Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

November 03, 2025315. I Can't Believe It's Butter
Lords:
John
Kevin
https://www.youtube.com/@kevin_hainline
Topics:
Asking for help / Dealing with the slightest criticism/suggestions/etc
Roger Rabbit and Marvel vs. Capcom were big deals. How long until multiverse & crossover shit is exciting again?
Update on media that makes me feel things vs. media that doesn't
"Bell's Theorem"", a poem that I wrote, and then, at a poetry reading someone suggested the next poem and it demonstrated how good poets are pretty amazing and I am not a good poet
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CkNH-KlDCAMRNsI6hDZjlyvOpAgM2TsP8x-lIp5TeqQ/edit?usp=sharing
We're in a golden age of new official localizations and rereleases of old games (and why am I not playing them?!)
Microtopics:
Some guy on the internet.
Transparent aluminum ukuleles.
Hurting your fingers because your ukulele action is too high.
Do you still call them cowboy chords when you play them on a ukulele?
An astronomer making a series of Youtube videos about Jurassic Park.
The history of Mr. DNA.
How much kids in the early 90s loved Jamaicans.
Solving a 30 year old Internet mystery.
Suing Michael Crichton to make him put you in the Jurassic Park acknowledgements section.
The Ancient DNA Study Group.
Ian Malcolm just saying a bunch of lines from James Gleick's "Chaos."
Going into slow motion to show all the Victorian era pickpocketing.
Asking an august astronomer to critique your work and squirming as he critiques your work.
Therapy-style processing via Topic Lords.
People who like being asked for help because it gives them an opportunity to help.
The German word for being a person.
Being so overly polite that people feel obligated to reassure you that you don't need to be so polite, which is a big pain.
After someone helps you, asking for clarification on whether they wanted to help or if they felt obligated.
How to save Jim a lot of time and effort.
Two people coming from the same gross Internet soup. (Not 4chan)
The friends you made on the Pokey the Penguin mailing list.
Swearing to kids these days that the internet was good once.
Finding the exact right gif for your animated profile picture.
Pretend socialization: it's still socialization.
Knowing a guy by his Internet handle for decades and suddenly having to call him his birth name.
When crossovers started being a thing.
The Supreme Court ruling that corporations are people, saying the stage for the world depicted in Bio Freaks for the N64.
Daffy and Donald playing rival pianos.
Detective Munch's cameo in Fortnite.
Konami Wai Wai World.
Vib Ribbon n Astro Bot.
Why am I on this show when I could be playing Vib Ribbon?
Burning episodes of Topic Lords to CD-R so you can play them in Vib Ribbon.
Extremely pixelated vector art.
The save the cat moment on Topic Lords.
Mind-blowing crossover media events where the mind-blowing part is how much they paid all the lawyers to negotiate the deal.
Why the indie game scene hadn't produced a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with public domain characters like Robin Hood, Santa Claus, Mickey Mouse and Abraham Lincoln.
Reagan-Gorbachev.
Which president was kidnapped by ninjas.
Choosing to let the ninjas keep Ronald Reagan.
Ape Out: Get Back In There!
Pushing the left stick to lean and pushing the triggers to lift either foot.
Trying to play a video game in which you dislike the protagonist.
A guy whose defining trait is that he tries to get out of every conversation as quickly as possible.
Playing with the mismatch between what the player wants and what the player character wants.
Upsetting the apple cart of how video games work.
A minimap that takes up the top fifth of the screen but is nonfunctional until you unlock it halfway through the game.
Which Jurassic Park video game is most interesting and which is most fun.
Looking down at your cleavage to see your health meter.
Saying the secret word and screaming real loud.
A poem based on a physics thing.
Forgetting your ex girlfriend's face, along with all the state capitals.
Time pointing an arrow at your back, and you walk.
The New Physicality of Long-Distance Love.
Sending a poet up on the spaceship to drain buckets from downtown.
A poem written sometime between 1936 and 1992.
Off-Topic Lords, a place for people who shout answers at podcasts in grocery stores.
A collection of Double Dragon and Kunio-kun games.
Kid Dracula.
Mother 3's copyright nightmare.
Mario Paint on the Switch 2.
Who was the Terry that Chris Houlihan replaced in Nintendo World Cup?
Satellaview games ported to the Switch.
Batman Loves Him a Parallelogram.
Joining the discord for the best PicoSteveMo experience.
KevinHainlineOnYoutube.com
Naming a distant galaxy after yourself and other astronomers mocking you mercilessly.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 20 min
October 27, 2025314. Gotta Catch Half of 'Em!
