Topic Lords

By Jim StormdancerComedy Education Arts

Topic Lords episodes

April 14, 2025286. A Kangaroo the Size of Two Kangaroos
Lords:
John
Tyriq
https://oddobject.zone/
Topics:
"Is it harder with twins than with one?" "I wouldn't know."
Would it be neat or terrible to live on a supercontinent
That X-Files episode when Scully scanned an alien artifact in a grocery store's bar code reader
When I Am Among The Trees by Mary Oliver
https://cih.ucsd.edu/sites/cih.ucsd.edu/files/cfm/When%20I%20am%20among%20the%20Trees%20by%20Mary%20Oliver.pdf
Dippin' Dots except each dot is a tiny burger
Microtopics:
Pouring a glass of water and leaving it for your future self to discover later.
What Jim used his mailing list for before Mail Chimp shut in down.
Discussion things. (Not topics.)
Trying to do a bit and the person you're doing s bit to does a bit back and now you're doing two bits.
Raising a couple of outliers.
Children who have learned how to run but have not yet learned not to run into the street.
You're already making dinner for one twin, why not feed the other one too?
Raising a child with your tired adult body.
Is it bad for twins to always be together?
A/B testing your twins.
Getting Minecraft pajamas for the kid who keep talking about Minecraft.
It's like Legos but there are monsters.
Running Doom in Minecraft redstone at four hours per frame.
The continents being spread out like s badly peeled orange.
Flying around in the Aluminium Falcon.
Pangaea vs. Panthalassa.
A small bird that digs into your bag and eats your food and it's not afraid of you because it has no predators.
Wooly Rhinoceroses, Land Sharks, and
A little guy in a world that's too big for him.
Playing Counterstrike and always picking the map where you are a mouse in a gigantic kitchen and all your friends hate it
The katamari getting bigger but the prince stays the same size.
Finishing your book about mice knights before you realize you're writing a children's series.
The breadth of fiction about sapient rodents.
Inner-Continental Gigantism.
Finding a reason to offscreen your lead actress.
Why Scully uses a different text editor to write her reports in every episode.
What does Scully do with the dog she adopted?
What happened to alien abductions?
A very powerful spice and making an entire meal out of just the spice.
The Lone Gunmen. (Cancelled after half a season.)
Watching unaired Lone Gunmen pilot for Casey's Star Trek podcast
Short subject lords.
Equally the beach, the oaks and the pines.
To go easy, to be filled with light.
How much five dollar words cost now, adjusted for inflation.
Becoming a nature person over time.
Whether dollars existed in the 1580s.
Measuring the value of a word by multiplying chips by mult.
Hoping to one day look back on your experiences playing Balatro.
A thousand burgers each the size of a grain of quinoa.
Whether it's possible to make hamburger buns smaller.
They're just tiny burgers, so why don't you call them that?
Maximizing your burger's surface area because you taste the surface, not the middle.
You can't taste the middle of a burger!
A plate full of Dippin' Dots burgers.
Eating rice, but each grain takes like a burger.
A bed of the finest chopped onions.
Making a rectangle of steamed hamburger and chopping them up in a grid.
Extruding tiny finished hamburgers out of the pasta machine.
Odd Object dot Zone.
The Garages' final final album.
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1 hr 3 min
April 07, 2025285. Poop Songs for Roy
Lords:
Erica
Jenni
Topics:
The chaos you missed
Having a baby is like being assigned a set of hobbies you don't necessarily care about but are expected to engage in full-time
Do people actually live longer in Greece and Japan or do they just have more pension fraud?
Too Many Women Become Desperate, by Infinite Sexy Marriage
https://bsky.app/profile/infinitesexy.bsky.social/post/3lcxskqdmoc26
Is it possible to never show your kid Cocomelon and they never demand to be shown Cocomelon or are they gonna find out about it through osmosis
Microtopics:
Beneficial nematodes: are they really that good?
How to pronounce "iykyk."
Singing "beneficial nematodes" to the tune of Hall of the Mountain King.
Going extreme on the melismas.
The Saying Hi Chamber.
Shazam chastising you for singing.
100 MIDIs that some Chinese intern threw together in a couple of hours and now every baby is going to grow up with these tunes in their heads.
