Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

September 01, 2025306. You Wouldn't Believe the Brutes They Make
Lords:
Xalavier
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3139570/Coop_Kaiju_Horror_Cooking/
Cort
Topics:
What's the coolest instrument to give a child?
What happened to sound lasers?
Appearing Canes
https://www.amazon.com/Healifty-Retractable-Collapsible-Professional-Accessories/dp/B093G7J6JG
The Story of Mel
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
https://melsloop.com/docs/the-story-of-mel/pages/mel-kaye-cv
Microtopics:
Whether your middle name is really Danger.
Half an extra plug.
The inexplicable aliveness of Strange Scaffold.
Co-op Casual Horror Cooking.
Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival.
Making a game so that you can voice act the main character.
How many careers you're allowed to have before the world begins to rip them away from you.
Hiring the designer of Frog Fractions when Frog Fractions is already designed.
A boxing game featuring the inside of your mouth.
Knockout Kings 2003 or Fight Night Round 3.
Your dad explaining all the ways grownups are better than children while soundly trouncing you at Fight Night Round 3.
Tattooing a message on your infant son's head so that he reads it when he begins to bald.
Playing music with humans.
What's special about playing an analog monosynth.
Getting an analog synthesizer and finally sounding like the 70s.
Your larynx thinking "I'm singing meat!" while you push air through it, making it vibrate.
All the ways your larynx is confused about the nature of music.
Sitting in a circle and playing music together.
The Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Festival.
Playing folk songs within ten minutes of owning a mandolin.
How Irish sessions compare to Bluegrass sessions.
Being too far back in the crowd to have sex with Neil Young.
A big long guitar with only four strings.
Bass Sherpa Hunter Bond.
Practicing bass with your bass unplugged because plugging in your bass feels like an imposition.
Short-scale basses.
Finding the bass that makes it feel like you're holding Mjolnir.
The Minibrute, Microbrute, Matrixbrute and Polybrute.
The problematic acoustic P-bass.
Travel amps and amp alternatives.
The non-problematic acoustic P-bass.
Oh yeah, that's the acoustic bass player!
The only instrument in a rock band that can go up to. x6 multiplier.
Coming back to Rock Band after learning the actual instrument.
The Rock Band Pro Controller.
What about Second Topic?
Asking a parent if it's okay to give their child an accordion and backpedaling when they start white-knuckling their chair.
Kung fu instructionals.
The smallest member of the mandola family.
Instruments that require elongation.
Chapman sticks.
The kind of musical instrument you can stab someone with.
Vibrating your bones.
That time science stopped itself from inventing something awful.
Non lethal directed acoustic energy weapons.
Sound cannons as an anti-piracy measure.
SASERs.
Using headphones as a microphone and vice versa.
Plugging a bass into a guitar amp.
Traveling to another country and trying out the basses that they have there.
Whacking the high tension wires to make laser noises.
What they have on BART now instead of high tension wire noises.
Raising Cain's.
Trying to reload your appearing cane.
The type of thing the TSA would miss but should watch out for.
Terrorists taking over the plane by doing such an impressive magic show that the passengers are like "that was amazing, we'd better do what he wants"
It poked me straight in the middle of my eye.
A sound laser for mischief and giggles.
Fighting those who would be your comrades in shenanigans.
Easy to operation!
If you love something, let it go. If you hold onto it, it will stab you in the hand.
A frog boiling effect but for extremely long poems.
Computers made out of drums and vacuum tubes.
Royal McBee Computer Corp.
Executing another complete revolution to find the next instruction.
If the thesis of Summoning Salt was that "this is what all gamers should be doing all the time."
When you get old enough that most of the people you don't like are now dead.
When you decide to hate somebody, taking comfort in the fact that one day they will die, or maybe you'll die, and either way you won't have to deal with them any more.
Taking comfort that Mel is out there writing in direct hexadecimal for all us sinners.
Jobs you wish you'd had in the past but that you wouldn't take today.
The honor in choosing not to be famous.
Our first pangram rhyme scheme.
Version control plugins that scan commits for variable names that scan to the Ninja Turtles theme.
Winston on the Microbrute.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min
August 25, 2025305. Phlegmletting
Lords:
Abby
https://www.thespaceuk.com/shows/2025/abby-denton-my-favorite-loser
Sid
https://linktr.ee/beamsplashx
Topics:
Reading about type 1 diabetes
Saying vegetables instead of cussin'
https://jp.itch.io/mr-friendly
Winston punched his tooth out
If I Ran the Circus (excerpt)
With the power of portable PS2 emulation, I can find out how many types of games I don't like anymore
Microtopics:
My Favorite Loser.