Lords:
Elena
Joël
Topics:
The Luck Factor:
http://www.richardwiseman.com/resources/The_Luck_Factor.pdf
Dual pilgrim certificate
The return of PicoSteveMo
https://itch.io/jam/picostevemo-3
Every poem, by every human
https://www.tumblr.com/nextworldover/793694487879827456/animatedamerican-atamascolily
Microtopics:
Packing cubes.
The Rolling Method.
Modular backpacks.
Camera people: a different type of people.
Nested zippered envelopes labeled one through five.
Why does your purse say "three" on it??
Tool user opinions.
Getting ready for fiction to incorporate our new conception of what AI is.
Running experiments on people who self-identify as lucky or unlucky.
Gladstone Gander.
Paying your put-upon nephew a dime to accompany you on a trip to Zazu-Zazu.
Stan Connery's terrible taste in roles.
Natalie Portman's Tom Scott number.
Systems that are gamable but not trivially gamable.
Rick Rubin numbers vs. Sabbath Numbers.
The Kumano Kodo Trail's trail adjudicators ringing a bell and giving you a certificate to certify that you've walked their trail.
A terrible time of year to hike the Camino de Santiago.
Taking a wrong turn while hiking the Camino de Santiago and ending up on France.
All the school children running over to high five the pilgrims.
Feral Eucalyptus plantation.
Peeking into all the ancient mills.
Shrine tossing tricks.
Passing bones from chopstick to chopstick.
The three major sources of ritual pollution.
Getting sick of climbing the hill all the time so you write a poem explaining that the gods don't want the shrine to be at the top of the hill any more.
Harassment prevention for non-supervisors.
Printing and framing the certificate you got after taking the class on filling out your timecard.
The uncle so otherwise never contacts you sending you a happy birthday message on LinkedIn every year.
Endorsing your friend on LinkedIn for being a git.
Balloons in the sewer.
Sokoban mechanics that could apply Stephen King's It.
A tricycle kart racer set in the Overlook hotel.
NanoSteveMo.
The scruffy guy the hotel manager doesn't want around.
Singlehandedly supplying the fanbase for this Mo.
Hoarding Pico-8 cartridges on you desktop.
The Spore creature creator exporting your creature as a PNG.
A topic for another Topic Lords.
Concatenating a zip file to the end of a different file.
Here's this artifact. Please try it out.
Saving PNGs to Starlings.
Storing your Pico-8 game in a bird.
Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme.
Pirating software on Usenet.
Catching 50 out of 100 birds to extract the Pico-8 game from them.
Realizing that it's a plums in a refrigerator thing and moving on.
Helping a stranger grieve using your well-honed crossword skills.
Approaching classical literature as a collection of in-jokes and wanting to be in on the joke.
A book with a serrated edge.
How to read a book vs. how to read a poem.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
October 20, 2025313. Don't You Wish You Didn't Know That?
Lords:
Daniel
https://www.danielmullinsgames.com/
Chris
Topics:
Psychic Students In Pursuit Of Guidance (psipog)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EIwP0zerbk
Zhaozhou's "Wash Your Bowl" Koan
Figwit
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Figwit
Sudo-Ku
https://katlehmann.weebly.com/sudo-ku-a-multi-haiku-form.html
Game Design: The form is arbitrary and not worth much thought. What's interesting is how you play in and with the form. See The Witness, Undertale, Sokoban games, Pinball machines
Microtopics:
Introducing yourself twice.
Spider mites and spider mite exterminators.
Exterminating your spider mite infestation with a washcloth.
Diatomaceous earth mines in your hometown.
The paperwork necessary when your diatomaceous earth mine accidentally breaks through into the neighboring nitroglycerin mine.
How to develop psychic powers of various kinds.
Learning to meditate in service of manifesting your psiballs.
Learning how to spin a watch around on the Psipog Archive.
A 90 year old dude who has been meditating all his life but still doesn't have psychic powers: maybe he's just bad at it?
The secret geometry that lets you talk to space beings.
Who wants to talk to space beings?
How to make progress on what mysteries we have left.
Reinventing all of physics from first principles.
How does nobody know about creating energy balls with your mind??
Choosing not to do the thought experiments that have no good possible outcome.
Sitting at a desk made of laminated particleboard.
Pseudo-complex meals.
When civilization collapses, how am I gonna make a Big Mac??
Taking the time to get to know every person you meet and understand every safety you interact with.
