Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

December 09, 20197. I Love a Good Mind Poop
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Lords:
April is a Park Ranger and a Beast Lord and Jim's wife
Ryan Ike Composer is a topic bucket at https://twitter.com/RyanIkeComposer/
Topics:
4:58 Inventing secular rituals for children
19:25 Playing a Tabletop RPG can make you a better person
33:02 Which key is most fun to jam in, on the piano?
The Strong Songs episode about "I Wish," by Stevie Wonder. http://strongsongspodcast.com/i-wish-by-stevie-wonder
"I Wish," by Stevie Wonder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYKYka-PNt0
Perfect Pitch. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Absolute_pitch
A=432 tuning. https://attunedvibrations.com/432hz-healing/
Patent: Vibrating toilet seat. https://patents.google.com/patent/US4920583A/en
40:30 The Muddler asks: "What would happen if we outlawed moss, botanically and culturally?"
Reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone. https://youtu.be/ysa5OBhXz-Q
47:27 Monster Kabinett is a robot-hell you can pay to go to in Berlin, why don't we have these here? https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/monster-kabinett
The cliffs of Dún Aonghasa. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%C3%BAn_Aonghasa
Oneonta falls. https://www.whentobewhere.com/travel-listing/oneonta-gorge-lower-oneonta-falls
58:18 "Dance Monkey," by The Tones and I. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q0hyYWKXF0Q
Microtopics:
Taking the beast lord before someone else does.
Being the bucket.
Being rooted to the ground and going down with the ship.
Brains autocorrecting puns out of existence.
Vouching for a deer prancing across a beach.
Not marrying someone born in the early 2000s.
Getting into that bucket.
Getting to sing in a room that's made for singing in.
A cat wanting to get into the recording studio really bad.
A cask of amontillado situation except the cask is the entire world outside the recording studio.
Choosing to consciously develop rituals for your son.
Throwing all of spirituality out with the bathwater.
Going to Hell even though you tried your best.
Being a steward of the land.
Recoiling from going out in public because social media has drained all your life energy.
Calling a dog a good dog when they're just being a dog.
Having a quiet reflection about the Solstice in the middle of a labyrinth.
Changing your real name because your pseudonym is better.
The murder squad rolling out.
Giving polygons the business and feeling bad for them.
Figuring out how to be a good person even though you're literally a monster.
The laws of physics demanding that you torture a goblin.
Turning into a grouse and being like "peace out, losers."
Creating an even worse relationship dynamic but at least this one isn't racist.
Rolling up a CVS middle manager for your D&D one-shot.
Working to become blind but always knowing you could work harder.
Meeting someone who won't admit that they like fun shapes.
Your local goth park ranger with a tattoo covered in flowers.
A toilet seat that vibrates at the brown note.
Knowing from experience that eventually you run out of poop.
Clicking random grids while you think about moss being illegal.
Outlawing Kate Moss as an unintentional side-effect of your moss legislation.
Being the moss lord.
Being the moss beast.
Muddling your mimosa because you're ahead of the curve.
Not drinking, but knowing so much about it that it'd be dangerous if you did.
Moss turning out to be the linchpin to global biological harmony.
Taking the time you used to spend itching and spending it reproducing.
Everybody being everything.
A Delightful Nightmare.
Having to wait because Mother is not ready yet.
Mother being ready now.
Mother turning out to be a free-roaming robotic spider about the size of a smart car.
Mother malfunctioning and kicking an aluminum folding chair across the room.
Mother vibrating out of the way like a cheap hotel bed.
A robot sticking out of the wall with crazy proboscis lips.
A robot that knows how to use chopsticks.
A flesh robot playing German industrial metal while you try to escape.
Mother remembering you and wanting to drink your blood.
Guessing sweaters until the beast lord tells you to stop.
A tourist attraction with a bunch of signs saying "don't come here"
Not wanting to die but on the other hand wanting a cool inscrutable death.
Having an animated gif of your cool death on your tombstone.
Joanna Newsom doing Aretha Franklin.
Not wanting to admit whether you're a doctor.
