Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

November 16, 202056. Ethical Snorlax Pasture
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Lords:
Laura is @lmichet on Twitter and just shipped A Monster's Expedition.
JP is @vectorpoem on Twitter.
Topics:
What is the least horny sport?
Best task-tracking software. Definition of "best" here is not necessarily the one you think has the best features, but the one you used longest and with the best attitude. Which is that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanban is an entire scheduling methodology, not merely the board-and-card-based task system used by various Scrum etc teams.
All comments relating to our critiques of git can be directed to [email protected]
Driving around with a photo of yourself on your vehicle
Timothy Dalton's character in Hot Fuzz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfICiLbwz8I (that 1-second clip captures the visual gag but not the comedic timing; good enough)
The Giant Eddie Murphy Head trailer thing was part of a promotional campaign for the 2008 movie "Meet Dave", and that one specific photo of it in highway traffic went viral. Neil Cicierega used it as the profile image for his last.fm page, and so it showed up as the album art for all non-album Lemon Demon tracks. https://kottke.org/08/06/eddie-murphys-giant-head https://www.reddit.com/r/tumblr/comments/c6m2nn/does_this_remind_you_of_something/
Stephen asks: "A fictional world, the discovery of which prompted global obsession and study which gradually allowed Tlön to bleed into and eventually replace the real world. Kind of like the internet."
Safety-proofing your house to keep a Pokemon in it, if Pokemon were real--what would this entail? Would you do it, or just give up on having a Pokemon?
An animal's cuteness being weaponized to promote its own exploitation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL4b0Pc1xIs
You can send one print of a single film of your choosing back to 1960. What film do you choose, and why?
Ferris Bueller supplements his own bodily function noises with an E-mu Emulator II. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATkUqWssSGc
Microtopics:
Typing in all lowercase because anyone who uses capital letters is a cop.
The Lowercase Age.
Capital letters and punctuation reflecting a certain social context.
Whether Laura has ever spoken to someone in person.
A very chill video game with cute jokes in it.
One of the better ways to enjoy life.
The eSport played by the oldest people.
Car Lords.
The hypothetical horniness of the train similar speed running scene.
Whether you can be fired from your train job in Train Simulator or is you're just shot on the spot.
The height of golf's horniness ceiling.
The horniness differential between simulated golf and real life miniature golf.
A medieval shepherd saying "caring for sheep in the Scottish Highlands is a low demand activity so I'm going to use this stick to hit rocks and eventually a sport will coalesce."
Not wanting to guess how to say "coalesce" in a Scottish accent.
Not wanting to call your coworkers at 9pm, the devil's hour.
Hiring a sensitivity reader to figure out how to respectfully create a pinup calendar of accents around the world.
A sample of Meg Ryan faking an orgasm.
"When Harry Met Sally" faked orgasm sound board.
Admiring the UI of task tracking software.
Using a text file to do task tracking.
An ignorant caveman who is working harder rather than smarter.
The miserable state of programming tools (compilers excepted)
How if GitHub had built their web site around any VCS, it would now be the dominant VCS, but it would be weird that they called it "GitHub."
Using SVN to talk to GitHub.
Game development putting the folks who can get value out of Git alongside the folks Git just makes miserable and forcing them to collaborate somehow.
Data mining your blood sugar levels over time.
Data mining your enamel pin collection.
Complaining that your wife really likes her new baby.
Having your phone number on your car so that if someone doesn't like your driving they can give you a call.
Decals on your rear window with stick figures representing every member of your family, with their social security numbers beneath them.
The parallel reality where everyone has their faces on their car and PictoChat on their DS so you can drive up to someone you recognize on the freeway and send them a drawing of a dick.
Not being willing to put a photo of yourself on your car but covering your tiny electric motorcycle with them.
A helmet with a huge depiction of your face, like you're in big head mode.
Gigantic electric skateboards with wacky shocks.
Eddie Murphy driving Eddie Murphy's giant head car.
Coopting someone's write-in to talk about manufacturing gaskets.
A question that makes you feel inadequate so you resent it.
Learning how to make gaskets because everyone who works at the gasket manufacturer needs to know how to make gaskets.
Gasket manufacturing equipment probably cutting rubber with a laser or maybe a big knife.
A chore wheel by which everyone at the company eventually does every job.
Treating all of humanity as a single organism, and not in the gross "this disadvantaged person needs to take one for the team" kind of way.
Gasket perishability.
A gasket failing and causing a terrible disaster because it was left on the front porch too long.
Having a plant product like perishability.
A piston seal pointing its piston tusks at the ground and launching itself into the air.
The fantasy of having a little animal who is in fire.
A dog or cat already being able to mess up your house pretty bad even though they don't have pyrokinetic powers.
Not being willing to give any dog you've ever met elemental magic powers.
A Problem Charmander.
The entire Pokemon universe is a hologram running on a GameBoy.
Whether you can be held legally liable for your pet Charmander burning your neighbor's house down.
Training your grass-type Pokemon to repeatedly fire solarbeam at your solar panels.
The ones who walk away from Nomekop.
The Pokemon species that became dominant and enslaved all the others. "Human human!"
Spending enough time in nature to develop a personal opinion about nature.
Journeying through the world and having fun equitable relationships with magical creatures.
The only anime that is about adults rather than teenagers.
Sending space movies back in time to feed the conspiracy theory that the moon landings were faked.
Repeatedly sending the sports almanac back in time to construct an optimal run of 20th century sports betting.
Sending a sports almanac back in time to everyone so everyone wins every sports bet.
Sending a white dude back in time so that a white dude can invent rock and roll.
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1 hr 14 min
November 09, 202055. Burger Crimes
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Lords:
April is @aprilsaur on Twitter.
Freddie is @fwong on Twitter.
Topics:
Burger opinions
Revisiting Breath of the Wild
Taking care of a kid for 8 hours a day is making me doubt my chronotype
Dennis asks: "Vtubers"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_YouTuber
Micro topics:
Finally, a place for topics.
A podcast that is surprisingly not a BDSM podcast.
Being the best town for chili with spaghetti because nobody else bothered.