Wanting to know a secret that nobody else knows.
How not to pronounce "koan."
What do you do after you finish your gruel?
Becoming enlightened during Ikea furniture assembly.
Ancient Chinese yo momma jokes.
The enlightened experience of inhabiting a mind vs. the bowl needs to be washed again.
Questions that science cannot answer.
Probing your blood.
Measuring your blood chemistry while you wash the dishes to determine whether you're a good person.
How to measure how many people you've helped.
Short-circuiting your friend's money metaphor before it starts.
An incredibly wise computer refusing to tell you the answer because it's too nuanced.
Concrete actionable advice that you can trust every time.
Figwit pre- and post lines.
How things went viral before social media.
The Figwit obsession: it's weird.
Tracking down Figwit's Topps card to look up his RBI.
Why is it the "one" ring when all the Nazguls also have rings??
Lord of the Rings fans and how much they love it when podcasters are confused about Lord of the Rings lore.
Effective fandom activism at its most innocent and pure.
Where were you when you found out Sonic was going to be in Smash?
A button that was effective so they pushed it a lot.
A Small Brown that Peter Jackson put inside the Real Brown.
Topic Lords Movie Secrets Special.
Sudo-Ku.
A fun gimmick that results in a worse poem.
Americans: do they do Haiku wrong??
Syllables vs. sound units.
One pthong and more than one pthong.
Spending too much time reading about the form.
Drawing a line on a grid.
A valid approach to making interesting stuff.
The Pacific Pinball Museum.
Pinball as kinetic electromechanical art.
Electromechanical puppet shows at Musee Mechanique.
If Pixar existed in 1800, what would they do?
What if you're playing DDR but it's a joke?
High concept jam games.
Alien vs. Predator but you're roommates with the Alien.
Advantages and disadvantages of starting from an existing design.
Advantages of having a slightly different goal from everyone else in your field.
Chess with time travel.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min
October 13, 2025312. Rubber Baby Knopfler Romplers
Lords:
Danny
https://nightbrunchband.com/
Walker
https://nightbrunchband.com/
Topics:
You Probably Think This Song is About You
The Perfect r/crappymusic Post: An audio tour of Archetypes
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0291r0zf.jpg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EIwP0zerbk
Sample-based film scores in the 80s
https://www.tumblr.com/mogwaipoet/786937779224461312/terminator-2-1991-and-the-princess-bride-1987
Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep, by Clare Harner actually
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do_Not_Stand_at_My_Grave_and_Weep
Being a Video Game Newb in Your 40s
Microtopics:
Is it a Topic or is it Just Banter?
Cleaning Lords, Lunch Lords and Cat Lords.
Have you heard the good word about the Gaylady?
Night Brunch.
Wearing your own band's t-shirt.
A thing that could happen for a while and then was no longer able to happen.
Hi Cindy!
Motivating yourself to work harder via self loathing.
Feeling the need to act all angsty so that people take you seriously as an artist.
A Touch of Grandiosity.
How many tracks get uploaded to SoundCloud every day?
Continuing to discover music from the 1970s.
It's called "Topic Lords," not "Correct Lords."
Once it becomes impossible to make new music, and we go back and start listening to all the SoundCloud uploads with 0 listens.
All the kids at Rock & Roll Camp getting excited about Lofey.
Pretending a topic is about one thing when it's actually about something else.
Canadian Actor Dave Coulier.
Tuesday at 3:01pm.
Learning a new chord on your Electric Tenor Guitar.
Bringing Pokemon Puzzle League characters into your love song.
Having a whole week to dial in that wub wub patch.
What art is for and what art should be for.
Fun is our only reward.
The objective best pitch wheel range.
The Funky Worm preset.
Synthesizers that can save and load patches but only when plugged into your phone.
Coming up with a Rube Goldberg machine to upload patches from a web server to your CZ-5000.
thisdx7cartridgedoesnotexist.com
In a convex optimization problem, there is no gradient to descend.
Fiddling with the synthesizer sliders until you reach a corner of the parameter space that doesn't make any noise and giving up.
Camp Counselor Grant hastily drawing all the synthesizer waves on the board.
Ask any Geometer, the triangle has three sides. Love triangles are actually just two love segments.
The All Topic Fakeouts episode.
The gulf between how an artist thinks they're presenting themselves and how they're being received.
A Beautiful Rainbow of the Human Experience.
Elderly rappers with excellent flow but terrible drip.
Piling onto propaganda music.
Someone doing their own thing with confidence and authenticity.