Playing a miniature game of snake in the spreadsheet that only you can perceive.
Still not having a catchphrase.
Being the beast bucket.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min
December 02, 20196. [email protected]
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords this week:
Jenni is on Twitter as @horsewizrd and wants you to back Aaron Reed's Subcutanea: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/subcutanean-a-novel-where-each-copy-is-different#/
Chris is a social media ghost.
Topics discussed:
1:46 There are SO MANY VEGETABLES when you peek outside cultural silos. SO MANY that we don't use or know about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddha%27s_hand
8:25 Concrete pipes stacked in vacant lots becoming the warp pipe.
I Am Error, by Nathan Altice: https://mitpress.mit.edu/contributors/nathan-altice
The Surprising History of the Warp Pipe: https://reichanjapan.wordpress.com/2016/02/24/the-surprising-history-of-the-warp-pipe/
The Enigma of Amigara Fault: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyo#%22The_Enigma_of_Amigara_Fault%22
16:45 Recurring segment: Jim's Baby Thigh Thickness Watch?
23:48 ZZT
The Museum of ZZT: https://museumofzzt.com/
Jim's interview at the Museum of ZZT: https://museumofzzt.com/article/201/an-interview-with-jim-crawford-frog-fractions-2-and-zzt
Where Are The Cowboys??? https://museumofzzt.com/file/w/Cowboys.zip
Funny Kumquat: https://funnykumquat.blogspot.com/2011/10/jokes.html
Shrek Retold: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM70TROZQsI
Star Wars Uncut: https://vimeo.com/34948855
"Our future selves are strangers to us." https://slate.com/technology/2017/04/why-people-are-so-bad-at-thinking-about-the-future.html
41:16 Creative work (writing especially) looks like you're doing nothing, from the outside, a lot of the time. True for other creatives?
47:23 Food As Revenge
Revenge Bento: http://www.iromegane.com/entertainment/foods/the-japanese-wives-revenge-bento-after-the-fight-shikaeshi-bento/
53:01 The "Only" comma
https://www.arrantpedantry.com/2019/10/24/the-only-comma-pt-1/
Hups! https://en.bab.la/dictionary/finnish-english/hups
ANUG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acute_necrotizing_ulcerative_gingivitis
Microtopics:
False promises about updating a podcast in-place.
Finding a creepy lemon hand in the Safeway lying there like a monkey's paw.
Finding citrus fruit in the toilet.
Finding talking fruit in the toilet.
Whether the toilet is a dish or a soup.
Accidentally paying $11 for cashew milk.
Asking the cashier to remove a weird squash.
Distracting the cashier with pictures of missing nuts.
The nut abduction clinic.
A grape that you have to peel like a shrimp.
A grape that is constantly pooping itself.
Writing grants for prawn farmers.
Draining the entire pond to grab all the prawns.
Sound re-use in Super Mario Bros.
Tropes that are boring in Japan but still interesting in other cultures.
King of the Hill being a relatable honor story about a salaryman.
Misutā Supākoru.
Imitation concrete pipes that won't roll over and crush you.
Being too socially inept to realize you're being excluded.
Trying to kill half your friends but only in retrospect.
The Goat Simulator stage of baby development.
The Goat Simulator stage of game development.
Being at the pinnacle of your child body.
Realizing halfway through the creative process that you should've been writing a novel.
Dying and giving a soliloquy about so dying representative democracy.
Having pages of justification for why you're covered with nipples.
The story about missing cowboys actually being about North Korea.
Not wanting to share your kumquat jokes.
Explaining a meme from 2010 to your grandchildren.
Sisqo playing a love interest dentist.
Replacing the love interest in the sequel.
Hangover 2 just having another hangover in it.
Making friends with Mexican paramilitary organizations to save the world.
Raising your child on a diet of guns and kung fu before the government takes him away.
The most woke Shrek movie.
Deciding whether you want to hear "All Star" literally all the time.
Moving pieces of paper around and not being sure you're making anything better.
Being yelled at by your sister to wash potatoes faster.
Your yelling sister following you from job to job.