A very good part about a hamburger.
The potential utility of a hamburger.
Wanting each bite of a foodstuff to contain every ingredient.
The sleeping baby preventing you from going to Five Guys.
A very specific smell manufactured in New Jersey that does not trigger any kind of nostalgia at all.
Deciding to stop cooking your fries in beef tallow and needing to add a fake scent to get the old smell back.
A burger joint that is the love child of In-N-Out and Dairy Queen.
Rating hamburgers by their mouth hinge requirements.
The ideal order of ingredients in a hamburger stack.
Putting a tomato between the patty and the slice of cheese in a cheeseburger.
Burger crimes.
Becoming convinced that Democrats really ought to be armed.
Years of playing Call of Duty and Counterstrike training you for your role in the revolution.
Years of playing The Sims training you for your role in the revolution.
Whether George Washington was a gamer.
Playing Breath of the Wild long enough to see the cool opening vista and thinking "I definitely don't want to go to these mountains."
A very American Truck Simulator approach to playing an open world game.
Winching yourself out of the mud.
The experience of drawing a map in order to understand your surroundings.
Two weeks worth of photos of your TV.
Trying to distinguish whether a childhood feeling of a video game came from the game design or came from being a child.
Designing puzzles that demand the player take physical notes.
The fun of inconvenience.
Playing D&D and catching the cartography bug.
Capturing the joy of a blank piece of paper.
A game about paperwork.
The video game expanding beyond the executable file you run.
Gambling with the game's demo to change the full game's price.
What it would take to stream Breath of the Wild.
Tiny little leaf people hiding all over the world each hovering with a tiny leaf they spin like a helicopter blade.
Hestu's incredible maraca dance.
Tattooing the entire DK Rap across your back.
An attractive person remaining attractive even when wearing a goofy outfit.
Staying home to take care of your kid and not sending them to daycare during a pandemic.
Changing your sleep schedule from waking up at 11am to waking up at 7am.
Vitamin D: turns out we need it.
Being unable to sleep in even though you used to be a sleeping in champion.
Being tired because it's the end of the day.
Making dinner and becoming a puddle on whatever surface you happen to land on.
Going camping because you have a kid when you would never care enough to go camping if it was just you.
Downloading Youtube tutorials on how to split a log so you can impress your kid when you go camping.
Using digital puppetry to make an anime avatar play video games on Twitch.
Cranking out content 24/7.
Livestreamers taking a vacation and losing 20% of their viewers.
The Tupac hologram except playing Fortnite on Twitch.
Producing a CG animation TV show where all the animation is live puppeteering.
Exhuming Tupac so you can do a body scan for the hologram concert tour.
Indiana Jones except with a really tiny head.
The career prospects of Indiana Jones themed strippers.
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1 hr 7 min
November 02, 202054. Stab 'Em Into Place
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Lords:
Adina is @FeyTechnologist on Twitter.
Alex is @ThemsAllTook on Twitter.
https://www.youtube.com/user/adiener
Topics:
Anarcho-communism for basic bitches
How I overcame my inability to stick with a project for the long haul
https://pomodoro-tracker.com/
Simulating the fluidity of natural group conversations in voice chat
Stephen asks: "The Damascus steel of maze generation algorithms"
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190919-the-maze-puzzle-hidden-within-an-early-video-game
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fast_inverse_square_root
The hidden worlds of each person's living space
Learning every craft to become the ultimate craft wizard
https://consumerist.com/2016/12/12/a-few-pen-strokes-on-this-mcdonalds-coffee-cup-give-warmest-greetings-a-new-meaning/
Microtopics:
Fabric and circus arts.
Getting private trampoline lessons at the largest nonprofit circus in Seattle.
Being happy with an audience size that doesn't require you to moderate very much.
Forming smaller communities to take care of the people left behind by large governmental systems.
Empowering smaller communities to take care of each other.
Knowing your neighbors and caring more about them than people you don't know.
Cultivating a neighborhood to make sure you live near people you want to know.
The long term viability of the nuclear family.
A commune of queer people funded by a couple of tech jobs.
Motorizing two wooden planks and hooking them up to the internet to get hugs online.
Getting a whole lot done when you don't have internet access but now there's internet access everywhere.
Adding a physical ritual to a mental activity to make it feel real.
Putting the tomato on a different shelf to indicate that you are done with it.
An accountability mailing list where people might hypothetically judge you for what you haven't gotten done.
Fake accountability that feels real.
Trying to replicate a warehouse full of indie game devs on Discord.
Asking you for friends' lunch table to be enlarged so you can fit.
Writing a Discord bot that replicates the chat of every voice channel in every other voice channel.
Solving a social problem with social change rather than software.
How many clicks it takes to switch chat rooms.
Running through a procedurally generated maze.
Doing floating point math by aliasing the bytes to an integer and subtracting it from a weird magic number.
Code that is so self contained and stable that it's not really a problem that nobody understands it.
Old programmers retiring and their knowledge leaving with them because they didn't document anything.
Writing a megabyte long brain dump of everything you know about a project before it leaves your head.
The talk Jim didn't give describing the shaving cream technology in Glittermitten Grove.
Being too tired from your shaving cream rendering R&D project to do a good job on your beard rendering R&D project.
Wario Ware except with relaxing minigames rather than stressful ones.
Porting your game from modern systems to MS-DOS so you can sell it on a floppy disk.
How scratch and sniff failed where a Smell-O-Vision video gaming peripheral will succeed.
A swear filter but for smells.
The Femicom museum.
Going for walks around your neighborhood and seeing the outside of someone's house.
The hidden interior of a stranger's home as an allegory for their unknowable mind.
Peeking into your neighbor's window whenever you get the chance.
Which service jobs let you go into people's houses and see how they live.
How it's okay to let the cleaning service employees see your secrets because you don't consider the working poor to be real people.
Whether house cleaners get a small amount of joy in knowing the weird secrets of rich people.
The guy who comes in every few months for repairs because your computer is completely full of porn.
Seeing someone's deepest darkest secrets and being like "it was aight"
Wanting a nicely interior-designed house but not wanting to put in any effort.