Graffiti with immaculate copyediting.
With improved access to art tools, taste is one of the only things left to get wrong.
Only the best crappy music.
Promoting your music in r/crappymusic.
Tori the Clown Rap Gal.
The audacity of extreme autotune.
All Youtube thumbnails converging on the same cognitive attention hacks.
Singing the comments on your last video.
Situations where echo chamber amplification is fun and good for the world.
Obscure Music That Slaps.
Serbian Kolos.
The Ketron Event Chrom.
The Nightmare Klaxon that Represents Dread.
All the Fairlight CMI presets used in the Terminator 2 soundtrack.
Growing up playing samples at every possible speed in Impulse Tracker.
Slowly sucking dog food out of a can to simulate the sound of a mimetic polyalloy passing through steel bars.
It's been a long day and you're ready to go home but you need to slam 1000 more inverted glasses into bowls of yogurt, let's hurry it up guys.
That one sample library squeaking metal door sound that everyone uses.
Calling out comb filtering whenever you hear someone exhale deeply while sitting down at a desk.
The sound guy instructing all the actors when to breathe to minimize comb filtering.
Rubber Baby Knopfler Romplers.
All the things you are after you die.
The purpose of suffering. (So we can write cool poems about it.)
Making art about how trauma used to exist.
Why wireheading will not solve our problems. (Because everything uses bluetooth now.)
Who needs trauma when we have CRISPR?
Shepherding noobs.
Play Any Video Game Day.
Complicated goose controls.
Trying to play Portal as your first 3D game.
Learning video games vs. learning board games.
Trying to get into video game series that don't change.
Looking at the screen and/or ants until it coalesces into an image.
Video games filled with really gross blood squirt sounds.
Jumping on and off of buildings.
Playing Breath of the Wild and just collecting mushrooms and herbs.
Grass simulation in Breath of the Wild vs. in Horizon Zero Dawn.
Putting yourself in the head-space of the protagonist in order to do protagonist stuff.
Spelling brunch the secret way.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 22 min
October 06, 2025311. Godzilla's Daily Routine
Lords:
John
Fif
Topics:
Accidentally exploring a bunch of related subjects and/or media
The excellent progression system of Blues' Clues ABCs (1995)
https://archive.org/details/blues-clues-blues-abc-time-activities-pc-cd-rom
Salty Licorice is the sixth taste
https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-sixth-sense-of-taste-salty-licorice/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice
The Cubivore between-level limerick
https://www.mobygames.com/game/11346/cubivore-survival-of-the-fittest/credits/gamecube/
55,555 names
Microtopics:
Modern problems requiring modern solutions.
Leaving media behind.
Subscribing to PBS Passport via your local PBS affiliate.
Running out of media and just watching Peaceful Skeleton Realm Attacked By Helicopter over and over again.
Whether the Arctic Circle requires any age verification.
What even are Truck Nuts?
Why do trucks have such tiny nuts??
Watching a movie every day because you're unemployed.
I'm Gonna Git You Sucka.
Independent used bookstores in the San Diego Area.
Used bookstores desperately trying to get rid of math textbooks.
The original Topic Lords.
Having a lot of knowledge that you can call on in a useful way.
Being old and having learned a lot of stuff.
Your mom describing your brain as "a bric-a-brac of useless facts."
Science Fiction Hall of Fame.
The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.
Someone who you forget as soon they go out of sight.
An SCP from the perspective of the SCP.
A really cool interactive fiction scene in France.
Rules lawyering your way out of yet another curse.
The 17th century demon cursing you to live forever and also that "whenever you send an email people won't be able to read what you wrote, they'll just say 'not more dick pill spam.'"
Word-based minigames.
The blank was in the sky. Blue had fun with her blank.
Making a game for three year olds warning them about insecure pedants on the Internet.
What year of our Lord was Bully released?
We don't talk about the 2010s.
The Milton Bradley Microvision.
The game is about cubes eating and fucking.
Trying to describe any flavor
Blue the Dog.
Scandinavian Delicacy Ammonium Chloride.
A quest to track down Circus Peanuts.
An edible earplug that tastes like fake bananas.
Red Vines and Black Red Vines.
Being the only grocery store in town that sells licorice and reeling in the only licorice eater in town.
That Rotting Shark Dish.
The white people equivalent of huitlacoche.
The Secret Cowbell.
The hip hop community realizing that you can increase the delay on the kick drum and rattle your entire car for several seconds.
Tigers can't see the sideshow, only cows can see the sideshow.