A sandwich being well beyond your cognitive load.
Ordering a viking at Subway.
Eating the devil given physical form every Wednesday for lunch.
Writing summoning words in your sandwich order.
Thinking of the exact same demon as your guest lord.
Writing an entire sentence with no commas at all because commas make you pretentious.
Putting a period in your minimalist font because you have to be able to refer to "Dr. Awesome."
Agreeing that "UPS" is a one-syllable word.
That one Finnish word that Jim still uses regularly.
Singing "Finnish Affectation" to the tune of "Wave of Mutilation"
Legislature that would force corporations to pay ongoing rent for the space their jingles take up in your brain.
Getting scurvy to cure your trench mouth.
Trading your oral health for the opportunity to make weird troll games for a living.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
November 25, 20195. Very Hype About This Apple
Lords:
JP recommends Esperpento. http://esperpentotapasrestaurant.com/
Styger recommends Esperpento and Yamo. https://www.theinfatuation.com/san-francisco/reviews/yamo
Topics:
1:52 A brief history of JP using "Lords" as a comedy word, 2008-present, and why British people will probably never "get" this quasijoke.
9:00 Emergency preparedness!
The SFFD neighborhood emergency response team: https://sf-fire.org/neighborhood-emergency-response-team-nert
16:55 The apple with a launch date. https://story.californiasunday.com/cosmic-crisp-apple-launch
23:15 Larry asks: "Are there horses"
Miniature horses as service animals: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=miniature+therapy+horse&ia=images&iax=images
28:39 Being an amateur naturalist from another part of the country.
Sneakers: navigating San Francisco by sound. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KuIheGaiFLM
"Watch Dogs 2: Touring San Francisco's Famous Landmarks"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F9_l19j4XY
43:15 What makes some hotels scarier than others?
"It should be illegal for horror movies to advertise." https://twitter.com/okexactly/status/1185756975612727297?s=20
"If you make that film as a bleak drama, then we’re making it for like, an audience of three. So what might be a deterrent to an audience in one genre suddenly becomes a virtue in another, and it just felt like a no-brainer to channel that through a horror-movie filter." https://www.vulture.com/2018/06/hereditarys-ari-aster-breaks-down-his-upsetting-film.html
Scratch and sniff feelie in Leather Goddesses of Phobos. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leather_Goddesses_of_Phobos
Microtopics:
Hypothesizing about how much business your internet review gets a small business.
A restaurant in San Francisco somehow not going out of business.
Reassuring meme carriers that they are still good people.
Majestic yet ridiculous muscledudes.
Dreaming a GDC talk.
Taking the "lord" title seriously because you are probably ruled by literal lords.
Our sister podcast across the pond, Topic Senators.
Distinguishing lords from non-lords by their shoulder armor.
Preppers going from being a joke to an aspiration.
Realizing that literally none of your skills would help you in the apocalypse.
Drinking pee through a Life Straw and it still tasting like pee.
California-branded disasters.
Naming your produce via an Internet poll.
Produce having a launch date.
Lining up at Safeway for produce's midnight launch.
Eating berries exclusive to your region.
Believing horses still exist because you've seen them once.
Being almost sure horses aren't a hoax.
Inserting horses into the historical record.
Duckbilled platypi being obviously bullshit.
Every platypus having been secretly manufactured by the Tyrell Corporation.
LA and San Francisco merging because Philip K Dick didn't predict rising construction costs.
Finding out that miniature horses can be service animals.
Service ponies in the soup aisle.
Someone defacing an explanatory sign to make people believe that horses can be service animals.
Miniature ponies being grandfathered in.
Everyone choosing the mockingbird as their state bird.
Being annoyed that trees are the wrong trees.
Being young enough for them to just be trees I guess.
The sky being the wrong sky.
Seeing freeway exit signs for Jupiter.
The Golden Gate Bridge getting wrecked.
A story being grounded in geography.
Stepping out of the movie theater into the neighborhood the movie you saw was set in and feeling like you're still in the movie.
Everyone's effective hometown being San Francisco because that's where every movie is set.