Wanting to paint your house and painting one wall and thinking "I'm good."
Getting the kind of paint that seems like a normal wall color but changes to a garish color after it dries, to fool your wife.
Being ready to learn all the new hobbies as lockdown starts but someone already bought all the sewing machines and felting needles.
How many more ways you can fuck up a sewing project vs. a knitting project.
Pulling out all the stitches in a pleated skirt for the third time and deciding you want a different hobby.
Taking natural animal fibers and stabbing them into place.
A sewing project having to hang on someone's body in a particular way.
Learning every game development skill so you can make games without ever talking to anyone.
Smearing goo on a white surface and it becoming a picture somehow.
The hobbies we'd have if we had infinite time.
Looking at a painting and seeing which parts the painter messed up by looking for the parts that are thickest.
The "warmest greetings" coffee cup.
The animated gif where they poke a hole in the coffee cup and coffee spurts out.
Making a d-pad feel like a fresh control scheme by attaching a jetski to it.
Inventing a solution while also entertaining your audience.
Co-op TIS-100, where each player gets their own CPU cell.
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1 hr 3 min
October 26, 202053. Pedialyte Teargas
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Danny is @dannyBstyle on Twitter and plugs vaping.
Alex is @adlleong on Twitter and plugs the Ian Knot shoelace tying method. https://www.fieggen.com/shoelace/ianknot.htm
Topics:
Invisible walls in games
BluBlockers
Bees take their lives into their hands every time they get thirsty
Nick Asks "♪ God only knows what I’d pee without poo ♪"
My wife is afraid of dogs that wear people clothes
Every response to "thank you" is rude
The multivarious ways being a child genius can screw you
Microtopics:
The good content.
Some kind of invisible wall.
What we already know about Blaseball.
A fantastic way to keep the player inbounds.
Manically trying to explore this island while on the run from the military.
Cops being the yetis of life.
Blizzard blowing up your best party spot by shipping the final Ironforge Airfield.
Whether Microsoft will ruin Bethesda games by making them fix all those fun bugs before launching.
Fixing all the bugs in your game by applying The Cloud to it.
Playing the Turok remaster and they ruined it by removing all the fog.
Going to Canadian Tire because you live in Canada now.
The most technologically advanced sunglasses you can buy.
A Geordi Laforge type of deal.
Dipping your whole head in the black film you use to watch solar eclipses so you can get a good night's sleep.
How to get back from Canada.
Canada being so polite they even let the smoke in.
Still not being able to do a Canadian accent after two years.
Moving to Vancouver expecting a frozen wasteland.
Thrill-seeking bees refusing to wear their masks.
Being stung by one of those wasps that look like bees and being scared of bees for decades.
Whether insects have the capacity for complex emotions such as vengeance.
Why Danny isn't doing better if unbridled anger is such an evolutionary advantage.
Replacing creative workers with AI that you can pay in exposure.
Whether "brown area" is a less racist term than "gray area."
Seeing the most enormous dog butthole and screaming inside your heart.
Trimming back the hair around your dog's butthole to make it look bigger.
A poster with a dog butthole in it saying "Have you seen this butthole? Now you have."
Doing AI upscaling on the picture of the dog butthole that looks like Jesus so we can see the true face of God.
Assholes being okay until the poop comes out.
A human proportioned body with a dog head.
A therapy session by proxy.
Why dog clothes only cover the butt in Canada.
Dogs wearing ties on PBS.
Saying "my uncanny valley is just really wide" to your partner every night before bed instead of "I love you."
Moving to Canada expecting everyone to be polite but they're just rude with an "eh" after it.
A full-throated "hey."
The most terrifying thing about being in Canada.
Whether anyone has checked on the Canadian bacon.
Writing to Tim Horton and demanding that in Canada Canadian bacon just be called "here bacon."
A new credit card payment device where you need to punch in your zip code with your nose.
Enacting publicly-funded health care so that everyone can afford to grow a moustache and use StachePay.
Leveraging your raw intelligence to do your school assignments, rather than learning the material, and eventually hitting a brick wall because you've never actually learned anything.
Getting along better with your teachers than with other kids, because you want to talk about what Gorbachev is up to.
Getting through school and several jobs without ever learning how to work.
Thriving when given instructions to follow.
The shame of discovering that just because the school system worked for you, that doesn't mean it'll work for everyone.
Walking around wearing a t-shirt saying "ask me about the pledge of allegiance" and leaving a trail of horrified Canadians in your wake.
Taking your four year old to protests because now they have tear gas made out of Pedialyte.
Being $300 deep into the Dark Souls series but still not liking any of them.
Replaying old video games because playing new ones is too stressful.
Revisiting old media you've liked not because of the story but because it puts you in a place or mood.
Deciding to play a game because of its aesthetics and then having to find out what the game is like moment to moment and whether you want to do that with your life.
How Animal Crossing New Horizons probably saved the human species.
Only having so many button presses before your joints start to hurt.
Whether in Japan, every time you enter or leave a room, you have to politely listen to someone recite a prepared speech at you for 30 seconds, like in Animal Crossing.
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1 hr 4 min
October 19, 202052. Speak Moistly and Carry a Wet Stick
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Lords:
Jenni is reachable at [email protected].
Chris is making cooking videos at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRsnCRAIi-VsRPPX4AtzVGQ/
Topics:
Possibly having doppelgangers in the same physical universe on the other side of the Big Bang is creepy
Never interfacing with the cool parts of baseball because the front-facing parts didn't appeal to you
https://music.metafilter.com/8889/Jaylen-Please-Dont-Bean-My-Man
The two kinds of people: people who can just put a dish in the dishwasher and be happy with the outcome, and people who have to wash each dish by hand before putting it in the dishwasher, in which case what's even the point?
Miko asks "John Joseph Merlin (!) introduced the world to roller skates by rolling into a costumed ball, playing a violin, and immediately crashing into a mirror because he hadn't invented brakes yet."
The virality of the Cool S
AZ is the only state in the union where you can get one of every kind of venomous animal in your yard in the same day, I think (edit: except marsupials?)
