Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

June 23, 2025296. Do You Know About the Sun?
The video of Charles Martinet puppeteering Mario around the screen:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyezQsI-v-s
Lords:
John
Esper
Topics:
Chess, the Musical: a show that is universally acclaimed but no longer performed because it consistently loses money
I believe live television to be the most exciting thing humans have invented
Blaseball had $3 million in VC funding
Pad, Pad by Stevie Smith
https://allpoetry.com/Pad,-Pad
Why not RSS for text?
Officiating weddings for your friends
Microtopics:
The video of Charles Martinet puppeteering the Mario head.
Who gets to say "roll theme song!"
A community where the chances of someone acting in bad faith is negligible.
DC Action News.
All human communication is technicallt advertising.
The generous Haste demo.
A skipping stones on water kind of game.
Sonic/Klonoa/late 90s/early 00s aesthetics.
A karaoke favorite that is not very reasonably sensitive.
All the Tims who did not work on Chess the Musical.
The guy from Rent whose name you can't remember.
Breakdancing while arbitrating a chess match.
Internet radio stations.
A Windows 95 theme of Chess the Musical.
Installing Windows 95 themes on your Picotron desktop.
Sex, Death and Live Television!
Live TV mishaps that ruin entirely the wrong career.
HQ.
At five o'clock, there's gonna be a guy.
The sense of spectacle you get from a live broadcast with a big audience.
The time one of the leads forgot his entire monologue.
The thrill of being part of a live performance as it's going wrong.
Listening to Shoutcast channels on Winamp.
Winamp's Shoutcast station registry.
The childhood dream of owning a TV station and getting to make all the little station IDs.
Netflix's abandoned "just fuck me up" button.
Six episodes of Deep Space 9 on a single VHS tape.
Drop 7 vs. Dropout TV.
Getting entirely the wrong information from your survey about what people like about your product.
Trying to sign up for Blaseball and failing.
Funny names such as Dominic Marijuana.
Jumping in and forcing some actions to happen.
Needing your game to break so that you can write the way it breaks into the narrative of the story.
Blaseball-likes.
Terrorball. (Short for Territory Ball.)
A list of all locations.
The Scarborough Fairies.
Resurrecting Jaylen Hotdogfingers.
An online text mode football manager with a live chat.
Fish Center.
Determining which fish is best.
Bringing a little bit of the live frisson to a fake live broadcast.
Whether it's okay to read a poem more than once.
Softly I go now, pad pad.
Cats you had together.
The cat that Hatricia Hop-Meow is based on.
Blogs: do they exist?
Making a point of finding an open source way to do your shit.
A 24 hour cycle of live podcasts.
TiVo for podcasts.
Edging the feeling of whether you're watching live TV or not in a slip slidey timestream.
Asking chat a question and then waiting 15 to 20 seconds for the response to come back.
Bringing back RSS readers.
The New Old Reader.
Opening with the mawwige joke.
Wanting people to want things.
Going back to your old life except now your friends are married.
Protecting The Lord from unauthorized clergymen.
Paying $20 to the Universal Life Church so you can perform weddings in most states.
Keeping the card in your wallet in case anyone tries to claim that you're not really an ordained minister.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 21 min
June 16, 2025295. Fantasy Malware
Lords:
Andrew
Andrew
Topics:
Finally making a 3D game after using only PICO-8 for 10 years
PICO-8 screen carts
Picotron Viruses
Quest by kittenmaster
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/Kvg10u32.png
Microtopics:
Professional software developers trying to figure out a terrible UI.
The Real Andrew – it says so on my computer screen.
Make 10 Deluxe.
Double Mustache's Lizard Multiplication, now available in a cardboard box in Staples.
Lizard Multiplication Tables.
Total Toads.
Pizza Panda vs. Pizza Possum.
Children's Allegra, on Nick, Jr.
Eugene, Oregon, the grass seed capital of the world.
Scientists discovering an exciting new antihistamine in the medicine aisle.
Working on whatever feature strikes your fancy for a year and ending up with an undirected project that's nowhere near shipping.
Using the lessons you've learned making small games to make a bigger game.
Making an N64 game for modern PCs.
Two people with the same name, the same headphones, and the same back story.
3D cameras: a huge pain in the ass.