Inventing a new way to live that's worse in every respect.
Having dinner with a friend while grandma puts the kid to bed.
A baby getting upset because he isn't staring at geometric shapes right now.
Making sure the baby makes all the right neural connections and not the wrong ones.
A video of a guy walking down every street in Vice City.
Twenty minutes of people icing cakes. Not the really fancy cakes, just regular-ass cakes.
Clutching at your face as the cake icer puts red next to brown.
Caking Bad.
A coup amongst the Smithsonian National Zoo's naked mole rats.
Stabbing your mom with your teeth so that you can breed.
A horrible skin creature with prehensile chopsticks.
Eusocial mammals.
Growing extra vertebrae every time you give birth.
A Topic Lords field trip to the naked mole rat colony to meet the new queen.
Intervertebral red shift.
EBF, EFF and EP.
Wake windows and contact naps.
Holding them like a football and making a sandwich and putting the sandwich in the football, and now you're breastfeeding!
Whether it's ethical to leave your baby at the Burger King or if you need to go fast casual.
The poop potato who has opinions.
You gotta draw the line somewhere, and it's sweeping the floor.
All the things you're not supposed to put in the crib with the baby.
Replacing your baby with a gerbil because you're not allowed to kiss your baby on the forehead in case you have a cold sore.
How to tell if a gerbil has been replaced with a similar gerbil.
Paying $7/month for the NYT crossword but not getting access to the articles so you click on the crossword constructors' notes but you're already at your three free article limit.
Anthrocyanins.
Cynical Jim says yes, Regular Jim says maybe.
The most domesticated mammal: man.
Small Japanese women having the longest lifespans because they hide in your crawlspace and death cannot find them.
Old ladies? In my duct work?
Hoping there are no old ladies living in your duct work because you haven't cleaned in s while and there are probably mold spores in there
Poop Songs for Roy.
Thinking of the shrieking old lady as a sonic shower for you duct work.
The future-episodes channel, where we discuss episodes that may one day exist.
Remember that time when you retweeted a thing and it turned into a picture of a fish.
The ransom note on top of peach tarts aesthetic.
Welcome to lesbianism. Here is your greeting card with peaches.
Whether reverse image search is bad now or if it was always bad.
The Poem is Entertaining.
Speculative fiction about soviets invading.
The kind of poem you'd read in feminist bookstores in the early 00s.
Children's YouTube channels full about new wave songs about trucks.
Showing your child only OG Sesame Street episodes so they can't relate to adults or children their own age and are technically Xennials.
Xennial Warrior Princess.
Everything's more true when you're wearing pants.
The 25th place you can post pictures of your baby.
The legend of Shrimptaur.
Hide in the discord and never post.
Finally writing the tweet that's going to make John Hodgman unfollow you
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1 hr 8 min
March 31, 2025284. Spotting a Wild Misogyny
Lords:
Mitch
https://www.youtube.com/@HBMmaster
Nathan
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2976260/ChainStaff/
Topics:
I wish someone told me all classic Star Trek was based on writer Ursula LeGuin
Ryu Numbers and Tom Scott Numbers
https://www.tumblr.com/tomscottnumber
How to get out of a chair
Have you seen the new show? by Orcboxer
https://www.tumblr.com/orcboxer/745859389762764801/poob-has-it-for-you
OUR DRAWINGS - PRINCESS MOVIE | Full Animation Film | Artist
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1LhdhQEKtg
https://www.tumblr.com/fullanimationfilmartist
Microtopics:
Mitch from jan Misali.
The episode where we have beef.
The milk frother attachment to the chain staff.
The milk frother is DLC you pay extra for that milk frother.
Hearing about Ursula Leguin for the first time.
The Wind's Twelve Quarters.
The Clock Before Armageddon.
Solving sexism, here on Topic Lords.
Living long enough to discover a new favorite sci-fi author.
What's interesting about Sapphire for the PC Engine, other than the price?
Dreams of gutting the collectors market.
Spending $2,000 on a rare game and trying to convince itself it's good enough to justify the price.
A game that is not very rare but it's still expensive because it's so good that people want to keep it.
