Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

April 20, 202026. The Double Equilibrium Point of Water (For Fish)
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Lords
John Mystery lives in Maryland. https://googlethatforyou.com?q=john%20mystery%20maryland
Nelson is making An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs.
@WritNelson on Twitter.
https://www.patreon.com/StrangeScaffold
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1246250/An_Airport_for_Aliens_Currently_Run_by_Dogs/
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/epic-pictures-launch-gaming-venture-1289270
Topics:
6:15 My worst fear as an adolescent: gravity reverses while I am in the family car on the 110 and I am flung into the sky at 9.8m/s2
VVVVVV https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf06P-_1lkU
15:31 Kaiju who should know each other, but don't.
I'm pretty sure the male description of the RBLD dating persona is actually suggesting you stop dating entirely.
The Wild Rose: https://web.archive.org/web/20141031024714/http://www.okcupid.com/personality?type=RBLD&g=0&o=1
The Manchild: https://web.archive.org/web/20141024161727/http://www.okcupid.com/personality?type=RBLD&g=1&o=1
21:52 This Arkanoid TAS:
http://tasvideos.org/6347S.html
The "Super Mario World vs. the Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Physics" video has been taken down but here's the original blog post: https://msm.runhello.com/p/20
And here's a similar video that gets the idea across. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIb2F7OLQJw
30:39 Yuri asks: "I was wondering what you and your fellow lords do to warm up prior to getting started on some creative thing. Does it change comparing coding to making music, drawing, crocheting, etc.?"
Gunhouse, on sale on Switch for $1 until April 26th! https://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/gunhouse-switch/
(Also available on a bunch of other platforms.)
47:21 Would a Cool Sentient Dog in a graveyard dig up the bodies? Would that make him the anti-caretaker?
Oiled Up Sax Guy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1dY6OkPb7E
Interview with Oiled Up Sax Guy, who it turns out really did arrange and perform that cover. https://dangerousminds.net/comments/the_infamous_sexy_sax_man_from_the_lost_boys_still_still_believes_a_chat_wi
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2015/12/tumblr-users-are-talking-about-bone-stealing.html
56:38 Experiencing FOMO about activities that you do not want to do
Microtopics:
John of the Maryland Johns.
Ruining the show before it's really even started.
High fiving a friend from six feet away using your selfie stick with a hand at the end of it.
Washing the hand at the end of your selfie stick after high-fiving someone with it.
Motion detectors not detecting black people so corporate hires white people to follow black people around and activate the motion detectors.
A black person walking in front of the Kinect and the Kinect being like "I think I just saw a ghost!"
Loving your punchline and so letting it go.
Being flung away from the earth at 9.8 meters per second per second.
The unfathomable horror of your senator voting in favor of the "subtly tweak the laws of physics" bill.
Finding the highrise apartment building that is most likely to remain attached to the Earth if gravity reverses.
Being deeply bothered by children who know the metric system and understand calculus.
Having known you were going to die but now being able to put a number to exactly how fast.
Always paying attention to whether you feel slightly lighter now, because that means gravity is starting to reverse.
Gravity's power suddenly doubling and the only survivors being people hanging out in trampoline parks and bounce houses at the time.
Our only hope being heroes in mech suits but unfortunately everyone who owns a mech suit is a billionaire.
Fish living through gravity doubling because they can swim up to a lower water pressure.
The moon crashing into the Earth.
Kaiju who are lonely because they don't know any other kaiju.
Whether Swamp Thing and Godzilla would be friends.
A giant dog who is perpetually alone because there is no Mothra equivalent in his universe.
Bigfoot technically being a kaiju because his feet are so big.
Whether Bigger Luke is big enough to be considered a kaiju.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen except for kaiju.
Whether Jack the Ripper looms large enough in our minds that he should be banned from our Kaiju-only dating app.
The OkCupid dating personality result that was fine for women but if you're a dude they were like "please stop dating"
A tiny green cat as dense as a neutron star.
Having to explain what a TAS, speed runs, Arkanoid, Breakout, and video games are before you can get to the part that's cool about this Arkanoid TAS.
Running your Arkanoid simulation on six cores for over a year to find optimal Arkanoid strategies.
Mario dancing with the fish for 15 seconds and then the credits play.
Martial arts masters going into the mountains and practicing one move for 30 years.
The Many Worlds interpretation of Super Mario World.
A speedrunner finding a COVID-19 vaccine faster than anybody else but the FDA blocks them from releasing it.
Philosophers not allowing themselves to have any fun because they're trying to counter the image of philosophers lazing around and not doing any real work.
Sitting down to create while being fully aware that you might not create anything worthwhile today.
Throwing nothing away and making everything.
A cool game that is available on a variety of platforms.
Being a year into making a game and it isn't fun yet and you have to trust in the iteration process that you'll find the fun before you ship, but actually maybe you won't, but you still have to ship anyway so it's not a total loss.
Making a bad game fun by association, by placing it in a fun context.
Hiring a narrative designer a couple months away from shipping your deeply text-centered game, because there is currently no text or story in the game and everything is on fire.
Adding a bunch of things to your game that will definitely bite you in the ass later because you cannot be stopped.
Running a D&D game that you haven't prepped enough and your players getting to the part of the scenario where your notes are blank.
Fragile people in a fragile people world attempting to make juice and having empathy for each other.
Sitting at the text editor to create and creativity not happening fast enough so you go browse Reddit.
Being stuck on a hard problem and going to play video games while your subconscious works on the problem.
Watching Zodiac while you're working on your cross-stitch and you look down and you've spelled out the name of the real killer.
Trying to pick a speed run to watch in the background while you work that will keep you from being bored but not be interesting enough that you watch it instead of working.
Having made your topic list and having to sleep in them.
Gifts to ourselves.
Cyber-Washington with carbon fiber dentures and a minigun that fires the teeth of his slaves.
A cool sentient dog wearing a leather jacket and sunglasses digging up bodies and putting them in cool poses.
Cool Dog digging for bones in the easiest place possible, the human body.
The movie with the oiled muscle-man singing and playing a saxophone.
Buff Weird Al Yankovic.
Promising to name this episode "Stacksophone" but lying.
Cool Dog turning out to be a very uncool dog if you think about it.
Lost Boys, exhibit A in the debate of whether being a jerk is cool.
Cool sentient dogs in the 90s digging up bodies in graveyards, but cool sentient dogs in 2020 awooing on Mastodon.
Preferring to use human bones in your occult rituals because you relate better to the energy they carry.
Selling your leftover human bones after you're done doing all your curses.
Whether or not the guy selling human bones on Etsy is cool, and whether they'd be cooler if they were a dog.
Loving Bribe Dog even though by all rights he ought to be in jail.
A small dog gumming at a stranger's ankles and not breaking the skin but they get upset anyway for some reason.
The life-long FOMO of wondering what you're missing out on from activities you never do because you hate doing them.
Correctly guessing that the other guest is subtweeting Animal Crossing.