What makes San Francisco Rush different from Mario Kart.
Getting Keys in Rush 2.
How to collect keys in the middle of the air.
Yellow Taxi Goes Vroom and other car platformers.
Extending the lifetime of an arcade game by adding weird secrets.
Arcade games with a save system.
Feeding Smash Tokens into the gacha system.
Super Mario Bros.: The Movie: The Game.
Looking at Picotron and thinking "I don't have time to draw that many pixels."
The Tweet Jam Andrews.
Is this really that interesting, Andrew?
Foreshadowing the poem.
How much game can you fit on one screen?
Code golfing and limiting yourself to typeable characters.
Reading a David Ahl book and realizing you want to tell the sand how to think.
Playing music on the PC speaker and printing funny phrases on the screen.
Writing a series of text mode animations in C in 1992 and then losing them all.
STDIO jam.
Dig World and Dig World Realms.
Typing in 6 pages of ROT13 text.
Writing an adventure game with a novel-length source code listing and demanding that players type it in.
Accidentally reading ROT13 spoilers.
The people who memorize the eye exam chart.
Rotting ROT13 a different amount.
Running ROT13 multiple times for extra security.
Competing ROT13 implementations that rotate in different directions.
Games in which the game state includes what line of code is currently executing.
How beginners expect game programming to work.
Deliberately contracting the Picotron virus where the characters fall to the bottom of your screen.
A monster that runs around on your desktop and eats your icons.
Turning off networking features for individual programs.
Writing a keylogger to read people's email and it turns out people's email is incredibly boring.
Writing a keylogger by hooking the keyboard interrupt and not bothering to log the state of the shift key.
Capturing the handshake and brute forcing it.
The first S is for Secure.
Screen carts vs. tweet carts.
Colon colon home colon colon.
Question mark? Puzzlescript man. (Or weird asterisk.)
The new default Pico-8 code editor background color.
Forgetting to screen shot the pixels so you open the image in Photoshop and add the pixels back.
Alfonzo's Bowling Challengs.
Unlocking HD streaming at level 2.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
June 09, 2025294. Click on This Ad To Save This Child
Lords:
Alex
Shannon
Topics:
The rapid proliferation of identical mobile games
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2348100/YEAH_YOU_WANT_THOSE_GAMES_RIGHT_SO_HERE_YOU_GO_NOW_LETS_SEE_YOU_CLEAR_THEM/
Randomly generated time traveler loadout
Turning your body into 3D printer filament after you die
https://www.suspenders.com/products/1-1-2-undergarment-hold-up-reg-suspender-hip-clip-style-patented-no-slip-reg-clips
Girls Only Want One Thing, Isabel Correra
https://www.instagram.com/isabellecorreawrites/p/Cz3t1xQOn_x/
Microtopics:
Alien Clay.
Gravity Falls.
Tryharding at Duolingo.
Removing the popsicle sticks in the right order or the king dies in lava.
Writing a solitaire game generator and uploading 30,000 solitaires to the app store.
Ads that are not even pretending to not be falsely advertising to you.
Mobile game advertisers all pretending that their games are the same non-existent game genre.
Yeah! You Want "Those Games," Right? So Here You Go! Now, Let's See You Clear Them!
People saying "that ad for a game where you pull out popsicle sticks until a king doesn't die looks pretty good but when I click on it it's a completely different game."
Lying to consumers in the 80s vs. lying to consumers today.
Ads that are just two horrifying images to get your adrenalin spiking.
Screaming Tamagotchi.
The Paw Patrol diagetically being funded by real life Paw Patrol merch sales.
Maximizing emotional whiplash when it doesn't matter which two emotions they are.
Having a week to prepare for a one way trip to Northern Italy in 1326.
Going on a trip and bringing along your undeveloped Broca's area.
Bootlegging reproducing GMO crop seeds in Renaissance Italy.
Wizard/Prophecy Person.
21st Century Traveling Merchants.
Bringing your jar of penicillin mold to the 14th century.
Being stranded in Renaissance Italy and becoming travelling minstrels.
Larger bearded guy that wears suspenders (under a graphic tee)
When were you born? The 14th century. Fuck you.
Bringing a snack to the spooky extraterrestrial from the planet Vulcan who lives in the woods.
Big ol' dogs.