Mistakes we always keep in the show because it's more fun that way.
How to plagiarize video using Da Vinci Resolve.
A tool that automatically turns any Youtube video into a series of screenshots with captions.
Your mom threatening to sell your copy of Sonic the Hedgehog when it's explicitly labeled "not for resale"
Explaining to your mom that they're not video games, they're computer games, and she explains that video is from the Latin for "to see"
Mom paying proper deference to your clever sass before grounding you.
They're called RPGs, Mother!
Reading just enough about diabetes to be unhelpful.
Reading the diabetes owners manual.
Your $200/month Glucagon habit.
The Quick Start Guide to Diabetes, which explains that ideally you'd do such and such for your diabetic child but you probably don't have health insurance so, uh, good luck!
WiFi 7 upgrading you to gay.
Recreational glucose monitors.
The new glucose tablets coming in metric and confusing everybody.
That time Solid Snake went hypoglycemic while being tortured and bit down on his fake tooth to release the glucose capsule.
We put sugar gel in you, Solid Snake! It's going to make you slightly loopy!
An accountant who likes jogging.
Nobody knows why women have a higher incidence of eating disorders. If only we could ask them
They made a cure to diabetes 30 years ago, but you have to become the President of the United States to get it.
If Diabetes is so good, why haven't they made a Diabetes 2?
The Quick Start Guide to Diabetes explaining that people with diabetes can talk over you in a funny voice and you're not allowed to do anything about it.
Fiddling with a bloodletting device in an antique store and accidentally letting nearly all of your blood.
Phlegmletters.
What part of the body hurts least to prick with a needle. (The balls.) (Of your feet.)
Code switching halfway through explaining how you like to cuss.
How to swear at someone using vegetables.
What a load of parsnips!
Brussels Sprouts patch notes.
Brussels Sprouts: Belgium's Great Shame.
Winnipeg Manitoba sprouts.
Walking up to a stranger on the street and saying "Hey! It's a load of parsnips!" when they don't even know how you feel about parsnips.
Veggie Tales: Christ Died for our Parsnips.
Finding hilarious jokes in the text but your Bible studies group doesn't think they're very funny at all.
Refusing to apologize about a joke because someone somewhere is going to get the joke.
Why they still play old cartoons when they have Dragon Ball Z now.
Trying to find the 90s show about a kid trapped in a sitcom neighborhood that a talking dog told Abby about.
A video game where instead of having to shoot people, you talk to people.
Mr. Friendly.
Running errands for the demons.
Demon acceptance.
Can you believe Satan? What will they come up with next?
Lucifer Twocifer: Bringer of the Deuce.
Embarking on a multi-year project to have the coolest most clever minced oaths because you refuse to have basic minced oaths.
Whether it's racist to call a safecracker a Yegg.
The funniest joke you heard when you were eight.
The hobo with excellent glycemic index who lives in your shed.
Trying cat insulin and promising to report back if you die.
Hyperdontia.
Accidentally swallowing a tooth and growing a tooth tree in your tummy.
Explaining to your kid who just swallowed a tooth that it's going to bite him on the butt on the way out.
Inventing an increasingly elaborate series of fairies that cover everything that can happen to your child's teeth
What kind of degree you need to become a tooth fairy.
Going to the dentist to do a bunch of drugs and get punched in the face.
The tooth fairy talking about switching careers.
Paying for PDFs to print and put under your child's pillow when they lose a tooth.
Trying to pay a mortgage on a tooth fairy's salary nowadays.
What you're going to make Mr. Sneelock do.
A hoodwink who can't wink good.
If only we could talk to the LAPD.
Looking up the IPA pronunciation of Truffula Trees.
Anticipating the day you'll finally get to say "what it is"
Reading The Lorax in a bad David Lynch impression.
Over Forty Years of Trusted Quality at Nature's Bounty.
Seeing yourself on video and realizing you've been on the autism spectrum the whole time.
Knowing your friend only has one joke and telling a whole shaggy dog story to set up the one joke, as a gift.
The zoomers that they have nowadays.
Hello, this is my Asian man voice.
Going around the circle and everybody doing their best Asian man voice, finishing with the guy you want cancelled the most.