Deciding at the last minute to not use motion controls for your Wii rhythm game.
Erdos numbers preceding Bacon numbers because of course it was mathematicians who came up with that shit.
What counts as a Bacon Connection.
A character who has been in a lot of crossover games.
The de facto authority on Ryu numbers.
Whether the frog at the end of TXT World is the same as the game from Frog Fractions.
Whether Hatricia from the Hat DLC is the same as the cat the wedding dress in the photo at the end of TXT World.
The British buy who wears a red shirt.
The ever-shifting discourse for what counts as a connection for Scott Numbers.
Adding rules to make a trivial game into a non-trivial game.
White men who have had a long Youtube career.
Whether Ryu has a surname.
Stephen Hawking's Sabbath number.
Movies and plays tending to tell different stories whereas recorded and live music tends to be the same music.
The hypothetical guy whose favorite movie is just one where they pointed a camera at a stage play.
Why do people love squats?
Doing a 500 pound deadlift to get out of bed.
Doing one exercise to get better at a slightly related exercise.
Fucking up your knees by getting out of a chair repeatedly.
Doing the old heave-ho thing to get out of a chair.
The Inherently Beautiful Design of Everyday Objects, by Bonald Normag.
Watching the X-Files with your wife.
Aged Like Me.
Putting your knees under the chair and standing up, and unbending your knees pushes the chair backwards and it falls over, but you're upright, and then like the punching bags with sand at the bottom the chair bounces back up and hits you in the ass so you don't even need to work to start walking.
A wheelchair with an extremely gentle ejection seat.
Why obese people have worse COVID outcomes.
How to make a bed that fat people want to lie in face-down.
A.C. Slatering.
Why isn't Jim an industrial designer?
Applying for an industrial design job and putting sharks on your resume.
Poob has it for you.
Screenshotting a Tumblr post and cropping out the username to post it on Tiktok and claiming that it's something your therapist told you.
The ghost you're talking about waving its hands in your face being like "I'm right here!"
Tumblr eras.
The event that convinced the Tumblr community that Tumblr users should not ever be in charge of anything.
The people who left Tumblr when they banned porn and then came back when Elon Musk bought Twitter.
The Tumblr Funnymen.
The Tumblr CEO personally harassing trans women off of Tumblr.
Someone who looks like they've been deactivated.
The miracle of Tumblr still being online.
The Poster's Curse.
Bucket, where are you?
A jumble of keywords that someone might hypothetically search for.
Distinctly amateurish outsider art in a way that only a human could create.
Beatboxing puppy!
A contextless segue into a musical number.
An hour long trailer for a twenty minute movie.
A movie made by people who were figuring out 3D animation as they were making it.
Legally distinct Marios rapping.
Being anti-AI art because you are extremely pro copyright law.
The beatboxing puppy scene that everybody forgot about.
It's cool when people make art.
Four consecutive narrators all explaining the same concepts in slightly different ways that slightly contradict each other.
A movie asking you to watch it over and over to pump up its numbers.
Wanting to see a sequel to "OUR DRAWINGS - PRINCESS MOVIE | Full Animation Film | Artist" because you want to know what the title will be.
Complaining that Amazing Digital Circus is more important than your own movie.
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1 hr 18 min
March 24, 2025283. Dracula's Big Happy Polycule
Lords:
Dan
https://orionblasters.com/
https://mollyjames.bandcamp.com/album/loved-by-life
Daniel
Topics:
Could Dracula escape Groundhog Day?
How to know you’re in a golden era
Indiana Jones is supposed to look good??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=1019&v=f1fWB5HP7s8
Where the Heart Is by F.S. Yousaf
https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/pMNUZSdU.jpg
Microtopics:
Deciding to get a teleprompter on episode 283.
The Molly James Band.
Mid-century lounge music.
Describing yourself as a cross between Pink Floyd and Doja Cat.
Shooting a music video the day after the election.
The sun and the battery life racing each other to ruin your forest concert first.
What does Dracula get up to? Does he have hobbies?
A lawyer hired to buy Dracula a new house
Scrubbing all the proper nouns out of your fan fiction.
Dracula as smoldering sex bomb vs. Dracula as a weird old man.