A game that is fun until it becomes your job.
Not needing to buy a new video game because Breath of the Wild still exists.
Not wanting to do an activity so much as be a part of the community that does the activity.
That month where everyone in the world was playing Pokemon Go.
Recommending a video game to two people who have already played it.
Leveling up as a person the first time you've ever made a non-optimal decision in a game to retain your quality of life.
Your Animal Crossing villagers expressing shock as you chop down your entire orchard in front of them.
Opening an iPad feeling special, like someone confessing that they love you and not loving them back.
Getting FOMO about everyone you're not in love with.
The future where instead of social media, everybody drops an ARG about themselves that you have to solve in order to talk to them.
A thing that sounds exciting that you don't want to do.
An alternate reality where nothing happens and no-one cares.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 12 min
April 13, 202025. Which One Is Eggteen?
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Lords:
Rusty is Rusty#1990 on Discord.
Rusty's Discord bot: https://deepfake-bot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
Chris is @MrChrisLHall on Twitter.
Topics:
2:39 Games that are work.
12:40 Twitter bots posting photos of people and cats that do not exist
https://twitter.com/DoesNotExistBot
https://twitter.com/normalcatpics
17:15 The best way to future proof your job against AI takeover is to get a job that machines are already better at but humans still do it anyway.
24:34 Quill asks: "Have you ever seen the different verbal naming systems for hexadecimal? They're all amazing. My favorite numbers are eggteen and chris."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexadecimal#Verbal_and_digital_representations
28:07 Where do you find folk games? Like Sticks or Contact or Fish Bowl. There must be some really amazing ones out there that I've never heard of.
36:55 My recording rig for podcasting
http://sonic-pi.net/
Live coding an ambient electro set w/ Sonic Pi. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1m0aX9Lpts
The Failure of the iPad. http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2020/01/29/the_failure_of_the_ipad/
45:02 When you're old and only remember jokes, the only way to learn new things is to make jokes about them.
https://mnemosyne-proj.org/
Microtopics:
Non-consensually turning a Discord user into a Discord bot.
A recurring topic on this particular episode.
Lightly-flavored seltzer water.
Entering the Konami code at a soda fountain to get the secret flavor.
Getting tasks in your inbox and doing the tasks and getting more tasks as a reward.
Not having to take part in the office drama.
A complete lack of scrum master.
The fantasy of doing a job and getting fairly compensated.
The plausibility of having fun at your job.
Letting others pay the cost of the harm you're doing to the world.
Loving to play games where you clean up messes while your real life home gets worse and worse.
Playing a game about a housecleaning robot and deciding doing housework could make you happy in real life too.
Not falling for it when mom tries to turn cleaning your room into a game.
Teenagers going out of their way to be helpful in the household.
Toddlers wanting to do what adults do.
Finding out 18 years later your theory is correct.
The lego: nature's caltrop.
Writing an angry letter to the Lego corporation asking why they don't make squishy legos.
Wearing only half a pair of glasses.
Choosing Markov Chains because they work better than Tensorflow.
Having enough ram to store 1.5 billion floating point values.
Whether the Dalai Lama has ever used ICQ, and if so why hasn't Jim talked to him.
Some people running really fast, but not as fast as cars, but we still pay them to do it.
The emergency board meeting that the CEO of running called when the speed of cars eclipsed the speed of runners.
Becoming an artisanal trucker on Etsy when computers take your trucking job.
Decking out your artisanal delivery truck in old-timey neon reminiscent of the 80s when people still had jobs.
The part of your brain dedicated to determining the gender of the driver who is trying to kill you.
Being a very chill person except when you're driving alone.
An angry meditation on driving in heavy traffic.
The only time your infant son has ever heard you be angry.
Bringing your date to see Black Swan without realizing it's secretly a horror movie.
Just waiting for the great black scary bird to show up.
Pronouncing 1E as "Eggteen."
Knowing your pointer is a bad pointer when it's pointing to DEADBEEF.
Magic numbers such as 0xDECAFC0FFEE15BAD.
Michael Jackson moonwalking on the moon.
That feeling when you find that the altar is co-aligned in Minetown in Nethack.
Playing tag but not knowing who invented it.
Having water at home but trying not to brag about it.
A really inefficient way of getting at musicking.
Choosing a software package because you just download and run it without doing a bunch of sysadmin bullshit.
Being frustrated that there are still some things you can do on a computer but not on a phone.
Having an example that you wanted to use but not being able to remember what it was.
Remembering what a word means because you once imagined a monkey saying it.
Deliberately cracking yourself up so you can remember Bob's last name.
Thinking of the time I thought your name was "Blob."
Only remembering to buy the funniest items on your grocery list.
Memorizing your grocery list and then being stuck with the same grocery list for the rest of your life.
The persistent allure of a shelf of physical media even in the era of digital downloads.
Being intrigued by Bee Simulator but not being $48 intrigued.
Bee dances that are sufficiently expressive to articulate game reviews.
Git cloning the mind of someone with a good memory so you can remember things better.
Only being able to remember monkeys brachiating, but remembering the hell out of it.
Support Topic Lords
55 min
April 06, 202024. So Horrible and Yet So Tiny
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Lords:
Jenni is on an internet break but you can email her at [email protected].
Tyriq is @fourbitfriday on Twitter and elsewhere, and is making Catacomb Kids. https://www.ckgame.net/
Topics:
2:13 Hot Topic
"Peaches, meet your fate!" https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/blna2q/hot_topic_employees_of_reddit_what_are_your/emqprnc/
8:28 Toe picks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_56TYtCggc
Mike Vallely yells at Tony Hawk about pressure flips. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQCe6guSOOM
A more detailed take on what happened with inlining and the X-Games. https://www.reddit.com/r/rollerblading/comments/1jpost/why_hasnt_rollerblading_come_back_to_the_xgames/cbhemrd/
22:15 Topical medication
30:42 Groke asks: "My friend (who is completely unaware of this podcast and did this apropos of nothing) emailed the Mars chocolate company to find out why the Topic candy bar has that name. 'Dear Mr Smith, Thanks for getting in touch about our MARS product. The Topic bar has been a firm favourite since it's introduction in 1962, unfortunately over time the origin of how the Topic chocolate bar came to be called Topic has been lost and now it has become a mystery that we are still trying to discover. If you need any more information, please let us know.'"
34:45 Test of Proficiency in Korean
Nifflas's braille labeling purchase snafu. https://twitter.com/Nifflas/status/1230232736734031878
Constructed scripts. https://www.omniglot.com/conscripts/english.htm
Nicaraguan sign language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language
49:36 Topic Records
Microtopics:
Listening to a lot of dolphin podcasts.
Discussing only topics on the Topic Special.
Belching instead of answering the question.
Your project going well lately and being slightly less afraid that it's going to be awful.
A store that isn't in your local mall so you have to drive half an hour to the cool mall.
Being afraid cool teenagers will stare you down and you'll evaporate on the spot.