Getting experience points for taking selfies.
The Coit Tower secretly being a giant hologram full of horses.
The arbitrariness of what makes a hotel scary.
The horror of a hotel room possibly having bedbugs.
Not being scared by a movie because you chose to watch it.
The cute robot doing all the murders.
The TV edit of Robocop somehow being even more traumatic.
Sneaking an art house movie into your horror movie.
No longer being affected by supernatural horror but being terrified of movies with car accidents.
The implicit social contract that horror movies shouldn't address the horror of real life.
The ethics of advertising horror movies.
The ad that places a horrible idea in your mind and promises closure/the antidote if you pay for the full movie.
Buying a tub of baked beans at the concession stand and feeling good for five minutes.
Refilling the essential oil cartridge for gunfire.
Not wanting to smell Bioshock, or most video games really.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
November 18, 20194. Don't Freak Out, But I'm Arresting You
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Lords:
Elena is reading Cordyceps by Benedict_SC. https://archiveofourown.org/works/6178036/chapters/14154868
Avery's solo album is on Bandcamp. https://averyburke.bandcamp.com/releases
Topics:
2:58 Male pigeons feed their young with "crop milk" produced in glands in their throat. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crop_milk
Fennec Foxes. https://duckduckgo.com/?q=fennec&iar=images&iax=images&ia=images
"Squid will survive and may even flourish under even the worst-case ocean acidification scenarios." https://news-oceanacidification-icc.org/2019/06/14/squid-could-thrive-under-climate-change/
The Honeyguide will show you the honey. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honeyguide
Do birds sweat? https://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20061208141845AAtuY9L
"Several months before his death, Lee had an operation to remove the sweat glands from his armpits." And this may have lead to his death from heat stroke. https://www.history.com/news/bruce-lee-death-mystery-solved-sweat-glands
18:07 Elena's friends use lexicalized emoji to communicate.
Alice and Kev, homeless Sims. https://aliceandkev.wordpress.com/
Happy Birthday, Wanda June. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Happy_Birthday,_Wanda_June
35:08 The story of the guy who wanted and then didn't want a mattress.
Vintage Pump Organs. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiqnINpIz74
44:46 Singing cowboys and their ethical codes, which demanded their young fans keep clean and invest in savings accounts. http://www.cowboyway.com/GeneAutry.htm
Alice's Restaurant Massacree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPx2t7xoF1k
55:40 Dimensions in candy space: chocolate, fruit, ...?
All figs contain a dissolved wasp. https://gardencollage.com/inspire/wild-earth/true-dead-wasps-inside-figs/
"An emerald cockroach wasp (Ampulex compressa) can control the minds of roaches with a sting of its venom." https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2018/02/parasitic-wasps-parkinsons-future-research-spd/
The neotenized Domesticated Red Fox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domesticated_red_fox
Humans may have domesticated themselves: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/how-humans-maybe-domesticated-themselves
Microtopics:
Infohazards.
Living in a house with instruments on the wall because you're a musician, not because you're a massive hipster.
Scientists who would describe cottage cheese as creamy.
Pigeon milk cappuccinos.
Animals that thrive in the city biome.
Anaerobic squid thriving in the oceans we ruined.
Honey-loving birds ditching their lame badger companions for fire-making humans.
Flame-throwing badgers demanding bird exes take them back.
Birds sweating out of their throats.
East Asian people have different earwax from white people.
Going deaf every few months due to earwax buildup.
Monetizing your overactive sebaceous glands.
Transplanting superior Asian sebaceous glands into your shitty white person's body.
What do mammals have that birds haven't taken from us?
The kiwi bird has ostrich-sized eggs.
Realizing that the kiwi isn't the size of a kiwi.
Thanking people by applying a turkey to them.
Missing the rest of the conversation because you were trying to find the perfect emoji.
Needing more than one train emoji.
Starving because your food options are equidistant.
Building the perfect Sims family so you can wreck their lives.
Walking into a random house and the occupants being fine with it.
Debuting moon landing footage you found in the bathroom.