Spending $150 trying to connect your PlayStation 2 to a modern television.
Exhorting people to read the jokes in your pinned tweets.
Importing PS3 games – or not importing them, which is cheaper.
All the things you could've done instead of shooting Shinzo Abe.
Playing Tenchu: Wrath of Heaven and trying to change the control scene to be more like Sekiro, even though you hated Sekiro.
Freaking out because you didn't have everything figured out by the time you're 24.
Playing Bumpy Trot with your weeb girlfriend.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 17 min
August 18, 2025304. Turn on the MacLachlan
Lords:
Andrew
https://highcadence.online
Brandon
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1900250/Demonschool/
Topics:
My daughter's high school pep band playlist is full of bangers
https://embed.music.apple.com/us/playlist/lakeridge-pep-band/pl.u-LdbqENjt759ZJ
Why some actors can't carry a b-movie but others can
What do these white rings on the Microbrute mean?
https://mastodon.social/@mogwai_poet/114842907188616207
Andrew wrote to Arturia support like a madman, and they got back to him to say that yes, the rings just mean "this knob is important"
Medley by Louis Phillips
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2025/06/29/medley/
Things you can eat in your garden that you might not expect
Microtopics:
Bringing the fact that you are now a Lord to everyone's attention.
Hitting 1700 nautical miles today.
Demonschool. (Wishlist it.)
Whether it helps to un-wishlist and re-wishlist a game on Steam.
The Hot Dog Plant.
Tiny stinky blobs that attach to each other.
What kind of marsh grasses rich people in the 80s would have in their house.
Calling an aesthetic "southwestern" even though it's to the east of you.
A pep rally band playing a Lil Nas X tune.
The band soundtracking your No Kings rally playing a medley of Blister in the Sun, When the Saints Go Marching In, and I Want You Back.
Transcribing music from Double Dragon 2 and slipping under the door of your high school band director.
Disasterpeace's score for Under the Silver Lake.
How many people it takes to compose a pop song.
What it means to be a producer.
Kyle MacLaughlan desperately trying to hold on to Elizabeth Berkeley.
Christopher Lambert being legally blind and accidentally stabbing everyone while filming Highlander.
A weird guy who goes "hheeehh"
Mean Guns.
Putting a b-movie guy in a b-movie and everyone is like "nice!"
The Recent Vampire Movie With Nicolas Cage.
The kind of movie you can follow without looking at the screen.
Someone who has at least one idea and a vision for how to achieve it.
Jean-Claude Van Damme pushing you aside so he can take over the editing suite.
Making a movie while making another movie.
The dwindling number of people getting weird chances.
What day they bury people in Ghana.
Art that's only good if a friend explains what's good about it first.
The comic relief witch doctor who is funny because he keeps screwing up.
Trying to type on a 25 key keyboard.
The three knobs that you have to be able to see best in a low light environment.
The ultrasaw: not as good as a supersaw.
Paying extra to get the one in red because of the kind of person you are.
Why buy an analog synthesizer in 2025?
The tactile wall of knobs.
The giant modular synthesizer at Mills college.
The tiniest patch cables.
Adamantium Rage's FM doom metal soundtrack.
Did you mean: I love Mickey Mouse?
Emailing Arturia Support.
The Pants That Said Maximum.
A poem with rotational symmetry around the center axis.
A poem where the whole point is the acrostic complaining about something.
Eating the leaves and stems of a squash blossom.
Allowing lettuce to bolt.
AeroLettuce.
Making pesto out of herbs other than basil.
The fragrance and the earth tones you get from a bay leaf.
Top garden plants you might not have thought of eating.
A hobby that is cool and fun to do.
Discovered two giant cucumbers you hadn't even noticed before.
Volunteer squash and wacky gourds.
Sharing the fruits of your garden with your neighbors.
When it's lemon season and everybody's trying to give everyone else lemons.
Some plants are in pots; some are in the ground.
Growing a plant that can give you something back.
mstdn.party
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
August 11, 2025303. A System of People Doing Stuff and Being Weirdos
Lords:
JP
https://jplebreton.com/
Styger
https://www.sf.gov/readysf
Topics:
Is "Non-Super" Mario an alternate state of consciousness or identity, or merely an alternate physical state?
"Hot defensive bee ball" + bees in general
Solving all 24,976,511 5x5 nonograms
https://pixelogic.app/every-5x5-nonogram
Poem Seen in a Motel Fan by Alberto Blanco
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/-_x1pv5l.jpg
Werecreature logistics
"The Ball is Back." Discuss.