Piggy Fif.
A classic poem about cubes fucking.
Checking GameFAQs for a list of poems in Cubivore.
Piggy Playername's extremely distinctive manner of speaking.
Atlus Beast and Editing Beast.
The Cubivore trophy in Super Smash Bros.
A genetic progression that you need to do by transmogrifying into a progression of various beasts.
Entering a tunnel shaped like a heart and sitting in a flesh colored void until you attract 20 females into your harem.
Want to mate? Yes/no.
The Cubivore manual with the cutaway diagram of cube physiology.
Bully/Cubivore crossover fic.
Little Samson.
Get good at enjoying video games without being validated by a tiny purple cube, scrub.
The file you keep of all the names you'll answer to.
Pith, fip, pince, fifth, and fint.
People: they have a lot of names.
Being diagnosably bad at code switching.
Writing a random number of fs as a symbol representing your employee.
Choosing to be the banana taped to the wall.
Gaming naming.
Printing up a deck of constraints for when you're asking people to choose a name for you.
Paraeducation.
Jobs at The MADE.
The Worst Nintendo Store.
Teaching game design to young children every Saturday morning.
The forefront of the next generation of digital creators.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
September 29, 2025310. Dance Like the Universe Is an Empty Wasteland
Lords
Alexander
Kev
Topics:
"Floaty movement" in games
The power to give people clutter that they can't throw away
https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/yorkdoom/palweb/week12/palwk12.htm
https://www.anabuzzalino.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/book-of-kells.jpg
Dunning Kruger got debunked!
https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/
With or Without Witnesses, by Hasbro, Inc.
https://scryfall.com/card/jmp/457/alloy-myr
Esper says: "A lot of the lore and worldbuilding of Magic is conveyed through flavor text, but there’s also about a novel’s worth of writing for each set distributed as webfiction and a few dozen novels throughout the game's history. It’s good stuff, usually!"
The instinct to not swing a heavy object at someone, even when you're supposed to
Japanese curry
Microtopics:
The Humble Screw.
What it might take to be good at hammering nails.
Fingerbashing.
An inclined plane that goes around in a circle.
Metric Rules Football.
Whether a state machine is the same kind of thing as a wedge.
Clockwork Maiden.
Speedrunning, cleaning and dating.
Floaty movement.
The JPEG artifact of physics simulation.
How to Unit Test a video game.
Using MIDI knobs to tune your game's physics.
Game Oriented Assembly Lisp.
Hot Reloading Workflow.
Why Naughty Dog stopped using Lisp.
Just going about your life when suddenly you have to use Perl for something.
Peak Node.JS/SAAS years.
Walk/run/sprint transition speed.
Getting an special drink for your guys.
Medieval style calligraphy.
Gifting someone with a burden for the rest of their lives.
Pouring rocks into your dad's pocket because that's where you keep your rocks.
The kitten going to sleep behind your laptop because it's warm back there.
Here's how someone in the 14th century would've written these words.
How to say "fuck around and find out" in medieval Latin.
Writing a meme in 14th century Blackletter Hand.
Sans-serif calligraphy.
The ancient Greeks trying to invent ASCII art but they couldn't close the deal.
Letters placed inside other letters.
Autocorrelation.
Figures 8 and 9.
Coming out of discussion the topic with a better understanding of the topic.
Using a bird feather to write.
Knowledge that we used to have and now have again.
Learning to Topic Lords while doing home improvement stuff.
Scrapping your fragile human body to merge with the machines.
Rainbows in Space.
Suns going around in circles regardless of whether anyone's looking.
A semi-conscious little robot dude.
Calling the Qualia Function.
A real messed-up looking machine cat.
Communicating the story solely via flavor text on mana dorks.
A squadron of little kids waving wooden swords at each other.
How do you turn sword fighting into something you can do in a video game?
East Bay Rat Motorcycle Club Flight Nights.
Situations where they ask if you want a mouth guard.
Asking the ref at the boxing match what the etiquette is for tapping out.
The crowd roaring when they realize you're a southpaw.
Punching a guy you just met three seconds ago.
Did you end up cutting that girl's head off?
Renaissance MMA.
That Awkward Sparring Feeling.
A simulacrum of kicking each other in the face.
Getting a part-time job at your favorite curry shop so you can learn the recipe.
What part of curry is the curry?
The curry you eat so you don't die.
Emperor Riding a Dragon to the Forbidden Palace.
The advantage of a burger as a fast food staple.
How to make curry convenient.