Non-electronic megaphones.
A little top you can spin that's made of grandpa.
A magic genie that can grant any wish as it's for a small striated plastic trinket.
Getting turned into Redstone after you die.
A poorly-made fidget spinner that used to be your husband.
Shipping ashes and asking that ashes be put into things.
The sloughed off skin cells coating everything you send in the mail.
A shitty fidget spinner that just happens to have some human remains in it.
Where human composting is allowed.
Places it's no longer legal to bury a body.
The problem with imbuing symbols with value.
An alternative wedding ring that you switch to as necessary.
A plant that is a metaphor for death.
Grandpa living forever by being repeatedly melted down and 3D printed into a new toy when you get sick of the old once.
Bringing 3D printing back to 14th century Italy to revolutionize reliquaries.
Giving the world both Frog Fractions and Topics.
How many people you pass on the street each day are wearing suspenders under their shirt.
Hip Clips Style Under Ups.
A poem that's in the bucket twice.
Love is a seed and lust is a bird ravenous for seeds.
Burying the word sorry and seeing what grows.
Poetry that's just a paragraph of text.
What you're going to be if you eat the fruit of the sorry fruit.
Trying to imit inimitable things.
There's a lot of different women and they all want different things. (Except they all want to travel back in time.)
My Mother's Savage Daughter.
Girls only want one thing: to not be found on the Internet.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 1 min
June 02, 2025293. Pasting the Sickos Face Back and Forth Forever
Lords:
Kory
Andy
Topics:
Whim-based coding
How do you make and maintain a buddy on the Internet?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJKRFd4J_1w
That oscilloscope demo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8CzrPG9S0U&
Peripheriques Like Halos, by Robert Montgomery
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/fmr9gsma.jpg
https://globalizationofcalifornia.com/alameda-county-i-580-political-signs-spark-free-speech-fight/
Enhancing a party with a bespoke bar menu.
Creating a threatening windows batch file and leaving it on the desktop to frighten an application into not crashing
Microtopics:
Kbones.
When was the last time you invested in yourself?
Getting FM to sound like anything except a bell.
The American Psycho meme of FM syntheses.
A griminess level somewhere between Streets of Rage 2 and Streets of Rage 3.
The Yamaha DX7 presets.
An aggressively nonlinear approach to productivity.
Doing board game AI until it becomes boring and then moving on to something else
A lifelong ADHD enjoyer.
Trying to explain "burndown rate" without knowing the term burndown rate or what burndown rate is.
Getting ideas out of your brain so it can think about something else for a while.
Games that you aren't allowed to play for fun.
The M stands for Money.
Whim-based topics.
Segue-free zones.
Essness and Snez.
Maintaining friendships via custom chat stickers.
Stickers you use in your daily life.
Discord For Andy.
Anonymous inscrutable pixel faces.
A sticker of Princess Rosaline shrugging with the text "Skill Issue?"
The rich ecology of daily Garfield recap podcasts.
Conflating RJ-45 and RJ-11.
Which One's The Astromech??
Two superpowers at one.
How to win the Frog Fractions ARG.
Classic Raster Bars.
Reading a 40k stream of consciousness essay scrolling by the bottom of the screen in a pixelated font
Scrubbing right to Cronologia.
Doing surgery on the topic bucket right now.
That Oscilloscope Demo.
Converting your laptop into tent mode.
Zamboni Mayhem.
Running a video signal through a reverb pedal.
Stereo oscilloscopes.
Pringle of Scotland: once you pop, you can't stop.
A picture of a wall with a bunch of balloon letters spelling out a phrase.
Non-elected councils called ABAG and ICLEI.
A weird thing that's been kind of near you your whole life.
The final Neon Genesis Evangelization 3.0+1.0 movie.
A gripe session with themed cocktails.
Continuing to think of puns and refusing to pass any of them up.
Taking a Negroni and calling it LCL.
A 55 gallon drum of Tom Collins with a valve on it.
Walking by the booze aisle and everything looks delicious. (Even though it's not.)
Everyone's favorite topic.
Waving a .bat around to make your computer behave.
Sorry about your synapses!
An angry phone call from your mom circa 1995.
Telling the sand how to think and making the little guy run around.
Writing a bad song and immediately sending it to all your friends.