Microtopics:
The World of Video Games
Your favorite granola coming back in stock.
Working to make the world a slightly better place every day.
Weird frustrating tethering.
Levels that are about hauling ass.
Being on the same train as someone for a few stops.
The small version of yourself that you become when you lose your mushroom.
Whether Small Mario has access to all of Super Mario's memories.
What was the authorial intent of Alice growing bigger and smaller.
Whether Small or Big Mario is the original default.
Mario accumulating power and becoming an enormous hulking beast.
Designing a level to support multiple player scales.
Game series that have been both 2D and 3D platformers.
Small Mario eating a mushroom and teleporting into a pocket dimension, swapping in Big Mario.
Japanese hornets in an evolutionary arms race with Japanese honey bees.
Bees forming a tight clump around a hive invader to make them uncomfortably warm.
A baseball sized mass of bees smothering a huge horrible wasp.
Touring beehives and giving seminars about the hot defensive bee ball.
A multi-disciplinary bullshit operation.
Enjoying your job.
The degree to which they waggle.
Bees having a dance-off to determine where to live.
Extending the bee dance language to teach them orbital dynamics so they can find pollen sources in space.
Candy that smells like a bee alarm pheromone.
The NPC in Curse of Monkey Island who explains that merengue is made of eggs.
What they call being "slashdotted" nowadays.
Doing 15 puzzles and taking satisfaction in being 15 puzzles closer to not being able to play this game any more.
Web sites: they shouldn't scale.
Putting every 5x5 nonogram in the Library of Congress.
Humanity dedicating all of its resources to solve every 6x6 nonogram.
The 100 people in the world whose brains are tricked by this kind of fake work.
The most interesting three-digit numbers.
What happens when we run out of nonograms??
The kayfabe of the community doing every 5x5 nonogram over and over again
A convex mirror, a fisheye, a golden dome.
Taking comfort in the continued existence of observers.
Having all the resources to grow as a person but none of the incentives.
Your little chunk of humanity's future.
Things can get better but also they can get worse.
The City Lights Pocket Poets Anthology, 60th Anniversary Edition.
The official City Lights typeface.
A dignified serif.
A poem is when you do something interesting with typefaces.
How to distribute your poem that does something interesting with fonts.
Lycanthropy booths and other werewolf accommodations.
It's not a disability but they still accommodate you.
Seasonal Mania.
Humans brains being affected by the sun and moon in ways we don't fully understand.
Hospital intake numbers that correlate with the lunar cycle.
What's the deal with the ball being back?
A flying silver ball that sucks your brains out with a fork.
Doing what you do just because.
The ball: it has to be back.
Watching an 80s horror movie and thinking "surely someone has made a Doom level of this"
Inventing perfectly mirrored silver spheres entirely independently from ray tracers.
Reporting back when you are further along on your Phantasm journey.
Not being on the Internet because you're hanging out with the bees instead.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min
August 04, 2025302. Frog Fractions 2 OST 2: Still Croakin'
Lords:
Kory
Ryan
Topics:
Incorrect stuff they teach you in school (blood, bats, soda cans, etc)
Oops I’ve started over remaking my game again, ECS edition
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8OkkHSQjWg
https://bevy.org/
Accidentally finding a cat on vacation
Being Boring, by Wendy Cope
https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/18ihpmd/poem_being_boring_by_wendy_cope/
Microtopics:
Watching an epicurean professional licking the Switch and Switch 2 cartridges back to back.
Switch 2 cartridges that don't contain a game but still taste disgusting.
A digital key that tastes awful.
1 in 100,000 Switch 2 cartridges tasting absolutely delicious.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow: Relorded.
How many people have licked the Switch game you just bought used.
A construction worker spitting a big loog of chew and there's a Switch cartridge floating in it.
Not everybody is Jim Stormdancer.
And independent game design aficionado.
The New York Mayoral primary.
Hackmud.
Games that get two soundtracks while some games don't even get one.
Disasterpeace's Soupertasters theme song.
How to prove that your blood is not blue until it hits the air.
Why do bats e-chocolate??
What color lobsters are until you cook them.
In space, noone can not see your blue blood.
Eating a 9-volt battery that tastes like chocolate.
Strawberry flavored chocolate that you puff on.
Hey, look who capitalism finally enslaved.