Opening up a cabinet at NASA and moon rocks spilling out.
Your bosses at NASA not really caring when you destroy old SETI documents.
Cats climbing discarded mattresses to hunt.
Sense of thirst being hereditary.
Kidney stones as a delayed sign of thirst.
Finally getting to the part where the guy wants a mattress.
Being finished loving the mattress.
The Sunken Mattress Fallacy.
Discovering the organ you just destroyed was from the 19th century.
Playing music by touching the bones of a dead creature.
Being the de facto authority because everyone else knows even less.
Putting money into Gene Autrey's savings account.
Building good citizens through singing cowboys.
Issuing an arrest warrant for secret reasons.
Appreciating the 19th-century sheriff's weird forehead while waiting to be arrested.
Sitting there on the Group W bench.
Teacher rewarding you with the cheapest possible candy.
Mistaking your deodorant for tamarind candy.
Being weird in the way that figs are weird.
Fertilizing figs with your dissolved corpse.
Sharing your fig with a friend so only one of you eats a dissolved wasp.
Not believing new information because it's implausible that you didn't already know it.
Wasps parasiting other wasps.
Figs no longer being considered vegan.
Closing your tiger restaurant because tigers are infeasible to farm.
Accidentally inventing puppies when you just wanted your fox farm to be safer.
Collecting a breeding population of raccoons.
Rats escaping their cage so they can cuddle you.
Outliving your pet parrot.
Being an ageless rat guardian.
Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks and nobody knows why.
Orcas rubbing themselves on flat rocks because they're itchy.
An octopus friend to untangle wires for you.
Uplifting the octopus race merely by lengthening their lifespan.
Uplifted octopodes inventing Twitter and becoming miserable.
Thinking your chimp knows ASL because it's mirroring your actions.
Worshiping Cthulhu in a secular humanist kind of way.
Making jokes no-one will get instead of doing proper marketing.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 22 min
November 11, 20193. The Screaming Man Simulator
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Jay worked on Hypnospace Outlaw. http://www.hypnospace.net/
https://twitter.com/jaytholen
James is working on Galapagos. https://triplefox.itch.io/galapagos
https://twitter.com/Triplefox
http://ludamix.com/
Topics:
3:25 James is taking a storytelling class at City College
15:49 Propizio Chittara: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q9xiOqfkKBM
20:12 Library and Production music. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Production_music
Prefab FM. https://twitter.com/PrefabFM
86 hour Spotify playlist of ~90s Production music: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1O7DMdjlJqBeAqGEVVihXD?
David Vorhaus - My Brain's Full! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI617uJKlg0
White Noise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Noise_(band)
29:46 Gottlieb "Street Level" Pinball. https://www.retrorefurbs.com/the-history-of-street-level-pinballs/
Free Gold Watch custom screen printing and pinball and video arcade. http://freegoldwatch.com/newhome/home.html
Pacific Pinball Museum. https://www.pacificpinball.org/
Pinside. https://pinside.com/
44:10 Jim's new life sleeping like Darth Vader
Microtopics:
Accidentally only booking guests with your same first initial.
Values systems driving design decisions.
Taking only the fun classes in college.
Children as an ideal audience for storytelling.
A job fair for monsters.
Black people being friends with metaphors for black people.
Only wanting to go to school after it's unavailable to you.
Never going to museums where you live because that's what tourists do.
Paying to do manual labor to entertain your infant son.
Insisting on talking to babies even though they don't understand you.
Not knowing who Arcade Fire is.
Knowing who Arcade Fire is.
Spraying guitar samples into the DAW just to fill space.
Going up to strangers talking in a bar to tell them their conversation is boring.
Tweeting with as much context resiliency as possible.
Hearing an instrumental in the 90s and wondering about it for the rest of your life.
The saddest accordion solo.
A laughing baby indicating lack of cruelty.
Library/production music that is just as avant garde as your personal work.
Corporate contexts appropriating music that was popular 10 years ago.
When the retro discount kicks in for production music.
Absorbing your friend's shoegaze album into your video game.