Pivoting to pay-per-reload.
Discovering what the requirements are as you discover the game you are making.
Crashing Pico-8 so hard that it reverts to Japanese.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 10 min
May 26, 2025292. A Dewey Decimal System, but for Libraries
Lords:
Alexander
https://youtube.com/@L4MPLIGHT
Chall
Topics:
Having an address after not having an address
Slopsquatting
Book curses
This boke ys myne, Eleanor Worcester
https://15thcfeminist.substack.com/p/the-preservation-of-womens-words
The David Lynch random number generator
Esper says: My personal favorite use of numbers stations is the brief “station ID” type messages on Secret Agent Radio, a radio station that plays funky groovy Bond soundtrack-type music. Every now and then between songs, you’ll get a brief clip of creepy French-accented actual number station recordings, which really sells the vibe: https://somafm.com/player24/station/secretagent
Do game designers ever go into public policy or vice-versa?
Microtopics:
Math.
An incredible youtube channel you don't know how to search for.
Lamplight but with a four.
Making art that only a tetrachromat could appreciate and then finding a tetrachromat to appreciate it.
The secret color: yellow.
Crashlands 2.
Watching X-Files until you've already seen all the Darin Morgan episodes.
Having twenty shirts to choose from and the same place to sit every day.
How long it takes to tire off the non-stop stream of novelty.
Working for yourself vs. working for someone else.
How to stop feeling like life is rushing past you.
Running a Kickstarter to get chores done around the house.
How to get your ADHD brain to do work in purpose.
Trying to get past the gauntlet of open browser tabs to the one where you get work done.
Running 100 times.
Productivity!
Buying a productivity calendar and then glaring at the calendar and saying "you can't trick me, calendar"
Nefarious NPM packages really popping off in the past few years.
Cool pens dot com.
Kazaam vs. Shazaam.
What people knew before they could search things on the Internet.
Dog bone facts.
The apocryphal things that LLMs like to say.
Lost books that we know about because they were mentioned in less old books.
The Actual Monster Mash.
Jeff Minter's Polybius.
Nobody ever releasing a fake Frog Fractions 2 even though Jim could never disavow it.
Hash tag relatable stories about medieval scribes.
Laws about book mishandling.
Dukes collecting books like treasures.
Putting a curse in your book to make sure nobody steals it.
The Falling Disease.
Irascibly Incoherent Book Curses.
May your NPM packages be infected with the falling disease.
A curse that can only curse people who can read.
Young people getting their grubby fingers dirty in the yard and leaving fingerprints in your books.
Someone left their bookmark in my book and the bookmark rotted again.
Cursing podcast bootleggers with the affliction where they always put their headphones on backwards.
The cheat code to unlock Nukey.
May your X button get stuck.
The wildest spelling that could possibly make sense.
A book that once belonged to a library.
Borrowing a book about space from your first grade teacher and forgetting to return it and learning about the ADHD shame procrastination spiral.
Blessed be he who steals this book.
Walking into a library and instantly being completely overwhelmed.
Giving your child the talk about where Little Free Libraries come from.
David Lynch giving you the weather in his all caps voice.
Why David Lynch never draws a 7.
The Reproducibility Crisis.
The Law of the Iterated Logarithm.
All the ways we make mistakes.
Coded drug drop messages on Britney Spears' Insagram.
The 485.152nd Amendment.
A great source of puns that must've existed for thousands of years.
How to predict whether your idea will work and then how to test whether it worked.
The Double Crossover Diamond Interchange.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 5 min
May 19, 2025291. Nair and Nnail: Keratin Erasers
Lords:
Alexei
Evan
Topics:
Silt clouds & underwater visibility as a game mechanic
The bass pro shop pyramid and the utility calculations of weird buildings
What happens when your Firefox root certificate expires?
The Ailing Mirror-Smith
https://medium.com/@EvanBalster/the-ailing-mirror-smith-9c4b5a76cd#9520
Microtopics:
Roguelike Celebration.
Virtual conferences.
How to be in a conversation with one person in a room and not the whole room.
Drinking a polymorph potion to put a different animal emoji next to your user name.
Roguelikes and Roguelikers.
Topic munching and topic grazing.
How to design non-violent roguelikes.
Spending your paw prints on the "become water" skill so when a human tries to pick you up, you just flow out of their hands.