A store selling pop culture stuff you've actually heard of.
Not having a Hot Topic story but telling one you read on the Internet.
An anime version of Ben Stiller's character from Reality Bites.
The Hot Topic in Ben Stiller's thought bubble that you can only shop at if Ben Stiller thinks of you.
All food vanishing from the world because Ben Stiller has thought of it all and it's trapped in his mind.
All the wiki pages that popped up for the movie Primer.
Having sorted the spreadsheet and being unable to un-sort the spreadsheet.
Thinking toe picks are a gross hygiene thing but actually they're for doing a triple lutz.
Amputee guitarists who are pretty proficient at foot guitaring.
Skates with four wheels in a rectangle being way less cool than skates with four wheels in a row because that's what girls do.
Ice skates being harder to turn in than inline skates, because they cut a groove in the surface.
Turning on the toe pick.
Sucking at tourism because nothing interests you.
Changing the subject to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater.
Which indie game developers were previously pro inline skaters.
Mike Vallely storming off angrily at the concept of doing pressure flips.
A kickflip except you don't make the ollie motion with your front foot, you just kick the tail down and scoop it forward with your rear foot.
Tony Hawk being cool and teaching you vert tricks and Mike Vallely refusing to talk to anyone who isn't a skateboarder.
Skateboarders getting petty and insecure and getting inline skating removed from the X-Games.
Completing the entire gap checklist in Tony Hawk 2 and putting it on your resume.
Dropping the franchise completely after Tony Hawk 2 because the Playstation 1 version of Tony Hawk 3 doesn't have female custom skaters.
The mission in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2 where you follow a homeless person around Venice Beach and harass him until he leaves town.
Ollie the Magic Bum getting good at skateboarding so he can exact revenge.
A full-contact, Tony-Hawk-And-Bully-Had-A-Baby roller derby game.
Punxsutawney Phil looking down and seeing poop and so there'll be six more weeks of poop.
Having to shove pills down a cat's throat twice a day for the rest of her life.
Giving away your spare geckos and explaining to the recipient that they eat sunlight.
A gecko eating another gecko like a corncob because they're not social animals after all.
Three creatures each nesting-dolled in the mouth of another creature.
The vet seemingly not knowing about lizards shedding when they put the cast on the lizard.
The gecko still being alive so you're doing okay at pet ownership.
Hiring a nurse that is also a gecko to take care of your gecko injections.
A mystery that we are still trying to discover.
Even the manufacturer not knowing why the candy bar is called Topic.
Inventing the jaw that can take the smallest possible bite.
Marzipan but with almonds.
Not liking how they pronounce "urinal" in the UK. Not liking it at all.
Things taking a dark turn and someone turning up dead.
Not going out of your way to inform people that your product's name is shockingly racist.
Preferring the language proficiency test that is more similar to Skee-Ball.
Changing the subject to Tony Hawk's Pro Skater again.
Wanting to feel sick about everything and doing all the missions at "sick" difficulty.
Doing a few missions at "sick" difficulty and deciding that's enough sick for you.
The Korean alphabet having been invented by a dude who thought ideograms were a bad idea.
Borrowing ideograms from Chinese and then later going back for more.
Nifflas inventing his own alphabet so doesn't have to hide his notes when he DMs.
The process of training yourself to read your weirdo moon-man alphabet.
Wanting to get into Lojban.
Liking a phrase as much as Tolkien likes "cellar door."
Inventing the language that magic is spoken in.
Inventing a language for your game and demanding your players become fluent in it.
The Nicaraguan school for deaf children doing a terrible job at teaching deaf children, but the children inventing Nicaraguan Sign Language.
Collecting your paycheck for doing nothing.
A corpus of industrial folk songs.
Yelling "peaches meet your fate!" and making the chainsaws kiss.
Mother-32 needing an offering of your hair every morning.
The composition process you enjoy most not leading to the kind of music you enjoy most.
Not wanting to make prototypes in the final medium because working in the final medium is a pain to work in.
GML being the wax and 6502 assembly being the marble in this analogy.
Live streaming video to the Apple II.
Having time for hobbies because you quit Twitter.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 2 min
March 30, 202023. Purpleface's Face Isn't Purple
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Danny enjoys bananas.
https://twitter.com/itsdannymusic
https://www.youtube.com/dannymusic
https://www.twitch.tv/dannymusic
Lauren streams on Twitch and plays in The Returners.
https://twitter.com/laurentheflute
https://www.twitch.tv/laurentheflute
http://the-returners.com/
Topics
1:12 If every Tetris piece has a personality, which piece would you most prefer to be stuck with on a deserted island?
The History of Tetris Randomizers. https://simon.lc/the-history-of-tetris-randomizers
12:45 The sense of smell is most closely tied to memory. Are there any really strong associations you have?
Ulillillia's relationship with music: http://www.ulillillia.us/aboutme/music.shtml
TXT World: A Journey Of The Nose. https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1196511832220917760
"We carry the WORLDS LARGEST Selection of Scratch N' Sniff scents!" http://www.promobrands.com/scratchandsniffscents.htm
22:15 Convincing my son that sleep is a good thing when I don't believe it myself
28:46 Groke asks: "Transitioning from making art for its own sake to making it to keep a roof over your head (or vice-versa)"
Basil's Adventure. http://twinbeard.com/basil/
40:55 Why IS a raven like a writing desk?
https://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/1173/why-is-a-raven-like-a-writing-desk/
46:36 In the last week, what is the best thing that you have seen, done, and/or eaten?
New Study Reveals Just How Sick Families With Kids Get. https://gizmodo.com/new-study-reveals-just-how-sick-families-with-kids-get-1722654292
How butter chicken roti became a Toronto classic. https://www.thestar.com/life/food_wine/2019/08/13/how-butter-chicken-roti-became-a-toronto-classic.html
Microtopics:
Doing video game music.
Breaking a problem into subproblems.
An unusual form of synesthesia where you perceive Tetris pieces as personalities.
Making rude buzzer noises when the guest gets it wrong.
The Tetris I-piece being egotistical and always late when you need it most.
Siblings who are not identical but are mistaken for identical.
The stem cell of Tetris pieces.
The Tetris T-piece being useful for opening coconuts because it's shaped like a bottle opener.
Playing Tetris without realizing that you can rotate the pieces.
The Tetris T-piece standing for Trauma.
Not realizing you push B to run in Super Mario Bros. because it doesn't do anything when you're not moving.
The smell of candles reminding you of the holidays.
Finding the cologne that speaks to your soul and wearing it literally every day.
A cartoon character design except it's how you smell.
Bringing around an MP3 player to play your theme song on loop as you walk around campus.
Testing how long you can listen to the Bubble Bobble theme.
Eating only carrots for a week because you want to really feel the fine distinctions between each individual carrot.
The particular mix of sweat and grass that makes you think of playing soccer.
Not being able to think of the word for when the water in a river is extremely busy.