Reinventing General MIDI for your alternate timeline's soundtrack.
Picking a name for your combination pinball parlor and print shop.
The timeline of pinball speed.
The timeline of pinball interactivity.
Analog video games frustrating the speed running scene.
Video game sound effects in the reality that never invented the speaker.
Switching around the pneumatic tubes on your brother's Call of Duty sound setup.
Sneaking into an amusement park to play the calliope.
Calliope MIDI playback as an online service.
Robotic percussion as an online service.
Sleep studies are take-home tests now.
Stopping breathing 25 times per hour.
Acclimating to your Darth Vader mask.
Never living to regret your bad decisions.
Not being sure how to pronounce your own name.
Support Topic Lords
52 min
November 04, 20192. Conjure a False Gobot
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
John is excited to be a Topic Lord
JP does stuff at http://vectorpoem.com/
Topics:
1:36 Horses will climb stairs but can't get back down again.
http://www.firecritic.com/2009/08/18/fire-pole-or-sliding-chute/
CLOP: http://www.foddy.net/CLOP.html
12:13 Do you get enough sleep? If so, how?
21:36 The ad for a movie sequel that was the entirety of the previous movie in the series.
The Wendy's tabletop RPG: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2019/10/dd-licious-wendys-now-has-a-tabletop-rpg-and-the-villain-is-frozen-beef/
Too Many Cooks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8
Bandersnatch, the semi-interactive Black Mirror thing on Netflix: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror%3A_Bandersnatch
Adaptation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptation_(film)
The weird trailer for Identity that preceded Adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8fjyxM7DgU
35:34 How much work would it take to insert a fictional person into the historical record?
Fall; or, Dodge in Hell - A novel by Neal Stephenson about near-future technological advancements like uploading your consciousness to the cloud and curating your online existence: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall;_or,_Dodge_in_Hell
49:18 John's recurring dream about seeing the wrong image and ending all levels of reality
Microtopics:
Lord enthusiasm.
Thinking of Ghostbusters because you can't imagine a firefighter.
Foraging for oats on the top floor of a fire station.
Installing a pole because your infant son can't descend stairs.
Finding a horse in a tree.
Playing CLOP to learn empathy for the descending horse.
Replacing a spiral staircase with a normal staircase.
The entire city burning down because the firefighters can't get past the horse that's stuck on the landing.
Becoming a morning person because of your government job.
Your child possibly loving the daycare lady more than he loves you.
Taking melatonin because you don't have the discipline for not looking at screens before bed.
The shitty dreams of melatonin boot camp.
Gnawing on the melatonin and leaving it on the nightstand for next time.
Your body getting stuck on a particular sleep schedule long past its relevance.
Hypothesizing how much long-lasting damage you did with your teenage sleep habits.
Focusing better because everyone else is asleep.
Working until 4am because you're being so productive.
Not knowing how ads work because you have an ad-blocker installed.
Finding about how ads work from an 11 year old.
Your alternate reality self who enjoys a good advertisement now and again.
Maintaining the pace of film trailers for over an hour.
Mistaking the trailer before the movie as being part of the movie.
Nobody being fooled by your fake trailer because people don't watch movies in theaters any more.
Avoiding watching Bandersnatch because you're a completionist.
The technical difficulties of adding late choice points to an otherwise linear film.
Being nostalgic for old UIs of web services.
Finding a web page that hasn't changed in 15 years.
Finding a web page that looks 15 years old but also has a mobile style sheet.
Editing an innocuous fact on Wikipedia that nobody will bother to fact-check.
Asking to view a historical document and sneaking in a quill pen and inkwell to modify it.
Citing your doctored document on Wikipedia.
Befriending a history professor and asking them to mention your fake Kansas senator in a published paper.
Falsifying movie running times just because you can get away with it.
Citing an obscure magazine as your source on Wikipedia because nobody will bother to check.
Clinging to the scraps of the past that you've salvaged from eBay and garage sale VHS tapes.
Poor documentation of pop culture leading to compelling mysteries.
Drowning true information with false information.
The downside of having a unique Google string.