A can of A&W Root Beer that folds in on itself like a neutron star and you don't get to drink any because it's just empty space.
Believing the thing you were told before you turned 18.
Bodyboarding on a plank of wood in an open field.
An empire of the skies and caves.
Whether the tritone was ever illegal.
Education as a Russian doll of nested simplifications.
Wait, this isn't plum pudding!
Blood color facts.
Tuning your piano down to A=420.
Making one mistake and proceeding from the premise that everything you know is wrong.
A t-shirt reading "My favorite guests don't have their fontanelles closed yet."
How to structure your game world.
A grid of lights that are flickering on and off.
The tilty wooden labyrinth with holes in it.
Always on the lookout for the next engine to rewrite your game in.
One of those newfangled scripting languages that targets the NES.
Renting a magic want and running from kiosk to kiosk doing quests.
Finding the Pinecone of Peril.
Capacitative touch interfaces aren't magical for you??
Asymptotically approaching cat saturation.
Framily.
Hot and cold running cat slides.
Weird reverb where things don't echo right because everything's wet.
A Rainforest Cafe the size of several football fields.
Rainforest Cafe Chic.
A liquid balance tied to your QR code.
Jailbreaking the soda fountain DRM, yelling "kill the banks" and spraying everyone with Mr. Pibb.
Striving to be as boring as possible.
Being boring. (In a good way.)
Being asked how you're doing and scrambling to come up with something interesting to say.
Trying to explain the Video Game History Foundation to your boss.
The Video Game Thing Guy.
Maintaining a garden and posting your harvests on your private Instagram.
Stopping someone on the street and asking them what are the last six vegetables you grew.
How to perform boredom after people realize that yawning means you're tired.
Starting to make omelets a new way.
Asking how someone is doing and bracing yourself for the answer.
Getting emotional and intellectual sustenance from cleaning the bathroom.
The me that comes up when you google my name.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 23 min
July 28, 2025301. For Those Who Are Glucose Curious
Lords:
Wacy
Chris
Topics:
Mysterious BART smell between 12th st. Oakland and West Oakland
Glucose monitor
Winston has been playing Minecraft. Have you heard about this game? Kids love it I guess.
The Earth Wants You
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/_jj6TAcC.jpg
Microtopics:
Knowing so many Chrises that you refuse to call yourself Chris.
Not knowing what just happened for the past how, but now there's an hour-long M4A file with your voice in it.
A whole range of thought experiments that might bear interesting fruit.
A scrap of papyrus containing a transcript of the first episode of Topic Lords.
Trash-adjacent smells.
Whether power substations smell like anything.
A smell worth seeking out for its own experience.
A smell for smell connoisseurs.
A tiny BART Easter egg for your nose.
A huge amount of substance that is replenishing the smell particles.
Checking your apps for indescribable smells.
Closing some Tupperware in a stinky room to preserve the smell forever.
A rat kingdom living under the BART tracks.
Where to talk about unsolved mysteries now that Unsolved Mysteries with Robert Stack went off the air.
Reintroducing mystery to the world like replenishing a lake with trout.
What is the goo under the BART 12th Street Tunnel?
Mystery caches.
An extremely achievable local mystery.
Your body surfacing issues you were previously unaware of.
The full spectrum of diabetes.
Disposable glucose monitors.
What type of food are you eating that spikes your blood sugar, and by how much?
Glucose Curious.
Sports enthusiasts needing to checking their pulse as they watch the big game.
Going for a walk right after eating.
Continuing walking until your blood sugar is back within tolerances.
Having a bad habit for a few months vs. having a bad habit for your whole life.
Learning to spot blood glucose meters in the wild.
Measuring your blood glucose for a month to learn how your body reacts to various foods.
Getting funneled into videos of a douchebag with spiked hair breaking shit with a hammer.
Figuring out how to survive the first night in Minecraft with a six year old.
A game that lets you do lots of different things but doesn't suggest any of them so you have to figure out what you can do and why you would want to do it.
Java edition mods vs. Bedrock edition mods.
Mods: they have they mod problem.
Why they added copper to Minecraft.
Purposeful exploration.
Laying down a bunch of the stone that makes The Warden spawn so you can meet your new Warden pal.
Exploring The End and getting your wings.
Dragon Quest Builders.
The Terraria tutorial.
A weird person to be.
Vampire Survivors: not the first Vampire Survivors-like.
Getting to the poem before it's too late.
Looking through your photos of graffiti
A cat mermaid playing a violin as if it's a guitar.