Ancient magicks and the price we pay for them
Microtopics:
The Korean spam company that owns the Video Games Taco domain name.
Who owns the Video Games Taco AOL keyword.
Editing video on an iPhone because you spilled coffee on your computer.
Refusing to use your girlfriend's salty leavings to edit video.
A symmetrical big bang implying an identical doppelganger Earth across the universe.
Traveling across the universe to destroy your big bang doppelgangers with the understanding that they want the same thing and will meet you halfway.
Arguments that exist only to depress people because you can't do anything with the information.
Whether or not the Big Bang knew about mirrors.
Higher order thought leading to the possibility of altruism.
The Chris Hegemony.
An automatic eternal baseball simulation.
Guessing what the cool part of baseball is and getting partial credit.
Speaking moistly and carrying a wet stick.
Voting to open the forbidden book and now the umpires can incinerate you.
MMO players voting in a law against running stoplights and expressing the devs to write code to enforce it like it's the law of gravity.
MMO players designating certain players to run around and hit you with a stick until you stop breaking the rules.
Finding out about Blaseball by dating and living with someone who is really into Blaseball.
Refusing to read Homestuck because you've already read Problem Sleuth.
Baseball having interesting rules but steadfastly refusing to market itself to game nerds.
When the sausages would race.
Whether there is Canadian bacon in this sausage race.
Finding the web site that keeps track of the sausage mascot race results.
Whether or not the chorizo sausage costume is wearing a sombrero.
Trading the player who assaulted the sausage mascot to the Chicago Cubs.
The sausage race promotional posters having surprisingly interesting composition.
Performing an act of necromancy on Jaylen Hotdogfingers.
Recreating the experience of people talking about a sport you don't follow except for a fake sport.
A first-person confessional of what it's like to be a racing sausage.
Finding out that the sausage races are never fixed and feeling relief that you can still believe in something.
Whether you grew up trusting dishwashers.
How to get stabbed in the hand.
Having dish-related trauma.
Having an incredibly high spoon to fork ratio.
Your spaghetti spoon.
Taking a saw and turning any spoon into a fork.
Loading the silverware drawer with four slots full of murder sporks pointing the wrong way.
Existing for four nanoseconds and spending all four being angry about how your husband wants to load the silverware drawer.
God blaming you when they were the one who made the universe deterministic.
Refusing to take the dish out of the dishwasher if it's still dirty, because god dang it you did your part.
Punting a task to when you have more brain.
Whether viewing your future self as a separate person is universal or distinct to American psychology students.
Doing a study for the beer money and screwing up the study because you're ordering beer online during the study.
Hearing about a "costumed ball" and picturing Pom Pom in a Halloween episode.
Not giving the inventor of roller skates too much credit because he didn't think of putting all the wheels in a row.
Inventing the car and debuting it by driving into a petting zoo, honking La Cucaracha and trying to steal novelty hats off of the racing sausages.
Determining whether you need to steal the hats off of the sausages while they're racing or if you can wait until they've taken the hats off at the end of the day.
John Joseph Merlin's fart remover.
The Cool S of topics.
Growing up in a parallel Earth without the Cool S.
People in the Amazon Basin who've never seen Goatse or the Cool S.
Waking up in a world without the Cool S and getting to be the one who teaches all the kids who can't draw how to draw one cool thing.
Finding the Cool S in a painting from 1533, right above the hidden anamorphic skull.
Neither the Animorphs or the Digimons having been invented in 1533.
Putting a skateboarding dog in American Gothic.
Going back in time to hide the plot of 50 First Dates with Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore in the Edda.
Arizona's death of poisonous marsupials.
Gila Monsters being enraged at the sight of human testicles.
Finding a black widow, a scorpion and a Gila monster in your yard all in the same day.
Importing tropical plants without phyto certificates.
Befriending the guy you met at the Sprint store.
The kind of person who seems cooler while they're working at the Verizon store than on Twitter.
Clinging to any shred of humanity you can find in the Sprint shop.
The wizard explaining that it's going to be another hour when you can see your curse amulet right there on the counter.
Apple biting Star Trek's style
Sitting down at the genius bar and ordering a Roy Rogers.
Apple running a contact tracing program so they can find out if you know any Android users.
Finally deleting your Facebook and feeling free.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 3 min
October 12, 202051. I Don't Want To Eat This Bug, Obviously
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Ben is not on the Internet but is just happy to be here. He recommends Lindsay Ellis, an excellent film critic:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCG1h-Wqjtwz7uUANw6gazRw
Ryan is The Man Who Messed Up Walking His Dog So Badly It Made The News.
http://ryannorth.ca/
https://twitter.com/ryanqnorth
Topics:
Being able to cook a recipe from your mind without being able to explain how.
Every recipe has a step called "to taste" that is a mini version of this. How much salt, pepper, chili powder and cumin do I add to these chilaquiles? I donno, it's just muscle memory. But the muscle memory only works for three eggs. More or fewer, I screw it up.
How many times a day do you remember something stupid you've done in the past? Am I normal and developing as I should?
The Ice Magic jingle in Ben’s head for the rest of his life: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=0rfL9d4MDJY
I miss making a game that was immune to bug reports.
Dan asks: "What would we have in common with intelligent aliens? It seems common for analytical-minded people to claim that mathematical theories are discovered rather than invented. There's a programming theory personality named Phillip Wadler who's claimed that if we met aliens, they would have Lambda Calculus. Another programming personality (on the 'math is invented' side) posted a hypothetical conversation between a human programmer and an alien programmer that went like this:
Human: How do you avoid race conditions?
Alien: We just look at the different futures and pick one without data races.
Alien: How do you calm arithmetic when it's angry?
Human: Our math is not sentient."
The Atari 2600 screenshot Jim was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message
What's the worst thing you've ever put in your mouth?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_razor_clam
Flake in Australia is a deep fried fillet of fish you can order at fish and chip shops: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flake_(fish) Usually about the length of a dinner plate.
Nintendo Labo is an industrial design marvel.