Having repercussions on all levels of nested reality.
Dreams as really lazy storytelling.
Remembering facts without remembering their origin.
Getting stuck opening a door to mask dream loading time.
Making up any old bullshit and being convinced it's a Beatles rarity.
Desperately fleeing from the "The End" title card.
Realizing your dream is actually just the plot of The Neverending Story.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 3 min
October 28, 20191. The Shoulderblade Is a Girl
Support Topic Lords on Patreon and get episodes a week early!
Lords:
Jenni does stuff at http://www.jennipolodna.com/
Jay worked on Hypnospace Outlaw. http://www.hypnospace.net/
Topics:
0:38 Jay is frustrated that he learned to play the ukulele rather than any other fretted instrument.
(I actually meant Super Mario Bros. 3 world 1. Here are the chords: 000x 0000 0002 0000 000x 0000 0002, then barre up to 222x, etc.)
Somewhere Over the Rainbow ukulele cover by Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwoʻole. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1bFr2SWP1I
11:16 Jenni attended a Stripper Karaoke performance. https://www.devilspointbar.com/stripparaoke
A dial tone is 350hz and 440hz, very close to F4 and A4.
19:26 Jim discovers how to make spaghetti edible.
The only evidence I could find that Japanese alphabet soup might exist: https://i.imgur.com/tDWu43P.png
22:44 There are no yeasty donuts in Germany, only cake donuts.
London cab drivers need to memorize the entire city: https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2015/10/21/450235327/londons-cabbies-say-the-knowledge-is-better-than-uber-and-a-gps
31:02 Jenni discovers how to make chicken wings edible
Pad thai was standardized by the Thailand government as the official Thai dish for westerners: https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/food-drink/article/3007657/history-pad-thai-how-stir-fried-noodle-dish-was-invented-thai
45:43 Jim talks about fixing a wet phone
TekDry possibly saved my phone: https://www.tekdry.com/
49:02 Jenni figures out how many peppers is too many peppers, but the jury is still out on how many is just enough.
The old process for measuring scoville was to dilute it until testers said "this isn't hot" and then report the dilutedness. Now they use science. https://www.thespruceeats.com/hot-chile-peppers-scoville-scale-1807552
Microtopics:
Not remembering the name of your own show.
Cursing oneself by learning the wrong skill.
Looking like a huge lumberjack playing a tiny instrument.
Enjoying music wrong.
Never asking for advice because you know people will tell you it's a bad idea.
The mythical non-portable ukulele.
Confusing Prog Rock and Prague Rock.
Punting a conversation to later because you can't brain right now.
Off-season Cirque du Soleil performers normalizing strip club culture.
Having just the right stripping outfit for someone's karaoke choice.
Why singing for the Rock Band high score doesn't sound like good singing.
Waking up your partner to join your loud video game.
Calling your partner to ask to make a dial tone together.
Everyone agreeing on the worst pasta shape.
Getting into a spaghetti situation.
Inventing short spaghetti.
Earning your satiation with the gamer's pasta.
Soup screaming at you if it doesn't like you.
Figuring out how to type during a podcast.
Donuts being slightly shiny to fool you.
Germans presenting Americans with fake donuts to collect their tears.
Swimming the English Channel in hopes that they have real donuts there.
Memorizing every street in London because cab drivers aren't allowed to use Mapquest.
Not feeling like any more of a monster than usual.
Eating a taco above another taco to grow its powers.
Taco Bell provocateurs rewriting history.
Going to a sushi restaurant when you don't like fish.
Insisting your wife only speak to you in German.
Not learning the local language because watching Netflix is easier.
Impressing people by setting the bar extremely low.
Being the only adult at the kid's table.
Dropping your phone in a freshwater vs. a saltwater toilet.
Using magical beams to get the water out.
Apologizing for your router.
The clerk knowing you eat Hot Cheetos just by looking at you.
Shaming customers into ordering the mild.
Moving to a country where everyone else is as spice-intolerant as you are.
Confusing being spicy and being spicy.
Tactically voting each other off the podcast.
Support Topic Lords
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