Figuring out how to not cancel Dracula.
A D&D campaign where you need to recruit a therapist into the party as part of your goal is to convince Dracula to become a better person.
Dracula being verbally abused by all his wives.
Batman playing Flappy Bird while he waits behind the curtain to ambush the villain.
Extremely high powered Nerf rifles.
Joining a community and ascertaining what they need.
Living through a golden age and not realizing until later.
Feeling grateful for the good things you once had.
Being reluctant to push your awesome community because you're afraid it's going to grow too large.
Figuring out how to 3D print blasters.
Mentoring under Captain Slug.
Realizing that your hobby is suddenly your primary source of income.
How to be part of a burgeoning music scene.
The cool kid at GDC.
Ways Jim could've made Glittermitten Grove more accessible without losing the interesting game design.
Getting email from a parent saying that their kid wants to become a mechanical engineer because of you Nerf blaster design.
A video game that is the third best Indiana Jones film.
Who is this technology helping, and how to we stop listening to their opinions?
Playstation Four and a Half.
A game with a lot of whirling debris.
Finding new ways to make more expensive every day.
How you'd put a loot box in a Pico-8 game.
The mental health community arguing about when it's okay to sleep with your therapist.
A/B tasting topics to see which ones get more downloads.
Staying up late enough to get hungry.
What kind of salad you'd put Doritos in.
What kind of salad you'd put a Clif bar in.
Clif bars: fall off of us!
Disappointing dolmas.
Your everyday carry web browser.
The difference between Chrome and Chromium.
Why doesn't everyone just compile their own Firefox?
Bawling at the typewriter about not having the thing you're writing a poem about.
Deciding your book of love poetry to your therapist.
Saving your fan mail to be read at your funeral.
Archaeologists tooting Interesting exchanges written in cuneiform.
Future archaeologists training AI to peruse the entire corpus of tweets to find the choicest memes.
The time to look for an out.
Serenading the audience with the address they can mail cash to.
Where all the best Lords hang out.
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1 hr 5 min
March 17, 2025282. Check Out My Feetbook!
Lords:
Jeff
https://dopeassvideogames.com/
Danny
https://www.youtube.com/@NoclipDocs
Topics:
What's happening on Bluesky.
Using Google Earth and YouTube to rid myself of Nostalgia of Places I've lived
Dad talk: what do we do about porn?
Microtopics:
The Good Morning America series finale.
Covering video games online.
Getting married and feeling safe from people who run dating sites.
Nintendo Disasters.
Reviewing every individual version of FIFA 2011.
The Sega Master System catalog.
Choosing not to do something because someone else has done it before.
A Weird Slop of People.
The CD-32 version of Alfred Chicken.
The Noclip documentary about PiCoSteveMo.
Blood and Fear and Nolf and Shogo and Condemned.
A hardware Pico-8 solution.
Explaining how to and how not to reply.
Enjoying social media because you need a place to type your garbage.
An Eternal September Situation.
Repeating Daily Show jokes from five years ago.
An oral history of Bluesky users.
Jimmy Fallon posting a picture of himself holding a Nintendo Switch.
The Ford vs. Chevy argument over and over again until we're all dead.
Laying your employees off based on their Klout scores.
What aspects of social media you can leave behind once you get a goat farm.
Having goats and not even posting pictures of them.
Goats as a gateway drug to other ungulates.
Did I get drunk and order 20 snakes again?
Boxcars: Where the Hobos Go.
Jumping in a train car full of refined materials.
Reminiscing about the time you lived in London and remembering everything that sucks about living in London.
A warped melting representation of your childhood memories.
An emotional VR moment.
Floating in space and hearing a cacophony of national anthems screaming up at you.
That time they added your uncle's farm to Google Street View.
Looking back on previous eras of your life and remembering why you don't want that kind of life any more.
The guy you know who mined bitcoins on his CPU and then spent it on black market Provigil.
Why do something that's going to make money when you can do ridiculous bullshit instead?
Three year olds who know how to use a remote control.
Areas of human interaction that you are just not prepared for.
Just putting your Zip disk in the file server and grabbing whatever's there.
What kind of porn the owner of the video rental place is personally obsessed with.