Rendang.
Dry curry.
Joining a discord and asking "what are all these users for??"
Which user is which lord on which episode?
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
September 22, 2025309. Shaking Ass to Music for Airports
Lords:
Megan
https://www.megancarnesmusic.com/
Austin
https://austinmwav.com/
Topics:
Going for a super long walk is amazing
"Elevated" horror is a sham
I was there when Every 5x5 Nonogram section 303 finished
NPC Dialog Test by Nintendo Europe #NintendoEurope
https://x.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1863976914349621280
My breakfast dogma
Not bringing my shitpost music/mashup ideas to life because I'm afraid they'll be more popular than my actual music
Microtopics:
Music for films and video games.
The Paper Labyrinths theme.
Feeding your cats and yourself.
Exercising, drinking water, you know, all of the worst things.
Explaining to the doctor that you're depressed and he asks if you've been eating well and exercising and you say "no, because I've been depressed."
Turning 35 and becoming interested in birds.
Shazam for birds.
Birdpilled and Avianmaxxing.
Taking the L in Chicago and eating Dick's in Seattle.
Cream cheese on a hot dog.
The late Chicago on a Bun.
Regional food that you get outside of the region.
St. Louis style barbecue.
Ordering Jack in the Box at 1am and regretting it immediately because you are in your 30s.
Eating a spicy chicken sandwich in the prime gremlin hours.
Feeling bad because you ate bad.
Forty years later, thinking "Maybe I shouldn't have eaten all that White Castle"
The kind of person who would call himself a genius.
Sometimes it's fun to be goofy and have fun.
Horror movies vs. anxiety movies.
Media imbibers.
The film critic opinions of your Trekkie mom.
The high audience score, low critic score, and vice versa.
Applauding a huge pile of garbage.
Whether anyone ever self-applied the "IDM" genre.
The Oscar Genre.
Very good movies nominated for Oscars.
Braindance.
Cringe (Derogatory)
The only good form of multiplayer.
One of the hominids that watched a different great ape figure out fire.
What happens when they run out of nonograms?
Morons welcome!
Twitch plays Every 5x5 Nonogram.
Twitch plays Dark Souls never getting out of that pool of water in the tutorial area.
Every star going out at the same time.
In the short run, everyone will be fine.
Getting bored of your death anxiety.
Life is meaningless and nothing matters and that rules actually.
Extremely sensible anxieties.
Setting an alarm to periodically tell your friend that you're not annoying and I don't hate you.
Whether everyone should be afraid of heights.
A database of all the kinds of movements a rollercoaster can make so you can search for the types you like.
Do you ever get thirsty? Studies say people with ADHD need to drink water.
Taking a drug test at your job and worrying that the test people will notice that you're dehydrated.
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog in all caps.
Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD.
There really are castles in the eyes of people see them.
Role-playing the skeleton of Ben Shapiro in a D&D campaign.
What's the difference between being an asshole and role playing an asshole?
The 'shopkeepers are not copyeditors" apostrophe.
Eating your breakfast burrito over the counter.
Things that people say are good for your mental health.
Anxiety medication that gives you terrible nightmares.
Your anxiety meds making you feel okay about the zombie apocalypse.
Revenge bedtime procrastination.
The kidnapping advice episode. (FBI don't listen to this one.)
Kids are funny. (Just trust us.)
Playing in a band with your best friend for fifteen years.
Kids: they're sticky everywhere.
Never making any shitposts because someone might like them better than your regular art.
Receiving a series of increasingly aggressive answering machine messages from the piece of public art across the street from your apartment.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 13 min
September 15, 2025308B. Oops, All Microtopics!
This is the pre-show planning and banter for episode 308, recorded and edited basically by accident?? Enjoy??
Microtopics:
The old saw that if the teacher is 15 minutes late, you are excused.
All the hosts forgetting about the podcast so that episode just doesn't get recorded.
The seam in the fish video.
Procedurally vs. manually textured terrain.
How to texture a limestone chunk.
Whether Donkey Kong Bananza is deliberately evoking the sickly sheen of Donkey Kong Country's raytraced art.
Procedurally decorating terrain in Techtonica.
A lens flare shaped like bananas.
Mario Kart opinions.
Doing a stunt for the next 30 seconds.
The Baja 1000 but with Mario Kart.
How Mario Kart tries to make highways interesting.
A souped-up Volkswagen Beetle driving 1000 miles through the desert
Mario Kart except it's Desert Bus.