The idealized smells of Frog Fractions 2 where everything smells like candy because of all the bright colors.
Going to sleep being the worst thing but your son going to sleep being the best thing.
Reading your child books about sleeping to convince them that sleeping is a good thing.
Refusing to teach your child about how certain activities are for boys and some are for girls, but then they learn about it in school anyway.
Having vivid dreams and taking ideas from them to use in fiction.
Hating to go to sleep and hating to wake up so maybe what you actually hate is just the transition one way or the other.
Wanting to go to sleep but going into a depressive spiral instead.
Reminiscing about making art as a hobby.
Doing the same amount of work but not burning out because you change the kind of work you're doing.
Creativity through limitations.
Getting to the point where you can afford to say no to freelance projects.
Having an audience and feeling obligated to serve the audience literally all the time.
Making dinner as an act of creative fulfillment.
Baking intuitively by just putting ingredients in a pan until it feels right.
Giving your guest baker a challenge ingredient to incorporate into their cake.
Picking activities that force you to not be perfect.
Forcing everybody to read a sentence from your novel before they get a cookie.
Whether "smartass" is really a swear.
Finding 11 socks in your desk at the end of the school year.
Both a raven and a writing desk having legs, but different numbers of legs.
Whether desks lay eggs to reproduce.
Finding the image that is exactly halfway between a raven and a writing desk.
Never having been sick as often as when you worked in a bounce house birthday party place.
Schoolteachers no longer getting sick because they've gotten literally every disease.
Putting the curry inside of the flatbread like they do in Toronto.
The relief of seeing a stray cat you haven't seen in a while.
A cat named Purrcy.
Arranging music for a friend and your band mates being excited to record it.
Artists appreciating art you made for them more than non-artists would.
Giving grandma your new noisecore album for Christmas.
Grandma sticking your new noisecore album to the fridge with a magnet.
Someone asking to read your fiction and then actually reading it.
A gift secretly being a demand for the recipient's time.
A gift made not just for somebody but made with their needs in mind.
Laura, Lauren, Laurie, and Laurel all being the same name if you think about it.
Profundity on demand.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 3 min
March 23, 202022. Abstinent Train Polycule
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Ryan (@ryanikecomposer) made a great grilled cheese sandwich in an air fryer two weeks ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_fryer
Alexander is a math professor at DigiPen and trades his chicken flock's eggs to a neighbor for home-roasted coffee beans.
https://www.quora.com/profile/Alexander-Young-2
Topics:
8:41 Creativity from a seed vs from a box
18:41 Every fucking comedy trailer in the 90s used Hall of the Mountain king and it sucked and I hated it and why don't we do that any more
https://www.20k.org/episodes/thebooj
29:04 Some guy you just met asks to install an HDMI port on your foot. You decide to go for it. When you plug in a TV, what's playing on your foot?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hawk%27s_Skate_Jam
https://twitter.com/tonyhawk/status/5184156673
40:12 David asks: "Yak shaving in your profession or hobby"
https://i.imgur.com/t0XHtgJ.gif
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeboxing
49:01 I think about the "abstinence train" from a high school health class video once a week. How can I turn this from distraction into motivation?
1:02:00 Multi-lingual animals
Microtopics:
Making a transcendent grilled cheese in the air fryer.
Dipping food in terrifyingly hot golden juice that might burn your face off.
Walking into your friend's house and seeing an edifice.
Esoteric kitchen appliances that we find invaluable.
A Kevin Bacon co-working situation.
An espresso machine where you have to screw the lid down properly or it explodes.
The adrenaline rush of surviving the cooking process making the food taste way better.
Trading your chicken's fresh eggs for your neighbor's home-roasted coffee beans.
Trading jam games for fresh jam.
Getting super excited by discovering that something is impossible.
Proving the theorem that something can never be equal to something else.
Using a constraint to make something new.
AI-driven space helmets that generate plausible sounds for the space vista you're looking at.
A naval battle In Space!!;
Taking the script of an existing movie and adding a bunch of jokes to it.
Everybody knowing that Shakespeare was a hack but being afraid to say it.
Marching on the National Mall shrieking about public domain music usage in movie trailers.
Getting nostalgic about trends you always hated.
Aphantasia but for envisioning loudspeakers.
Being the kind of kid that keeps a database of classical music used in film trailers.
Owen Wilson's goblin-like face, sitting in his hall.
Looney Tunes characters creeping around while pizzicato strings punctuate their footsteps.
All classical music being recontextualized as Looney Tunes music.
John Williams changing one note of your opus and now it's the soundtrack to Star Wars.
Learning to play a mid-90s cartoon theme on harpsichord and realizing it's basically Hall of the Mountain King with every third note removed.
The booj.
Listening to a fake movie trailer and growing excited for a movie that doesn't exist.
A young child singing a Judas Priest song as if it's a nursery rhyme.
Putting the booj in trailers for Casablanca and giving 1940s audiences a heart attack.
Playing the booj outside ancient Rome and Romans inventing the film camera because they want to see the movie so badly.
Somehow removing even more agency from a "would you rather" question.
The HDMI port in your foot playing pretzel advertisements.
Asking your friend if they see the creepy guy staring at the camera in the background of this People's Court episode, but your friend can't get past that the TV episode is playing via an HDMI port on your foot.
Being assured that whatever comes out of your foot won't kill you.
The HDMI port in your foot not hurting unless you try to run.
The HDMI port on your foot playing memories of you running with the Columbia City Running Club.
Forgetting to run your brain screen saver and getting brain burn-in and the last thing someone said to you faintly ringing in your head forever.
An AR Tony Hawk skating game where you skate on power lines by holding your phone camera up to them.
Tony Hawk being a Pokemon.
The cat bus from My Neighbor Totoro.
Toddlers discovering the front yard.
A toddler whaling on a cat but she refuses to run away and just gets annoyed.
Getting all your cat poking and yanking out of the way as a toddler.
Yak shaving being a metaphor, hopefully.
Getting anxiety from hearing yak shaving explained.
Growing up with an antagonistic relationship with sleeping and by extension your own body.
Thinking of sleep as step 0 for anything you want to get done tomorrow.
Wanting a free uninterrupted hour and getting it by sleeping an hour less tonight.
The hemispheres of your brain having two different chronotypes.
Trying way too hard to relate to the teens.
Teens in the 90s being way into locomotives.
Three humans dressed up as train cars heading for Abstinence Street and the caboose trying to unhook himself because he wants to feel something right now.
The two front cars of the train polycule trying to convince the caboose that Abstinence Street is really cool actually.
The Abstinence Train PSA being the direct inspiration for The Human Centipede.
Ryan being the caboose in this metaphor.
The awards organization that gives you a trophy for eating your very last peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
An abstinent train polycule in the railyard of ideas, validating each other's impulses.
An abstinent train polycule changing the law to allow polygamy.
Becoming a Zen Master but when your followers think you're meditating, you're actually repeating the Abstinence Train PSA in your head.