Why do you never see porn scored with tracker music?
Deep appreciation of porn that is made for somebody else
Beavis and Butthead trading cards.
Scintillating pizza delivery.
Explaining to your child that porn is fictional, not a documentary, and leaving it at that.
Your daughter asking you questions about Sonic the Hedgehog that you're not prepared to answer.
Encountering boys who play Minecraft.
Deploying new words to the wrong people.
Laying in bed and cursing at ghosts to calm yourself down.
An entire generation who goes to the gym and doesn't just watch CKY2K and break things.
Doing all the drugs so that you can explain what drugs are like to your children.
Learning how to fall as a child so you can fall safely as an adult.
Smoking Ice and waking up in San Francisco.
Pulling over, opening the hood, and punching the engine block over and over.
A poem that somebody else will read.
Whether the money has changed the Dwarf Fortress developers.
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1 hr 12 min
March 10, 2025281. Mr. Nukem Was My Father
Lords:
Stevie
Bri
Topics:
3D modeling and my lack of visual imagination
Cutthroat compounds (my linguistic specialty) – current pursuit is "verb-em" last names – I'm researching the origins of the fictional law offices of Dewey Cheatum and Howe
Pocket Warwick and other lost software
For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper, by Joseph Fasano
https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/1fvzv1f/poem_for_a_student_who_used_ai_to_write_a_paper/
Colma's city motto "It's Great to Be Alive in Colma" is great marketing
Microtopics:
Silly inventor and brainstormer.
Writing code that generates audio.
Giving talks at the Odd Salon.
Coffeehouse revolutionary thinkers.
Classic Hughes Behavior.
Looking at Blender again every seven to ten years.
Imagining a place in any level of detail. (Other than the name.)
The memory of what a tiger looks like, and whether it rotated on a Lazy Susan.
Whether seeing things in a dream feels similar to visualization.
Needing a license to operate as an engineer, but anyone can call themselves an Imagineer.
Weenies and MacGuffins.
Drawing something in 2D and tracing it in Blender.
Different ways to approach level design.
Thinking of something and putting it in your game.
Getting your game design playable as soon as possible so you can find out if it's any good.
A verb and its direct object.
Misers and drunks and cowards and gluttons.
Kick 'em Jenny.
Bop It!
Plastic keys where the point of the key is that it immediately breaks and you have to buy a new one.
Lawyer jokes from 19th century Australia.
Whether Nukem is his last name or just a nickname.
Syntactic freezes.
Rude slang words that end up on listicles.
How "cacafuego" became "spitfire."
Etymonline shrugging and giving up.
Not knowing about the alternate pronunciation of parentheses and processes until you get an office job.
Choosing a comma as one of your hills.
A unit of sound and meaning that you use to modify another unit of sound and meaning.
How to pronounce Warwick Davis.
A Jib Jab.
A Tamagotchi Situation.
Boatswains and forecastles.
Adding redundancy for clarity and also removing it for efficiency.
If you still have a Jaz disk, what do you even do with it?
Going to MagFest to see a chip metal band called Master Boot Record and he's throwing floppy disks with Deluxe Paint on them into the crowd.
Sharing a birthday with a Kentucky Derby winner but not being sure if he's a person or a horse.
The Friendliest Friend!
Stu Sutcliffe, the sixth Beatle.
International Snooker 2012 and Seven Wonders: Ancient Alien Makeover.
Fantasy consoles that only run Final Fantasy games.
If it's your first time at Nice Club, you have to Nice.
Seeing a generation grow up using automation to do a task that you had to do by hand and feeling one way or another about it.
How to tell whether somebody can reason about a topic and express their thoughts clearly.
Underpants Gnome Plans.
Polishing your thought processes until you find one that you agree with.
Defending Your Thesis, directed by Al Brooks.
The only place on the Internet you can hear advice about going to college.
Colma Secrets.
Noone ever stops in Colma (on purpose)
Everyone who came to San Francisco and died.
Go By Train.
Calling the Colma Historical Society to see if they have a living volunteer there that day.
Calling a song "Going to Colma" and hoping that the phrase catches on as a euphemism for Kicking the Bucket.