A Hunter S. Thompson stand-in sent to report on Mario Kart races and ranting about the Mushroom Kingdom.
Keeping your powder dry in case your anecdote gets promoted to Topic.
Topics that have been in the bucket for a long time and probably will remain there for a long time.
Doing a brass fall with your mouth.
Finally learning to play "Imagine" on piano.
Zoom's musician mode.
Going on a date with twins to the same restaurant but neither one knows about the other, so you have to keep going into the bathroom and parting your hair the other way.
The episode of Three's Company where there's a misunderstanding.
Don Knotts making a weird face.
Your prospective roommates explaining that you have to pretend to be gay so the landlord doesn't think you're all having sex with each other.
More behind than ahead.
Keeping cats in the Storage Atrium.
Buying an organ from a salvage yard.
Bartering with the organ maker's apprentice.
The Estey Organ Company.
Playing a bad prog rock solo on the analog synthesizer next to your couch.
An organ with all of its organs showing.
An accordion with zero subtlety.
The difference between an electric piano and a digital piano.
The Yamaha Clavinova with Advanced Wave Modeling.
Don't play these notes unless you want to hear them forever.
Topic Negotiation.
Driving every single topic into the ground.
Support Topic Lords
29 min
September 15, 2025308. A Xylophone for Jandek
Lords:
John
Avery
Jay
Topics:
Being known for one thing and trying to do a different thing
https://jtholen.bandcamp.com/album/new-active-object
Finding instruments on the street
Accidentally arguing with sauna guy
Microtopics:
Many-Time Topic Lord John Mystery.
Talking the plunge into the Topic Lords discord.
An unspoken constant presence like Seymour Glass in the Glass Family novels.
The Once and Future Musician.
Putting a formant filter on your organ so you can play the organ on Zoom.
Why pouring hot water sounds different from pouring cold water.
The sound of boiling hot urine.
The top rated coffee shop in San Francisco on Yelp for seven months in a row.
Remaining your coffee shop after Mark Zuckerberg in hopes that he'll show up in person.
Trying to open up a coffee shop in late 90s San Francisco and only realizing too late that it's 2016.
ADA compliant seating.
Four-person episodes of Topic Lords.
A 6'5" guy trying to barter a half-used spray paint can for a cup of coffee.
The Menacing Barterer.
Aggressive Wimpy gladly paying you tomorrow for a hamburger today or else.
Aggressive Wimpy throwing a shoe at your espresso machine.
Your car accidentally becoming an art car.
Letting people spray paint your car until it's nothing but spray paint.
Calling 911 and explaining that the guy menacing you needs marijuana.
Being detained by Mark Zuckerberg's private security force.
Living near Mark Zuckerberg's house so you can do whatever your fixation with Mark Zuckerberg is.
Aggressive Barter Guy trying to barter a Porsche for a cup of coffee.
The $6 Porsche.
Tholen or Tholen.
A prog album constructed from Klik n Play samples.
When someone who does I've things decides to do something else.
The Mountain Goats novelizations.
Leonard Cohen's terrible poetry.
Thinking a song is deeply meaningful until you read the lyrics.
New Active Object.
Lunch Music.
Doing a thing for a long time and getting good at it.
Who has time to read a novel?
Having Game Boys Advance but still reading books sometimes.
Telling your teacher that you need to go to your job at NASA and they're like "oh you must be doing something important over there"
Working in the waterslide industry.
The Joy of Being the Secrets Guy.
Reading too much into it is the next Frog Fractions game.
Admitting to your wife that you found a digital piano on the curb.
The digital piano in the background of the Frog Fractions 2 pitch video.
Walking by a theremin at a party and it chirps at you like a proximity car alarm.
The Moog Etherwave.
Staring at your broken Omnichord.
A toddler whose first word is "mandolin."
Living Out Yonder.
The Roland Space Echo.
A cassette tape except there isn't any cassette, the tape is just kind of wriggling around in there.
Buying synthesizers from thrift shops that don't know how to tell whether synthesizers are broken.
The Two Organs Behind Me.
Ukelins.
Zither-esques.
Dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers.
Looping your song and picking the notes that kind of sound like they belong.
A Xylophone For Jandek.
Feeling like you're taking to extremely accomplished people and you're just a weird little guy.
Who Is Sauna Guy??
Stuck debating sauna guy while the venerated author with similar interests to yours is holding court in the next room.
Physics Philosophy guy talking about physics and philosophy.
An hour into the conversation, telling Sauna Guy that you don't even like being warm and he just stares at you.