Finally finding the Abstinence Train on YouTube and vaporizing into the atmosphere, your purpose fulfilled.
A homebrew recreation of the famous Abstinence Train video.
The results you get when you type "Abstinence Train" into YouTube.
Wanting to get a job at Google to fix YouTube's search engine so you can search for "Abstinence Train" but having to shave a yak first.
Mean Girls but all the time and they never grow out of it.
Chickens having a particular call they make when a hawk appears that means everyone should hide.
A crow that knows when chickens are warning other chickens about the incipient hawk.
Being very frustrated that the host put the topics in the wrong order.
The host leaving the show early but the guests continuing to talk for another fifteen minutes.
Assuring the listener that you're not bragging when you explain just how many podcasts you've been on.
Being called out by a podcast you were listening to but not otherwise involved in.
Being a doctor of mathematics but weighing in on whether dinosaurs were domesticable because it's Quora after all.
Chickens being way more shareable than your latest math problem.
Remembering the face of the human that threatened your nest.
Making decoy nests to fool the government agency trying to get rid of you.
A crow really just being a black pigeon.
The sound of a juvenile crow hassling their mom for food.
Throwing an olive at a murder of crows to meet the one crow who is willing to approach it like it's a live grenade.
Seattle residents exchanging crow attack stories.
Jim not being here to ask you if you want to plug anything.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 16 min
March 16, 202021. Strip Laser Tag
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Josh makes Thunk. https://www.youtube.com/user/THUNKShow
Elena is on the Topic Lords discord.
Topics:
2:29 Procrastination, or, avoidance as a protective coping mechanism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass
13:08 Newcomb's Problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newcomb%27s_paradox
19:46 Celebrating Christmas by saying you have a machine gun
https://twitter.com/mogwai_poet/status/1210729053465931781
26:16 Kevin asks: "The fear that other podcasts will steal your idea to discuss topics."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twilight_sleep
http://bash.org/
32:09 McMaster-Carr
https://www.mcmaster.com/
http://thistothat.com/
"Satisfying Spiral Liquid Bubbler Timer" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFLNpSqzn7o
41:34 Conlanging with toddlers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructed_language
50:26 Preserving old software
THUG Pro. http://www.thugpro.com/
"Ozimals did give rabbit owners a brief chance to save their rabbits. Before shutting down, they gave away items which make rabbits not need food – and leaves them sterile. Some rabbits will live on forever, the last of their kind." https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2017/05/19/second-life-ozimals-pet-rabbits-dying/
The Lifecycle of Software Objects. https://cpb-us-w2.wpmucdn.com/voices.uchicago.edu/dist/8/644/files/2017/08/Chiang-Lifecycle-of-Software-Objects-q3tsuw.pdf
Rolled Out, the Super Monkey Ball clone. https://blog.rolledoutgame.com/
Microtopics:
Being old and knowing nothing.
Finding out that you can buy citric acid and put it in your drinking water.
Finding out that you can buy concrete and put it in your toilet.
The refreshing concrete toilet.
Regretting agreeing to do a thing you really enjoy.
Defeating procrastinating by discovering what you're afraid of and reframing it or interceding.
Worrying that you're incapable of surviving in a capitalist system.
Tracing every fear back to a fear of dying alone, like how every page on Wikipedia leads to Philosophy.
Wanting to do a thing but having no effective mechanism to prefer any given thing over any other and doing nothing.
Hearing syllables and then "ass" and pretending you understand.
Learning a word that you didn't know and then explaining it to other people.
Breaking your task into small steps and doing the first step.
Listening to your emotion and being like "what's your deal"
Self-acceptance helping when beating yourself up doesn't.
Instead of writing, taking copious notes and then skipping right to editing the notes into a completed text.
Laying out an outline and then finishing the essay by removing the bullet points.
Having an idea in each hand and holding two more in your left foot and trying to squinch them together into a linear series of thoughts.
Everything being related to everything else.
Giving people the tools they need to engage with topics.
A future-knowing genie who knows you're going to have pizza tonight.
Someone having done this topic already on a different podcast.
Being the genie you want to see in the world.
Causality seeming to flow in reverse.
Reassuring the genie that you're not the kind of person who takes two boxes.
The genie turning out to just be a guy with a rubber duck.
An odd Christmas greeting that you are here for.
Living next to people who think it's festive to announce how armed they are.
Knocking on your neighbor's door and asking for a cup of machine gun.
A corpse wearing a santa hat.
Trying to think of any movie that doesn't depict a corpse that could've worn a santa hat.
Some of your best friends having machine guns.
Being charmed by the utilitarian and efficient design of firearms.
Crying in a VR game and the tears filling up the mask until you drown.
Strip laser tag.
A topic peasant just waltzing in and talking about topics.
Editing out the guy hiding with a gun in post.
Having an unconscionable amount of bash.org memorized.
Waking up from your drugged haze to a flaming burnt cake in the oven and your house is burning down.
Being sad because the folks at Chipotle forgot your burrito but then your wife reminds you that you've eaten it already and you just forgot.
Everything that you could possibly need to build a thing.
Spinning around in an enormous magical hardware store with arms outstretched and an inventory robot fluttering around your skirt and landing on your finger.
Metal boxy objects of mysterious provenance.
The reaction speed of your transition lenses.
Welding masks transitioning to near-opaque in less than a millisecond because at any moment you might use a plasma beam that is brighter than the surface of the sun.
Installing permanent earplugs powered by your greasy earwax.
Not needing McMaster-Carr after Josh just tells you the answer.
An oil timer forcing a door to open or close slowly.
Having an idea for a cool Youtube video and assuming there's probably a cool Youtube guy who's already done it.
A toddler teaching you how to teach dragon language and the dragons being annoyed you didn't ask them.
Asking one of the indigineous people what the name of the hated rival tribe is named and them saying a slur and then being like "okay you're all that now."
Circumlocuting around the concept of the color green.
Summing up your engineering degree as "f=ma" and "you can't push a rope" and saving your listeners five years.
A fairly ingenious use of math that we've had sitting around forever.
Sliding rules getting us to the moon because we hadn't invented calculators yet.
The content being the same but the context changing.
The NES being the game dev platform that is most likely to survive the next thousand years.
Trolling through aerospace source code looking for funny comments.
Deleting your source code to free up space because nobody is ever going to need to port or revise Final Fantasy 7.
Planning a heist to retrieve the floppy disks stashed above the acoustic ceiling tiles of a dry cleaning service.
Games being reasonably well-preserved but other kinds of software being mostly lost because teenaged nerds don't care about it.
AI pets dying because the company that manufactured them went out of business.
Your GMO dog dying because the manufacturer's SSL certificate expired.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
March 09, 202020. The Bowerbird's Apprentice
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Mark's meme is https://imgur.com/a/YFTXteU plus the caption "When you get on the bus and it's rush hour and the only free space is being taken up by someone's bag."