The Joy of Actual Citizens and People Involved in Government.
Encyclopedia Briannica.
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1 hr 7 min
March 03, 2025280. How to Start an Ice Cream Shop (Probably)
Lords:
Andi
Casey
Topics:
Lifehacks as communion with the divine
I decided to fire my computer
Winston is starting to forget things
Microtopics:
A Star Trek watchalong podcast that doesn't exist yet.
Positing that what you said is no longer an NDA violation by the time this episode comes out.
Plugging a fake game that you worked on.
Astrobot.
Horror movie clinky noises that you can't hear over the PS4 fan noises.
Caffeine-infused mints with Tux the Penguin branding on Think Geek dot com.
The pre-eminent source for Life Hacks.
Using a hotel shower cap to bake bread.
Anime girls that are happy to see you.
That one time Film Crit Hulk broke character.
The joy of moving efficiently through the world.
More efficient ways to set the microwave timer.
Hotel rooms that you can bake bread in.
Whether bread should contain hair.
Tricking yourself into not being bored while doing something you have to do.
Reading 50 life hacks and applying none of them because.
Viral Life Hack that's killed 33 people.
A life hack that already had a body count in the double digits before someone made a TikTok about it.
Getting really fed up with computers.
Cryptographic signing processes that you can't participate in.
The HDCP certification board taking steps to ensure nobody can take a screen shot of their Crunchy Roll anime.
The analog hole.
Open source web browsers that can't see DRM content.
Microsoft-authenticated Linux installations.
Designing a circuit that solves a math problem.
Stamping a circuit onto your circuit clay.
An independent circuit re-implementation of video game hardware.
Should you use FPGA to do a thing?
Ridiculous multi-level memory caching systems.
Bootstrapping an FPGA design tool that runs on an FPGA device.
Every single circuit doing something on every single cycle.
Voltages going high and/or low.
Making a bunch of CPUs and testing them afterwards to see how many GHz they have.
Why the PS3 Cell processor had 7 SPUs
The industrial uses of the Cell processor.
A GLSL compiler that outputs FPGA circuits.
Mr. MiSTer.
Open-hardware laptops.
Inventing an open-source GPU.
Multics or Minix.
Writing a Breakout clone in Rust targeting the weird CPU your friend just invented.
Making a terrible first effort that is the right kind of good enough.
A laptop that has a FPGA where the CPU/GPU usually goes.
1970s-era TV games.
The Epoch Cassette Vision.
A game console with interchangeable cartridges where the CPU is on the cartridge.
The Glasgow Interface Explorer.
Describing your FPGA circuit in Python.
Manufacturing homebrew Cassette Vision Homebrew cartridges for the audience of zero Cassette Vision owners.
Making art just for you, in the most overly elaborate and overly complicated way possible.
The programmer equivalent of going to swim with the dolphins.
Diagonal pixels.
Childhood amnesia.
Remembering your memories.
Using 10% of your brain. (And also the other 90%.)
Knowing things about stuff.
When one brother dies, the other brother gets their memories.
Memories that are formed before vs. after you learn to talk.
Being persecuted for being friends with a girl.
Rules of heteronormativity being enforced by three year olds.
Getting off of Wordpress.
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1 hr 22 min
February 24, 2025279. Concrete Peanut Butter Condensate
Lords:
Kory
James
Topics:
I've been reading more lately, and ditching the eReader sure has helped
Journey to the Planets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEWiJ1Mn-aY
Send Me to Heaven
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Send_Me_to_Heaven
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun, by William Shakespeare
https://poets.org/poem/my-mistress-eyes-are-nothing-sun-sonnet-130
Re: Smooth Criminal. Are criminals like peanut butter?
My journey to make photography as labor intensive as possible and learn to enjoy it again in the process
Microtopics:
A circulating cadre of hobbies.
Corpseflower blooms.
A forum to complain about the state of e-Readers.
eReaders launching as a perfect product and then slowly morphing into shitty phones.
Autosleep anxiety.
Increased difficulty of finding reference art now that stable diffusion exists.
Turning off all your screens in order to accomplish something.
Accordioning ebooks.
Breaking out into meat space with tiny Greek busts.