Imitone.
Abruptly tooting a horn.
Reading an email and then pointing at it and yelling "sold!"
DSP for game developers.
Video essays about maritime disasters.
Penetration diving.
Huge warning signs in front of every underwater cave.
Silt Warnings.
Guideline Entanglement.
Moving in more directional axes than you normally do.
Fast things that live underwater.
Panicking and forgetting that the game is turn based.
Playing Nethack with a screen reader.
Multi stage dives to deliver oxygen further and further into a cave system.
Retrieving the bell from the Edmund Fitzgerald.
Inventing special hells to put yourself through because the existing hells aren't good enough.
Gabe Newell's lack of fear response.
Remembering the time you blacked out and thinking "the brain is really cool."
Borrowing some time from your cat attack to give to the car crash.
Scout the Floof.
Running out of adrenalin and being extremely calm.
Entering and exiting Tennessee in a state of intense unreality.
Memphis, the ancient capital of Egypt.
The acoustic properties of a gigantic metal pyramid.
Getting married inside the Bass Pro Shop Pyramid.
Hotel rooms attached up the back of the giant fish.
Why the Egyptians built pyramids rather than other cooler shapes.
A procedurally generated lady in Canada.
Importing the Burning Man from Burning Man.
Stopping at Saskatchewan for gas.
Home of the World's Biggest Dad.
Building Ram Pumps in Dwarf Fortress.
Great Pyramid Ram Pump.
Mummy Tea.
A terrible waste of tax dollars that brings joy to children all around the world.
Firefox telling you "oh shit, you need to update now, dog."
Configuring Windows Firewall to not allow Windows Updates.
Protecting your users from malware by opening the floodgates of Internet ads.
Encino Man.
Handing Firefox a Baby Ruth and it's like "this tastes like plastic."
Picking tiny hills to die on as a way to remain mentally stable.
Escalating lack of politeness from a UK security firm.
Nitric Acid Piano: sounds great but hurts like heck to play.
3D printing new fingernails right onto your bare cuticles every morning.
Working on a long project in which you see more potency than clarity of purpose.
Valorizing craft for the sake of craft, disconnected from the use of it.
In the worst case scenario, how could your tool be used?
Avoiding doing evil by making morally neutral art.
Sitting on multiple generations of Cold War techno-optimism.
Keita Takahashi's manifesto about being a video game romantic.
Designing things that people can do and enjoy in the world we want to live in.
Striving to bring people some small amount of a positive emotion.
Making curry for your colleagues and going totally overboard on it.
I'm going to go do evil with this curry.
Learning the flavors of new herbs and spices.
Fenugreek leaf.
The worst time in history to get enthusiastic about cooking quiche.
Trying to figure out how to post.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 9 min
May 12, 2025290. Forever Games are Just Rude
Lords:
Lena
Droqen
Topics:
Kill gameplay
https://droqen.itch.io/the-end-of-gameplay
The thrill of firefighting on live service games, and how to stop
It was D and K who showed me the way
https://newforum.droqen.com/index.php?topic=705
Microtopics:
Great content.
Multiplayer games that are focused on human connection.
Farmers' markets.
Kinopio. (The mind-mapping software.)
Just barfing stuff onto the page.
Looking at a piece of software that someone has polished for fifteen years and being astounded.
Weird ego boosts.
Meeting hundreds of people whose names you recognize from the Internet and they're all like "I love the thing you made."
Pursuing the thing that other people say is good about your work and forgetting what you liked about it yourself.
A nebulous idea whose lot in life is to be dominated by more concrete ideas.
Making your next game with the intention of killing your most popular game.
Unlocking creative expression into a vessel.
Tolerating a combat system to get to the good parts of a game.
Playing a game because you enjoy pushing the buttons.
A museum exhibit of a hundred different platformer control schemes.
Using your ability to hang out with people to tell them a story.
A list of all the ideas you've ever had.
The safety of watching the numbers go up.
An interaction that exists to be self-perpetuating.
Advertising as a way to tell people that a thing exists vs. all the noxious cruft that we've grown on top of that idea.
Game addiction as a thing that is desirable.
Games that grip you as tightly as possible vs. games that gracefully end and allow you to stop playing.