Shirley's meme is https://imgur.com/a/9oyR7fa
Topics:
1:10 Living abroad/Third Culture Kid experience
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_culture_kid
Understanding prejudice: the Implicit Association Test. https://secure.understandingprejudice.org/iat/
11:19 Camgirl life
27:14 Why don't most animals need to learn to walk?
Bowerbird. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowerbird
35:43 Quill asks: "What bones have you broken and how?"
48:51 Hypnagogic hallucination/anxiety
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia
Microtopics:
Jim's favorite episodes of this show.
Not being plugged in and having no idea what's going on.
The podcast ruining somebody's lack of internet presence.
Not being sure whether you defined Third Culture Kid correctly.
The four types of Third Culture Kids.
Being within five minutes of a Coca Cola at any given moment no matter where you go in the world.
Meeting a child of a Coca Cola executive at every international school.
Bathroom metaphors for your childhood identity.
Thoroughly describing the procedure of a scientific test.
The only guy you know who didn't show any bias on the Implicit Bias Test showing plenty of bias after living in the United States for 15 years.
Showing kids pictures of faces of different races and asking them which one is the liar.
Children turning out racist despite never having been explicitly instructed to be racist.
Taking a Third Culture Kid refresher course to refresh your lack of racial bias.
Confusing being a minority with being oppressed.
Nobody having enough experience with your race to know whether or not to be prejudiced against you.
People who sound like they have no accent because they live near Hollywood, California.
Turning on a camera and expecting the money to pour down around you.
Nobody giving you money because you're a boring naked person.
Sometimes logging on and making $0 and sometimes logging on and making thousands of dollars.
The liberation of leaving your retail job.
The ability to say no when you don't want to do something.
Realizing your ability to consent is way more present at your sex work job than at your retail job.
Not being able to ban the worst customers from the store you work at.
Feeling like you can get to the life you want if you stick through the hard times.
Quitting one job that sucks and ending up at another job that sucks.
Working 16 hours straight at your catering job and only being able to eat when you reach in and scoop a handful of spaghetti and meatballs out of the tray you're about to serve.
Heading back to the kitchen before your tray of hors d'oeuvres is empty in hopes that you can eat the last few yourself.
Taking the deviled egg tax every time you make deviled eggs.
Realizing that being a scientist is way cooler than working retail.
When the one guy you know who's always had it figured out suddenly changes it up.
The cool high school robotics teacher with a top knot.
God-tier hipsters.
All babies being born early because their head gets too big.
The word for when someone is deliberately slow at work.
Being jealous of your son's ability to learn skills extremely quickly.
Being jealous of your son's enormous head circumference.
Kangaroos basically giving birth to a fetus and the fetus climbing up into the mother's pouch when your kid is sixteen months old and still can't climb worth a damn.
Deciding this bower sucks, chirping out and trying to find a better bower bird with a better bower.
Bowerbirds innately knowing that they want to build big, blue bowers, but sucking at it until they apprentice under experienced bowerbirds.
Innately preferring big bowers and you can not lie.
Bowerbirds being super impressed by blue headphones with bluetooth support.
Joking about introducing paint to bowerbirds and finding out they already mix their own pigments to paint the interior of their bowers blue and realizing who is the true blue master here.
Tripping into a plexiglass window and realizing the guy from Hudsucker Proxy saved your life.
Having a rich friend who owns a golf cart and tearing the golf cart around while South African golfers shake their fists at you.
The golf cart not having a third seat so you just stand in the indentations where the golf bags usually go.
Diving off of a golf cart that is about to tip over.
Sustaining grave head injuries but the gate attendant still not letting you take the golf cart out of the parking lot.
Peeling the hair off your friend's face to reveal why the gate attendant should let you out of the parking lot.
After your concussion, not remembering who the president is or what year it is, but still remembering that you're going to get drinks at O'Hagen's tonight.
Getting a security briefing at the U.S. consulate about how to deal with a carjacking and he says to just give the guy a car.
Embedding a second PSA within your PSA.
Breaking a toe by kicking the softest thing you can think of.
Bringing up the Big Mike for maybe the third episode in a row.
Needing to come back on the show to tell the people the banana truth if it turns out that the Big Mike really does taste like the fake banana flavoring.
Giving a name to the dude you keep hallucinating standing in the corner of the room as you sleep.
Rearranging your bedroom to minimize shadows because the creepy dude only materializes in darkness.
Your wife waking you up to tell you someone's standing in the corner of the room and saying "ok good luck with that babe" and going back to sleep.
Not wanting to tell anyone you hallucinate while you sleep because of mental illness stigma.
Sleep paralysis and hypnagogic hallucinations totally explaining why people used to believe in ghosts.
Having the fun doesn't-ruin-your-life kind of hypnagogic hallucinations.
Existential dread only getting worse as your life goes on.
Not being able to finish watching an episode of Gargoyles because a shot from very high up gave you mortal terror.
Not being on the Internet except to look for memes.
Enrolling in every Cognitive Neuroscience program in the country because you're trying to befriend this week's guests to get their memes.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
March 02, 202019. A Pickled Egg Christmas
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Jeff is an event planner at https://www.acesup.com/ and blogged at https://80isenough.wordpress.com/ back when he was unemployed.
Joe is.
Topics:
0:52 Not having time to be a geek.
10:21 Pickled egg ordering paranoia.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickled_egg
20:04 This topic is mostly an excuse to ask Joe how he raised such good kids.
The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate
33:05 Quill asks: "What sort of art did you make when you were younger?"
Double reed instruments. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_reed
45:44 Augmented reality killer app: the etymology explorer
The Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/
49:46 80% is enough.
Microtopics:
Having nothing to plug.
Consuming all the media available because you're in high school and it's the 80s.
Not being sure if the media you're consuming, or about to consume, is worth your time.
Forgetting everything else as a prerequisite for getting anything done.
Humans figuring out what to do with their drive to make art once computers are better at making art.
Collectively choosing to limit the art you consume to create an artificial culture in your collective.
A fake band invented by the internet come alive.
Computers taking over art curation, too.
Making a statement in a specific context that can't be as easily transplanted into another context and that making you a luddite weirdo.
Cultivating a healthy creative space being super weird now, but will make more sense in the future when the creative.
Liking pickled eggs but not being able to find them in any local store.
The hypothetical fraughtness of purchasing pickled eggs online.
Buying a bunch of gross stuff and being disappointed.
Hating the pickled eggs you bulk-purchased and feeding them all to your dogs.
Pickled sausages -- a southern specialty.
Selling your pickled products at a discount because they're past their sell-by date.
Pickled Thai eggplant about the size of marbles.
Not being diligent enough to look up how to include Pickled Banana Blossoms in a prepared dish and just eating them like popcorn and being disappointed.
The entire egg pickling community thinking your egg pickling method is heretical.
Asking everybody in your family for pickled eggs for Christmas and throwing a pickled egg party to get rid of all your danged pickled eggs.
Consuming twenty pounds of pickled eggs on a Topic Lords live show.