Freedom to do it the wrong way.
Reading the last page of a book so you don't have the temptation of reading the last page of the book.
Physical bit rot books.
Buying more than one book.
Collecting treasure in order to get home.
A flying around in space mini game.
Dying from comets.
Designing a game that you would never play.
Art that is better in some contexts than others.
King's Quest.
Tuning your adventure game difficulty based on how distracting the real world is.
Difficulty ramping in adventure games.
The text adventure prototype of Outer Wilds.
Untitled Goose Game's melding of the adventure game and the stealth sandbox.
Brock the Investigator's melding of the adventure game and the belt scroller.
An adventure game where the solution to the puzzle is to run up and kick something.
Games that would've been a useful referent for Gunhouse if it had existed.
The I'm Rich era of phone app development.
Let's Play videos of Send Me to Heaven.
App Store review bits that are not very well received.
If hairs be wires then black wires growing on her head.
Quoting a Shakespeare sonnet in your diss track.
Whether "reeks" has the same connotation in Early Modern English.
It's true but you shouldn't say it vs. I just think they're neat.
Whether the Smooth Criminal is the kind where you need to stir the oil in
Smooth criminals vs. chunky criminals.
In what ways criminals are like peanut butter?
What would a chunky rap sheet look like?
A pristine unopened criminal.
Getting merged in some sort of valve situation.
Scientists studying the stripey toothpaste to discover how it stays striped.
That movie where every character is the same person.
Regressing to the analog wherever possible.
Developing film without a dark room, using a dark bag.
Obsessing over a single photograph until the color balance is perfect.
Photography tropes that read as fancy.
The instinct to replicate the superficial qualities of an analog process in its digital equivalent.
Authentically taking a terrible picture with a terrible camera.
Getting sick of what fancy used to mean and figuring out what fancy means going forward.
Hypernice photography.
Art that has way too much detail.
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1 hr 6 min
February 17, 2025278. Successfully Talking
Lords:
Avery
Linker
Topics:
Twin Peaks
Myxozoa
How storytelling is failing us
Bones and Shadows, by John Philip Johnson
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56581/bones-and-shadows
Novelizing films that originated as novels
Microtopics:
A spike of interest corresponding with every episode you're on.
How many hate listeners Topic Lords has.
Chiaroscuro.
Buying Linker's games so he doesn't die.
Watching Blue Velvet while high.
Finishing season two of Twin Peaks out of a sense of duty.
A protagonist who you want to be happy.
That time David Lynch bought five Woody Woodpecker dolls and named them Chucko, Buster, Pete, Bob and Dan, then had to cut them out of his life after their personalities changed.
Focusing the energy you have on the things you love: filmmaking, painting and smoking.
The David Lynch Foundation for the Human Mind.
David Lynch changing the subject back to transcendental meditation.
The permeable boundary between dreams and reality.
David Lynch putting sawmills in every movie because he just likes sawmills.
The disappearance of all-night diners.
What it takes to get Denny's In small-town New Brunswick.
Whether it's possible to mod the bad parts of Deadly Premonition.
Putting evolutionary pressure on jellyfish to get smaller until they evolve back into a single-called organism.
Mammals returning to the sea.
The mutation that allows Henrietta Lacks to live forever.
The cancerous organism that's been hitchhiking in dogs for over a thousand years.
What kind of tumors are blowing around in the Tasmanian Devil whirlwind.
Real and metaphorical spandrels.
Where the Panda's sharp thumb came from.
The kiwi egg-to-body-mass ratio.
Big Bird, the evolutionary pinnacle of all birds.
Introverted Darwinism.
Keeping your toilet paper on the bed.
It's an indie game, you have to put a dead wife in there somewhere.
Obama's presidency as the end of history.
That time everyone was terrified of superpredators.
Human beings organizing facts info stories.
One of the many human traits that cause problems.
Interpreting observed facts differently when you are depressed.
Virtue Ethics.
Deducing ethics via pure reason.
Whether it's true or false that Sherlock Holmes smoked a pipe.
Flash games where you drone strike terrorists.
Exploring a system by interacting with it.
A poem about a guy being beaten up for money.
Successfully talking.
Becoming the bones in the last case.