The Earth Wants You To Be Die.
Emitting a series of tones that insert an image in the listener's mind.
If you can't handle me at my fish, you don't deserve me at my cat.
Missing some sleep and some teeth.
Trying to refute an idea without exposing your audience to the original idea.
Videos continuing to appear on your travel vlog long after you've finished traveling.
Support Topic Lords
57 min
July 21, 2025300. Dave's Kid Doesn't Know How To Spit
Lords:
Jenni
Tyriq
Topics:
Internal Monologue Soundboards
Ash wants to be the very best, but at what cost? When is competition a bad thing?
The different ways people play games
Friendship is a skill
Water… Earth… Fire… Air… which bending is best bending?
Microtopics:
Scrubbin' Trouble.
Figuring out how to do a multiplayer roguelike.
Power leveling all your skills at once and hoping it's enough.
Looking at the comments, because there might be something good in there.
The Dawn of Our Topic Lords Century.
Why all ducks sound like that.
Hearing a sound an incorporating it into your internal monologue.
Saying "good morning" whenever you pick up the phone no matter what time of day it is.
Alone in the Dark Hedge Maze Mafioso Barks.
Talkin' Barks.
A vault full of clones of a guy named Gary and the only thing they can say is "Gary"
You're a cluster of cells wafting through the universe and latching onto phrases you hear on the internet.
Kids who think they invented being dumb on the Internet.
The Bill Nye theme song sound board.
Wanting to be the very best, like noone ever was, and defining "best" as "kindest."
Wanting to be the very best, and then being it, and then no longer being it and losing your entire sense of identity.
What if you're on a spaceship? Lots of weird things happen on a spaceship.
Striving to be the most benevolent god, like noone ever was.
The sound of angering the giant goose.
Trying to get your significant other to play Outer Wilds because you can't fly the spaceship.
Solving puzzles with the internet.
Super Metroid + Link to the Past and other multi-game randomizers.
Lies on video game forums.
The Search for the Last Great Secret.
A Clop or a Girp.
Collecting meat for a Roguelike Celebration talk.
Holding a meeting about all the ways your project could potentially fail.
Good mortem!
Going back in time and all humans clump together like a giant Katamari.
Friendship as a skill vs. friendship as a natural outcome of your life circumstances.
Friendship decay, a a problem that neurotypicals have.
Keeping up with real life friends vs. with Internet friends.
Online games as a third place.
Complaining about all the ways in which your are socially incompetent.
Inviting people over for a listening party.
Not knowing what number you're thinking of but knowing that it's either odd or even.
Filling away tidbits of information.
The Y2K problem where when pro people start being over 127 years old, everyone remembers them as being -128.
Things that are impossible to think about because you have no frame of reference.
Making yourself a little coffee treat and scrolling reddit so you can stop thinking about death.
Water is imba!
Whether magma falls under bending Earth or bending Fire.
Highly fluid particulate sand.
Which bending is most delicious, according to avatarfandom.com
The cosmology of Jefferson Starship's "We Built This City"
Whether circuit bending is still fun now that everything is software-controlled.
Circuit bending your electric together.
The Goodbye Noise.
Odd Object dot Zone.
Hamster Disco.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 8 min
July 14, 2025299. Skin Fortress With Armed Idiot
Lords:
Jenni
Robb
Topics:
The phenomenon where multiple people respond with the same mystifying emoji
Skin Fort dream and image both provided by WiL: https://stale-meme.itch.io/
Lately I've engaged in pretend play with my 4 year old nephew by pretending we stole a crate of "Toxic Waste" candy and lying to the cops about it. As actual parents, is this healthy for the child?
It turns out you don't want to rent a Playstation
Hints
https://x.com/jensbest/status/413105300535668736
I would be happy to talk about what having an operation to get an Osia 2 bone anchored hearing aid is like.
Microtopics:
The Stanley Parable New Edition.
Cyberganked.
Wishing for games using the Steam wishlist system and the Steam Monkey's Paw curls.
CRPG blobbers.
25 years of Hugo.
Recognizing a Windows program from 1996.
Back when malware pretended to be a little guy.
The origins of Skinfort.
Hapsburg Jaw.
Angry Cry Laughing.
Meta-channels and meta-meta-channels.
Medicinal Dock Spiders.
This Spider Pays Taxes.
The weakest Great Lake of all.
The good Mexican restaurant in Fond du Lac.