Watch someone transform a Nintendo Labo keyboard into an actual synth! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CjLOElL0rY
Has anyone else noticed that long-anticipated events eventually "happen" and are thereafter "in the past"?
For years my personal blog was the top internet resource for earlobe cysts.
Microtopics:
Traveling to E3 from Australia.
Making games for the Nokia N-Gage.
Just now realizing that "Squirrel Girl" rhymes.
Bluffing your way through a title pun because there's limited time in a game jam.
A pun that you need to be both from England and New Zealand to get.
Procedures for recreating an unknown recipe when the recipe changes as it's observed.
A discrete series of steps that can be reproduced
A bottomless measuring cup that keeps track of how much a substance that passed through it.
A measuring cup that tells an anonymous third party you how much of a thing it holds, but doesn't tell the user.
Whether or not anything comes up if you search the internet for minestrone soup recipes.
Getting owned on Twitter after posting about the Ship of Theseus.
Feeling dumb and then later feeling dumb about how you felt dumb.
The mortifying ordeal of being known.
Dismissing intrusive thoughts with a vocal tic or a spasm.
Remembering advertising jingles from the 1980s all the goddamned time.
Whether or not the Zest jingle invented the word "zestfully"
Corporations owing serious back rent on the space in your brain taken up by advertising jingles.
Crackly choc-ice.
Going into a deep existential dread about a forty-year-old t-shirt.
Calling it the "WC" when it takes way longer to say "WC" than "water closet"
Asking the waitress where the toilet is and she gives you a weird look and says "in the bathroom, sir."
Offering your top hat for the nobleman to micturate into.
Having an audience who sees cool literary references in your work and assumes you did them on purpose.
Writing an impossible season cliffhanger believe that you're quiting the show, but then not quitting the show and having to somehow resolve the cliffhanger.
The biggest spoiler being whether or not a work is good or not.
Living vicariously through someone watching your favorite TV series for the first time.
Meeting an alien race with sentient math.
Having just the one math but being certain that it's the only math.
Doing your best to communicate with intelligent aliens but you can't think of anything to talk about.
Only trying to contact alien races that you have enough in common with to meaningfully communicate.
What kind of math a salt-leech would invent.
Coherent systems of mathematics that don't reflect reality.
Maths that would hypothetically reflect reality better than ours, and how ours could do better.
The guy waking you up from your cryogenic sleep explaining to you that we know how to divide by zero now.
Knowing that if the laws of physics change, your program will break.
Recompiling once a year to make sure your program breaks when mathematical laws are updated.
Realizing that the anecdote you're about to tell actually happened to your brother, not you.
Discovering that ants are extremely sour.
Ordering a shark kebab and the guy asks if you want crickets on it and you're certain you misheard him so you ask "what are those?" and he says "they're tiny bugs!"
Crickets just being crunchy until you look at them and realize that you're definitely eating an entire being right now.
Being stuck with your lame fish and chips when Australians have badass shark and chips.
Things you learned as a kid and never critically examined as an adult.
Razor clams: the meal that bites back.
Building a fully functional steering wheel, with levers and adjustable dials that click, out of cardboard and rubber bands.
The visual programming environment that comes with Nintendo Labo.
Buying toys for an eight year old when your son is born because one day he'll be eight.
Artisanal reprinted Nintendo Labo cardboard components on Etsy.
Taking your cardboard Nintendo Labo synth on tour and seeing how many gigs it lasts for.
Everybody really wanting to hear Jim's earlobe cyst story.
Jim's primary claim to fame before Frog Fractions.
Jim's top 3 earlobe cyst tips.
Just how deceptively close to the jugular the earlobe is.
Getting to watch a stranger's kid grow up because they don't believe you when you say they've got the wrong email address.
The kind of person who just assumes their email address is their name at gmail.com.
Holding onto the last vapors of 2012 Twitter.
Like finally talking to T-Rex.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 1 min
October 05, 202050. Big Jesus Retouch Energy
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Kev - https://www.radcade.com/
Chall - https://twitter.com/MrChrisLHall
Topics:
Rick Astley's Youtube channel in 2020
https://www.youtube.com/c/RickastleyCoUkOfficial/videos
https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1303143128740720640?s=19
https://twitter.com/necrosofty/status/1300908917896085505
Unconsciously adjusting for sensory deficiencies
https://www.improbable.com/2010/02/15/ig-nobel-acceptance-speech-knuckle-cracking/
https://news.bme.com/2013/03/06/adding-and-subtracting/
All food photography of prawns in the UK use the same six genetically engineered prawns.
https://twitter.com/LRBbookshop/status/1301469852599754753
https://youtu.be/J1NV6CUJl18
Not A Butt Face asks: "Numbers in games are too big. We should just use smaller numbers. YuGiOh and final fantasy monsters having tens of thousands of HP and your attacks doing hundreds or thousands of damage looks cool when you have those quad 9s pop up... but games like Paper Mario or Megaman Battle Network keeping damage and health numbers in the tens to hundreds range means you can mentally calculate damage difference and feel the impact more granularly."
https://thespelunkyshowlike.libsyn.com/
I forgot to mention another important aspect of BCD, which is that it rounds more intuitively than binary floating point math. Hence its use in calculators.
Michael Jackson and the Sonic 3 soundtrack
Sonic Robo Blast 2: https://www.srb2.org/
Microtopics:
The raddest place to play web games.
Topic Time.
Something the Algorithm decided you should know about.
Having a hairstyle identical to the one you had in that music video thirty years ago.
Having an appropriate face for your voice.
Rickroll Georg who lives in a cave and has rickrolled people over a billion times.
The patron saint of being disappointed.
A bobblehead of Rick Astley on a crucifix.
Taking the loupe out of your breast pocket to check if your date's crucifix is really Jesus or if it's Rick Astley again.
The YouTube algorithm deciding it's important that everyone learn how to make a house out of sticks in the swamp.
What the Dancing Baby is up to these days.
How memes propagated before social media.
A deep learning up-rez of the Dancing Baby at 1080p and 60FPS.
A reverse engineered Diddy Kong 3D model with big Retouched Jesus energy.