Pre-nostalgia.
Answering a question by just saying shit.
A video game adaption of a poem.
An atheist take on Tarot readings.
The opinions of someone who once read a lot of philosophy.
Sensing the passage of time in a film clip of a stationary object.
Splinter of the Mind's Eye and the Star Wars radio plays.
The Weird Al song that's just the whole plot of The Phantom Menace.
The Blade Runner and V for Vendetta novelizations.
Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, the novelization.
Kenneth Branagh rolling around in slime with a naked reanimated corpse because because Mary Shelley would've wanted it that way.
A social media platform that was designed to be mindful of mental health, going out of business almost immediately.
Support Topic Lords
57 min
February 10, 2025277. Tunic 2, for Lords Only
Lords:
Andrew
Kate
Topics:
Is it okay to make a game that is boring
My friend wants me to play WoW. Should I?
How to melt chocolate
Kate's Wallace and Gromit song
https://bsky.app/profile/hownottodraw.bsky.social/post/3lfctso62a22q
VFX is like cooking, game design is like baking
Looksmaxxing
Microtopics:
Adam Atomic's Pico-8 renaissance.
Vampire vs. Pope Army
Still Kate.
Grass and flowers and touching them.
The bifurcation of Bluesky into Twitter 2 and Mastodon into Not Twitter.
The different kinds of people who tell you you're doing it wrong on different social media services.
Looking at Bluesky and realizing it's just like Twitter, and having a reaction to that realization.
Comparing your mood before using an internet service to your mood afterwards.
You're the cow, baby!
A story about living in a village of fewer than twenty people where nothing happens for thirty years.
Countervailing forces preventing your game design from becoming a worry stone.
Going outside and being bored until being bored stops feeling like an assault on all your senses.
Talking to your mates in the pub about your new socks.
Your mayonnaise manufacturing district.
YAGNI.
That time your ex-husband stole your knife and without a knife you can't cut food! Or ropes!
Needing medical help and asking the guy in your village who owns half an encyclopedia.
A miserable experience that is worth doing.
The big advantage of playing World of Warcraft in Hardcore mode.
WoW Classic and WoW Classic Classic.
A game about killing 40 rats.
The game for children that do annoying dances.
Who knows about causality?
The two year period when game designers played nothing but World of Warcraft.
Getting addicted to an MMO and never contributing anything to society ever again.
Entering into an activity with a miserly determination to not have fun.
What it takes to do a dungeon.
The spaces between the exciting parts.
Melting chocolate on top of parchment paper.
Melting chocolate with a hair dryer.
A Fraught Bark Experience.
Mouthfuls of raw flour.
Cake Batter Bark.
Rescuing seized chocolate.
Counterintuitive chocolate behavior.
Baking: It's Stupid.
Adding a tart cheese to cream of mushrooms soup.
Reading the poem as if you're not singing it in your head.
Asking the vicar to share a stir-fry.
Adding swear words to the Wallace and Gromit theme.
Leggy Desert Boy, by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The verse in Eleanor Rigby where they talk about cooking and eating dinner.
Words that rhyme with "pint."
Rhyming "pint" with "2019."
Inventing an OC named "blorange" to solve your rhyming problems.
Taking flavors and synthesizing new flavors.
Hammering on the "fun" button for forty or fifty years.
Having the one hit and not needing another hit.
Exploring a multidimensional design space and tapping on all the walls to see which ones are destructible.
Starting to make a game and finding out whether it's an easy game to make.
Langoliers.
Night Snacker.
Releasing games exclusively in the Topic Lords discord.
The art of turning your mortal vessel into a weapon.
Softmaxxing vs. Hardmaxxing.
Doing tongue exercises to sharpen your jaw.
The Wikipedia page with the most scare quotes on it.
Limb-lengthening surgery.
Dabbing: it's just extremely short-term looksmaxxing.
When two subcultures have two different words for the same idea.
Whether the Xes in "Looksmaxxing" are the kisses and the Os the hugs, or vice versa.
Whether the Xes in are the kisses and the Os are the hugs or whether the Xes are the dead eyes on the cartoon face.
Archiving the VODs.
Support Topic Lords
1 hr 15 min