Being really impressed by somebody's child-rearing technique.
The "blank slate" theory -- that children are born with no personality -- being total bullshit.
A sample size of three technically counting as a pattern.
Having a dialog with your children rather than just telling them what to do.
Growing up hating authority and how that informs parenting strategy.
Doing the bare minimum and getting great results because everyone else just sucks.
Parents who are basically still children themselves.
Not having any parenting books to read because you are the first person who has ever been a parent.
Doing everything being indistinguishable from doing nothing.
Not having any good way to choose between all the available child-rearing options.
Not knowing why you read a particular parenting book twenty years ago and also not being sure if it shaped your parenting strategy.
Making bad decisions because we're all human and we all make bad decisions.
Being well-equipped to adapt to a changing world.
Not making a lot of art because your penmanship is terrible and it would just be a blob of nothing.
Your parents forcing you to take guitar lessons because it would help you get into a good school and it actually getting you into a good school.
Kids rarely being good at anything.
The amazing child drummer who amazingly turns into a commensurately even more amazing adult drummer.
Noodling around with a keyboard as an adult being informed by a decade of rigorous piano lessons as a child.
Loving Mechwarrior and spending all of grade school drawing spaceships and giant robots.
Growing up a Scream Tracker kid.
Loading up a song you like into a tracker and digging deep into its technical details.
Explaining that this song is only four channels and 200 kilobytes and your mom remaining unimpressed.
An incredible technical feat that is entirely meaningless to anybody not embedded in its context.
Coming from a position of empathy and charity by default.
Two wooden reeds tied together like a duckbill creating a much smoother sound than a wooden reed resting against a hard surface.
Your band teacher not knowing enough about the bassoon to critique your bassoon playing and your next band teacher switching you to piano.
Trying to remember all the words you want to look up the etymology of next time you're at a computer.
Conjectural etymology that seems sensible but isn't actually backed up by evidence.
Reading ahead because you are bored in class, but that just meaning you'll be even more bored later.
Getting to 80th percentile of a skill or subject and then moving on to another skill or subject.
Accidentally hiring someone pretty good at both social work and IT work but it being ridiculous to try to hire someone like that on purpose.
The multivarious sub-skills required to run a UPS store.
Not recommending anybody follow your career path because your resume looks like you have some kind of personality disorder.
Nobody wanting to hire a generalist.
Just shipping at 90% done because most likely that's good enough.
Making the news one day but in a year a kid breaking your record.
Everybody being sad because they're not the best in the world and the best in the world being sad because they're not even better.
Getting really good at a skill and then computers taking your job anyway.
Enjoying learning for the intrinsic value of learning.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 2 min
February 24, 202018. Yelling Sweater
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
James is working on Galapagos. https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos
https://twitter.com/Triplefox
http://ludamix.com/
Jay is on Twitter. https://twitter.com/jaytholen
Topics:
1:38 References dating things and/or making them inaccessible. Examples: older Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes and that Winter Wonderland song where they say a snowman looks like Parson Brown. Who the heck is that??
What color is Parson Brown? https://www.datalounge.com/thread/18081042-what-color-is-parson-brown-
"What are your favorite culturally untranslatable phrases?" https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/efee7/what_are_your_favorite_culturally_untranslateable/
9:33 How four-year-olds perceive Lego(tm)
The Game Engine Black Book: Doom. http://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/
Romero's Sigil Doom episode, featuring Buckethead. https://www.romerogames.ie/si6il
19:25 Watching behind-the-music documentaries and realizing all the meatheads I was judging from their appearance in music videos in the 90s are as huge music theory nerds as any of my friends.
T-Pain without autotune: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyzlUUqxXYs
25:06 Groke asks: "Cheap musical instruments are cool, aren't they? Penny whistles, harmonicas, ocarinas... any personal experiences with these?"
The Thomas the Tank Engine theme played on Otamatone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugW_eU5jgIM
The Tastee Bros. play the Olympic Fanfare https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs5ioAc_oY8
The Tastee Bros. 300 tips for playing a trumpet really high: http://www.gibble.org/high.htm
"A dodecaphonic scream trumpet homage to Christmas the Tastee Bros and Mr Santa. X" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Udvy8XYzH4U
32:35 Timberwolf/husky breeds and their incredible jaws.
38:49 Losing the ability to know when things are conventionally aesthetically pleasing.
One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age. https://blog.geocities.institute/
53:04 This CPAP machine is really putting a damper on my dreams of growing a Santa beard one day.
"Your Source for CPAP Mask Sealant Specially for Bearded Men" https://cpapbeardandmustacheseal.com/
"The 'Machine Bow' is a reality!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs5ioAc_oY8
Microtopics:
Your co-host not saying his last name so you're not sure whether he knows how to pronounce it.
Sometimes working in the same room and sometimes getting coffee together.
Living in Germany and not being able to not bring it up.
Trying to enjoy topical comedy from decades ago.
Trying to enjoy topical comedy from centuries ago and having to rely on footnotes.
Jokes that are so dated nobody even perceives them as a joke.
Liking a joke better before you get it.
Translating a text that is full of French puns into English puns.
A police officer yelling "sweater" at a lady driving down the road.
Trying to find an authoritative answer but only finding answers.yahoo.com.
Parsons being so ubiquitous that everyone must know a "Parson Brown."
Your four year old niece asking you what a Lego is and it probably being a part of a wing from a Toy Story kit or something.
A four year old wanting answers and older people having all the answers.
A giraffe staying forever in a park because you surrounded the park with a fence and it's a happy giraffe.
Playing with Legos with your uncle but not really wanting to build anything and just wanting your uncle to tell you a story about something that already exists.
Trying to evoke a feeling by doing the thing that did it thirty years ago.
Being inspired to try exciting new creative tools but as soon as you get in there it just immediately feels like work.
Games that you need to read a textbook to be able to enjoy.
Seeing something happen once and assuming it's going to happen that way every time.
A baby throwing a cup on the ground over and over again to make sure it falls downwards every time.
Most people having a much higher drive to be cool than you do.
A nu-metal punk sitting at a piano and talking about jazz chords.
Being surprised when people who look fashionable are also skilled.
Having being in your early teens when Grunge hit and that affecting your fashion sense for your entire life.
A photo of your nu-metal phase somehow not ending up in Hypnospace Outlaw.
Finding dorky button up shirts some Silicon Valley folks would've worn in the late 90s and making that be just your fashion sense.
Method acting but for video games.
Billy Idol insisting that interviewers need to have read Neuromancer but not having read it himself.
Not having time to read so insisting that interviewers read a book for you and tell you about it while they interview you.
The note getting louder when you squeeze the face.
Thinking an effect is a digital filter but it turns out to just be the mouth opening and closing.
When you put your thumb over the Game Boy speaker and slowly peel it off.
Just sticking the head of a plunger into your trumpet.
Getting a reed instrument for Christmas and not being able to make it make anything that sounds like a note before your mouth gets tired of vibrating.
