's not just putting orcs in a mountain range inventing a way for planets to work that is not plate tectonics.
The new Frog Fractions game spoiling for all of pop culture including itself.
A photograph of a disc of plain dough with meatballs scattered loose in the box.
Hacking the Domino's garlic bread by ordering a pizza with just garlic on it.
Hatewatching your favorite sitcom.
Moving to Greece and everybody finding out that you're a nerd and being like "oh I know what your favorite show is."
Making a TV show where the whole joke is that the main character has Asperger's.
Finding Chuck Lorre's email address and writing to ask why the show is called "The Big Bang Theory."
One level of pun connoisseurship up from "what's up dog"
Ungoogleable questions such as "why is the show called 'big bang theory'" and "what is the volume of a parakeet"
Finding out the volume of a parrot via water displacement.
Emailing every combination of letters at gmail.com and asking them all why the show is called "the big bang theory" and hoping that one of them is show creator Chuck Lorre.
A duck that means "free telephone"
The canonical hobo object.
Sitting around the fire with a lead mug you're drinking chili out of.
How often you need to pretend to faint.
Reading Wikipedia aloud and going "huh!"
An alternative Topic Lords podcast with train noises dubbed over it.
Recording a podcast where you read a stack trace for ten minutes and your seatmate moving to a different place on the train.
A podcast episode where the host gets carted off in handcuffs and yells "avenge me!" and hits upload with their toe.
Being arrested on live TV and your fans assuming that it's another mysterious lore drop.
The optimal minimal subset of all languages.
The 65 words that can express any human idea.
A Pinteresty soundbite of knowledge.
Deep philosophical conversations with your toddler.
A semantic substrate that is our natural world.
Persuasive systems having some fundamental level of plausibility because at some level the system has to function.
Making a career out of building persuasive systems.
Overcoming difficulty with persistence.
Telling the story of overcoming difficulty with persistence via a masocore platformer.
A couple of sentences on a sheet of paper that you then enact.
Investigating an opaque system and taking away a message.
Some Frank Lantz tweet threads.
The indie game community transitioning from focusing on game design to focusing on art design.
How juicy you should make a game.
How good the screen shake was on Rod Humble's "The Marriage."
Spreadsheets like you've never felt them before.
Cracking knuckles on the juice hose.
Eating the concept of frying something.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 13 min