Game developers accidentally discovering that they can Skinner Box people and then deciding "let's build our entire industry around that forever"
The mantra you use to remind yourself to not put gameplay in your games.
Trying to detect the humanity in a work of art.
Trying to express your experiences in a medium and knowing you at least have an audience of one. (Yourself.)
Disagreeing about color names.
It's Thanksgiving and people are at-ing you on Twitter that your online service isn't working.
Moving fast enough that you don't have time to sit with your thoughts and second-guess yourself.
The true meaning of a Lord.
How to sit with the discomfort of uncertainty.
Solving a problem before you get the chance to wonder whether solving the problem aligns with your values.
Running an online world that gets hacked and rolling back only 98% of the hack, leaving enough to remind people that this is a world with a living history.
Ruminating about your past actions as a way to learn how to behave in the future.
Acting without reflection because you can't reflect and act at the same time.
It doesn't matter what you do as long as you feel really bad about it afterwards.
How to stop.
Don't make live service games.
Sitting with the knowledge that you are going to make mistakes.
Staring at blue-green walls.
The most juicy fire-fighting that's available.
The horrible steak that is life.
Trying to construct your life so that you are doing something thrilling and important for one to four hours per day and then relaxing.
The introverted fire fighter who has his own personal cardboard box to cover his head with as he's hanging out at the station.
What's-his-letter?
If Heaven's so good, why haven't they made a Heaven 2?
Making a one-user forum for yourself.
Poetry 2: it's when you do something interesting with forum posts.
Doing something for brain reasons and then people who you inspire do the same things to so they can pretend to have the same brain reasons.
Adding everyone who ever influenced you to the credits of your game.
Intentionally excluding the U.
Suck it, English orthography!
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 3 min
May 05, 2025289. It's Pronounced VRML
Lords:
CisHetKayFaber
https://www.patreon.com/CisHetKayFaber
Andrew
https://luxurybunkers.bandcamp.com/album/killer-karen
Topics:
People say the craziest stuff in front of janitors.
Revisiting development of a creative work after 20 years
Naming conventions in the demo scene vs. the ZZT scene
How to Be Perfect, by Ron Padgett
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57243/how-to-be-perfect
Floops, a 3D cartoon character generated in VRML in the mid-90's internet
Microtopics:
Putting all your stress from the last three months into a single EP.
Brains pooping right into your ears.
Refusing to talk about Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music.
Are you allowed to talk to janitors??
Being assumed to be part of a group (openly racist people) that you are not actually part of.
The risks of letting other people clean up after you.
How do you know when it's time to eat candy when you don't have the candy gland?
Giving yourself heat stroke because you don't realize it's too hot.
Making a plan for how to not get heat stroke!
Not having a thirst meter but your snacking meter is pegged 24/7.
The inability to sleep and eat at the same time.
How to tell if you're on SSRIs.
Cyclothymia.
"You have to do this now or I'm going to stare at you."
A VR exercise app where if your heart rate drops too low all the NPCs start staring at you.
The cost of not taking care of yourself.
Clinging to your flow state for dear life.
Feeling like you've done a thing vs. actually doing the thing.
Sedarising and unsedarising your essay.
The many eras of cancelling David Sedaris.
Independent tabletop game developers in the Osaka area.
Writing to explore your own thought space.
Writing the program and then running the program.
Taking a twenty year break between essay drafts so you can revisit your ideas fresh.
Cyberpunk-coded online handles.
Attaching a political ideology to the ZZT scene.
Role-playing bring a small business owner as you make art in your bedroom and share it with the online community.
Social capital in the cracking community.
The era in your life when you didn't even know it was possible to pay for computer games.
Who'd win in a fight, Slayer, or Mega Slayer ZZ9 Final?
The revealed philosophies of different online communities.
Shareware and early web nostalgia.
A wild time to be on the Internet.
Enjoying lo-fi versions of a thing.
A movie with bad special effects that look great in the pirated cammed version.
Straightening your room before you save the world.
Not doing anything to make what you want impossible.
Using attractive stamps, like the one with the tornado on it.
Carrying the only poem you like around with you on index cards.
Living in a culture where respect for the elderly is out of control.
The age at which you get to elbow your way to the front of every line.
Getting paid to tell people how to do things better.
Things you had to learn outside of school.