Learning to hit those high notes because it's cool, not because it's particularly musically useful.
Being obsessed with claves because of Brian Eno's "St. Elmo's Fire," but not being sure how to pronounce "claves."
Finding a melodica in your wife's parents' basement.
Most dogs just looking at your hand but this one bringing its entire jaw over your arm sideways.
Noisebridge being an anarchist collective where anything can happen.
Laughing when your kid does stuff you really ought to be discouraging.
Accidentally teaching a small child to call people fat.
Your kid calling a Wal*Mart customer "fat" and trying to pretend he meant "hat" because she's wearing a hat and the kid emphatically clarifying that no, he meant she's super fat.
Writing in your first-grade journal that you don't like when your parents take you to "the dark place."
Writing in your first-grade journal that "on 911 a fire happens" with an illustration of a burning building but you just meant the TV show "911" about emergency responders.
The borrowed tribal iconography mixed with tech themes that Internet companies to show a new era of togetherness and communication.
Finding beauty in a Geocities web page with random animated images everywhere and a tiled background.
Immersing yourself in an aesthetic until you like it.
Art getting way better when the image links start breaking.
Your sense of aesthetics being your only guide for knowing how to make something.
Slowly learning to trust your sense of aesthetics when people like your work.
Not trusting your own sense of aesthetics and turning to philosophy to come up with interesting aesthetic rules to follow instead.
Trying a new pixel art aesthetic that's even more rectangular than before.
The threshold between mere aesthetic weirdness and people immediately dismissing a work as ugly.
Deliberately choosing your system palette in the way that 8-bit microcomputers and early consoles did not.
Considering yourself done after the first draft of an idea if the idea is difficult and complicated to implement, but iterating if it's simple.
Having an aesthetic plan for growing old.
Doing a cursory Google search before giving up on your dreams.
Not trusting cheapcpapsupplies.com because they probably just want to sell you their CPAP supplies -- but at least it's cheap.
Instagram figuring out that you have sleep apnea.
The potions master brewing up a snoring solution as a punishment.
Dressing up like disguised Santa and if a kid finds out you're santa, pulling open your trench coat to reveal the S emblazoned on your chest.
Having a distinctive laugh for when you're firing your longbow extremely rapidly.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 1 min
February 17, 202017. A Buzzsaw Made of Bananas
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
April is Jim's wife again and still a Beast Lord.
https://twitter.com/aprilsaur
https://www1.flightrising.com/lair/463464
John is a Mystery.
Topics:
2:25 Create a D&D character right now
Drizzt the Drow. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drizzt_Do%27Urden
Moai eyes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moai#Eyes
12:51 Being friends with people who are more than ten years older/younger than you: not weird until suddenly it is?
Teaching English in Japan. https://www.internationalteflacademy.com/teach-english-in-japan
Nova. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nova_(eikaiwa)
24:31 Being in another country and seeing a person from your own country: is a head nod appropriate or not?
30:05 You can get Big Mike bananas from a specialty dealer in Miami
https://miamifruit.org/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rambutan
43:04 Relational memory/mind palaces/file structures from long-retired computers
46:37 What's your preferred method for migrating your stuff from your old computer to your new computer?
56:43 Willow asks: "Methods for assembling great salads"
Microtopics:
Refusing to be a Topic Lord because you're just on Topic Lords to promote your alternative podcast Beast Lords.
Not having anyone to plug this time either but maybe you have a Soundcloud somewhere.
Choosing all of your topics while driving to the zoo.
Containing multitudes and being super excited.
A band of adventurers being led by an operatic soprano.
A party of all bards.
Appropriating spam musubi because it's delicious.
Not technically being part of a band of adventurers but you play a tambourine and own the van.
Stealing the spam musubi from your bass player's bag of holding because they're going to go bad eventually.
Keeping both gold coins and spam musubi in the same bag of holding and having to dig around for the money when you buy anything.
Finally having a dog on this podcast.
Putting your dead dog in every D&D party you're in for the rest of your life.
Putting your dead dog in every platformer you make for the rest of your life.
All your D&D adventures going wrong because you're just musicians and can't actually deal with monsters.
Putting monsters onto the bus to the next town over.
Putting a fishtank bubbler on your bag of holding so all the monsters in there can breathe.
Fixing it then ruining it.
Coming to your chosen profession late in your life.
Age gaps getting less weird as time goes on.
Thinking about watching new TV to be able to relate to young people and deciding nobody has that kind of time.
Old people being full of stories from their lives.
Not talking to your friend as much as you used to because she lives in Ohio now.
Spending your retirement taking care of dogs.
Responding to difficult situations with grace and tact.
Stopping going to work because they stopped paying you.
The English teacher bubble in Japan.
Seeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and wondering if you should nod at them.
Seeing the only other white person for a mile in any direction and thinking "frickin Americans!"
Not wanting to talk to strangers except in your favorite coffee shop.
Telling your wife something a week ago and then finding out it's a myth and having to correct her on a podcast.
Bananas being especially susceptible to disease.
Replacing the Cavendish banana with an even shittier banana after it succumbs.
Hiding your bananas because if your son sees them he won't be able to think about anything else.
Giving your son bananas because he already poops enough.
Foot-long avocados.
A giant box of intimidating tropical fruit being the best Christmas gift.
Drinking soursop juice tasting flights at a Mexican restaurant.
Bananas that look like a buzzsaw made of bananas.
Your infant son seeing a rambutan and realizing that maybe some things don't go in your mouth.
Haunted fruit.
Remembering trauma that happened when you were way too young to remember stuff.
Visiting your dad in prison and he's wearing fake shoes.
Riding in the back of a pickup truck and sharing Now & Laters with your older sister.
The US government deciding that televising court trials is a terrible idea after televising the OJ Simpson trial.
Knowing when a thing happened because you remember where it happened.
Trying to construct a mind palace like Hannibal and Sherlock and after a day of hard work deciding you don't need to remember anything that badly.
Yelling "story math!" when you correctly predict a story beat.
Realizing at the end of the episode that he's been inside his mind palace the entire time.
Copying your old hard drive onto the new one always working until one day you get an SSD drive and nothing fits.
Paying Dropbox money to get more storage and Dropbox starting to spam you about features you don't care about.
Only having a laptop to more effectively play your favorite web game.
Most people not really having any use for a desktop PC any more.
Having to remember life milestones differently because your life has settled down.
Liking a salad that doesn't have any lettuce in it.
Never having so badly wanted to go make a salad.
Peeling cucumbers so you don't get Cucumber Gas.
A hot cucumber.
Flashing your King.com CEO badge to get into the food truck even.
The burger joint offering you a salad with cheddar cheese crumbles on it and it turns out to just be a slice of cheddar they broke into a few pieces.
Crisping cheddar cheese in the broiler and throwing away the rest of your meal because you've peaked.
Trying to convince your wife that if you add mayo to a cheese plate it becomes a salad.
Not understanding when the young folks talk about going to sleep.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 12 min