Memes: look 'em up.
The ethics of adding a moment of silence in post.
Giving Rick Astley the Topic Lords Bump.
Memorizing the eye test they give you at the DMV because you keep forgetting your glasses.
The guy who only cracked the knuckles of one of his hands to test the hypothesis that cracking your knuckles causes arthritis.
Repeatedly breaking your knuckles so you can have enormous terrifying swollen knuckles and calling it a "bone trick"
The Bone Trick Brothers trying to out knuckle each other.
The doors that are now open to the Bone Trick Brothers.
The Bone Trick Brothers growing up to be insurance investigators specializing in knuckleheads.
The complete impossibility of photographing prawns.
Having to tell a
A derivatives market for trading futures contracts against the six genetically engineered prawns used in all food photography.
Being totally bought into a complete lie because it was written in a convincing authorial voice.
Being convinced by photo evidence even though you haven't looked at the photo evidence.
Getting your one mistake out of the way and having smooth sailing for the rest of your life.
This Headline is False.
Squinting at a plate of colorful rice and trying to see a negative space prawn.
Scientists just realizing that nobody has cooked a real prawn in decades.
The last topic being a complete fabrication.
Opening a hole in reality and pulling in alternate reality Topic Lords episodes where Jim is in a biker club and has guests named Rex.
Getting notifications any time a podcast anywhere in the multiverse talks about you.
Not even liking notifications from this universe.
Lyrics that sound like words but are not words.
A podcast as a way for people who miss you after you die to listen to you talk for hours about inane bullshit.
The first year of Topic Lords topics in a coffee table book.
When GPT-3 Jim is narrating the podcast of the future.
Instead of doing the whole trial, just doing the first few minutes of the trial and sending the transcript through GPT-3 and searching for "verdict."
Whether we're still talking about prawns.
Chunky Integers.
Feeling the weight of smaller numbers better than enormous ones.
The advantages and disadvantages of binary-coded decimal.
Feeding a virtual pet except you're just clicking on cookies.
Comparing sizes and distances and only really caring about order of magnitude.
A ragtag team of Internet people spending decades elaborating on your game idea.
Dozens of people adding features that they think will be cool and hoping that after ten years of this a good game design will emerge.
How Micheal Jackson might hypothetically have written the Sonic 3 soundtrack.
Getting excited to go down a YouTube rabbit hole.
An even cooler mystery than the mystery of the prawns.
Whether you like a song being predicated on exactly how familiar it is to you.
Loving the Sonic 3 soundtrack so much that you track down this Michael Jackson guy's other music.
Like playing an ARG except you're just living your life.
A Doom mod secretly being the best Sonic the Hedgehog game even though Doom doesn't support slopes so they can't do the loop-the-loop.
Modding room-over-room into the Doom engine so that you can put loop-the-loops in Sonic Robo Blast 2.
A great place you got here, lotta nice topics, really screams "party."
A part time paid employee who just came out of the woodwork.
Being a leaf node on the employment tree.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 3 min
September 28, 202049. A Very Wet Hell
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
April is @aprilsaur on Twitter.
John remains a mystery.
Topics:
Climate-aware architecture
https://twitter.com/wrathofgnon/status/1013941701293928449
https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/thermal-delight/
On Dungeons & Dragons: focusing on the characters vs focusing on the story
Why do people say "ahh" after taking a drink
https://www.lbc.co.uk/radio/special-shows/the-mystery-hour/human-body/why-do-people-say-ahh-after-finishing-a-drink/
Miko asks: "Perpetual Stew, a food that instead of being cooked once and then eaten, continues to be cooked for up to five hundred years (while occasionally also being eaten, but not in its entirety)"
That strange feeling when you move to a new state and the laws around plastic bags are different, and other weird differences between places
The Afghan-Mexican fusion burrito shop in Albany that we didn't name on the podcast: https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/the-hot-shop/Location?oid=1113434
You want the "tropical" or the "cajun," depending on how spicy you like it.
Microtopics:
Seasons that aren't summer and states that aren't California.
John of the Commonwealth of Virginia Johns.
Calling yourself a Commonwealther but not knowing all the deep Commonwealth cuts.
Not having a city name because you're between cities and so calling yourself a "census designated place."
An experience that you had that is in the past.
Plugging a suspiciously expensive hat that players love.
Not being able to have hobbies because you just bought a house.
California, where it's sunny for hundreds of years and then suddenly a thunderstorm covers the entire state in tens of thousands of lightning strikes.
Not having to get your home repairs done before people visit because nobody can ever visit.
The good news is: podcasting.
Not having had a basement in decades.
Discovering that Virgina is a tiny piece of a giant land mass called North America.
Buying the Frog Fractions hat DLC for all your friends.
An extremely Californian form of hell.
Architects forgetting that climate exists after air conditioning is invented.
Fantasizing about winning the lottery when you never play the lottery.
The downside of climate control via architecture.
The feeling of tatami mats under your feet.
Realizing that having bugs in your floor sometimes is just the price you pay for having floor mats that bugs like to live in.
The tortilla mouse story.
Discovering that a mouse is living in your bag of tortillas and signing a contract with the mouse that it will just eat the tortillas and not destroy the rest of your house or breed.
Cats discovering extremely stale candy in the cabinet under the sink.
A squirrel spinning a corn tortilla like a steering wheel and eating it from the outside in.
A squirrel spinning a tortilla like a sign spinner.
Joining a D&D campaign late.
Knowing what your characters are about and creating situations where the characters have something to play against.
Making sure your players have stakes in the story being told.
A dope encounter on a luxury liner where you have to follow a bard with an anti-magic field.
A D&D campaign where all the players just hang out and eat Doritos.
Crafting a narrative by building outwards from a single dramatic moment.
Not knowing anything about the company you own half of.
The mystery of the Ultraviolet City.
Collaboratively inventing a story with your friends.
Having a beverage with you and being able to test a beverage hypothesis.
The sensation of a little bit of cool air passing over the various nerve endings in the inner mouth area.
Whether pooping is a social construct.