Fish pouches.
Whether you have to refrigerate Big League Chew.
Putting tuna on dry toast.
Four year olds who want to impress people with how sour s candy they can eat.
The amount of toxic waste you are allowed to feed a child.
Having a milkshake and being in bed by 8:30.
Doing improv with your four year old nephew about invoking the fifth amendment.
The Cocomelon video about never talking to the police.
I'm not sad; I'm just on a triangle.
French mice asking to buy your armpit cheese.
A kid who just plain needs to be lied to.
Renting a child so you can make cheese in their armpits.
Did Jim finally rent the Playstation?
Going to the place to rent a Playstation and they immediately ask for your Social Security Number.
It's hot inside the Playstation, and the bugs are cold.
Just doing the poem about Data's cat Spot every episode.
The warlock dominatrix Harley Quinn voice that you make everybody listen to.
Oh I'm sorry, I thought the ceiling was your ass.
Telling your friends about the guy who said he thought the ceiling was your ass and asking them what it means and they just respond with the grapes emoji.
Games that have both Booty and The Wizard.
The scrawny wizard from Zwackery.
Whether chewing your food is a spell.
Listening to Topic Lords for all the mouth sounds.
Constantly rehydrating this child so that he can make the whole house wet.
Starving zombie apocalypse survivors taking the child seats out of a car so they can turn them upside down and shake all the gummy bears out.
A poem with a pangram rhyme scheme.
Bone-anchored hearing aids.
Bringing a topic list to a first date.
Waiting until your last day of insurance and bursting into the OR like the Kool-Aid Man.
Your surgeon quitting the industry immediately after seeing the inside of your head.
Performatively pressing your hearing aid's nonfunctional volume button.
Your wife violating HIPAA to tell you a hilarious work story.
Accidentally installing Bonzi Buddy on your hearing aid.
Marrying an audiologist to get the best possible hearing aid.
Going to zoom.ca to rev up your savings.
Performance Acura North Mississauga.
Adapting Eliza into a game where you're trying to trick Smaug into giving up his hoard.
Making a joke about a banana slug actually bring a plantain slug.
It is the 90s and there is time for Rifftrax.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min
July 07, 2025298. Rawdogging Life
Lords:
Mark
https://wyrmburden.bandcamp.com/album/strange-sorcerous
Shirley
https://shop.naturmacht.com/sorcerot-merch/sorceroet-rotten-magick-vinyl-crowdfunding-lim
Topics:
Music League
Shaping the Head Like a Japanese Watermelon
Kugelmugel
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kugelmugel
Welcome to Holland by Emily Perl Kingsley
https://www.emilyperlkingsley.com/welcome-to-holland
Using drugs in 2025
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_timeline._Drugs_involved_in_overdose_deaths.jpg
Microtopics:
Wyrm Burden.
Metal bands running out of cool word combinations.
Checking Metal Archives.
Canadian atmospheric sludge metal.
Sorcerot.
Crowdfunding a vinyl pressing because your label refuses to pay for it.
Music that is not on Spotify.
How many Music Leagues you're part of right now.
A competition to see who has the best taste in music.
A song about a horse.
Adversarial Music League.
Posting on the internet with the goal of getting the same number of upvotes and downvotes.
Benign Hypotonia and the Floppy Baby.
Wearing a helmet 23 hours a day to adjust the shape of your skull.
Heads that smell like feet.
A very head-shaped head.
Babies that look like the Gary Oldman character in The Fifth Element.
A cone-shaped otter.
Zorg and Zord.
What kind of gear is this baby on?
Eat clen, tren hard.
Collecting as many physical therapists as possible.
A sweet little guy who's having a great time.
Putting on your resume your first word and the age you first walked.
Parent influencers with bad takes.
A baby that expands to the size of its container, so they'll stay baby sized forever unless you move into a bigger house.
Listen, have you ever evaluated anything? It's not easy.
Vibes-Based Medicine.
Declaring your metal sphere a micronation.
Closing the borders of your 8 meter micronation during COVID.
Building a house that looks like a ball.
Declaring your new house a micronation after the city refuses to grant you a building permit.
Antifascism Square.
Declaring your baby paddock a micronation.
A very good basically-a-poem.
Disabilities that are worse than going to Holland.
Trying to figure out how to live with the life you have.
Making peace with the fact that you didn't achieve all your dreams.
Divisive takes about sleep training.
Outcomes associated with prolonged cortisol exposure.