The new way to joke about forum URLs.
Back when the Internet was full of exciting possibilities.
What topics turn you into Sauna Guy.
David Byrne sitting alone at the David Byrne art exhibit in Palo Alto.
We're All Sauna Guy Now.
Voting each other off the podcast.
Lightning round sudden death topics.
When the sunscreen finally makes it onto your cornea.
Not having a home page again but meaning to someday.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 9 min
September 08, 2025307. The Bad Boy of Crossword Construction
Lords:
Ben
Avery
Topics:
The Mishima Incident, in which one of the most famous authors in Japan created his own private militia of young men, attempted to overthrow the government and, upon failing, committed ritual suicide.
City-wide game of hide and seek
How to stick it to bad Bluetooth actors
The Carrotman's Lament, by E.L. Hubert
https://x.com/sweetstench/status/1724958011754504568
Esper says: "Avery’s anecdote about the carrot poem being something he’d do in high school reminded me of something I did in high school, where I took the song 'The Cha Cha Slide' and removed every instance of 'slide to the right' and added a bunch of 'slide to the left' so that people eventually collapsed into the wall. I got to do it at a little party with friends, and it paid off nicely."
Microtopics:
Where to play some crosswords.
Cruciverbalism.
Putting the black squares where the letters don't go.
Putting structural jokes in your crossword puzzles.
The cleverer the gimmick, the less fun the crossword puzzle.
Talking into your phone's transcription software during a five hour drive and having five hours of gibberish at the end of it.
Fifth caller wins a t-shirt!
Impossible Owls.
Squishy details.
Taking on an apprenticeship with a nobel prize winner.
The Japanese Self-Defense Force.
Dressing in bee keeper outfits and hitting each other with sticks.
Buying swords for your right wing ultra nationalist militia with the proceeds of your prize-winning literature.
Exhorting the troops to reinstate the emperor of Japan but nobody can hear you because there's a helicopter flying overhead.
A poster of a kitten next to a poster of a samurai, with diametrically opposed mantras about how you ought to handle failure.
Topics that leave you speechless.
Founder Brain.
Debunking a thing from philosophy.
The Philosophy of Reversing a Linked List.
The alternate universe where Banksy is a totalitarian dictator.
Vladimir Putin tagging up the streets of Bristol in the 90s.
Top hat, eyeball and coattails.
The Residents of Theseus.
Rednex.
David Bowie starring as Tesla in The Prestige and self-driving off the set.
The percentage of Teslas on the street
Nice Stylized T as a Screw Shirt.
Brainstorming places to hide in Copenhagen.
The problem of how to define the bounds of the hide and seek legal play field.
Playing hide and seek and knocking on a stranger's door and asking if you can hide in their house.
Knocking on the door of the company that moved into the building your company was in six years ago, asking to use the conference room because you're six years late for a meeting.
Journey to the End of the Night.
Playing music and speaking in riddles.
At what point it becomes morally correct to join the zombies.
Why is it okay to name a thing after another thing? Why is it okay to name a band after someone else's song?
Whether Skibidi Toilet has been cool, is currently cool, will become cool temporarily, or will become cool and stay forever.
A meme based on a Youtube thing.
Dadaist comedy Internet videos made in Garry's Mod.
Changing the head so it's not owned by Valve.
Generations starting the alphabet over, like hurricane names.
Turn of the millennium coffee shop war stories.
Drinking coffee at 2 AM on January 1st, 2000, looking out the window and waiting for the satellites to come crashing down.
Tech folks successfully convincing people that the Y2K bug is a problem, but not what the problem actually was.
What the Y2K bug was and how we solved it.
The Corolla Must Have Control.
The phone is too eager and the car is too greedy.
The phone and the bluetooth speaker agreeing to connect, and isn't there somebody you forgot to ask??
We invented this new thing but we don't know what it's for. Let's try to solve every problem with it and see if anything sticks.
Everybody migrating to TempleOS to get away from LLMs.
A lightweight operating system designed to be the Third Temple from the Hebrew bible.
Writing to your colleague to retract the continuum hypothesizing.
God's Chosen Programmer.
Off-Topic Lords.
A poem on the back of a bag of carrots.
A poem having been added to a bag of carrots by a scoundrel.
How many carrots you need to eat before you can be called a carrot man.
Explaining hidden tracks by first explaining that music used to come in this form called "albums."
If you have topics to talk about, we have a show for that, you don't put it on a hidden track on a CD in the 1990s.
Living to regret your self-own.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min