A two year old fixating on the color of Pepsi.
Tripping out on your own sensory experience.
Some real good honest mischief.
Taking a deeper breath so you can drink more.
Getting out the whiteboard to teach your infant son how to drink and belch.
A gentle sweet boy forcibly closing your laptop so you'll pay attention to him.
Perpetual stool, which also hangs around for 500 years.
Living for as long as you can keep the stew going.
Being caretaker for a stew that is 300 years older than you.
Making sure you eat all the meat out of your stew before it goes bad and spoils the rest of the stew.
Filling your house with the smell of fresh baked bread.
A bread recipe where you just put all the ingredients in a pan and then bake it.
A gradient of cheese.
Broccoli with horrible stinky cheese melted on top.
Jumping on any excuse to make an elaborate ridiculous meal.
Visiting your friends in Virginia but never talking to them because of COVID.
Going ballistic whenever you see a deer.
Making everyone sign an NDA before they can listen to this episode of your podcast.
Some sort of palace of food.
Two grocery bags being filled before you even realize what's happening.
Stipulating that the burrito rant has occurred.
Differing vehicle registration laws in Virginia and California.
Running a bunch of stop signs because they don't write the word "stop" on the ground in Portland, they only have the red sign.
How to proceed with the ARG when you believe you've solved the mystery of John's identity.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
September 21, 202048. Long Furby
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Abby
https://twitter.com/mizabitha
http://abbydenton.podbean.com/
John
https://twitter.com/YouOldSoAndSo
Topics:
A-life and v-pets of the late 90s: why did they die, where do we see them today (pokemon go, etc)
Nano Pets commercial with catchy jingle: https://youtu.be/R_KIwHHMVmQ?t=298
The only Wappy dog review on Metacritic: https://www.pocketgamer.com/articles/047860/wappy-dog/
Stack Up video by Jeremy Parish: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb8RHzSW2yo
Stack Up in WarioWare, Inc.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WBXh5cLJt4
A Long Furby: https://twitter.com/LongFurby/status/1002690751988453379
Another Long Furby: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/long-furby-wife-guy
Furby source code: http://www.seanriddle.com/furbysource.pdf
DadDoes review of Wappy Dog: http://www.daddoes.com/3912/wappy-dog-review/
San Diego, CA
Everything John forgot to mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Diego_County,_California
Torrey Pines State Natural Reserve®: https://torreypine.org/
Geisel Library: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geisel_Library
San Diego Zoo Safari Park: https://www.sdzsafaripark.org/
International Cottages at Balboa Park: http://www.sdhpr.org/
Salty licorice/salmiak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice
I have many friends, and am very popular, and awesome, and rumors about my smell are greatly exaggerated- John.
San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Onofre_Nuclear_Generating_Station
San Diego depicted in the 1998 Midway arcade game California Speed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8lSX1aUHQw
Hotel del Coronado: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotel_del_Coronado
“Nobody’s perfect.”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mHhr-aaLnI
Harmony Gold’s most popular move in years: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qk3p6hIdVeM
Send your Robotech questions and comments to: https://twitter.com/marwilliamson
California is on fire; get in the van, loser, we’re all moving to Pittsburgh.
Bloodlust Software and the 90s indie game scene
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rf5KIss6csA
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/9a48z3/the-story-of-nesticle-the-ambitious-emulator-that-redefined-retro-gaming
Not A Butt Face asks: "Marble Hornets Sex Tape ie. A Found Footage Style Webseries but the footage being sifted through is on Sex Tapes and just out of frame or partially obscured is a lurking unknown creature. Could this ever work?"
Microtopics:
Being a cyborg and being out of the closet.
Doing standup comedy in an empty room.
Figuring out the best way to get a podcast onto your phone.
Kevin Spacey ruining your podcast.
A 20th-anniversary digital Tamagotchi.
F2P Tamagotchi all getting horrible pain disorders that demand you pay daily microtransactions or they just scream all day.
A large company that operates suspiciously.
Reading a lot of Newsweek in grade school.
Getting high on your own supply of Newsweek.
An eight year old wearing a blazer with elbow pads picking up a Newsweek at the book fair to read about Tamagotchi.
Shaking the Chao garden to make the Chao fight.
Whether or not Nintendogs go to heaven.
Neglecting your real dog because you have an exciting new virtual dog.
Sickening podcast guests with your Pokemon Go strategies.
The sensor on Wappy Dog's tail that only exists so it can get upset that you pulled its tail.
That one banger on the Wappy Dog OST.
Your Robotic Operating Buddy's ability to pick up discs of a certain size and move them in an arc around itself.
Playing Stack Up over Skype and having to call your friend and have him reset the puzzle whenever ROB fucks up and drops the pieces on the floor.
The baffling absence of YouTube videos of Gizmo Furby interacting with Yoda Furby.
Steven Spielberg patrolling the internet for videos of Gizmo Furby talking to Yoda Furby and shutting them the heck down because that's not canon. (George Lucas is fine with it.)
A village of Furbies living on after the extinction of the human race.
Yes! Dad does!
Wappy Dog being immortal, but if he did die somehow he'd go straight to hell.
Pikachu turning to the player and asking "who was the last person you kissed?"
Trying to make a game that creates the same reaction in every player.
Confusing Yoot Saito and Noob Saibot.
Playing SimCity 2000 on a Game Boy Advance.
Becoming a chef so that you can figure out why burritos are better in San Diego than anywhere else in the world.
A library raised up in little feet with a swirly tail called The Spang-Dangler Building.
A library that looks like a big concrete tree.
A library that looks like a space invader.
Discovering Finnish Salty Licorice and finally not having to share your candy with your friends.
Lurking in the floorboards so that you can visit your introvert friend without them noticing.
Those big concrete nipples on Camp Pendleton.
Driving from Camp Pendleton to Mexico in less than a minute and then turning around and driving across an aircraft carrier.
Doctor Seuss's favorite San Diego hangouts.
Whether Jack Lemmon likes it hot in the ending of Some Like It Hot.
Taking part in the panda breeding program in the 70s.