A guy who looks like he's eaten every lemon in the world.
Ron Padgett celebrity lookalikes.
An alarm clock that wakes you up by shouting "I'm looking forward to the Internet of things!" in your own voice.
Who's been to cocktail parties and when, and did you discuss VRML?
Hand animating 3D cartoons by typing VRML.
Vtubers in the 90s.
Making things and putting them on the Internet and everyone just assumes you just prompted an AI to make it.
Demystifying the magic pixie dust.
The burly wizard with a hammer and anvil who knows how to make the metal not brittle.
NAND to Tetris and Cryptopals. (Not the blockchain kind.)
Learning to never roll your own crypto.
Magic. (Derogatory.)
Punished for understanding the assignment.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 7 min
April 28, 2025288. Nobody Has Poop on Their Balls on The Astral Plane
Lords:
Jenni
Rebecca
https://toots.ravenoak.dev/@rebecca
Weft Magazine: https://www.weftmagazine.com/
Topics:
Getting emotionally ambushed by a children's toy piano
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g8fzwmnw8M
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kvhdHkugIPE
All the non-art things you have to do to get external validation about your art
Explaining where owls come from
The Witches are Coming (excerpt) by Lindy West
https://playingintheworldgame.com/2021/11/15/the-witches-are-coming-by-lindy-west/
Ask Me About Loom(s in video games)
Festive gazelles, vampire christmas, and the rest of the christmas card project: https://ravel.me/ggggbbybby/swc
What’s a gamp? https://ravel.me/ggggbbybby/js2cawg
In case you need comfy fingering in your life: https://www.knitpicks.com/yarn/comfy-fingering/c/5420197
The ravelry forum where we play old-lady Minecraft: https://www.ravelry.com/discuss/warped-weavers
Microtopics:
Weft: for weavers!
The Weft Zone.
A two and a half foot piano with five notes on it.
Are you the width of your arm?
Pushing a button to increase your team's number.
A white paper about how to not get a divorce when you go to burning man together.
Teaching kids all the animal names, even the ones they'll never encounter, like how we used to teach kids all the state capitals even for the states they'll never visit.
A bird with polka dot wings that could fly over the sea, and John Legend sings about it.
Expecting your child to eventually go through every age.
Now that your kid is 40, he can clean the poop from his own balls.
The umbilical cord being connected to weird meat inside your body.
Kidney bean figures connected by glowing blue lines in the astral plane.
Being paid to stay at home and solve puzzles on you computer. (And go to Zoom meetings.)
All the non-art things you need to do to get your art out there.
The Loom on Loom Island.
Exhibiting at Maker Fair and explaining how a loom works 50,000 times.
Happy last year's birthday! I made you something and it took me this long to finish it.
Getting a fanbase who has a parasocial relationship with you and having to pretend not to be a crotchety asshole.
What it takes to run a personal Mastodon instance.
Getting a call from the school and they're like "your instance isn't federating with the other instances, we need you to come pick it up."
Explaining to a six year old about sexual reproduction, DNA, mutations, and speciation so you can explain where owls come from.
Explaining to your baby that talking is when an organ vibrates in your throat that makes the air vibrate, but he doesn't know what air is, he thinks there's an ether.
What music you can play with the pentatonic scale.
Poko the cockatiel sitting Totoro.
The intern at the mobile factory who spent an afternoon downloading a hundred bootleg MIDIs so that the mobile plays.
Tooting the bad cone inside the house.
The person who would be playing the trumpet in your relationship.
Seeing someone knitting incorrectly in a TV show.
Patching better jokes into the hat DLC.
Using a sequence of transpilers to get your code from point A to point B.
People who make game engines wanting your to touch the engine as much as possible.
Wanting to declare a global variable and the developers say you can't do that but they point you to the bespoke language feature that does the same thing as global variables but in a much more complicated way.
Playing the Frog Fractions text adventure with a gamepad.
Funny looking pirates who are secretly advertisements.
Kidney beans, swans, and other delicious things.
Learning a song from a dye pot that turns things green.
A piano guitar that you just press on.
Showing your husband the Wikipedia page that proves that you hobby exists and he's like "anybody can edit Wikipedia."
Making a sculpture of the Eiffel tower without looking at any references and it ends up just being a letter A with the word "Paris" written nearby.