Category One Squawking.
Spending six years figuring out how to get your kid to fall asleep.
The term they invented to remind parents that just because things are good now, that doesn't mean they stay good forever, which is true for everything, but for children sleeping they have a specific term for it.
Getting real sad and going home.
Trying to take any drug except for fentanyl.
Fentanyl test strips from reliable suppliers.
If Coolio isn't safe, who is?
Narcan vending machines.
Walking down the street like you have Narcan in your pocket.
The terrifying gray line that dominates the entire graph.
A credible threat to a lot of recreational drug users.
Finally inventing the nightmare drug that DARE wanted you to be terrified of.
Nostalgia for street heroin.
The role that dopamine plays in human behavior.
A dogshit drug even from a drug enjoyer's perspective.
The only internet you even like any more.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 24 min
June 30, 2025297. Grimace Exploded, Covering 70,000 People
Lords:
Erica
Judy
https://www.tiktok.com/@diluftmensch
https://www.tumblr.com/diluftmensch
https://bsky.app/profile/diluftmensch.bsky.social
Topics:
The Pantone college experience
Why is everyone with superpowers a crime fighter or a criminal
Sell me on metal utensils
Grand Avenue, by Ron Koertge
https://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php%3Fdate=2014%252F10%252F19.html
Abridged version: https://allpoetry.com/poem/14373111-Grand-Avenue-by-Ronald-Koertge
Toothpaste is traditionally spicy
Microtopics:
Just Judy.
Telling your friends you love them.
Taking a break from the Internet and staring at the ceiling.
Realizing you need to take a break and then trying to figure out what you need to take a break from.
Doing absolutely nothing for ten minutes.
People who enjoy meditation explaining that you just need to meditate harder.
Taking a depressing game and remaking it, reframing it as relaxing.
Tetromino Chill.
Asking "do I have the flu?" in French.
Clicking on a wav file of Sleepwalk by Santo and Johnny and thinking "computer music is cool"
Your college's particular shade of purple.
The proliferation of this exact shade of purple now that Pantone has made it possible to exactly reproduce a color.
The reason why can't we tell who's buff and sexy any more.
Going to college to get sick of a particular color.
Whether any place is as intensely branded as a college campus.
What the founding fathers would think of this college campus' branding.
James Madison inventing the signature duplicator.
James Madison insisting that his entire family sleep sitting up.
Colors that you can't use until you really mean it.
Colors that are not allowed in the bathroom.
Pantone inventing a way to pee any known color.
Boom Box Guy.
The professor with the glasses with two different color lenses who is constantly complaining about JMU Purple.
Having jaws strong enough to eat bones and eating way more bones than you used to.
Topics that have been in the bucket since the inception of the bucket.
Unlimited energy. (Not limited energy.)
Why isn't Superman using his x-ray vision to watch TV better than anyone?
Lois Lane wearing superman's shirt.
Using your x-ray vision to make sure ant colonies aren't siphoning money out of bank vaults.
Advising strangers on the street that they have an untreated medical condition and they're like "go away creep"
The spoon doing a catapult move because the handle is too heavy, and flinging chili everywhere.
Plastic utensils for adults.
Hitting the age when doctors start saying things like "let's see if we can get a couple more good years out of you"
Whether the fork ever touches your tongue.
Ceramic spoons.
Melamine, the plastic material manufactured on Alf's home planet.
Handsome Korean wooden spoons.
Just slurping down a whole bowl of guacamole.
Everyday Carry Forks.
Metal utensils: so good, you carry them around.
Trying to eat a leaf of lettuce with an extremely heavy fork.
Eating a meal with a pickaxe and a pronged shovel.
Turning the corner by Señor Fish.
Different ways to kil for somebody.
A punch-line that was not set up in the descriptive part of the poem.
A poem that is a subset of another poem.
Where is the wacky misunderstanding that I was promised?
A bumper sticker reading "you just got passed by a bad driver (AI)"
Slapping the "artificial intelligence" label on everything you write so people blame AI.
Cinnamon toothpaste and ginger toothpaste.
Conventionally spicy toothpaste.
Toothpaste that doesn't taste like anything. (You know, for cats!)
Spicy tuna toothpaste and black pepper toothpaste.
Rinsing your mouth with lemon cleanser so your mouth can feel lemon fresh.
Pure Piperin.
Tubes: they're for squeezing.
Phosphoric acid toothpaste.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 1 min