Not knowing what the San Diego Convention Center looks like outside of Comic Con and just assuming it's always swarming with nerds.
None of the speakers showing up for the big Robotech panel at Wondercon so the marketing director steps up with PowerPoint presentation describing Robotech merch.
Everyone losing their shit over Robotech skate decks.
Singing and dancing when the sky turns black.
Trying to hide violence from children so the children rebel by celebrating violence as much as possible.
A full-featured Mortal Kombat clone developed by two high school students.
Whether One Must Fall stands up.
Choosing to release the first free-and-good-enough NES emulator and calling it NESticle.
How the mouse pointer for NESticle was actually a severed hand, and only the Windows icon was a scrotum.
Keeping your emulation legit by deleting your ROMs every 24 hours.
The only place the long-rumored SNESticle was ever released.
How early SNES emulators didn't handle transparency so you had to manually toggle the cloud layer in order to see anything.
Shock value Flash cartoons before and after 9/11.
A gif of a plane crashing into Oprah.
Going into work each day with the intent of trying to get fired.
Who today is carrying on the Bloodlust Software ethos.
Making the same ultra-violent video game as everyone else but adding narration explaining that "violence is bad and this game is important."
A hyper-detailed art style evocative of biology and gross innards without actually depicting any gore.
A tasteful logo that represents a butt pooping.
A barely-visible monster lurking in the background of every video uploaded to Pornhub.
Porkin' Across America.
Finding people who were already going to make a series of sex tapes and offering to lurk in the background in your Slenderman costume.
Training a neural network to insert Slenderman into the background of every movie.
Writing erotic House of Leaves fan fiction and waiting for the Internet to discover and reenact it.
An art critic giving your life a B+.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 9 min
September 14, 202047. Santa Barbarella
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Chris's album "The Lost Backups" is out now!
https://b-e-e-k.bandcamp.com/
https://twitter.com/CHRISdelCAMINO
https://www.instagram.com/chrisdelcamino/
Jimmy is on LinkedIn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkd3_fowcFs
https://open.spotify.com/track/4nHfs2e1bRAeS5JHVa50yh?si=EO2vB_DQSrGJ5ov7s5x0Bw
Topics:
22 years later, I am able to answer Rimbo's question he asked me on the way to Wesside '98: "What is an Obispo"
Why "Starflight" is the greatest PC game ever made
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starflight
Drums that you play standing up (and double-sided drums)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pz8XELwxAuw
Bulbous Cretin asks: "Tweeting the contents of Fred Flinstone’s frozen carcass before you dig in"
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/12/permafrozen-dinner/604069/
16 bits is not enough and destroyed music
Microtopics:
Plugging a 21 year old song that you still can't believe you wrote.
Musicians deserving royalties.
The secret fourth guest.
The rolling golden hills driving down the 101.
Knowing all the technical musical terms in Spanish but not knowing how to say "mop."
What would happen to the Cookie Monster if Big Bird was blue.
Whether or not the Topic Lords audience knows about the demo scene.
Whether or not Unreal by Future Crew is the same thing as Unreal Engine by Tim Sweeney.
Demo scenes and then demo parties.
Visiting Montreal and hiding in a high school gym for three days rather than seeing the amazing city with its amazing architecture.
Wanting to hold the Great American Demo Party.
Whether or not you should cover the ice when you hold a huge party in an ice rink.
Assembly 2010 mostly being a big LAN party with the demo scene folks tucked away in the corner.
The sun going down at 11 PM.
Boozembly 2010 taking place in the woods behind Assembly 2010.
Plugging a PC keyboard into your Mac and all the keys work perfectly in Schism Tracker.
Giving up on the Macintosh after decades because Mac hardware and MacOS are terrible now.
A laptop that is so broken that it shuts down every computer on the wifi network you try to connect it to.
Advertising the latest Macbook as having a physical escape key.
Running Ubuntu as an app on Windows.
The secret 16-color CGA mode if you plug in a composite monitor.
Modern nostalgia for the terrible four-color CGA palettes.
Storing an entire universe on a two-sided 360k floppy disk.
Landing on a planet and finding The Ancients and finding enough fuel to get to three stars over.
Stuffing The Ancients into your warp drive because there is no better fuel.
A project where you don't have to worry about bugfixes because if something breaks, the user just runs it again.
The thousands or millions of people out there who would give you money if they knew your product existed.
The market for Frog Fractions-themed N95 masks.
Making a live post to r/tipofmyjoystick asking for the identity of an educational space game during the podcast in hopes that someone replies before we finish recording.
Misremembering which band's drummer plays a snare drum and a tranceaphone.
A drum kit with tom toms so high that you have to jump up to reach them.
Two wildly different drum heads using the same resonation chamber.
Soundproofing a shed by adding 2500 pounds of sheet rock to the walls.
Converting sound pressure waves into heat.
Measuring the frequency response of these egg crates.
Putting squares on the walls having no effect on the sound of your saxophone escaping the room and annoying the people on the other side of the wall.
Walking right up to your wall and speaking and it sounding like you plugged your ears.
Placing yourself in a space by listening to reflections.
Spinning up the Periscope server on Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass so that you can Periscope yourself eating Fred Flintstone.
Making Fred Flintstone's frozen carcass lip-sync to WAP.
Who, exactly, needs to apologize for this topic.
Discovering that humans don't have a gizzard and really wanting a gizzard.
Whether or not a Twinkie is technically meat.
Texas Twinkies.
Wanting to eat 35,000 year old Mammoth meat but it turns into a smelly liquid when you thaw it.
Thousand year eggs not looking a day older than 150.
Which genres CD quality is and isn't good enough for.
Frequency-based MP3 audio being decoded into PCM so it can be sent out of a speaker, and then back into a frequency-based format by your cochlea so it can reach your brain.
The Magic Mushroom PC dot com.
Running timecube.com at the DOS prompt.
Classical music having way too much dynamic range.
Riding the volume knob to not go deaf while listening to the William Tell Overture.
Visible color banding during dark scenes in a movie.
El Camino except it's Del like Del Taco.
What LinkedIn is for.
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59 min