A coked-up knitting machine.
Spring has sprung so sprang your sprang.
Heddles and treadles and gamps.
Some of your best Comfy Fingering, please.
Basic Sour.
Smelling things in your mouth.
Getting tired of sucking your baby's snot through a tube and getting an electric aspirator.
Starting up Morrowind and being immediately presented with a guy who has a bad case of Bethesda Face.
The thirteen games that have looms in them.
The looms in Assassin's Creed being kind of historically accurate because Ubisoft's whole thing is being kind of historically accurate.
Subscribing to a service that periodically sends you different swatches of cloth so you can disassemble them and figure out how they're woven.
Festive Gazelles.
Happy Vampire Christmas!
Forum drama on Ravelry that ends up with the web designer no longer being allowed to talk directly to customers.
Creative mode for Minecraft except for a bunch of old ladies.
If you lose your bird bone just wait for another bird to hit your window.
Magazines as extremely slow podcasts.
Updating your gender and getting rid of your loser middle name while you're at it.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 15 min
April 21, 2025287. Drive It Like You Hate It
Lords:
Ben
Andrew
Topics:
Super Nintendo World's theming is on point
The ABC of Style - A Guide to Plain English (book)
Can you still rent game consoles?
Matsuo Bashô: Frog Haiku
https://www.bopsecrets.org/gateway/passages/basho-frog.htm
https://itch.io/jam/variety-megajam-2022/topic/2514101/2nd-poem-
Pixel art impressionism
https://twitter.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1801616946837823790
Microtopics:
The games you should've bought when the Steam Spring Sale was still going.
Citizen Sleeper 2.
Being excited about a new project until you landlord tells you to move out.
Real-life POW blocks.
Timing your punch so that the shell pops out.
The park employees doing their best to ameliorate the bad game design of the theme park.
Rushing to hit the snooze button so the piranha plant doesn't wake up.
A plant that's not quite as big as Audrey II.
Buying the wrist band so that you can punch blocks to get coins and find all the KONG letters.
Using your shadow to interact with a video game.
Running from the park entrance to your favorite ride right when the park opens and there's already a two hour line.
A picture that you took with your camera and somehow they made reality look cel shaded.
Super Mushroom Croutons.
Clipping the AR goggles into the Mario hat.
No matter where you look, stuff is happening all the time.
Whether kids in Japan handle failure better than kids in California.
A phone booth, except it exists.
A book about pedantry.
When to use difference vs. discrepancy.
Reading text aloud but internalizing it not at all.
The model of the mind where you are a passive observer sitting in the backseat thinking about pancakes while the driver is doing all the thinking and acting.
Whether the person who struggles to read gets more out of the text than the person who reads effortlessly, because they're spending more time on it
Two full pages about "like."
Faces similar to faces you've never seen before.
Drive it like you hate it vs. drive it as if you hate it.
Utilizing a big word.
Phrasing something in an awkward way for entertainment purposes.
One of the more expensive things you can rent.
Being able to afford all the games that you want. (Not that many game consoles.)
Naughty Dog remaking The Last of Us for the third time.
Sending an assassin to the Second to Last Blockbuster.
Not knowing how a certain business works because you refuse to give them your social security number.
Digitally renting a PS5. (It has fingers.)
Putting stickers on your toilet claiming that it's an Xbox.
Building a Mario Kart course into your house.
Sharing your cool social security number.
Pronouncing Japanese like someone who is covered in tattoos of Pokemon.
Frog-jump-in Water-sound.
Pond. Frog. Plop.
Localizing a Japanese poem into sculpture.
What is art? What is anything?
Looking at a pixel art face and thinking "whoa, what's going on with that guy?"
Pixel art being able to represent detail at a certain scale, but only if it aligns with the directionality of the grid.
Trying to represent a cartoon world realistically.
Walking into a dungeon and being surrounded by statues that look like sentries.
Recognizing a blob of pixels as representing the idea of a decoration and never thinking about it again.
Fan art of Dr. Robotnik's niece.
High color, high detail, low resolution.
Weird rendering techniques that are texture mapping adjacent.
Line Cook.
A blue lid that feels sort of mayo.
Only realizing late in life that three lines makes a ladder.
The main places that you don't post.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 4 min